I presented a program on night sky and Milky Way photography to the Arizona Professional Photographers Association. After class time we headed out to Apache Junction south of Phoenix to put the knowledge to work. After helping my students with ideas on composition and focus, I made some images for myself. I’ve found that I need to concentrate on helping folks or photographing. Can’t do both together. Results of one of my compositions below.

Cholla cactus composition

The cactus you see in the foreground of this photo are called cholla and they need some serious respect. In addition to just being their cactus selves they have tendrils the float on the wind. If you pass by too close they can shoot their spines out at you. In spite of their defense mechanisms, I find photographing them yields a lovely texture. Add in the path that leads into the scene mimicking the Milky Way shape and there’s a lot going on composition-ally.

Many times the foreground is the star of the show in a Milky Way Nightscape.

Capture

I work with OM System cameras. One of the advantages of my OM-1 camera is Starry Sky Autofocus. When activated it looks for sharp stars. If it registers as in focus you know you have sharp focus. This is an extremely handy feature for night sky photography. It’s one of the toughest things my students have to deal with with other camera models when first starting out making night sky images.

Once focus and composition were attained it’s time for shooting the stars. Making multiple images is the secret. More images made and stacked lead to less noise. I have found however, there is a fall off in the noise reduction and the extra time it takes to make lots of images past 20 or so is negligible. You’ll want to experiment with the amount that works for you. I’m usually happy between 8 and 20. You can also capture dark frames for additional noise reduction. In order to deal with noise issues, I made 10 exposures. I used the steps below to process the files.

Note: the SLS is showing 9 frames but I processed 10.

Post process

First stop is to move the files from RAW mode, which I always use for capture, into 16 bit .TIF files. These are saved into a folder. As a MAC user I employ an APP called Starry Landscape Stacker. (SLS) The APP aligns the stars and processes and blends files to remove noise. This can also be done by processing in Photoshop but I find the time saved using the SLS APP makes the $59.99 price more than worth it. Especially, if you work with a lot of night sky and milky Way captures. You’ll find SLS int the Apple APP store.

Starry Landscape Stacker: A closer look

Point Starry Landscape Stacker App to the folder of .TIF images. It will ingest the files and prepare them for processing. Once the files are in you can ask it to find the sky. It will place red dots throughout the sky area. You can help the software making the sky selection along by adding extra red dots. If there are red dots in the foreground they can be, and should be, removed before making the sky mask. The sky mask can still be adjusted with a paint brush if necessary. I find adding the extra red dots usually gives me a good mask on the first go.

Then it’s time to let the software do its magic. It will align the stars, remove the noise and allow you to export the final image. There are a number of algorithms that can be used for different results. I usually find success choosing “Mean Min Hor Noise.”

If you are a PC user, there is a free stacking program called Sequator. I’m not a PC user so I can’t offer any tips other than to get it and find tutorials online for best practices.

Photoshop

When processing, the Milky Way needs to be teased out gently as what you see with your eye is a soft cloud gracing the night sky. It’s the large aperture and time exposure that allow us to record the clouds of gasses and detail in the shadows of the Galactic Center.

Enhancing the image was accomplished using Adobe Photoshop. Layers, Adjustment Layers, Blend Modes and Masks are my tools of choice. One caveat, especially for new Milky Way image makers, is to avoid adding too much color or pushing the image to far toward the blue. It’s easy to overcook color and intensity of the night sky. I personally favor a more natural look.

This image was helped by the light pollution from the city to the North. It lit the cholla and Superstition Mountains and gave the photo lots of depth and dimension. That same light, however, also took away some of the subtleties of the Galactic Center. There are always tradeoffs when working to have an interesting foreground to enhance the Nightscape with Milky Way.

If you are looking to move to OM System, I recommend the flagship OM-1 Mark II camera as it has more features and is currently only a couple hundred dollars more than the OM-1.

Yours in Creative Photography,

Bob

Shopping for a laptop is already hard enough due to the sheer number of options. But your task gets even more difficult when you need a laptop for a very specific purpose, like photo editing. This demands even more research and scrutiny on your part, which may sound like a tall order. Talk about analysis paralysis.

If you’re in the market for a photo editing laptop and are having a hard time making the final decision, you’re in luck, because we’re here to help you choose something you’ll love. In fact, not only have we tested all of the top powerhouse laptops, but we even brought in some backup — to give us some more insight into buying a laptop for photo editing, we reached out to Tommy Yonash, a Brooklyn-based documentary and portrait photographer, and Joseph Maldonado, a photographer for Mashable’s parent company, Ziff Davis.

What makes a good photo editing laptop?

“Honestly, it comes down to three things for me,” Yonash told us. When shopping for the best laptops for photo editing, he recommends prioritizing something with fast processing speeds, a great battery life, and something that’s lightweight and portable so you can take it on the go. Maldonado agrees that speed is vital to having a good photo editing experience. “It just has to be able to process the images quickly,” he said. “I don’t enjoy a laptop that slows down while bouncing between different photos.”

Yonash told us that he uses a MacBook Pro for photo editing, as it’s a great marriage of all three of those important specs. “I work between the M1 Pro and the M1 Air, both of which have held up great over the years, but the Pro has usually been my go-to for its better battery life,” he added. While the M1 line of MacBook laptops can still be found pretty cheap at various retailers, Apple has since released the MacBook Pro and Air with the latest and greatest M3 chips, which are much faster. For photo editing laptops specifically, we recommend going current-gen to get the best bang for your buck.

Yonash maintains that speed, portability, and battery are the most important specs when shopping for photo editing laptops, but out of those three, processing speeds will always win out. “Since I don’t do too much editing on the go, I would have to say speed or processing power is the number one most important feature,” he told us. “Nothing kills editing flow like a laggy computer.” Maldonado concurred on this point, but also added that a great display and plenty of storage are also a necessity. He said that a minimum of 1TB of SSD storage will serve you well.

What are the best laptops for photo editing?

After all of our research, testing, and expert interviews, we found that the M3 MacBook Pro will be the best photo editing laptop for most people. We know that not everyone is an Apple die-hard, though, so we included laptops from beyond the Apple ecosystem as well. Below, our top picks for the most reliable photo editing laptops.

An old video of a rhino waddling up to a wildlife photographer for belly rubs is going viral again, and it’s no wonder why! Rhinos, typically seen as intimidating due to their immense size, powerful build, and fierce behavior, aren’t usually known for their cuddly side.

Wildlife filmmaker Garth de Bruno Austin/ X

In the viral video, a rhino can be seen allowing and even expecting belly rubs from a wildlife photographer. 

Wildlife filmmaker Garth de Bruno Austin, who directed the 2021 conservation documentary The Last Horns of Africa, had the privilege of indulging a southern white rhinoceros’ request while filming in the savannah.

Captured on camera in 2016, it was a heartwarming encounter. “If a rhino walks straight up to you while you’re filming and wants some rubs, you better rub that rhino like your life depends on it,” Austin wrote when sharing the video. “Lucky for me she left my URSA Mini 4K camera alone!”

Watch the video here:

A rhino walks straight up to wildlife photographer while he is filming and wants a belly scratch 😂 pic.twitter.com/ZdPLi1VDPU

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) June 7, 2024

However, this doesn’t mean anyone should walk up to a rhino and start giving it a belly rub. 

Austin clarified, “I have been lucky enough to film this rhino for quite a few years and because of that have built up a level of TRUST. DO NOT try and do this with a truly ‘WILD’ rhino as it may end up with you being killed!”

According to his YouTube channel, Austin didn’t approach the female rhino; she allowed him into her personal space. 

He fondly recalls the ‘amazing experience,’ saying, “These incredible animals humble you every time you see them. Please think about the fact that if we can’t save this iconic species from extinction, then what will we be able to save?”

The white rhinoceros, which is the largest extant species of rhinoceros, is known to be the most social of all rhino species and to have a relatively calm demeanor compared to other rhino species.

White Rhinoceros/ Wikipedia

Despite its name, the white rhino is actually gray and gets its name from a mistranslation of the Dutch word “wijde,” meaning “wide,” referring to its mouth. 

There are two subspecies: the southern white rhino, which is relatively abundant, and the critically endangered northern white rhino, with only a few individuals remaining. 

Conservation efforts are crucial to protect these animals from poaching and habitat loss.

For more news and current affairs from around the world, please visit Indiatimes News.

There is a fairytale quality to Bertien van Manen’s 1975 photograph of the arrivals hall at Budapest Keleti train station. Among the questions it demands is: who are the two women in shawls and where might they be going? (And then there is the slight double take required to be sure that the pointing woman’s arm is not somehow on both sides of the right-hand shawl-wearer’s head.)

The otherworldly atmosphere of the photograph was appropriate to Van Manen’s quest. Her journey to Budapest marked a sliding doors moment in her career. Up until then, the photographer, who died last month aged 89, had a successful career in Amsterdam working for fashion magazines. But then she started looking hard at the pictures in Robert Frank’s landmark odyssey, The Americans. She felt the need to be on the road, in curious places. She was 40, her children were growing up, so she took a trip to Budapest, then almost as inaccessible as Narnia.

Her photographs from that journey have hardly been seen before, and are about to be published in a new monograph. They convey the freedom Van Manen appeared to feel from finding time just to look, without any commercial imperative. She dwelt on the ways that time appeared to have a different quality in this alternative world. People move without much urgency; you can almost hear clocks ticking.

After Budapest, Van Manen never really looked back. She travelled extensively in the former Soviet Union, and Appalachia, embedding herself in the life of communities unlike her own. She planned to call the series from Hungary “I Will Be Wolf”, a line borrowed from the Budapest-born poet Attila József; the quote sounds like a remembered statement of intent. Having let the world come to her, for the first half of her life, the photographer would now be on the prowl, in search of it.

• I Will Be Wolf by Bertien van Manen is published by Mack (£25)

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Donn Delson has made his name hanging out of helicopters in the name of art.

The 75-year-old landed in this curious sector of the photography field only a decade ago but his work has quickly spread around the world’s galleries and art fairs.

His pictures offer sweeping birds-eye views of cities and landscapes, often showing familiar sites from widely inaccessible perspectives.

He aims for high detail and prints big – up to four metres wide – in the human-scale format made popular by art world giants like Cindy Sherman and Andreas Gursky.

Delson’s current camera of choice is the Fuji GFX 100, enabling him to capture images at 102 megapixels (the latest phone cameras shoot around 12MP).

After retiring in 2010 from a successful business career – in which he founded and sold several firms including a merchandising company representing, among others, Rihanna and Billy Joel – Delson leant into pursuing photography professionally.

A helicopter trip in Queenstown, New Zealand, in 2015 set him on his current trajectory, which has seen him capture cities and landscapes the world over from heights up to 12,000ft.

“Collectors often tell me that viewing my photography affords them an almost meditative experience, as the large scale of the works helps immerse them in the visual experience,” says Delson.

Last month the photographer visited London and invited The Independent picture desk to accompany him on a flight over the city.

Taking off from Battersea Heliport, the helicopter travelled east over central London, above sights including the London Eye, Piccadilly Circus, Tower Bridge and the British Museum.

Delson said of the trip: “Flying multiple flights over London last week with so many of the London press corps was an honour.

“It was also so much fun to be able to share the experience with people who know and love their city, and may never have had the opportunity to experience such an intimate perspective from just above it.”

He added: “Virtually everywhere you look above London, you see the history of this great city, the old along with the new. It’s a spectacular amalgam of architecture, and one over which I could spend many hours with or without a camera in my hands.

“I got to do what I love to do, and the best part for me was sharing that feeling with so many others”.

As far as we can recall, photography is often seen as a direct representation of reality. However, the truth is far more complex as we dive deeper to examine the underlying issue. The issue isn’t just about altering reality through manipulation with Photoshop or generating images with AI. Instead, I believe our societal expectations and perceptions have fundamentally altered how we view and interpret photographs.

Let’s take documentary photography, for example. By definition, it is a genre of photography aimed at capturing real-life events, environments, and situations truthfully and objectively. But in practice, many of these images are somewhat staged or controlled to some degree. For instance, adding a light source to get a better exposure of the subject in a backlit situation can raise questions about the authenticity of the image. The issue here isn’t so much about manipulation changes, but about whether the image truly represents reality.

When a partially staged scene is presented as a documentary, or when the presentation of reality is altered, it challenges our perception of truth. But we should also be aware that nobody sees the same way. Someone who is colorblind may not see certain colors, or someone with cataracts may see the world with lower contrast. So how do we know whose view accurately represents reality?

This brings the discussion to where tonal adjustments sit. Local tonal adjustments, such as dodging and burning, have been used since the early days of photography. Changing exposure to highlight certain elements or adjusting color tones can influence how an audience perceives a scene. Even viewing images on poorly calibrated monitors or in print with a limited color gamut is sufficient to distort reality. Not to mention the decision to present an image in black and white also affects its emotional impact. Therefore, are all these factors considered photo manipulation? The choice of medium has some level of influence on how we view an image. These factors alone are sufficient to highlight the gray area between manipulation and representation.

Photography, by its nature, is expected to be an accurate representation of reality. A photo of an apple is immediately recognized as such, even if spatial dimensions and size are not perfectly conveyed. Similarly, a photograph of an event is often accepted as a true record of that moment. But, in truth, framing and composition to a certain extent do introduce inherent bias. A photographer decides what to include and exclude, which can omit critical context and alter the viewer’s perception.

Limiting yourself to only photographing straight-out-of-camera JPEGs does not solve this issue either. The expectation that photographs are exact replicas of reality is flawed from the beginning. Instead, one of photography’s most compelling qualities is its ability to make us believe in the plausibility of its contents. This belief hinges on the suspension of disbelief, facilitated by perspective and lighting.

Traditionally, photojournalists have a responsibility to depict reality accurately. Yet, this quickly becomes subjective. What is reality, and whose perspective do we trust? Every image carries a message influenced by the photographer’s own thought process and point of view. This subjectivity means that no photograph can truly represent reality. Therefore, the focus should be on the underlying message that it is representing. Photographs are often believed to represent reality to a general audience, but trust issues arise when manipulated or generated images are presented as truths.

In conclusion, the challenge of portraying the truth with photography is deeply rooted in our expectations and perceptions. No medium can be entirely objective, and photographs are no exception, as they require processing by the photographer and interpretation that is influenced by the observer’s perspective. As viewers, we can only overcome this challenge by critically considering the underlying message and context of each image. How do you interpret the truth in photography, and what influences your perception of reality?

The position of photography as an art form was debated from its beginning in the mid-19th century. However, photography made its way to museums by the 1960s through many exhibitions and acquisitions. At the same time, American and European conceptual artists altered the traditional practice of photography by using it to express an idea which was at the essence of conceptual art. They adopted the camera as an experimental tool. Photographs of their ephemeral works allowed them to advertise their practice and ensure their legacy.

Surrealist Experiments Towards Conceptual Photography

Fine art photography has its roots in early 20th-century photographs, which placed a strong emphasis on the craft and form of the medium. Later on, Dadaists and Surrealist artists experimented with the possibilities of the camera, leading to the emergence of a conceptual approach to photography through which artists not only depicted a subject but illustrated an idea. The American artist Man Ray experimented with photography in the 1920s and 1930s, creating many memorable images. He would play with angles, lighting, and different visual effects. This resulted in sometimes equivocal and unhesitatingly aesthetic photographs, such as L’Inquiétude [Anxiety] (1920), where he tentatively represented an emotion rather than a material subject. The photograph is blurry and evocative, leaving the viewer puzzled, if not anxious to know more about it. Other artists from around the same time, such as Claude Cahun, would also experiment with the camera, creating self-portraits of performances by dressing up and embodying different characters.

Performing For the Camera

Many conceptual artists developed performances based on instructions, cues, or controlled improvisation. Artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s used the camera to compose and create photographs as documents of these performances. American artist Martha Wilson created a series of characters that she impersonated using her own body and face in photographs that could not be described as self-portraits.

These works became conceptual photographs representing the fictional identities of the artist, based on gender stereotypes. Her series A Portfolio of Models (1974) showcases different female figures (such as The Working Girl or The Lesbian), for which Wilson chose clothing, styling, and a pose in a very studio-like image. She then paired each photograph with a short text, in which she humorously described the character’s life and motivations. She worked together with photographer Victor Hayes on these images.

Other artists used the camera to stage repetitive acts or experimental situations representing their intentions and goals. Italian artist Giovanni Anselmo who was a member of the Arte Povera group, placed his camera to face a field and ran into the frame once the camera’s timer was on. The final piece was titled Entering the Work (1971). The work speaks about the conceptual idea of entering one’s art, piercing its secrets, while at the same time reflecting on the artistic work that’s being done in order to produce a piece. It also directly ponders on the camera’s capacity to capture movement, and therefore time and space. The work has been printed on different mediums (paper or fabric) and in different sizes, highlighting photography’s great ability to be reproduced and disseminated.

Photography as Documentation

Obviously, photography can also be used as a way to document moments in time. Conceptual artistic practices include performances and ephemeral works. In those instances, photography (as well as video) has often been the only way to record, keep track, and later on publicize these works. Photography helps performance artists ultimately make their art sellable and collectible. In 1976, Artforum critic Nancy Foote wrote an essay called The Anti-Photographers about the delicate, yet paradoxical, relationship that conceptual artists had with photography. The author noted: “Conceptual art has never been plagued with accusations that it belongs on photography’s side of the tracks, yet the condition in which much of it could or would exist without photography is open to question.”

Without the camera, many conceptual artworks would only exist in narrated accounts or artists’ instructions.

For instance, during the 1970s American artist Bonnie Ora Sherk created a series of visionary performances in urban environments of San Francisco, California, exploring the relationships between humans and nature. Her performance Public Lunch (1971) took place at the San Francisco Zoo, where Sherk decided to eat lunch in the big cats’ cages during opening hours. Video footage and photographs became the only records of that artwork. They show Sherk sitting at a table, next to the lions’ and tigers’ cages, being fed like an animal. While the artist didn’t take the photographs herself, she decided to use photography as a tool to transmit her message. These images have become deeply associated with her practice, as well as with the general performance art of the time.

Conceptual Use of Photography

As seen in the examples above, most conceptual artists were not photographers. Performance artists would have friends or hired photographers record their art pieces. Other conceptual artists, interested in the relationship between text, image, and meaning, also included photographs in their work in order to question our relationship with abstract ideas and reality.

One of conceptual art’s seminal artworks was made by American artist Joseph Kosuth. It’s called One and Three Chairs (1965) and it features a display of three versions of a chair. There’s a definition from the dictionary, a manufactured chair, and a photograph of the chair. All three elements (the physical object and the two prints) embody the same concept—a chair.

In that particular work, Kosuth used photography to simply ask the question: What is a chair? Is a photograph of a chair equivalent to its written definition? The work is collected and displayed in many institutions around the world using different chairs and definitions written in various languages. Kosuth’s instructions for the piece state that the chosen chair should be photographed as it is installed in the museum’s gallery.

American artist Ed Ruscha also uses photography in his works. In the early 1960s, he took a series of photographs of urban environments in Los Angeles, focusing on one element of the landscape. For instance, he photographed gas stations and produced an artist book titled Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963). A decade later, Ruscha was invited to collaborate with the limited-edition print firm Gemini G.E.L. and create a new kind of still-life photographs in a series titled Tropical Fish (1975).

His print Air, Water, Fire from that series is a colorful and luscious image. It shows a bike pump, a seltzer dispenser, and a small figurine of Satan placed on a red plastic background. Each of these objects represents the three elements from the title. The objects’ juxtaposition is rather comical if not banal, adopting a type of Pop Art aesthetic. While the series’ concept is ambiguous, its images show how a conceptual artist can play with the codes of consumerism.

A Boxed Set of Conceptual Photography 

In 1982, American artist Tom Marioni curated a boxed set of 54 black-and-white reproductions of photographs made by different artists. For the project, Marioni invited artists like Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden, Paul Kos, and Richard Long to submit a conceptual photograph (not a documentary one), to be featured in this portable exhibition. The box, titled Artists’ Photographs (1982), was actually the fifth and last issue of Marioni’s magazine Vision, dedicated to conceptual art and published by Crown Point Press. This last issue of Vision focused on the conflict between photography and conceptual artists. By the late 1970s, photography made its way into the art market. Artists such as Cindy Sherman or Jeff Wall, of the so-called Pictures generation, adopted the conceptual artists’ ways of playing with photography while they embraced and confronted pop cultural imagery.