Deciding who and what is cool is not only a moving target but also entirely subjective. And you might say attempting to “rank” the coolest people in Houston is a fool’s errand, one that will leave us immediately open to criticism. “You think she is cooler than him? You included this person?! You left off that one!?”

To that, we say: You’re right, it’s crazy. Also: Lighten up. These aren’t the Nobel Prizes. This is a lark, a fun way to fill some magazine pages. But, then again, it’s not not important. The Cool 100 — graciously sponsored by Four Seasons Hotel Houston, the Post Oak Collection and Insólito Tequila — is our way of commenting on Houstonians drawing our attention right now.

We’re interested in highbrow, and low. We like fun and sexy, and cerebral and poised. We like people who have made it to the top, and those striving to get there. We like the rich and famous, and those doing their thing quietly their own way, outside the limelight.

We have a bias, we admit, for young, beautiful and artistic. We’re not necessarily honoring the legends of Houston or the most generous philanthropists, and we’re not ranking the saints. (That’s another list.) However, we are impressed by maturity — and accomplishment in all fields. And kindness is always cool.

Also, to be on the CityBook list, you must live and work primarily in Houston. Sorry, Beyoncé.

Those named to the inaugural Cool 100 stood apart for their aesthetic and impact, their attitude and intrigue. We love what they’ve been doing lately, and we’re genuinely curious about what they’ll do next.

To borrow from The New York Times, which presented a similar list recently: We welcome dissent. But we are, without a doubt, correct.

This photo is part of my Fake Holidays series. At the beginning of the project, more than 15 years ago, I went to Lara Beach in Antalya, Turkey, where there is one luxury five-star hotel after another, all along the coastline. On the other side of the road were the tents of the workers who had built the hotels. Luxury hotels are like little ghettoes. You take your plane and your taxi, then you are in the middle of an isolated luxury area.

The Kremlin Palace hotel, where this photo was taken, has an exact copy of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, Moscow. I have been to Moscow and seen the original church, which is a focal point – all tourists take a picture there. But here in Turkey, there is a swimming pool in front of the cathedral. I was fascinated. There were many Russian tourists.

I saw a weird guy, an astronaut, walking around the pool. “What’s happening here?” I asked. It turned out the hotel had a huge room with costumes for the entertainers who perform for the tourists. Superman was one of them. I found him by the pool and immediately asked to take his picture. I took about three shots. I chose the photo point, in front of the church with the pool between us, then asked Superman to jump. It was a very childish approach, perhaps, but he did it. The way he jumped was perfect. I felt in the moment: “That’s the picture.”

It quite often happens that when I take a picture, I know it’s strong, but when I go home and look more closely, I understand its more complex meaning. This was one of those times. When I saw the image on my computer screen, I understood what it was about. There is the No 1 tourist site in Moscow, which stands for the entire history of the Russian empire, and then you have Superman on that famous square, jumping over Saint Basil’s Cathedral. It is Superman, representing American power, rising above what represents the Russian empire.

It would have been impossible to take a photo like this in the real Red Square and, now, I think you would end up in prison. In 2006, it was more simply a funny image: the collision of two worlds in one picture. The Crimean crisis happened much later, in 2014, and we were a long way away from the Ukraine conflict. If I look at the picture now it has a different meaning: I relate it to the political situation nowadays and it is getting more and more interesting. I loved the image before, but some images take their time to develop their whole impact.

My Fake Holidays project was inspired by seeing how many European cities were creating artificial beaches. I first came across one in Hamburg, Germany; they had put sand on the street and set up palm trees, and there was an inflatable swimming pool. I took off my shoes and put my feet into the sand. I felt immediately transported – just touching the sand reminded me of beach holidays when I was a child. I was fascinated by the idea that we can be so easily manipulated by our surroundings. There’s a whole industry doing it, like Disney – the mother of all leisure parks. I took photographs all over Europe, China, the United States, Japan … I was fascinated by the facades of happiness.

In my heart, I still feel like a documentary photographer. I am reflecting what I see with my photographs. The representation of reality with photography is a beautiful idea, but photography is changing a lot these days. We have artificial intelligence. Last month, an AI image was selected for the first time for a photo contest. But the most beautiful thing with photography is that reality is so strong. If you go out for a walk with a camera, you can’t imagine what you will find until you find it.

Reiner Riedler’s CV

Born: Gmunden, Austria, 1968.
Trained: Photography at Höhere Graphische Bundes-Lehr und Berufsanstalt, Vienna.
Influences: “Taryn Simon, Paul Graham, Wolfgang Tillmans.”
High point: “In the pandemic, I had a lot of time to think about my work. When I received a substantial grant for a film project, it was a very special moment because it marked the beginning of a new creative era for me: a step from photography to the moving image. I love these moments that give a new direction out of nowhere.”
Low point: “Being completely broke and hungry at the beginning of my studies.”
Top tip: “I believe in the importance of documenting. Photography doesn’t have to submit to trends.”

Adventure and perspective from the field

After college, Morley joined the photography staff at The Times-Dispatch, where he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won numerous state and national awards. His work also appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Newsweek.

“Photojournalism is who I am, what I love very much,” he said. “I am passionate about it.”

Morley started writing “Photoadventures” five years ago, gleaning material from the notebooks he saved during his decades with The Times-Dispatch. “Many of the stories were rough drafts with notes and quotes,” he said. 

Photographers often say their photographs are like their children: all unique in their own right, making it impossible to pick a favorite. Morley is no different, but he does have a few adventures he loves to recall – especially his assignment at White Tail Resort, a family nudist colony in Virginia’s Southampton County, where he had to embrace a clothes-free attitude while working.

“It was a bizarre story,” he said. “It’s a whole other world.”

Memorable for other reasons was a three-week trip to Africa for a story on Baptist mission work. Morley visited two large camps for refugees of the Rwandan civil war; Baptist missionaries were among many nonprofits helping the displaced. One camp was in Tanzania, and the other was in Goma, Zaire (since renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo). 

L.C. Singh, the 74-year-old Founder of global consulting and services company Nihilent, is an avid photographer. “By training I am an engineer but I have always had a lot of respect for the right side of the brain,” he smiles, adding that he got interested in photography nearly 15 years ago. “I am fascinated with nature and how it is able to hide engineering. Sophisticated models covered beautifully. So it is my fascination with nature that led to photography,” he says.

Singh only shoots nature—landscapes, birds and wildlife —with his Nikon Z9. “I don’t like shooting human beings,” he says. The Nihilent Founder has always used Nikon products and currently has lenses from 12mm to 1,200 mm. “I also use nearly 18 different pieces of software to process the pictures. After all, it is said that you don’t take pictures, you make pictures,” says Singh.

“The camera is unbiased. It just clicks pictures, but doesn’t necessarily create emphasis where I want it to. So when you make pictures, the focus is on controlling the eyes of the viewer,” he adds.

Singh who likes to study ontology and epistemology, loves shooting at national parks such as Ranthambore, Pench, Tadoba etc., but his favourite is the Kruger National Park in South Africa and he goes there at least once a year.

While Singh is self-taught, he enjoys sharing his experience with others and conducts photography workshops. “In photography you get totally lost in the act. You don’t know where you are, what you are doing,” says Singh, adding that it has made him more focussed. “When I am shooting a flower I am not thinking about work then. Photography has the same impact on me as meditation. It gives me a connection with a different species. It’s a peaceful experience for me,” he says.

Even while shooting his subjects, Singh follows some principles. He never shoots animals in captivity or a flower from top. “You need to respect your subjects,” he signs off.

@smitabw

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Along with shutter speed and aperture, ISO is one of the three fundamental exposure parameters that have a significant impact on the technical quality of your image and on the creative decisions you can make. If you are new to photography and feeling a bit unsure about how to handle your ISO, check out this helpful video tutorial that takes a very pragmatic approach to the topic with five useful tips.

Coming to you from Nate Torres Photography, this awesome video tutorial features five tips for getting a better handle on using ISO. By far, the most common mistakes beginners make with ISO is simply keeping it too low in an attempt increase image quality and using too slow of a shutter speed as a result, which causes issues with blurring from camera shake or subject motion. The important thing to remember is that modern cameras handle higher ISOs very well, and post-processing software can do quite a bit to clean up noise. On the other hand, if a photo is blurry from camera shake or subject motion, there is not much that can be done to fix it. It is always better to have a noisy but sharp photo than one with less noise but issues with blurring. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Torres. 

Before most people knew what a camera was, the V&A was already amassing photographs. Its collection — now 800,000 works — began as soon as it was founded, as the pioneering Museum of Manufactures in 1852. Just a year earlier, the magazine The Chemist reported the invention of the collodion process, which became the standard photographic method in the next decades. So the museum and the medium grew up together, and still share a unique, hybrid identity — connecting art and design, fashion and performance.

You succumb at once to that invigorating, upbeat mix in its Photography Centre, an ambitious venture begun in 2018 and fully inaugurated — four brand new galleries joining the initial three — last week. The opening exhibition Energy: Sparks from the Collection is a seductive, dynamic and original history of photography seen through the prism of its most difficult subject — things that move. Alfred Stieglitz’s train hurtles towards us in “The Hand of Man” (1902). Jacques Henri Lartigue celebrates his brother’s flight in a homemade glider “Zissou Taking Off in the Yard at Rouzat” (1910). A Hoover pipe snakes up a fishnet-stockinged leg in Jo Spence’s “Libido Uprising” (1989) and clouds of pulverised stone shoot out like rockets from a quarry in Nayoa Hatakeyama’s “Blast #5707” (1998).

That the 20th century — from American industrial might and belle époque optimism at the start to feminist and environmental pressures at the end — was the first to see itself through photographs is quite brilliantly distilled. Bill Brandt’s sooty “Miners Returning to Daylight” in Wales in 1937 is a miracle of chiaroscuro empathy. Casting dazzling light and sinister shadowy forms, Brian Griffin’s firework explodes over booming high-rise London in “Big Bang” (1986) to suggest the city as an unstoppable economic force, yet also a war zone.

Chronology is jumbled: moments assemble and reassemble like a kaleidoscope into fleeting patterns, shifting between old and new, known and unknown, the past altered by the present.

From a central space, Jack Elwes’s deepfake cabaret drag installation “The Zizi Show” (2020-23) blares out Beyoncé and George Michael and sends neon-pink and orange flickers down two long, classically hung, mostly monochrome picture galleries. The result is a dazzling juxtaposition with such gracious 19th-century landmarks as Philip Delamotte’s surging jets “Water Fountains at Crystal Palace” (1852) and Gustav Le Gray’s “Tugboat” (1856), silhouettes of a sailing ship trailing a steam-powered vessel on the Norman coast.

It’s a lovely meeting of innovative glories across the centuries. Delamotte’s images of Crystal Palace in south London and the dismantling of the Great Exhibition, along with Roger Fenton’s records of the Crimean war, were the breakthrough pictures that won photography a popular following in later 1850s Britain. Le Gray’s “Tugboat”, the steamship’s dark plumes gorgeously echoed by the clouds, as emotively atmospheric as a painted seascape, marks not only steam power vanquishing sail but photography’s challenge to painting — the mechanical camera supplanting the hand and brush as witness and chronicler.

Elwes’ subject is today’s technology: master of ceremonies Zizi is a gender-neutral, translucent, shape-shifting artificial intelligence creation compèring drag artists whose joyful ambiguities draw attention to AI bias and the threat of facial recognition systems. I loved this noisy, bright, inventive piece, playfully locating questions about the blur between real and virtual/fictive in a cabaret converging the worlds of Weimar Berlin and Silicon Valley. 

Photography’s enchantment with technology is compellingly presented throughout as inseparable from its democratic impetus. The smartphone era makes us all photographers but, even by the 1870s, amateurs were catching moments of magic and wonder — an anonymous traveller passing through York station photographed its canopied roof, intricate, sweeping and strange, rising like an exotic monster, just as in 1952 an unknown transatlantic passenger took a shot through a window of a plane’s propellers spinning over the ocean. 

Intriguing, too, are the many early works that are formally perfect in ways anticipating modern abstracting impulses; they suggest how closely modernist aesthetic sensibility evolved from industrial design. In “Bevington & Sons, Leather Manufactory”, teenage Geoffrey Bevington photographed his family’s factory in Bermondsey, south London, in 1861 as a pattern of strict verticals and horizontals, as geometric and forbidding as conceptualists Bernd and Hilla Becher’s formal depictions of industrial ruins, “Silo for Coal” and “Cooling Tower” in the 1970s. And Andreas Gursky’s panoramas of Siemens factories in the 1990s are heralded in the aerial view of the massive assembly line “Employees’ Cars at Ford Factory”, photographed by Robert Smith for a commercial company in 1936. 

The ability to capture mass experience and collective memory was photography’s winning streak over painting in the golden mid-20th century. Even the surrealists, favouring personal unconscious experience as a subject, perceived this aspect. Man Ray chose Eugène Atget’s view of a crowd on the Place de la Bastille looking up at a solar eclipse in 1912 as the cover for La Révolution surréaliste in 1926. Here Atget’s stunning picture is in company with 20-year-old Marianne Breslauer’s “Paris”, street shots taken in 1929 with a Leica at unexpected angles, boldly cropped; sometimes Breslauer displayed them upside down.

Surrealism’s odd perspectives, strange reflections and snatched glimpses determined photography’s special flair for fragmentary, elusive urban life. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Palermo” (1972) frames insouciant kids chasing a bicycle wheel by a stately, slow funeral procession: a decisive instant, classical, monochrome, masterfully composed, where the metaphysical — life running on against the background of death — is fixed in a particular place and time. 

In his haunting series “Parties” (2006), Amirali Ghasemi depicts pulsing groups of young Iranians feverishly dancing but whitens their faces and exposed flesh to protect identities in a repressive regime: the figures appear as luminous, animated ghosts, like a surrealist dream — defiant and bittersweet.

Susan Sontag called the camera a predatory weapon, and certainly hopes for progress thread throughout, from Fenton and Stieglitz to Cartier-Bresson and Ghasemi. In contrast, the latest acquisitions mostly disappoint — the open-ended, masterful image has diminished into mere coercive identity politics in Liz Johnson Artur’s “Black Balloon Archive” and Tarrah Krajnak’s self-portraits which, according to the V&A, “critique the canon of westernised photography . . . as an indigenous woman of colour” — deadly dull. But then comes Noémie Goudal’s marvellous “Untitled (Giant Phoenix)” (2022), close-ups of palm trees staged as a jungle of monumental puzzle-like broken panels — a fresh, engaging approach to photographs as environmental protest.

This is a great moment for photography. The new galleries, the UK’s largest devoted to the medium, are a significant addition to the museum landscape, and symbolic of photography’s vital role in 21st-century culture. More than any other visual art form, photography is rooted in processes of social change; from now on the V&A will be able to show how it evolves to mirror the world in ever more complex ways.

vam.ac.uk

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When it comes to photography, there are several technical terms and concepts that can seem overwhelming for beginners. One such term is “aperture.” Understanding aperture is crucial for achieving the desired depth of field and controlling the amount of light that enters your camera. In this article, we answer what is aperture and explain its significance in photography.

What is aperture?

At its core, aperture refers to the opening in the lens through which light enters the camera. It acts similarly to the pupil of our eyes, adjusting its size to regulate the amount of light reaching the camera’s sensor. Aperture is measured in f-stops, denoted by a series of numbers such as f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, and so on.

The concept of aperture may seem counterintuitive at first, as the f-stop numbers work backward. A smaller f-stop number, like f/2.8, indicates a larger aperture opening, while a larger f-stop number, such as f/16, represents a smaller aperture opening. Understanding this inverse relationship is crucial in grasping how aperture affects your photographs. There are small aperture blades in the lens which open and close depending on the aperture chosen.

Understanding depth of field

One of the primary effects of aperture is its influence on the depth of field. Depth of field refers to the range of sharpness in an image, from the foreground to the background. A large aperture opening (small f-stop number) results in a shallow depth of field, where the subject is in sharp focus while the background appears blurred. This effect is commonly used in portrait photography to create a pleasing separation between the subject and the background.

On the other hand, a smaller aperture opening (large f-stop number) increases the depth of field, resulting in more elements in the scene being in focus. Landscape photography often benefits from a larger depth of field to capture intricate details in both the foreground and the background.

Finding the correct exposure

Apart from controlling depth of field, aperture also plays a crucial role in managing the exposure of an image. Exposure refers to the amount of light that reaches the camera’s sensor. A larger aperture opening (small f-stop number) allows more light to enter the camera, resulting in a brighter image. Conversely, a smaller aperture opening (large f-stop number) restricts the amount of light, resulting in a darker image.

It’s important to note that aperture is just one of the three elements that affect exposure, along with shutter speed and ISO. These three factors work together in what is known as the exposure triangle. Adjusting one element affects the others, so finding the right balance between aperture, shutter speed, and ISO is crucial for achieving well-exposed images.

So, which aperture to choose?

When it comes to selecting the aperture for a particular shot, it often depends on the desired effect and the lighting conditions. As mentioned earlier, if you want a shallow depth of field with a blurred background, choose a larger aperture opening (small f-stop number). For landscapes or situations where you want everything in focus, opt for a smaller aperture opening (large f-stop number).

Modern cameras provide different shooting modes to assist beginners in choosing the right aperture setting. These modes include aperture priority (A or Av) and manual (M). In aperture priority mode, you set the desired aperture, and the camera automatically adjusts the shutter speed for proper exposure. Manual mode allows you to have full control over both aperture and shutter speed.

Aperture is a fundamental aspect of photography that affects both the depth of field and exposure of an image. By understanding how it works and experimenting with different settings, you can unleash your creativity. You can capture stunning photographs with precise control over what’s in focus and how much light enters your camera. So, grab your camera and start exploring the fascinating world of aperture!