Local photographer hosts drawing to win tickets to Taylor Swift concert
Photography
A Beginner’s Guide to Portrait Photography With One Light
If you look at the work of professional portrait photographers, it can be easy to be fooled into thinking that it is not possible to create high-level images with just a single light. This could not be further from the truth, though. If you are new to working with artificial light, check out this fantastic video tutorial that will show you how to shoot compelling portraits using just one light and a portable modifier.
Coming to you from Jiggie Alejandrino, this excellent video tutorial will show you how to shoot portraits using a single light. If you are just starting out with artificial light, it is better to start out with one light. Lighting really comes down to mastering a few technical concepts (such as source size or subject distance) and manipulating these to fit your creative vision. When you are learning, it is much easier to see the results of different changes and to build that knowledge if you are working with a single light. Once you master this, you will find your proficiency with multiple lights will come fairly naturally. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Alejandrino.
If you would like to continue learning about how to light a portrait, be sure to check out “Illuminating The Face: Lighting for Headshots and Portraits With Peter Hurley!”
Photographer’s Moody Landscapes Capture the Harsh Winter in Finland
A photographer has sought to celebrate the cold, harsh landscape of his native Finland in a series of ethereal photos.
Mikko Lagerstedt’s breathtaking photos capture the Nordic country’s bleakness, emphasizing the brisk conditions.
Lagerstedt calls his series In the Solitude, a project he shot over “the last couple of years” on a Nikon Z7 II with a Nikkor Z 14-24mm f/2.8 S and a Nikkor Z 24-70mm f/2.8.
“While capturing landscapes, I try to be open and look for elements that evoke a sense of curiosity in me,” Lagerstedt tells PetaPixel.
“I’m drawn to scenes with a strong visual impact, whether a single tree in a vast landscape or through the interplay of light and shadows, unique weather conditions, or compelling compositions.”
Lagerstedt says that most of his photos are “straight,” the only composite, called Infinite, features the aurora lights.
“My editing process primarily involves using Adobe Lightroom with my preset system and, occasionally, Photoshop,” he says.
“I focus on enhancing the atmosphere and mood with different colors. I aim to create visually and emotionally captivating photographs that follow my style in editing.”
Lagerstedt scouts locations in advance, and even traveled to Swedish Lapland for a few of the photos, but he allows for spontaneity.
“I also try to embrace unexpected opportunities. Being open to the moment often leads to the most captivating images,” he says.
“Recently I’ve been more open to allowing myself to be a complete beginner and seeing the sceneries in a different light.”
Finland is a country famous for winter, and Lagerstedt believes its unique landscapes are often overlooked in photography.
“The title In the Solitude reflects the quiet, introspective nature of the landscapes I sometimes capture with a person to emphasize the feeling of scale,” he says.
“These scenes evoke a sense of peaceful solitude but also show how a storm can bring isolation—inviting viewers to pause and reflect on the beauty, stillness, and power of the surrounding world.”
More of Lagerstedt’s work can be found on his website, Facebook, and Instagram.
Image credits: All photos by Mikko Lagerstedt.
Southern Hotel to screen Covington filmmaker and photographer’s sugar cane film Sub hed: Ticket sale proceeds to benefit St. Tammany Art Association
As soon as Covington filmmaker and photographer Andrew Boyd met Joe Judice, he knew there was a story worth telling about the retired sugar cane farmer and his family.
It is a family that has farmed sugar cane in St. Martin Parish for seven generations, beginning in 1800.
“You spend a career meeting and filming and photographing people, and you know a good story when you see one. This looked like a great story,” said Boyd, a former Times-Picayune photographer who now runs his own photography and videography company, G. Andrew Boyd LLC.
Boyd has told that story in “Sugar in Their Blood,” a self-funded documentary.
Through interviews with both the Judice family and sugar cane experts, the hourlong film reflects both on the family’s farming history and the current challenges they — and the Louisiana sugar cane industry as a whole — consistently face to stay in business. It’s a story of pride and resilience in the face of constantly changing conditions, both in terms of business and climate, according to its promotional materials.
“One of the questions that gets asked early in the film and doesn’t get answered until the end is what the future holds. Will there be an eighth generation? And what the challenges are to farm sugar cane these days,” Boyd said.
“Sugar in Their Blood” debuted to a sold-out crowd earlier this year at the 18th Annual Cinema on the Bayou, a juried film festival in Lafayette, where it won the Best Louisiana Film award.
“It was so gratifying because my farmers were all at the opening, and I felt like I had done them justice, to have it seen and accepted and awarded that way,” Boyd said.
Northshore audiences will get a chance to see the film during two screenings May 6 and 7 at The Southern Hotel in Covington. Proceeds from the ticket sales will benefit the St. Tammany Art Association.
Boyd had not set out to create a film about sugar cane farming. But that changed after talking with his friend Chris Dautreuil about filming a sugar cane farm for another documentary filmmaker.
“Chris immediately said, ‘I’ve got a guy you need to meet’,” Boyd recounted.
Dautreuil, now a Covington resident, played high school baseball with Judice and connected the farmer and the filmmaker.
Judice and his brother, Robert, started Judice Brothers Farms, located in the country between Loreauville and New Iberia, in 1964. When Robert retired in 1993, his son Robert Jr., joined the operation. When Judice retired in 2011, his sons, Jim and Justin, joined Robert Jr. in running the farm, which totals more than 2,600 acres.
After their initial meeting, Judice gave Boyd permission to come back and film the farm’s operations.
“I went home, and I did a bunch of Google research and realized there really wasn’t a good story that showed what (modern-day) sugar cane farming is all about ….It was not something that had really been covered in the way this would allow me to cover it,” Boyd said. “From day one, this was a real passion project for me.”
Boyd’s passion for photography began as a young adult “through an interest in the outdoors,” he said, describing how on a hiking trip with a friend, he shot images with a point-and-shoot camera.
When they didn’t turn out how he hoped, the Jackson, Miss., native decided to invest in better camera equipment. He took journalism classes at Loyola University while attending Tulane University, which at the time did not have a journalism program.
Boyd joined the photography team at the newspaper in 1977 and began shooting videos along with still photography for the paper’s website, www.nola.com, around the time Hurricane Gustav hit Louisiana in 2008.
“I was just entranced with what you could do once sound became part of your toolbox and actual moving pictures became part of your toolbox. That all just fascinated me and seemed like a powerful new way to tell stories,” said Boyd, who left the Times-Picayune in 2018 to start his company that creates still photography and videos for clients.
To create “Sugar in Their Blood,” he spent from January 2019 to January 2020 filming a complete farming cycle. He visited the farm at least once a month, documenting the “downtime” in January and February when equipment is repaired, the planting of sugar cane and soybeans (the farm’s bumper crop) in spring, and the harvest in the late fall and early winter when the sugar cane stalks are cut. The film also shows the cane being processed in the local sugar mill.
Along the way, Boyd interviewed Judice, known as the family’s patriarch, and the younger generations about the family’s history and its future. He rode in tractor cabs during the cutting of the sugar cane and used drones (he is an FAA-licensed drone pilot) to film both the fields and the sugar mill.
“You got an up-close look at what’s involved, and these are great guys, too,” Boyd said.
Exploring Life & Legacy of Legendary Photographer Rodney Smith
“Saori on Seaplane Wing, Dominican Republic,” 2010 (Photo: © 2023 Rodney Smith Ltd., courtesy of the Estate of Rodney Smith)
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Across his 45-year career, celebrated fashion photographer Rodney Smith took hundreds of thousands of photos. Most of his whimsical and imaginative imagery was shot on a 35mm Leica M4 before he transitioned to using a medium format Hasselblad. Smith’s work was already celebrated during his lifetime, but after his passing in 2016, it’s only become more clear how strong his contribution was to the history of photography.
His work has now made its way into many public collections, including the Getty Museum. So it’s only fitting that their publishing branch, Getty Publications, should tackle a new monograph that examines his prolific photography career. Rodney Smith: A Leap of Faith, includes many never-before-seen photos from the New Yorker, who regularly contributed to Vanity Fair, W Magazine, and The New Yorker.
With nearly 200 images, the book is an in-depth look at the photographer who has often been compared to Surrealist painter Rene Magritte thanks to his dreamlike compositions. Getty Museum Curator of Photography Paul Martineau, who authored the volume, shares, “Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, his photographs lead us down the rabbit hole to a fantastical place that is just beyond our reach but one intended to inspire us to be better versions of ourselves.”
At the same time, Martineau also appreciates Smith’s uncanny ability to create perfectly balanced imagery. He tells My Modern Met, “The work is perfectly composed, and his later pictures demonstrate great sophistication in terms of his color relationships.”
Rodney Smith: A Leap of Faith details the photographer’s trajectory, which took him from street photography to corporate photography to the fashion imagery that he’s most well-known for. The book also investigates Smith’s personal life and character, particularly how his privileged, lonely upbringing manifested itself in his creative tendencies. “Smith often stated that photography saved his life,” Martineau shares. “I hope people will be intrigued and impressed by the somewhat tortuous trajectory of Smith’s personal and artistic journey.”
With text by Martineau, as well as essays by Rebecca A. Senf from the Center for Creative Photography and former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, the book is a well-rounded look at Smith’s creative and technical genius. The book, which comes out May 16, is now available for pre-order.
Rodney Smith: A Leap of Faith is a new monograph about the work of acclaimed fashion photographer Rodney Smith.
The book includes nearly 200 images, many of which have never before been published.
“Self-Portrait with Leslie, Siena, Italy,” 1990. (Photo: © 2023 Rodney Smith Ltd., courtesy of the Estate of Rodney Smith)
Through text by Getty Museum curator Paul Martineau and others, the book is an illuminating look at the work of the whimsical, imaginative photographer.
“Twins in the Tree, Snedens Landing, New York,” 1999. (Photo: © 2023 Rodney Smith Ltd., courtesy of the Estate of Rodney Smith)
“Roll No. 1, Monkton, Maryland,” 1999. (Photo: © 2023 Rodney Smith Ltd., courtesy of the Estate of Rodney Smith)
The book, which comes out May 16, is now available for pre-order.
“A.J. Chasing Airplane, Orange County Airport, New York,” 1998. (Photo: © 2023 Rodney Smith Ltd., courtesy of the Estate of Rodney Smith)
“Holding Hands, Amalfi, Italy,” 2007. (Photo: © 2023 Rodney Smith Ltd., courtesy of the Estate of Rodney Smith)
My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by the J. Paul Getty Trust.
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A Review of the Nikon Z 7II Mirrorless Camera for Landscape
With a 45.7-megapixel sensor and a lot of dynamic range, the Nikon Z 7II mirrorless camera looks like a strong candidate for a lot of landscape photographers. How does it hold up in practice? This great video review features an experienced landscape photographer discussing his thoughts months after switching from a medium format setup.
Coming to you from Thomas Heaton, this awesome video review takes a look at the Nikon Z 7II mirrorless camera for landscape photography. The Z 7II comes with a nice range of features, including:
- 45.7-megapixel BSI CMOS sensor
- No optical low-pass filter for higher levels of detail
- 5-axis in-body Vibration Reduction
- Low native ISO of 64
- 4K video at up to 60 fps with external 10-bit N-Log and HLG
- 493 phase-detection autofocus points
- Eye-Detect AF for both people and animals
- Dual memory card slots (one CFexpress Type B and one SD UHS-II slot)
- 3.6-million-dot OLED electronic viewfinder
- 3.2-inch, 2.1-million-dot tilting touchscreen
- 10 fps continuous burst rate
- Long exposure times of up to 15 minutes
- Magnesium alloy body with dust- and weather-resistance for working in inclement conditions
While not perfect, the Z 7II certainly produces high-quality images and ticks a lot of boxes for landscape work. Check out the video above for Heaton’s full thoughts on the camera.
A Photographer Tried to Get His Photos Removed from an AI Dataset. He Got an Invoice Instead.
A German stock photographer who asked to get his images removed from a dataset used to train AI image generators was not only met with a refusal from the dataset owner but also an invoice for $979 for filing an unjustified copyright claim.
The photographer, Robert Kneschke, found out in February that his photographs were being used to train AI through a site called Have I Been Trained? This website allowed him to search through LAION-5B, which is a dataset of over 5.8 billion images owned by the non-profit Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION). The dataset has been used by companies like Stability AI, which supported the dataset’s development, to train AI models that generate images. Kneschke found that “heaps of images” from his portfolio had been included in the dataset, he wrote in a blog on his website.
After seeing another photographer comment online about asking to have their images removed from the LAION dataset, Kneschke decided to contact them about his own work in February. A day later, he wrote on his blog, he received a letter from the organization that said it was compliant with copyright laws and that it is not possible to remove his images.
“Our client only maintains a database that contains links to image files that are publicly available on the Internet. It cannot be ruled out that the database may also contain links to images that you are the author of,” the letter, written by the law firm Heidrich Rechtsanwälte on behalf of LAION and viewed by Motherboard, said. “However, since our client does not save any of the photographs you have complained about, you have no right to deletion. Our client simply does not have any pictures that could be deleted.”
The letter also threatened to collect claims for damages from Kneschke, saying he filed an unjustified copyright claim.
At the end of March, Kneschke decided to send out a cease-and-desist request, which Motherboard viewed, that asked the LAION team to take his images out of the training dataset and provide information on the extent to which the works were used, how long they were used, and where they got the images from.
The LAION team responded again that there had been no copyright infringement. “The only act of reproduction that our client could have undertaken was of a temporary nature and is covered by the limitations of both Section 44b UrhG and the more extensive Section 60d UrhG,” LAION’s lawyers wrote in another letter seen by Motherboard. “As already explained to your client, our client does not store any copies of your client’s works that could be deleted or about which information could be provided. Our client only found image files on the Internet for the initial training of a self-learning algorithm using so-called crawlers and briefly recorded and evaluated them to obtain information.”
According to German copyright law, “it is permitted to make reproductions to carry out text and data mining” if they are “lawfully accessible” and deleted afterward. Temporary reproductions are also allowed if the sole purpose is to enable “a lawful use” of a work and the reproduction has “no independent economic significance.”
“It might be true that LAION does not currently store images itself,” Knesche said to Motherboard, noting that the LAION whitepaper refers to downloading images from URLs, “so copyright infringement might have taken place.”
The legal letter contained an invoice for $979 in Euros, and demanded that Kneschke pay the amount within 14 days or the firm will take legal action. The amount was due for filing an unjustified copyright claim, the lawyers argued, saying that Kneschke must pay because their client had now incurred legal fees to deal with the matter.
“In a letter dated February 14, 2023, we had already pointed out to your client that our client is entitled to claims for damages in accordance with Section 97a (4) UrhG in the event of an unjustified claim,” LAION’s lawyers wrote. “At the time, our client had refrained from asserting this claim, but now feels unable to be lenient here. She incurred legal fees for defending against the obviously unjustified warning you issued, which our client will not bear herself.”
“If I, as the author, ask for my images to be removed from the training data and to fulfill my legal right to information, I am supposed to pay damages to them? That feels like adding insult to injury,” Kneschke told PetaPixel.
The legality of using copyrighted material to train AI is still very contentious and there has not yet been a precedent case that can be used to determine the validity of either side of the case.
“AI is already widely and commonly used and I have no expectations that my case will change that. However, I have hope that we can take part in shaping the legal framework for this new technology to not only cover the AI usage, but also the AI training in respect of the many artists that have their works used without their knowledge and/or permission. I hope that it will become common grounds that artists will get a cut if their data is used in AI training to compensate for lost income due to advancing AI technology,” he told Motherboard.
As of Thursday, Kneschke said that he has filed a lawsuit against LAION at the Hamburg regional court in Germany.
Currently, Getty is suing Stability AI for its role in supporting the development of LAION, which includes over 12 million photographs from Getty Images’ collection. Many artists have also been vocal against the use of their images to train AI. Karla Ortiz, an artist and board member of an advocacy organization for artists called the Concept Art Association, is leading a fundraising campaign to hire a lobbyist in Washington D.C. Ortiz and the organization hope to bring changes to US copyright, data privacy, and labor laws to protect artists’ intellectual property.
Artists should theoretically already be able to remove their work from the training dataset, according to Stability AI, which announced in December that it would honor all opt-out requests collected from the Have I Been Trained? website. There is also a section on the LAION website’s FAQ that states EU citizens who find their images and other identifiable data in the dataset are eligible to file a claim for their personal data to be taken down under the GDPR law.
Spokespeople for LAION did not respond to a request for comment.
12 Normal-Looking Pictures That Are Actually Quite Badass
Ah, photography. The art of capturing a moment in time, preserving it forever in a single frame. From the first photograph taken of a person in 1838, to the most expensive photograph ever sold in 2011, the history of photography is a fascinating one. This list celebrates twelve of the most ordinary-looking but surprisingly important photographs of all time, each with its own unique story to tell.
From a picture of “Tank Man” at Tiananmen Square to a photo of the “Ideal Aryan Baby” chosen by Nazis, this list provides a glimpse into some of the most important moments in history. It also includes a photograph of the first veterans of the United States, a rare Colombian weasel caught in a bathroom, and a revolutionary aerial view of Boston.
So grab your camera, take a deep breath, and get ready to explore the world of photography. It’s time to take a look some of the most important photographs of all time.
Rare weasel caught in bathroom.
Juan M. de Roux
“Ideal Aryan baby” chosen by Nazis.
Prendergast Library to Present Photography, Herb Cooking Class as Part of Murray L. Bob Community Education Initiative
A bookbinding class held as part of the Murray L. Bob Education InitiativesThe James Prendergast Library will present a photography class in May as part of the Murray L. Bob Community Education Initiative.
Local photographer and Infinity instructor Cathy Panebianco will lead “Artistic Photos with Just a Smartphone” at 5:00 p.m., Tuesday, May 9 at the library. The class will offer participants an opportunity to improve cellphone photography skills by learning the basics: settings, techniques, lighting for exposure, and composition.
A smartphone is needed for the class. To register, call (716) 484-7135 Ext. 226.
The Jamestown Public Market will be at the library with Cornell Cooperative Extension’s SNAP-Ed program on May 16th from 5:00-7:00PM for “Cooking Fun with Fresh Herbs.” Attendees will learn how to grow herbs at home, identify them at the local community garden or nursery, and incorporate them in to easy and delicious meals. Participants will be able to smell, taste, and enjoy various herbs that grow well in WNY such as cilantro, sage, parsley, and basil. This program is supported in part through a grant from the Chautauqua Region Community Foundation.
Additional Bob programs are scheduled throughout the year. Children’s Music Studio will hold Music Exploration classes in July and August for kids ages 6 and under and their caregivers. Children will sing, dance, and explore basic instruments during these free classes.
To learn more about the Murray L. Bob Community Education Initiative and find a full list of events, visit prendergastlibrary.org/bob-programs.
