Dealing With Fear as a Photographer

Apr 20, 2023 By Admin in Photography

Photography is a challenging career, particularly since it does not have the sort of well-established stable path that something like a more traditional job does. Fear is a natural thing to arise from that experience, and as such, it is important to be prepared for it and ready to handle it in a healthy manner. This great video essay features an experienced pro discussing the issue and how to cope with fear.

Coming to you from Scott Choucino of Tin House Studio, this excellent video essay discusses the issue of experiencing fear as a photographer and how to cope with it. I think it is important to not try to avoid the feeling or pretend it will not present itself. After all, fear is our mind’s natural way of indicating a risk to us, and a career in photography can be a risky thing. And when it comes to fear, as illogical as it might seem, understanding its presence and what causes it can actually help to reduce its intensity, whereas trying to avoid it can actually cause it to come back in unpredictable and unhealthy ways that can cause issues. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Choucino.

Mansfield Senior alumna opens D’Shae Harris Photography studio

Apr 20, 2023 By Admin in Photography

MANSFIELD — D’Shae Harris has always made space for her photography passion. She has constructed studios in garages and basements and operated out of rental space for freelancers.

“I’ve been renting around here in Mansfield or doing outdoor sessions (from 2016 to 2023),” she said. “Finally … I am now opening up my own space.”

Freelance photographer Shay Harris gets creative in Mansfield

D’Shae Harris Photography studio

My Virginia Adventures: An Exhibition of Photographs by Patricia Temples now on display

Apr 20, 2023 By Admin in Photography

The following is a press release by Chee Ricketts from the Art Guild of Greene.

Anyone who wishes a glimpse of authentic scenery in the Old Dominion should first make a visit to The Stanardsville Station (on Main Street next to Maybelle’s) where an exciting photography exhibit by Patricia Temples is currently on display. The Art Guild of Greene, in collaboration with the Stanardsville United Methodist Church, is honored to offer this exhibition to the community. The show will continue through the end of June. Admission is free and all are welcome.

Twenty-nine framed photographs comprise this exhibition, offering sightings into the hidden and frequently forgotten remnants of rural life in the backwoods and by-ways of this beautiful state. Pat’s motto, “Make It an Adventure”, is evident when one views her images. In her travels throughout the state, she has sought out subjects that echo another time and place, displaying a reverence for the land and the people who have inhabited it.

Pat is especially drawn to subjects that demonstrate the changes that often occur over time. Several of her images show structures in different seasons, sometimes spanning years. Occasionally, she will return to a site to photograph a subject and find that it has disappeared, due to the ravages of nature or commercialization. A prime example is her collection of three photographs of a farm on Madison-Hood Road, located on the left as one heads towards US 29. Pat notes that “ I’ve always considered it the best managed farm I’ve ever seen. The fields are groomed and perfect in all seasons.” Pat had the foresight to photograph the barn during three seasons to show the changes over time. Today, there is an empty space where the barn once stood.

In two other photographs, Pat has documented a charming caboose as it sat in Rapidan and as it has now been restored and returned to its original home in Nelson County. Her enthusiasm for “capturing an historical moment” is also evident in the way she has presented an assemblage of photographs of the horses at Montpelier. The six images are encased in an original window that was salvaged from the Montpelier barns that were built in the 1920s using prefabricated Sears building kits.

Of special interest is a unique process that Pat describes as “woven photography”. In these, she has printed two slightly different photographs of a single subject, subtly changing the saturation and colors in each. She then cuts the photographs into strips and weaves them together, creating exciting optical effects. Her most recent woven photograph is of a tree in Big Meadows, although there are several other examples in the show.

A Virginia native, Pat began her career in education as a teacher, school counselor and social worker. Moving to Greene County in retirement, she began to pursue photography seriously, joining the Charlottesville Camera Club and taking classes to perfect new skills. Her photography achievements include numerous appearances and awards in Virginia Wildlife Magazine Photography Contests, in shows at the Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community Juried Art Exhibitions, the Bath County Annual Art Show in Hot Springs, VA, and the Appalachian Mountain Photography Contest in Boone, NC. Her most extensive work was the Voices of the Land project for the Blue Ridge Foothills Conservancy, for which she produced a photo exhibit and a DVD documenting life on a dairy farm in Greene County. Most recently, several of her photographs of Greene County were selected by the Greene County Public Schools to be hung as large murals in new additions to the high school and the middle school.

Committed to the community in which she lives, Pat has used her skills as a photographer in support of many worthwhile projects. She has been responsible for photographing the 100-plus barn quilts that appear throughout the County for the Art Guild of Greene. Recently, she presented programs to both the Greene County Historical Society and the local JABA group on the trees of Greene County.

This remarkable photography exhibition allows the community to share in and be enriched by the vision of Pat Burton Temples. (It is possible to see more of Pat’s photographs on her website: www.patriciatemplesphotography.com) The Stanardsville Station is generally open Tuesday-Thursday from 10 -3 and The Art Guild of Greene provides volunteers on occasional Fridays and Saturdays. Operated as a community outreach center by the Stanardsville United Methodist Church, The Stanardsville Station offer free internet access and a place for friends to gather over a cup of coffee. All are welcome. Patricia Temples’ photography exhibition will be on display until the end of June. This show is a “must-see”!

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Tap into the world of AI photo editing with Luminar Neo

Apr 20, 2023 By Admin in Photography

The award-winning Luminar Neo Lifetime Bundle is on sale for just $79—just over $11 per program.

Just a month ago, AI-generated took social media by storm. Users created wide-ranging photos—funny and realistic—using a technology that has recently become more prevalent in photography. According to Wedio, the implementation of AI drastically cuts down on how much time photographers need to edit their prized shots.

While the technology was enjoyed in a more informal sense by the general public, AI-assistant photo editing has dramatically enhanced the portfolio and catalog of professional photographers. Aspiring and award-winning photographers alike have used technology to enhance their efforts. Now, you can also utilize AI-powered photo editing tools with Luminar Neo, which is bundled with other innovative tools, for only $79 (reg. $400). This is the best price you’ll find online.

Luminar Neo is the star of this bundle. Its easy-to-use friendly interface makes it accessible to everyone. It empowers users’ photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative AI-driven tools. Powerful editing tools feature many tools, including layers, masking, and local adjustments. AI-powered tools allow users to replace skies and enhance landscapes and portraits. It’s also compatible with Windows, macOS, and can even be used as a plug-in for Photoshop or Lightroom.

Six photo editing add-ons also come with your purchase, including Perfect Fluffy Clouds, Soulful Panoramas, Spring Adventure, Emerald Forest, Bokeh Dreams, and Champions Bundle. Adjust the clouds in landscape photos to look more fluffy and dynamic, or add a moodier, earthy vibe to your stills. No matter what you want to edit, Luminar Neo and these add-ons can help.

In addition, mobile users can use the Luminar Share Mobile app, which allows them to quickly and seamlessly transfer images from their phone to their computer. Updates to the program are also included for the duration of your product’s lifecycle.

Luminar Neo was the 2022 Red Dot Winner for Interface Design and boasts a 4.8 out of 5-star rating on Trustpilot. One verified user wrote, “The product is amazing. Its editing capabilities are astonishing and the technical support was thorough and committed.”

Unlock a world of photo editing creativity and capabilities with the help of AI. Grab the award-winning Luminar Neo Lifetime Bundle now for just $79 (reg. $400), the best price on the web.

Prices subject to change.

This article was made in collaboration with The Jerusalem Post Deals.

AI photography is here to stay—here’s why we should be worried

Apr 20, 2023 By Admin in Photography

The photographer Boris Eldagsen recently caused surprise and a wave of discussion in the photography field when he won in a category of the Sony World Photography Awards with a synthetic image that he had produced using the AI or generative neural network DALL-E 2.

Eldagsen claims his intent was not to deceive, and he rejected the prize at the awards ceremony because he felt the organisers were not talking about the fact the image was synthetic. His aim, he says, was always to stir debate about the impact of these technologies on the way we think about photography. He also made his position clear, arguing that these synthetic images are not photographs and should not be accepted in competitions for photography. But is it so straightforward?

In a subsequent interview with the BBC, Eldagsen described these images as “promptography” not photography, making the distinction that a true photograph is made from light reacting with a sensitive surface, whereas these photographs are the result of prompts inputted into a neural network. However, this description masks the rather more complex and murky reality of how these neural networks can generate these images at all.

In order to generate such impressively life-like photographs, these neural networks are trained on huge datasets of millions of pre-existing photographs, which allow them to form the necessary “neural” connections to take a textual prompt and turn it into a photorealistic image. In a sense these systems don’t exactly produce anything new at all – they synthesise new images based on the data points of pre-existing photographs.

Through this they “learn” how light and lenses interact to create images in a conventional camera, but they don’t do this themselves, so in a way their outputs are almost closer to collage or 3D-modelling than to conventional photography. The problem here is that these systems struggle to generate images of things they haven’t been trained on, and so this will always be a major limitation to their creativity.

As Eldagsen said in an interview “photographic language has become a free floating entity separated from photography and has now a life of its own”. At the same time, it is also worth noting that computational and generative photography is not exactly new, and we tolerate a wide range of post-processing effects being applied to photographs that bear no direct relationship to light, lenses and the other things we associate with traditional photography. Mobile phones increasingly employ neural networks to improve the images from their cameras, sometimes dramatically altering them in the process and producing an image that would not be possible through optics alone. So a middle ground between traditional photography and synthetic imagery also exists, one of “assisted” photographs that combine the best of both worlds.

Perhaps part of the problem with this debate, however, is that photography is used for a massive array of purposes, and to speak about all of them in the same breath is too ungainly to be useful. There are genres where we might agree that the undisclosed use of these images is problematic, like photojournalism, where the potential for them to be misused is enormous and could have genuinely dangerous consequences.

Synthetic imagery of news events is already circulating widely on social media (such as a recent image of presidents Putin and Xi), and in my own research I’ve found there is huge fear on newspaper desks about the dangers of news organisations using one of these images by mistake. It perhaps matters far less in the context of art, where these generative neural networks are a potentially powerful tool of expression, as Eldagsen himself argues.

But a final question is whether the debate should focus less on whether these images count as photographs, and more about the moral right or wrong of how they work. There is growing evidence that the training data for many of these neural networks draws on copyrighted imagery by existing photographers, and there are a growing number of court cases brought against the companies behind the neural networks. Beyond the rights and wrongs of the images themselves, we should be asking if it is fair that photographers might find themselves losing out financially to systems that are only made possible in the first case because of their photographs.

• Lewis Bush is a London-based photographer. He is currently a PhD student at the London School of Economics in the department of Media and Communications and was formerly the course leader of the MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography course at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London

Photographer Captures Jaw-Dropping Mysterious Spiral Over the Aurora with a Simple Explanation–(LOOK)

Apr 20, 2023 By Admin in Photography

credit Todd Slatt with permission – www.aurorahunter.com

For Todd Slatt, a.k.a the “Aurora Hunter” photographing the northern lights is nothing out of the ordinary, but last Saturday, he witnessed something emerging from the darkness of the night sky that shocked and inspired him.

A spiral of pale blue light began to form in the distance, growing ever larger and coming ever closer to the man holding his camera and his breath.

Eventually, it completely passed over his viewing spot in Delta Junction, Alaska, leaving the expert photographer mystified.

“It was a beautiful piece of art in the sky,” Slatt told Anchorage News Daily. “I would say this was maybe the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Residents farther north, who are used to wild weather phenomenon, also saw the spiral and wondered what it was.

MORE WILD WEATHER: Hiker Captures Video of Rare Ice Disk Vortex Spinning in Scottish Winter Weather Phenomenon–WATCH

Like many others that night, Slatt did some research and soon appeared on his Facebook with a stunning image of the spiral and a surprising explanation for its origin.

“After doing some online research, this phenomenon appears to be rocket engine exhaust from a SpaceX Transporter-7 mission that launched on the Falcon 9 about three hours earlier in California,” he wrote.

“Water vapor in the exhaust (or jettisoned fuel causing it to spiral?) from the second stage engine freezes and catches high-altitude sunlight, effectively glowing and creating this spiral-galaxy-looking display of light.”

The beauty of the aurora is augmented no end by the blue spiral atop it, and serves to make the sky look somewhat like a national flag.

SHARE This Inspiring And Beautiful Photography With Your Friends…

Two Mexican Photographers on Vulnerability and Legacy

Apr 20, 2023 By Admin in Photography

Graciela Iturbide: I became Maya’s mentor through a government grant in the 1990s and, not long after, she traveled with me to France and Hungary as an assistant. We have a similar way of thinking, politically and spiritually, and we live in similar worlds, but our temperaments are very different. Maya has often looked for the toughest thing she can find — the femicides in Juárez; her wonderful projects with sex workers — though she has also photographed healers and shamans. I prefer to shoot in calmer situations. When I get surprised by something, that’s when I pull the trigger.

I don’t feel I’m her teacher, although I suppose she learned about photography from our long conversations and from looking at images together, and we have a shared way of working. I go to live with the people I photograph for a month or two [in order to] establish relationships. It makes the work less intrusive. While Maya was working on “Plaza de la Soledad” (2006), her book about prostitutes in Mexico City, she took me to meet those women. She’d developed such close relationships with them, too.

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Margaret Cho,
comedian and actress

and Atsuko Okatsuka, comedian

Naomi Watts,
actress

and Elle Fanning, actress

Wu Tsang,
multidisciplinary artist

and Klein, musician & filmmaker

Salt-N-Pepa,
musicians

and Issa Rae, actress, producer, and screenwriter

Maria Grazia Chiuri,
fasion designer

and Zadie Xa, interdisciplinary artist

Joan Baez,
singer-songwriter & visual artist

and Lana Del Rey, singer-songwriter

Margaret Cho,
comedian and actress

and Atsuko Okatsuka, comedian

Naomi Watts,
actress

and Elle Fanning, actress

Wu Tsang,
multidisciplinary artist

and Klein, musician & filmmaker

Salt-N-Pepa,
musicians

and Issa Rae, actress, producer, and screenwriter

Maria Grazia Chiuri,
fasion designer

and Zadie Xa, interdisciplinary artist

Joan Baez,
singer-songwriter & visual artist

and Lana Del Rey, singer-songwriter

Margaret Cho,
comedian and actress

and Atsuko Okatsuka, comedian

Naomi Watts,
actress

and Elle Fanning, actress

Wu Tsang,
multidisciplinary artist

and Klein, musician & filmmaker

Salt-N-Pepa,
musicians

and Issa Rae, actress, producer, and screenwriter

Maria Grazia Chiuri,
fasion designer

and Zadie Xa, interdisciplinary artist

Joan Baez,
singer-songwriter & visual artist

and Lana Del Rey, singer-songwriter

Margaret Cho,
comedian and actress

and Atsuko Okatsuka, comedian

Naomi Watts,
actress

and Elle Fanning, actress

Wu Tsang,
multidisciplinary artist

and Klein, musician & filmmaker

Salt-N-Pepa,
musicians

and Issa Rae, actress, producer, and screenwriter

Maria Grazia Chiuri,
fasion designer

and Zadie Xa, interdisciplinary artist

Joan Baez,
singer-songwriter & visual artist

and Lana Del Rey, singer-songwriter

READ THE ISSUE

But I don’t know if we have such clear-cut legacies in Mexican photography. When I started out in the 1970s, the great Manuel Álvarez Bravo was the first photographer I knew. As his assistant, I learned how to develop, how to draw out blacks, whites and grays. More than anything, though, in the many years I knew him, he taught me a way of life. He taught me about literature and music and painting, about how to be myself and how to have liberty. My family, who were very conservative, didn’t approve, but now I have nieces who want to be photographers so, in one way or another, I’m passing down the legacy that he left to me, to Maya and others. We all have to go our own way at some point. If we don’t, we never become ourselves.

Maya Goded: For more than 30 years, Graciela and I have had this intense dialogue. I would go over and we would drink a lot of mezcal, look at images, talk about photography, what we were reading, what we were listening to, ideas, politics, the social and cultural life taking place around us. Photography wasn’t just looking at photo books. It was life itself. For a time, Graciela was the only person I always showed my work to, and she’s the only photographer I’ve gone into the field with. She has this powerful but natural way of moving through space, which is something I learned from her: to wait and observe, letting time do its work.

If you’re photographing vulnerable situations, you have to make yourself vulnerable, too. Photography’s a kind of healing, a way to understand your own wounds, which is something Graciela and I have spoken about a lot. Over the years, I’ve seen that she’s always searching. If you have a fixed idea about your work, if you’re not questioning yourself, that means you’re not really living your craft.

Interviews have been edited and condensed.