Karuizawa, Japan

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, prepares to deliver a joint statement with the UK foreign secretary, James Cleverly, on the situation in Sudan, where fighting continues between rival army factions

Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AFP/Getty Images

I love vintage automobiles. And I love mystery and weirdness. Here’s how I went about light painting a vintage Model T in total darkness.

What is light painting?

Light painting is a term that is often used loosely to describe any addition of light to a night photograph. Really, though, light painting is a technique that uses a handheld light source to illuminate a scene during a long exposure. You are quite literally painting the scene with light. Night photographers have used this technique for many decades.

Here’s how I illuminated a vintage Ford Model T, an automobile built a century ago.

CRAAAAAAASH!!!!

The Model T was housed indoors. Usually, I am outdoors photographing beneath the starry skies or the moon. 

Not this evening, though. On the first evening of my night photography trip, I was talking to someone for a moment. I left my Nikon D750 and Rokinon 12mm f/2.8 fisheye lens standing on a tripod. When I returned, I couldn’t find it for a couple of seconds. 

An insanely strong and sudden gust of wind knocked it over and carried it several feet from where I had left it. The lens was smashed, with the lens hood peeling off. The lens cap was hurled 30 feet to the east. It would have gone farther had it not been for a building stopping its path.

So, photographing indoors it was with my surviving Pentax K-1 and 15-30mm f/2.8 lens.

A good way to photograph in complete darkness indoors

Of course, indoors is in almost complete darkness. Sure, I could turn on the fluorescent lights above, but where’ the fun in that? This is night photography!

However, I might want to see my way around.

I used my handy Wurkkos FC11 LED flashlight and laid it on the ground pointing away from the Model T. This would illuminate just enough for me to see where I was going, but not enough to really illuminate it.

Four steps to light painting the vintage Model T

Step one: Lighting the left side and front of the vehicle

From camera left, I held the ProtoMachines LED2 light low to the ground and swept it back and forth three times. This lit the ground to give it some texture and also lit the automobile’s front grille.

Step two: Lighting the right side and front of the vehicle

From camera right, I did the same thing on the right side. This would create a sense of symmetry as well as give it some texture and lighting.

Step three: Lighting the headlights

I screwed my homemade DIY snoot onto the ProtoMachines LED2. This would direct the light in a much smaller, more specific area. This is perfect for things such as headlights. A quick burst of red light on each of the headlights, and I was finished.

Step four: Lighting the windshield

Removing the snoot, I then held my light beneath the steering wheel. Why? Who doesn’t love a steering wheel shadow on the windshield?

After that, I closed the camera shutter. The long exposure was three seconds shy of two minutes (117 seconds at f/8 ISO 200). When you are photographing in total darkness, it doesn’t matter whether you are doing a three-second exposure or a three-minute exposure. Your light painting is doing all the illuminating. The darkness is going to be dark with any reasonable exposure when using a low ISO anyway.

You are the director

When you light paint during night photography, you are making creative decisions. You decide what to illuminate and what to keep in shadow. You decide what angle, what sort of texture, what sort of feel, and what sort of colors you want in your photo. It is the most actively creative form of photography that I know. You are wandering around in the scene, determining the angles, colors and brightness. Every “brushstroke of light” builds the photo.

If you do this, you are one of a very small amount of photographers who try. Far less stick with it. Hopefully, articles like this inspire you to keep doing it. I cannot possibly exaggerate how addicting, fun, and rewarding it is.

In times of rising antisemitism, and with the number of remaining Holocaust survivors rapidly dwindling, raising awareness about the horrors they went through remains one of humanity’s essential responsibilities.

Museums equally face the task of finding new ways to keep the public interested in learning about the difficult facts.

“Flashes of Memory: Photography During the Holocaust” is an exhibition that manages to successfully tie in the past with the present. The Instagram generation, used to seeing well-curated self-optimization photos that are perfectly staged and digitally enhanced through filters, will discover through this exhibition that photography during the Nazi era was already used as a tool to manipulate the public opinion, but also served as essential documents of atrocities for later war crimes trials. 

Exposing the camera’s ‘manipulative power’

First shown at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, “Flashes of Memory: Photography During the Holocaust” has now left Israel for the first time and is currently presented at Berlin’s Museum of Photography.

“The camera, with its manipulative power, has tremendous impact and far-reaching influence,” Vivian Uria, director of the Yad Vashem Museums Division, pointed out in 2018, when the exhibition first opened. While “photography pretends to reflect reality as it is, it is in fact an interpretation of it,” she said.

The three-part exhibition provides three different perspectives: through photographs taken by the Nazis, photos taken by Jewish photographers, and pictures taken by the soldiers of the forces that liberated Germany from the Nazis.

Children’s portraits used for antisemitic attacks

The Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, which had been stirring up anti-Jewish resentment since the 1920s, printed for example pictures of Jewish men sitting together in a pub, and accused them of plotting. It even used portraits of children to claim that Jews supposedly had base instincts.

Beginning in 1932, the viciously anti-Jewish tabloid started using the subtitle, “German Weekly for the Fight for Truth.”

During the war, the propaganda paper published photos sent in by Wehrmacht soldiers taken in the ghettos in occupied Poland, captioning them with antisemitic remarks.

Jewish photographers also took photos in the ghettos; they were commissioned by the so-called Judenräte (Jewish councils). These Jewish municipal administrations were appointed by the occupiers and were required to implement Nazi policy. Those photos aimed to document how “efficiently” the ghettos were run, while the councils were actually forced to hand over the Jewish locals for forced labor or deportation to the concentration camps. The extensive photographic documentation aimed to prove to the Nazis that Jewish labor was indispensable.

Although expressly forbidden by the Judenräte, some of the commissioned photographers used their cameras at the risk of their lives to document the suffering and horror in the ghettos.

Henryk Ross, who took photographs in the Lodz ghetto, is quoted as saying he was aware that his family members would be tortured and killed if he was caught taking pictures.

Meanwhile, the Nazis relied on antisemitic stereotypes to portray the ghettos as production facilities where “lazy Jews” were being taught to work.

The exhibition demonstrates the imbalance between the overpowering mass media Nazi propaganda industry, including elaborately staged films by Leni Riefenstahl, and the efforts of a handful of people who risked their lives trying to provide a corrective. “This is an exceptional example of human will,” said Vivian Uria.

Some of these photos avoided destruction by being buried or hidden, and would later serve as evidence in Nazi war crimes trials.

The Allies’ photos served their own purposes

Another section of the exhibition is dedicated to the photos taken by Allied soldiers. As they liberated concentration camps, they documented the horrors of the Holocaust. Through their photos of piles of corpses, or of the extremely emaciated bodies of the survivors, the planned extermination of human lives could no longer be denied.

Harrowing and disturbing, the Allies’ photos are naturally categorized as pictures taken by the “good guys.” But it should still be noted that their photographs sometimes served their own purposes: Numerous images of people behind barbed wire fences at the Auschwitz concentration camp, waiting to be freed, were staged for the cameras.

The iconic image of a Red Army soldier waving the Soviet flag on the roof of the Reichstag building on May 2, 1945, the day of Berlin’s military surrender, serves as a famous example of how post-processing can taint the documentary power of a historical photograph.

The Soviet Red Army photographer who took the shot, Yevgeny Khaldei, scratched off from the photo’s negative one of the two wristwatches the soldier was wearing, as it was a sign of looting — and the liberators were not to be suspected of looting.

The Soviet news agency later added clouds of smoke to the shot, darkening it and enlarging the flag to give the image more drama.

The show illuminates the manipulative power of images from all sides. “Flashes of Memory” is on view at the Museum of Photography through August 20, 2023.

This article was originally written in German.

In times of rising antisemitism, and with the number of remaining Holocaust survivors rapidly dwindling, raising awareness about the horrors they went through remains one of humanity’s essential responsibilities.

Museums equally face the task of finding new ways to keep the public interested in learning about the difficult facts.

“Flashes of Memory: Photography During the Holocaust” is an exhibition that manages to successfully tie in the past with the present. The Instagram generation, used to seeing well-curated self-optimization photos that are perfectly staged and digitally enhanced through filters, will discover through this exhibition that photography during the Nazi era was already used as a tool to manipulate the public opinion, but also served as essential documents of atrocities for later war crimes trials. 

Exposing the camera’s ‘manipulative power’

First shown at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, “Flashes of Memory: Photography During the Holocaust” has now left Israel for the first time and is currently presented at Berlin’s Museum of Photography.

“The camera, with its manipulative power, has tremendous impact and far-reaching influence,” Vivian Uria, director of the Yad Vashem Museums Division, pointed out in 2018, when the exhibition first opened. While “photography pretends to reflect reality as it is, it is in fact an interpretation of it,” she said.

The three-part exhibition provides three different perspectives: through photographs taken by the Nazis, photos taken by Jewish photographers, and pictures taken by the soldiers of the forces that liberated Germany from the Nazis.

Children’s portraits used for antisemitic attacks

The Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, which had been stirring up anti-Jewish resentment since the 1920s, printed for example pictures of Jewish men sitting together in a pub, and accused them of plotting. It even used portraits of children to claim that Jews supposedly had base instincts.

Beginning in 1932, the viciously anti-Jewish tabloid started using the subtitle, “German Weekly for the Fight for Truth.”

During the war, the propaganda paper published photos sent in by Wehrmacht soldiers taken in the ghettos in occupied Poland, captioning them with antisemitic remarks.

Jewish photographers also took photos in the ghettos; they were commissioned by the so-called Judenräte (Jewish councils). These Jewish municipal administrations were appointed by the occupiers and were required to implement Nazi policy. Those photos aimed to document how “efficiently” the ghettos were run, while the councils were actually forced to hand over the Jewish locals for forced labor or deportation to the concentration camps. The extensive photographic documentation aimed to prove to the Nazis that Jewish labor was indispensable.

Although expressly forbidden by the Judenräte, some of the commissioned photographers used their cameras at the risk of their lives to document the suffering and horror in the ghettos.

Henryk Ross, who took photographs in the Lodz ghetto, is quoted as saying he was aware that his family members would be tortured and killed if he was caught taking pictures.

Meanwhile, the Nazis relied on antisemitic stereotypes to portray the ghettos as production facilities where “lazy Jews” were being taught to work.

The exhibition demonstrates the imbalance between the overpowering mass media Nazi propaganda industry, including elaborately staged films by Leni Riefenstahl, and the efforts of a handful of people who risked their lives trying to provide a corrective. “This is an exceptional example of human will,” said Vivian Uria.

Some of these photos avoided destruction by being buried or hidden, and would later serve as evidence in Nazi war crimes trials.

The Allies’ photos served their own purposes

Another section of the exhibition is dedicated to the photos taken by Allied soldiers. As they liberated concentration camps, they documented the horrors of the Holocaust. Through their photos of piles of corpses, or of the extremely emaciated bodies of the survivors, the planned extermination of human lives could no longer be denied.

Harrowing and disturbing, the Allies’ photos are naturally categorized as pictures taken by the “good guys.” But it should still be noted that their photographs sometimes served their own purposes: Numerous images of people behind barbed wire fences at the Auschwitz concentration camp, waiting to be freed, were staged for the cameras.

The iconic image of a Red Army soldier waving the Soviet flag on the roof of the Reichstag building on May 2, 1945, the day of Berlin’s military surrender, serves as a famous example of how post-processing can taint the documentary power of a historical photograph.

The Soviet Red Army photographer who took the shot, Yevgeny Khaldei, scratched off from the photo’s negative one of the two wristwatches the soldier was wearing, as it was a sign of looting — and the liberators were not to be suspected of looting.

The Soviet news agency later added clouds of smoke to the shot, darkening it and enlarging the flag to give the image more drama.

The show illuminates the manipulative power of images from all sides. “Flashes of Memory” is on view at the Museum of Photography through August 20, 2023.

This article was originally written in German.

In times of rising antisemitism, and with the number of remaining Holocaust survivors rapidly dwindling, raising awareness about the horrors they went through remains one of humanity’s essential responsibilities.

Museums equally face the task of finding new ways to keep the public interested in learning about the difficult facts.

“Flashes of Memory: Photography During the Holocaust” is an exhibition that manages to successfully tie in the past with the present. The Instagram generation, used to seeing well-curated self-optimization photos that are perfectly staged and digitally enhanced through filters, will discover through this exhibition that photography during the Nazi era was already used as a tool to manipulate the public opinion, but also served as essential documents of atrocities for later war crimes trials. 

Exposing the camera’s ‘manipulative power’

First shown at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, “Flashes of Memory: Photography During the Holocaust” has now left Israel for the first time and is currently presented at Berlin’s Museum of Photography.

“The camera, with its manipulative power, has tremendous impact and far-reaching influence,” Vivian Uria, director of the Yad Vashem Museums Division, pointed out in 2018, when the exhibition first opened. While “photography pretends to reflect reality as it is, it is in fact an interpretation of it,” she said.

The three-part exhibition provides three different perspectives: through photographs taken by the Nazis, photos taken by Jewish photographers, and pictures taken by the soldiers of the forces that liberated Germany from the Nazis.

Children’s portraits used for antisemitic attacks

The Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, which had been stirring up anti-Jewish resentment since the 1920s, printed for example pictures of Jewish men sitting together in a pub, and accused them of plotting. It even used portraits of children to claim that Jews supposedly had base instincts.

Beginning in 1932, the viciously anti-Jewish tabloid started using the subtitle, “German Weekly for the Fight for Truth.”

During the war, the propaganda paper published photos sent in by Wehrmacht soldiers taken in the ghettos in occupied Poland, captioning them with antisemitic remarks.

Jewish photographers also took photos in the ghettos; they were commissioned by the so-called Judenräte (Jewish councils). These Jewish municipal administrations were appointed by the occupiers and were required to implement Nazi policy. Those photos aimed to document how “efficiently” the ghettos were run, while the councils were actually forced to hand over the Jewish locals for forced labor or deportation to the concentration camps. The extensive photographic documentation aimed to prove to the Nazis that Jewish labor was indispensable.

Although expressly forbidden by the Judenräte, some of the commissioned photographers used their cameras at the risk of their lives to document the suffering and horror in the ghettos.

Henryk Ross, who took photographs in the Lodz ghetto, is quoted as saying he was aware that his family members would be tortured and killed if he was caught taking pictures.

Meanwhile, the Nazis relied on antisemitic stereotypes to portray the ghettos as production facilities where “lazy Jews” were being taught to work.

The exhibition demonstrates the imbalance between the overpowering mass media Nazi propaganda industry, including elaborately staged films by Leni Riefenstahl, and the efforts of a handful of people who risked their lives trying to provide a corrective. “This is an exceptional example of human will,” said Vivian Uria.

Some of these photos avoided destruction by being buried or hidden, and would later serve as evidence in Nazi war crimes trials.

The Allies’ photos served their own purposes

Another section of the exhibition is dedicated to the photos taken by Allied soldiers. As they liberated concentration camps, they documented the horrors of the Holocaust. Through their photos of piles of corpses, or of the extremely emaciated bodies of the survivors, the planned extermination of human lives could no longer be denied.

Harrowing and disturbing, the Allies’ photos are naturally categorized as pictures taken by the “good guys.” But it should still be noted that their photographs sometimes served their own purposes: Numerous images of people behind barbed wire fences at the Auschwitz concentration camp, waiting to be freed, were staged for the cameras.

The iconic image of a Red Army soldier waving the Soviet flag on the roof of the Reichstag building on May 2, 1945, the day of Berlin’s military surrender, serves as a famous example of how post-processing can taint the documentary power of a historical photograph.

The Soviet Red Army photographer who took the shot, Yevgeny Khaldei, scratched off from the photo’s negative one of the two wristwatches the soldier was wearing, as it was a sign of looting — and the liberators were not to be suspected of looting.

The Soviet news agency later added clouds of smoke to the shot, darkening it and enlarging the flag to give the image more drama.

The show illuminates the manipulative power of images from all sides. “Flashes of Memory” is on view at the Museum of Photography through August 20, 2023.

This article was originally written in German.

When Neil Buckland, an artist based in Seattle, met a geologist named Tony Irving a few years ago, he had no idea it would launch an extraterrestrial collaboration. Buckland was at the University of Washington photographing ultrathin slices of meteorite for a project Irving was working on. The cut space rocks didn’t seem particularly exciting at first. Then Buckland peered at the 30-micron-thick samples through a pair of polarizing filters. He was stunned by the vibrant collage of hues.

Talented students from across the area showcased the natural beauty of the Island Paradise for the Key Biscayne Lions Club Photo Contest, and the winners were honored by the service club.

Even though this year the photos submitted didn’t meet the technical requirements for the cover, the artistic quality of the young photographers came through and the top selections were:

–First Prize – Daniela Yuste. MAST Academy

–Second Prize – Ethan Sullivan. Ransom Everglades School

–Third Prize – Isabella Paz. Immaculata-La Salle High School

–Creative – Ethan Sullivan. Ransom Everglades School

–Sunrise – Alana Salazar. Immaculata-La Salle High School

–Composition – Gustavo Emilio Ortiz-Penzol. Immaculata-La Salle High School

–Sunset – Lara Zadeh. MAST Academy

–Lifestyle – Valentina Capote. Ransom Everglades School

–Exterior – Francisco Pages. Immaculata-La Salle High School

–Nature – Lara Zadeh. MAST Academy High School

–Panoramic – Daniel Badash-Campana. MAST Academy

–Wildlife – Nicolas Velosa. MAST Academy

Judges were Robert Gentilini from the Lions Club; Malena Assing, photographer; Diego Camejo, freelance filmmaker and photographer; Maritza Minor, photographer for Key Biscayne Magazine; Leo Quintana, photographer; and Kiko Ricote, commercial photographer.

Special thanks to all the students that participate for sharing their photos.

For more information contact Nora Camejo at (305) 775-250, kblions@icloud.com or click here. 

April 17, 2023

The Sony World Photography Awards (SWPA) has quietly removed the Creative category winner after the entrant, Boris Eldagsen, admitted to using AI to generate the image and declined the prize.

Eldagsen entered his now-disqualified award-winning image, The Electrician, into the contest without disclosing the usage of AI. His aim, beyond perhaps generating publicity, is to ‘find out if the competitions are prepared for AI images’.

They are not,’ he writes on his blog. ‘We, the photo world, need an open discussion. A discussion about what we want to consider photography and what not. Is the umbrella of photography large enough to invite AI images to enter – or would this be a mistake? With my refusal of the award I hope to speed up this debate.’

When the organisers contacted Eldagsen to inform him of the win prior to the announcement, he claims to have sent them a link to his Instagram account and website, where he’s transparent about using AI to create ‘synthetic images’. He presumed the organisers would discover the truth, although no one bothered to check – which seems like the minimal due diligence such a prestigious photo contest should take.

Here’s an excerpt from an in-depth interview with German photo publication, ReVue:

‘Then I said: Beware! If you had looked at all the things I’ve sent you, everything would have been clear, but I now feel the need to re-emphasise that the image was created using artificial intelligence. I did compete with photographs at the Sony World Photography Awards for several years, but without much success. Now I have used my photographic knowledge from 30 years of experience to generate images instead.

I’ve been doing my experiments for more than a year, a kind of stress test for Artificial Intelligence, and if you come to the conclusion that you don’t want that, we’ll give a prize to someone else, it would be okay for me. But if you’d say we want to use this as an opportunity to think into the future, then I’d be happy, and would offer myself as a conversation partner to discuss how festivals and competitions should prepare themselves for the current challenge. ‘

Interviewer: And their response was?

My offer to discuss the matter was not accepted. On the day of the press release I have received a lot of enquiries and the agency CREO, which organises the award, contacted me via email. I sent them a statement, which they did not use. Instead, they communicated a generic response that said something along the lines of «we support the dynamics of photography and artistic freedom». So they weren’t actually interested at all in a discussion. I followed up again this week and was told, well, we have interviews on our blog from time to time, maybe we can do something there. I think this is a historic opportunity.

Photography has taken on a life of its own as a visual language. The visual language of AI, reminiscent of photography, will live on independently – separate from photography – but will in turn permeate photography pervasively, influencing it either directly or indirectly! A precise term, however, for the emerging AI-generated images is still lacking.

The ReVue article goes in deep into Eldagsen’s creative process, which combines AI and AI outpainting with photo editing processes like inpainting, as well as his views on AI, photography, and more. Worth a read.

World Photography Awards ‘censors’ Hong Kong protests

Eldagsen is a respected photo media artist who has lectured and shown work around the world, including in Australia at the Centre of Contemporary Photography, Australian Centre of Photography, Melbourne University, Photography Studies College, RMIT, and Monash University.

He highlights this is a watershed moment in photography, as its the the first AI generated image to win a prestigious international photography competition. More so than the so-called ‘historic’ moment claim by Sydney AI agency, Absolutely AI, which recently won DigiDirect’s measly Weekly Photo Competition.

Eldagsen has worked as a photo artist for 30 years, and throughout his career appears to be an artist who is willing to embrace various image-making processes and push boundaries. When AI image generator technology emerged in the last 12 months, Eldagsen began experimenting and AI imagery is now the focus of his work.

In a blog post about the SWPA award win, he acknowledges that ‘AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this. They are different entities. AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award.’

According to Petapixel, Eldagsen even travelled from Berlin to the awards ceremony in London, walked on stage without invitation, hijacked the microphone and briefly spoke about what happened.

‘I expected to have a short moment on stage, as an open competition category winner,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t. They only asked the overall open competition winner on stage. Then they had dinner break. After dinner break before the 2nd part of the show started I went straight to the host. Told her that my image was selected as a winner for the creative category / open competition and if I can say something.

‘As she was taken by surprise I did it anyhow. That’s it. No response. The 2nd part started, the show must go on. I stayed until the end. No one from SWPA or CREO approached me, no one was interested in communicating with me.’

While SWPA hasn’t released a statement to acknowledge Eldagsen’s disqualification or refusal to accept the award, it has removed his picture from the printed exhibition and from the website.