A photograph stops time for a fraction of a second. Then, life keeps moving. But what if a photograph could be used to preserve the place you love from changing?

It’s why Sierra Grace spends most of her days off doing what she refers to as “light trespassing” around Hollywood Beach.

Grace is part photographer, part archivist and part activist — raising red flags about development and demolition of historic buildings on her Instagram account LushSuburb. She’s a frequent voice at city meetings around South Florida.

“I have always had a compulsion to take pictures. And pretty pictures help get a point across,” she said while guiding WLRN around the Hollywood Beach Broadwalk. “That’s how I do good work with it, you can catch people’s attention and then get them mobilized.”

More than a decade ago, Grace started creating an archive of “old Florida” motels and shops that represented the esoteric and art deco architecture around South Florida. She posts the photos on social media where her followers connect with the nostalgic aesthetic.

Then, during the pandemic and the housing crisis that followed, Grace became more politically active — sometimes urging her followers to sign petitions to save historic buildings or speak out against anti-preservation bills like HB 1317.

Preserving the Broadwalk

On a recent afternoon, Grace wore her blonde hair up and tucked under a red baseball hat. She draped her camera over her shoulder and a fanny pack around her waist. And even though she was walking the beach in the middle of the afternoon, she wore construction boots — necessary for visiting certain sites, she said.

“It’s not that we’re anti-development, it’s that we’re anti reckless development,” Grace explained. This “reckless development” — according to Grace — threatens the look and feel of Hollywood Beach.

She stopped at the historic Neptune Motel on the Broadwalk — the motel was purchased by a real estate investment group in 2022.

“Could you imagine … if this was a massive tower now? It would be the beginning of the end of the character of the Broadwalk,” Grace said as she walked into the courtyard to take some photos of the beachfront motel.

The Condra Property Group plans on building a 3-story beach club and restaurant over the Neptune. They are also planning an 18-story apartment building with affordable housing units a few blocks away on A1A. They plan to utilize the Live Local Act, which prohibits local officials from weighing in on zoning, density and height restrictions for eligible developments.

Qualifying projects are defined as any residential housing project on commercial, industrial or mixed-use land that allocates at least 40% of units to be affordable for residents earning up to 120% of the area median income.

Restoration vs. redevelopment

Grace tries not to draw too much attention to herself when she’s out photographing — she likes to use her iPhone instead of a larger DSLR camera — but often she’ll run into people curious about what she’s up to.

It happened while she was showing WLRN around — a woman asked Grace what she was taking photos of, and Grace asked how she felt about new development on the beach.

“This is going to make it so much more like Miami Beach, versus the intimacy that we have here right now,” the woman told Grace. “And just in general, the comfort. I come here often to avoid tourism.”

But Grace hasn’t lost hope for Hollywood. She grew up moving throughout different cities in Broward and Miami-Dade counties which helped shape her appreciation for the unique style of South Florida.

“Every Florida city has its vernacular. Floridians, we’re really known for like crazy roadside architecture. We just kind of do what we want freely. So it’s unique. There’s nowhere else that exists like us,” she said. 

Grace guides us by the Marlin hotel, a carefully remodeled art deco building complete with Miami-Vice-teal paint and a pink neon sign.

“It’s a great example of restoration, she says. “It’s perfect. It’s painted. People have great experiences. They make good money. It contributes to the look and feel and the character of Hollywood.

Photographing local landmarks

David Paulo is another photographer working to preserve parts of Broward. He started taking photographs of what he calls “Broward County landmarks” last year.

He’s self-taught and uses a FujiFilm point-and-shoot film camera. It’s unobtrusive, light and creates warm images that he shares on his Instagram account ShotByLeather.

We met recently in Sistrunk, a historically Black neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale. It’s in neighborhoods like this where Paulo’s work has its greatest impact.

“I don’t think most people would be comfortable walking down these ways,” he told WLRN. “I think it’s extremely vital to preserve the history. By me taking these photos, essentially, I’m capturing history.”

Whereas most photographers stick to the beaches and downtown areas, Paulo roams the streets of neighborhoods like Lauderhill and Dania Beach to create snapshots of some of the most recognizable buildings in the area.

“It’s so important to me because this is where I’m from and I’m seeing it change rapidly with all the development,” he told WLRN.

Walking the streets of these neighborhoods is vital for the work that Paulo does. While taking WLRN on a tour, Paulo was stopped multiple times by members of the community who were curious about his camera.

“I connect with the community. It’s deeper than just taking pictures. It’s also knowing the people in your community, digging deep,” he said. “As humans, we’re supposed to connect with other humans.”

Many of the neighborhoods Paulo photographs are bustling with construction of new apartment buildings and with the new development comes the threat of gentrification.

“Change is good, as long as change comes with equality,” he said. “I’m not talking about gentrification and pricing people out. I mean changing the dynamic of the neighborhood.”

Photographing buildings before they are torn down

Paulo’s photographs are unvarnished and mostly unedited. When he sees something he likes he takes a few steps towards or away from it and fires a few shots with natural instinct. He prefers to shoot during the day when the sun is high and shadows are intense, casting a tropical light on buildings so that they emit a blinding glow that South Floridians are all too familiar with.

There is urgency in the work of both Grace and Paulo. They are both Florida natives who have seen the landscapes of the places they grew up in change rapidly.

“Everything is changing. So I’m trying to preserve as much community as I can through my art,” Paulo said.

On a recent afternoon Paulo wanted to photograph one last landmark — the amphitheater at Huizenga Plaza in downtown Fort Lauderdale.

“I know you remember the Broward Performing Arts Field trips?” he said. “And then after we’d go to Subway, we’d have sandwiches and sit at Huizenga Plaza and just chill, enjoy the breeze.”

But when he got there, construction tape surrounded the rubble of the former amphitheater. Soon a restaurant will take its place.

“I’m mad I didn’t get a picture of it bro,” he said. “And look, now it’s gone. History’s gone.”

Editor’s Note: In Snap, we look at the power of a single photograph, chronicling stories about how both modern and historical images have been made.

At an outpost in Afghanistan’s eastern Korengal Valley, in the midst of a heightened American military campaign against the Taliban, two soldiers appear to be fighting — each other. It’s a play fight and the young man on the bottom has his comrade in a headlock, forcing a kiss on the cheek.

The photograph, taken in 2008 by the late British photographer Tim Hetherington, is from a time when nearly a fifth of all combat in Afghanistan was taking place in the six-mile valley.

In the long stretches of boredom that would arise when the enemy was nowhere to be found, the men had to find other things to do at their remote outpost.

“These guys are tough, aggressive guys and when there wasn’t any combat, they turned their aggression on each other — in a fraternal way,” explained Sebastian Junger, a writer and journalist who first brought Hetherington to Afghanistan on an assignment for Vanity Fair magazine in 2007.

Both Hetherington and Junger became “enamoured with the opportunity to show the intimacy of a platoon in combat,” Junger said in an interview via telephone. The pair went on to co-direct what would become the Oscar-nominated documentary “Restrepo” filmed over the course of the same platoon’s deployment.

Bobby, the soldier on the bottom of this image, is remembered by Junger as “incredibly funny, extremely smart.” On top is Cortez, “an incredibly sweet kid,” said Junger, adding that he was “sort of the pretty boy in the platoon.”

The photograph is currently on display at London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM), accompanied by an excerpt from Hetherington’s journal written that same year: “In the end it has little to do with the war, and a lot to do with being men… Or in the case here, becoming men.”

The works form part of an exhibition called “Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington,” which opened on the 13th anniversary of the photographer’s death (he was killed by shrapnel while filming and photographing the Libyan Civil War in April 2011).

Junger agrees with his friend’s sentiment. “One of the things that place is very good at is turning children into men. And I think that’s always been true of war.”

Young men in conflict

“The experience of war was the only opportunity that men had in a society to express unconditional love for each other,” is a quote that Hetherington often repeated, according to his friends.

He first learned it from another friend, photographer James Brabazon while the pair waited with Liberian rebel forces who were going to attack the capital Monrovia, during the Liberian Civil War in 2003. It was Hetherington’s first experience of combat.

Brabazon first heard the saying from his grandfather, a British soldier who served in World War II. “He just clearly, really took it to heart,” said Brabazon in a video interview with CNN. “Tim was really interested in the dynamics of young men… He was really interested in how young men related to one another, how they represented one another to each other, where those representations came from, how they were amplified and how they were perpetuated — particularly in conflict.”

In a remote outpost where society was “stripped away,” these bonds captured Hetherington’s attention more than the war itself.

“I became much more interested in the inter-relationships between the soldiers and my own relationship to the soldiers than I was in the fighting,” reads a quote from Hetherington in the exhibition. “My examination of young men and violence, or of young men… It’s as much a journey about my own identity as it is about those young soldiers,” he wrote.

Following his year in the Korengal, Hetherington published “Infidel,” a photography book of stills taken during his deployment with bits of commentary from himself and the US soldiers he was embedded with.

One contributor is Cortez, one of the subjects of the photo, who wrote: “I told them time and time again that if a grenade went off, I would actually throw myself on the grenade… Because I actually love my brothers. I mean, it is a brotherhood… I think any of them would do it for me also.”

‘It’s very important that this work happened’

The IWM, which holds the entire archive of Hetherington’s work, worked with researchers and different communities to find out how they engaged with conflict photography. Greg Brockett, who curated the exhibition, was especially interested in how refugee communities would respond to Hetherington’s work.

“It’s very difficult to say how people are going to respond… Because a lot of them have experienced war and conflict directly,” he told CNN over a video interview. “What struck me was there was generally an overwhelming sense of people who felt it’s very important that this work happened, and people were able to see the realities they experience.”

“I’m less interested in people taking away knowledge of Tim, I’m more interested in people taking inspiration away from Tim,” said Stephen Mayes, executive director of the Tim Hetherington Trust, who also spoke to CNN via video call.

Hetherington was distinguished from other conflict photographers by his approach, which involved spending prolonged periods of time with his subjects. He often used film cameras and would speak to his subjects while photographing them.

“He wasn’t interested in photography in and of itself, for its own sake. He was interested in how that would allow him to access the lives of others,” said Brabazon.

‘It took a little bit from his soul’

In this process, Hetherington worried about how photography could be extractive. “He wanted the process to be consensual and also to leave something in the community,” added Brabazon, recounting a series of street photographs Hetherington took in Liberia where he would take photographs of people, keeping one Polaroid for himself and giving another to the subject.

“I think that was really important, because it allowed people to have agency in the work that was being created… It’s about extending the courtesy of participation in the creation of the work to the subject themselves.”

Hetherington’s friends reflect on the tragedy of his death in Libya, believing he was killed in his prime as a photographer — not only because of the images he produced, but because of his reflections on what it meant to capture conflict.

Mayes mentions the old adage that making a picture takes a little piece of the subject’s soul. “Tim thought, definitely, in his mind, he’d sold his soul to the devil in a way, because he saw that in making every picture he made, it took a little bit from his soul.”

“What did Tim want the effect of his work to be? That is a question which I don’t think we will every really know the answer to, because he died in the process of working that out himself,” Brabazon explained.

In his final diary entry on April 19, 2011, Hetherington wrote about attending the funeral of a rebel fighter who was killed by a mortar. He wrote of the young men he met there: “They are grimily happy that we are here to help them. They feel that now the whole world can see.”

“Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington” is on at London’s Imperial War Museum until September 29.

The V&A’s new exhibition showcases iconic photos by the likes of Tyler Mitchell, Nan Goldin, Ryan McGinley, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe and more

Adobe’s seemingly endless drive to convince the world we need artificial intelligence (AI) tools rolls ever onwards, with the company adding new features to Adobe Lightroom, including Generative Remove and an AI-powered Lens Blur. 

Adobe calls its AI tech Firefly, and it is now in many of the company’s products. Its latest application in Lightroom is Generative Remove which lets users remove unwanted objects from any photo entirely non-destructively with just a single click.

From there, users must then paint a general shape over the object(s) they want to remove.

This differs from existing heal functions, which Adobe says are best suited to small objects like dust spots or minor distractions.

Generative Remove is designed to handle larger and more complex situations, like removing an entire person from the background, and brings functionality into Lightroom that was previously only found in Photoshop.

When users use Generative Remove, Lightroom offers three potential variants, each with a slightly different spin on AI-powered object removal. 

You can see some examples of results in the screenshots below.

In addition, the other new addition is the formal introduction of Lens Blur into Lr (it was previously in early access as we covered on our guide here).

Lens Blur works by analysing the image and creating a Depth map to distinguish between the foreground, the main subject, and the background.

Once the depth map detects different depth levels, the Lens blur tool can then apply a blur effect selectively to specific depth ranges.

In use, it works the same as it did in the Beta version, and like Generative Remove, is non-destructive, meaning users can tweak or disable it later in editing. Also, a selection of all-new presets allow photographers to quickly and easily achieve a specific look.

Lens Blur is available across Lightroom on desktop, mobile, and the web.

The other notable new function for Lr is tethering support in Lightroom Classic for select Sony Alpha mirrorless cameras, a welcome addition.

According to Adobe, the rollout of the new functionality will be staggered. Generative Remove is available in “early access” across mobile, desktop, iPad, Web, and Lightroom Classic. It is also coming to Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).

Lens Blur is generally available across the entire Lightroom ecosystem. However, the amount of manual control photographers have over the depth map and visualisation depends on the platform. Lens Blur is also in ACR.

CHENNAI: Growing up, Dr Navin Gnanasekaran was always curious and eager to explore. Following his post-graduation, he realised the importance of taking an interest in everything around him. During that period, Navin met Dr Arun Kumar, who joined the medical college as a junior. The two hit it off instantly and have been friends for a long time. After a few years, the two doctors became colleagues, and since 2013, they have been working together. Dr Navin specialises in Interventional Radiology and pin-hole surgeries.

Pictures taken by doctors Arun and Navin

“One became an extension of the other during procedures, and we formed a close-knit team. Following our medical duties, we started going on extended road trips. We share a deep curiosity about people, places, and the stories these places hold. On one occasion, while in Bengaluru, we travelled from there to Hyderabad and onwards to Jabalpur for a medical conference. En route, we took a spontaneous detour to nearby Bandhavgarh National Park. There I encountered my first tiger in the wild. That experience left us both fascinated, and from then on we started uncovering hidden trails and exploring national parks,” recounts Dr. Navin.

During their trip, the duo met many interesting people. They learned about the special bond that people of the forest share with wild animals. “It’s their way of life, which we sometimes struggle to understand. The connection between humans and animals is simple yet deep and meaningful. It’s touching to see their spiritual connection with nature,” explains Dr Arun Kumar.

The duo is happy to share stories of conservation and how people coexist harmoniously with nature. “Travelling has shifted our perspectives. Being in nature feels like attending a ‘green church’. We’ve visited most of the forests in India, but we’re eager to explore more places and deepen our understanding of the flora and fauna,” adds Navin.

He acknowledges that travel has enhanced their understanding of people and exposed them to diverse local cultures.

“Staying in a place for a few days gives us a real sense of the community. In Sundarbans, where tigers are known to prey on humans, I was struck by the villagers’ attitude. One villager’s response surprised me when I asked how they cope with the constant fear. They revere the animal and view it as a sacred offering. It’s a form of reasoning that might be difficult for us to understand. This sacred relationship has enabled humans to coexist with animals in the wilderness, minimising conflicts,” Navin shares with DT Next.

As a parting note, the doctors express that their passion for photography has been instrumental in their journey of learning and understanding about nature, wildlife conservation, and conservation photography.

HOMER, Alaska (KTUU/Gray News) – The man killed by a moose in Alaska this weekend was identified as a well-known wildlife photographer who “knew the risks,” his son said.

Family members of 70-year-old Dale Chorman said he died “doing what he loved most” – photographing wildlife.

Chorman was killed Sunday after being charged and kicked by a female moose, known as a cow moose, that had just given birth.

Chorman was able to snap a few pictures of the mother moose giving birth. It was a moment so special that after getting a few shots, Chorman grabbed a friend to find the moose again for more pictures.

This time, however, the cow moose was more elusive.

“As they were approaching the area, suddenly the moose came crashing out from wherever it was — they hadn’t seen it — on the attack,” Tim Kizzia, a friend of Chorman’s, said. “And they turned to run, and his friend looked back and saw that Dale was already on the ground and the moose was standing over Dale.”

Alaska State Troopers said they received a report at 11:52 a.m. Sunday that a moose had charged two men, kicking one of them.

First responders pronounced Chorman dead at the scene. The moose was no longer in the area when they arrived to help.

Regardless of what happened to their loved one, Chorman’s family wants to see the moose live.

Nathan Chorman, Dale Chorman’s son, said in a statement that the moose was “just protecting her offspring.”

“Dale had remarked the previous day that the brush was particularly thick this year — thick enough to get closer than intended, and surprise a wild animal by accident,” Nathan Chorman said of his father.

Moose calving season runs from mid-May to mid-June, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Wildlife officials tell people to look for signs that moose are upset.

“Hackles on the back of their neck standing straight up, the ears pinned back against the head and the moose will start licking their lips,” Cory Stantorf, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said. “Those are all signs that the moose is agitated and you are too close.”

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game said moose are especially irritated this year because of the record snowfall that has made finding food difficult, something Chorman’s family said he would have understood.

“This was not a hapless fool stumbling into danger — this was a person who went out looking for a great photo, knowing the risks, and got caught in a dangerous moment,” Nathan Chorman said.

Dale Chorman was well-known as a photographer, a beloved father and loving husband.

“I know you’ve all loved his photos over the years. He loved sharing them with you,” Nathan Chroman said.

Read Nathan Chorman’s full statement about his father’s death below:

“We are shocked and saddened to report the loss of Dale Chorman. He was a loving husband to Dianne, a great father to me, and (as you know) a fantastic friend to many. He was also in the running for my favorite character in this whole human drama. We loved him. We love him.

As for the manner of his death, Dale died on his property, tromping through the woods with a dear friend, in pursuit of a great photograph. This was his favorite thing to do.

I don’t think this needs clearing up for anyone viewing this page, but Dale was highly experienced around wildlife. He was intimately familiar with nature, and had no naivete about its danger. This was not a hapless fool stumbling into danger — this was a person who went out looking for a great photo, knowing the risks, and got caught in a dangerous moment. The moose, obviously, is not at fault. To the concerned neighbors, I say — quell your primate spear rattling. The ungulate mother need not die. She was just protecting her offspring. Dale had remarked the previous day that the brush was particularly thick this year — thick enough to get closer than intended, and surprise a wild animal by accident.

I’m sure Dale was surprised too. On a given day, nobody expects to die on their own property doing something routine, even when the routine is fairly dangerous. But he would have accepted this outcome. Whether for the cranes, or the calves, this was his favorite time of year. The truth is he died doing what he loved most — or, *close* to most, as moose have a distinct lack of feathers. Whether birds, or moose, or bears, I know you’ve all loved his photos over the years. He loved sharing them with you.”

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