Rising junior Oliver Marks already has worlds of experience with both written journalism and photography, and is using them to make an impact this summer.

16-year-old High School Insider summer intern Oliver Marks is already covering all of the bases, so to speak. Aside from being an adept pitcher and third baseman on Pasadena’s Polytechnic School’s baseball team, Silver Lake native and rising high school junior Marks has proven a valuable resource to the Poly Paw Print, serving as both the Sports Section Editor and Photo Editor. 

Evidently, he’s a bit of a journalism renaissance man; Marks decided to continue journalism after an introduction to it in middle school, and has kept it up into high school. A newer pursuit for him, however, is photography—a skill that transfers perfectly into the field of photojournalism. 

“I took a [journalism] class in eighth grade just because all my friends were taking it. We only met, like, once a week. But the teacher was really nice, although we didn’t write too many of our own articles; we would kind of just piece together other articles and, like, pass them off as news. But it got me into it, “ said Marks. “So I decided to join the paper at the start of my freshman year, and then I started photography, I’d say around last May.”

Travel photography is another focus of Marks’, besides sports. (photo by Oliver Marks)
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Travel photography is another focus of Marks’, besides sports. (photo by Oliver Marks)

According to Marks, the two facets of producing content for a newspaper are both crucial to his work.

“They definitely go hand in hand, especially because even before I was doing sports photography, I was doing sports writing.” 

“One of the reasons why [I started] is while I was writing, I was always complaining that the pictures they would pair with my articles were not very good, and it would kind of make my writing look a little like meh,” he said. “So I decided, oh, I could do that. I could do that better. So my dad happened to get a camera around the same time, because he also used to do photography, and I kind of stole it. And so then, yeah, I started experimenting with it. And I think it definitely helps tell my story.”

So by honing both skills simultaneously, Marks cuts a striking image for a possible future in journalism. With the ability to capture events he covers both verbally and visually, he takes his coverage to new heights, avoiding the disconnect that threatens stories with accompanying photographs by a different person. From writing articles for the popular “Athlete of the Issue” series to taking travel snapshots for his photography-based Instagram account, Oliver Marks has skills for media that are rare among journalists. 

And within the fields of both writing and photography, sports are big for Marks; he has been playing baseball since he was in preschool, and quickly took to sports writing upon joining the staff of the Paw Print. Having moved up the ranks, he will start his second year as both the Sports and Photography Editor this coming school year. In fact, sports are such a big focus of his time in journalism that Marks will be spending his summer as a High School Insider Intern covering the rise of flag football in high school and international athletics, as a safer and more inclusive alternative to the tackle version of the traditional American sport. 

Marks was just four years old when he started playing baseball, and now plays for both his school and his club team. (photo courtesy of Oliver Marks)
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Marks was just four years old when he started playing baseball, and now plays for both his school and his club team. (photo courtesy of Oliver Marks)

As for his plans for the rest of high school and beyond, he is still unsure, beyond knowing that he wants to continue to focus on exploring and photography, especially sports photography.

“I think I’m gonna see where [photography] can take me. I’ve only been taking pictures for myself and for my high school, so I’m going to see if I can start branching out a little more and doing commercial work, or working with colleges or even professional teams. So that’s that would be the dream,” said Marks.

“I like all kinds of photography, except, like, studio photography; it’s so artificial. I prefer just kind of being in the moment. But yeah, I think if I were to pursue it further, it would be in sports photography.”

Besides journalism and photography, Marks also occupies his free time by playing baseball, cooking, listening to music, watching television, and taking walks. 

As he looks to expand his photography horizons with new types of work, Marks snaps photos whenever he can. (photo by Oliver Marks)
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As he looks to expand his photography horizons with new types of work, Marks snaps photos whenever he can. (photo by Oliver Marks)

Marks attributes the most significant positive impact in his life to his parents. His father has a background in journalism, but it was their combined encouragement throughout his life that he claims has contributed to his current-day successes.

“They both pushed me to be my best, and they’re really inspiring. So they’re always giving me guidance,” he said.

Overall, as a journalist and a person, Oliver Marks has a lot to take pride in, but highlights one aspect of his life as most valuable.

“I’m proud of the confidence I have in my work, I think. Just putting myself out there and kind of trying to build a brand, and an image for myself.”

Related

Being a photographer for more than a decade, this is probably the shortest love story I have with camera gear, pushing the definition of a love-hate relationship to the next level.

Previously, I went through all the hassle of resurrecting the Ricoh GR, as I fell in love with its capability to shoot great black and white images and its superbly compact size. While it felt like reuniting with an old flame, all I had was a mere 2 weeks before it was broken again after approximately 1,000 frames. The lens refused to budge, the shutter remained stubbornly shut, and my once-beloved Ricoh GR seemed to mock me with its inactivity once again.

Motivated by my curiosity, I began to research the root cause of this recurring incident and discovered this is actually quite common among the Ricoh GR community, and most of them claim it to be caused by the weak flex cable. A known issue bound to happen with most Ricoh GRs.

From experience, the symptoms began subtly with a randomly stuck lens and shutter. Yet if you force the shutter and power button enough times, the camera will persist, allowing intermittent functionality. Gradually, these quirks intensified until the camera ceased to function altogether, leaving me with a frustrating puzzle to solve.

Determined to revive my cherished companion, I went ahead and ordered a replacement cable from AliExpress, an e-commerce site known for selling odd components. Fueled by my naivety and knowledge from YouTube, I eagerly set out to replace the damaged flex cable. However, reality hit hard when I discovered that the delicate flex cable, originally soldered onto the micro stepper motor with plastic pins, was prone to melting upon contact with heat. To further escalate the issue, finding a replacement stepper motor is close to impossible as there are none available in the market.

Out of desperation, I turned to online forums for help. Some advocated for soldering extra copper wire to the tiny motor wires and connecting these makeshift leads to the flex cable. It sounded plausible yet daunting, requiring precision and expertise beyond my amateur capabilities. And there are no technicians willing to take risks doing it. I also tried contacting the official Ricoh Camera Service Center here in Malaysia but was told that parts were no longer available as the camera has long been discontinued.

As I weigh my options and spiral deeper down the rabbit hole, I consider seeking generic parts from online stores and most probably enlisting professional help to weld and match the specifications of the stepper motor’s bracket. Here I would like to share a PSA warning to all Ricoh GR users who are facing the same issue as I had. Do not attempt to replace the flex cable yourself as the risk of irreparable damage looms large. The best course of action remains consulting professionals who may have better odds of restoring this beloved but troubled camera.

Going through all this, I can’t help but wonder if this is the price we pay for our passion, or simply another chapter in the ever-evolving relationship between photographers and their tools. Since this is a long-known issue that was not solved in the final production models, are Ricoh GRs meant to be disposable and built to break? The mystery remains unsolved.

So, you’re ready and raring to go on a photowalk or outdoor photo session when suddenly the skies turn gray and rain starts pouring. So, what is a photographer to do? Why, the show must go on. Here’s what you can take photos of instead when bad weather sets in.

Bad weather has ruined the plans of many photographers, especially landscape photographers. But as Thomas Heaton reminds us, there are still things and places you can point your camera at. So, in the video above, he suggests five things to photograph when the weather gets gray, wet and miserable. Whether you resign to shooting indoors or face the less than ideal conditions outdoors, it’s still possible to get creative with what you can photograph out there.

For example, minimalism and black and white still holds even when the light is flat and there aren’t a lot of variations in color when you’re outdoors. So, try to keep your compositions simple and stick to a single subject. Or, you can draw attention to interesting patterns and textures that stand out even with the drab colors from the gloomy weather.

Have you found any other interesting subjects or techniques to do when photographing in bad weather? Share it with us in the comments below!

Elopement locations are often chosen for their photographic potential. The mountains, with their range of different landscapes and dramatic peaks, are often a favorite location. Yet, mountains present challenges for photographers, from the quickly changing weather to working at higher altitudes. This week, find inspiration and tips for mountain elopement photography with our Photos of the Week from Daria Endresen, Charleton Churchill, Gabe McClintock, Diana Lustig, and Flora Gibson.

Daria Endresen, Ást og Hraun

When photographer Daria Endresen of Ást og Hraun first saw this location in the Icelandic Westfjords, she knew she had to take a couple there one day. She finally got the opportunity for mountain elopement photography in this location on a moody day in June. While her initial idea was to have the couple holding hands and looking towards the fjord, they took this stance and embraced unprompted, creating one of Endresen’s favorite shots. She captured the image using the Canon R5 and RF 24-70mm f2.8 lens.

“If the mountains are far away, I prefer using tele lenses, anything from 85 to 400 mm. It gives great compression, making the background much more prominent and grand than what it would feel with a wide angle,” she explains. “If the mountain is closer, I love shooting at the angle from below. Again, it helps to convey the feeling of how high and sometimes overwhelming the background is.”

Charleton Churchill, Charleton Churchill Photography

Having hiked and photographed many of the trails at Yosemite, Charleton Churchill of Charleton Churchill Photography knew that the half dome would have this glowing light that only lasts for a short season. When the couple’s plans changed, Churchill knew this light and location would be perfect for the elopement. He captured a series of shots at this location with the Nikon Z6 ii and Z7 ii and the Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 lens to compress the mountain in the background.

“I don’t know if I have any magical advice,” Churchill says, “I just shoot what I see, adjusting the color/lighting as close as possible to what it looks like in real life — pretty much a timeless look. Filters are fine if that’s your style, and I have tried many, but tend to gravitate towards a stronger look, increasing the darks/lights a little more for a pop. I used to use the contrast a lot when I first started but have backed off quite a bit and refined my look. Be bold, but know when to go softer, allowing light and scenery to direct your image processing.”

Gabe McClintock

While mountainous backgrounds typically take up a large part of this image, keeping the couple and mountain small in this image by Gabe McClintock of Gabe McClintock Photography creates an otherworldly feel. McClintock took the image with a Leica Q during an Iceland elopement.

“Be prepared for anything,” he advises. “Weather, light and conditions can change very quickly in the mountains.”

Diana Lustig, Love and Latitudes

While Diana Lustig of Love and Latitudes has photographed this location in the Sierra Nevada many times, she’s always inspired by capturing the same location in a new season, with new light and a new couple. For this shot, Lustig wanted to capture the couple’s awe and adoration over the area. She took this image with the Canon R6 and a 35mm lens.

“Always check the weather,” Lustig advises photographers for mountain elopements. “This wedding saw snow, chilly temperatures, and high winds—despite it being late spring. Don’t forget to drink water and remind guests to do so as well—the elevation can be rough!”

Flora Gibson, Flora Gibson Photography

While Flora Gibson of Flora Gibson Photography uses this location in Big Sur for mountain elopement photography often, the fog inspired her to use the cliffs differently and take advantage of the light being less harsh than it typically is. The softer light allowed her to shoot from more angles than the location typically allows. She captured the shot with the Nikon Z6 ii and a 50mm f1.2 lens.

“My biggest advice for shooting in the mountains is to take five steps farther away than you initially think to stand. Sometimes this allows me to see the landscape in a different way,” she says.

Dig into our Photos of the Day Archives for even more timeless photos, eye-catching wedding photos and portraits. Submit your wedding, editorial, documentary and other interesting imagery (up to five images at a time) to: hillary.grigonis@emeraldx.com.

Capturing wildlife in the Arctic is both challenging and rewarding. The extreme conditions and stunning scenery offer unique opportunities for photography. An insane 1200mm lens can help, though.

Coming to you from Pangolin Wildlife Photography, this fun video tests Canon’s RF 1200mm lens in Svalbard. This lens, with its impressive focal length, allows for close-up shots of distant subjects, a critical feature for photographing subjects like polar bears. The video highlights the challenges of using such a powerful lens, including the need for higher shutter speeds to avoid vibration and the effects of atmospheric haze even in the cold Arctic environment.

In this video, you see how the 1200mm lens captures polar bears at distances others might miss. It explains that the lens’ weather-sealing is a crucial feature in such harsh conditions, also demonstrating the benefit of using a 1.6x crop on the Canon EOS R5, extending the focal length to nearly 2000mm, perfect for those far-off shots. However, this comes with its own set of challenges, such as the amplified effect of even the slightest movement, requiring shutter speeds over 1/2,500th of a second to get sharp images.

Even though it’s highly specialized, it can be used to capture detailed close-ups when bears come too close, something most lenses can’t achieve due to their minimum focus distances. The lens’ ability to produce sharp images, even in difficult lighting conditions, is impressive. However, it does struggle with heat haze and low light, making timing critical for the best shots.

Using such a long lens in the field requires careful planning. The video discusses the practicalities of carrying and using the lens, noting its size and weight. Despite its bulk, the lens is relatively light for its size, but it still doesn’t fit in most camera bags, making it a niche tool for specific situations. This lens isn’t for every trip, but when distance is a factor, it can capture images that would otherwise be impossible. Check out the video above for the full rundown.

‘Are you sure?” a man ascending the stairs asks before I venture down into Arles’ ancient cryptoporticus. At the bottom awaits Sophie Calle’s exhibition Neither Give or Throw Away. It’s one of the headline shows of this year’s Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, but I understand what the concerned passerby means. It’s spooky down here in the subterranean chambers, where the semi-dark is permeated only by the stagnant scent of underground damp, and pools of sepia water collect on the dirt floor.

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I’ve walked into a funeral for photographs – a final farewell for Calle’s ill-fated series The Blind, when the French artist interviewed people attending an institute for the blind in Paris in 1986. She interviewed 23 individuals of all ages, and the series is composed of Calle’s haunting closeup photo portraits of them, with collections of photographs of the things they describe in text extracts as beautiful – the sea, leopard fur, the colour white, hair, their homes, their mothers. It’s a poetic and, at times, harrowing rumination on vision, and how images are constructed in the mind. But in 2023, the works were damaged after a storm hit Calle’s storeroom, and they became infested with mould spores. So this – at least according to Calle – is to be their final resting place, along with some other works she wasn’t sure what to do with. But in case you’re thinking of taking anything – as the title implies – don’t bother. As Calle warns in an introductory statement: they’re toxic.

It’s a bracing beginning for this year’s edition of the world-famed photo festival, opening just as France enters a new political chapter. What we are has a huge impact on what we see – and this is explored in existential ecstasy across Arles. A giant floating cucumber and colossal cauliflowers turn out to be an AI-generated historical fiction about the Green revolution by Bruce Eesly, that eventually becomes too absurd to believe , yet leaves you considering the veracity of any visual account taken as fact. In the ecclesiastical setting of the Saint Trophime cloisters, a pair of prismatic panelled panoramas, with gorgeous gradients that change as you move past them, are in fact recordings of sunrise and sunset on high seas in the Arctic, Indian and Pacific Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea. They were taken by sailors and navigators according to strict instructions laid out by artist Mustapha Azeroual and curator Marjolaine Lévy. These benevolent abstract images belie a dark political undertow: a chromatic call to arms about the degradation of the seas and skies, the colours the result of human activity on Earth.

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Elsewhere, a wounded civilian sits on the ground in tattered clothing; the remains of the flesh of his left leg poke out of torn trousers, apparently blown off. Nearby a soldier poses with a grisly facial wound. It turns out it is all part of an elaborate simulation of warfare, documented by Harvard-trained human rights lawyer Debi Cornwall at army bases across the US. The relief when you discover they are not real is short-lived. This realistic role-play walks a razor-thin line. Many of these bases employ real refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan to reenact versions of themselves in these mock Middle Eastern landscapes to help American soldiers train for combat.

There’s a lot of very niche stuff here, some good, some less so. I couldn’t get enough of Rajesh Vora’s glorious documents of the doozy sculptures that sit atop homes in villages across the Punjab, each creation more wild and entertaining than the next. A photographic paean to the short-lived history of the railway dining carriage, and another devoted to the Provençal pastime of petanque, are whimsical and nostalgic, but I find both too on-the-nose to feel there’s much more to them than seductive gimmick. A show about vampires in a church sounds promising: but the exploration of “tropical goth”, the visual culture of El Grupo de Cali, a Colombian gang active in the 1970s and 1980s, feels disjointed, from a strange video of a 13-year-old’s birthday party, to flashmobs dancing to Thriller, to portraits of disfranchised prostitutes. It is disappointing, too, that this is the only major representation of Latin American artists at Arles this year.

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As with most festivals, it’s the unknown acts that unexpectedly steal the show: pass the fruit and veg aisle and duck between the women’s underwear at retail chain Monoprix to find the Louis Roederer Foundation 2024 Discovery award shortlist exhibition, On the Lookout. Loosely themed around “disquiet”, each artist expresses disillusionment and anxiety about what comes next in the world in evocative ways.

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Nanténé Traoré’s works are physically and conceptually porous, printed on plexiglass and transparent fabric, ambient, indistinct murmurs that are hard to read. An entirely different atmosphere is created by Tshepiso Mazibuko – the only African woman included in this year’s official programme, which is a travesty. Mazibuko’s series borrows from a Sesotho proverb – To Believe in Something That Will Never Happen – and focuses on young people and children in the first established Black township of Thokoza, near Johannesburg, where the artist lives. These young Black people, like the artist, belong to the born-free generation – but as Mazibuko’s empathetic documents show, their circumstances are still difficult and full of dashed hopes. Using motifs of homes, streets and clothes that are insalubrious, stained and wounded, Mazibuko’s body of work is an indictment of the romanticised view of post-apartheid freedom and a testament to the bittersweet perseverance of youth in unequal times.

The winner of the Discovery award 2024 is François Bellabas’s project An Electronic Legacy, which began in 2016 when the artist found himself in the middle of a wildfire in California. He captured the burning landscape and charred skies on camera, and later fed 5,000 of his images to GAN, a first-generation AI. In 2023, he used the images from that database to create a tracking shot with ChatGPT, Dall-E and Mid-Journey. Images from all three periods of the work are arranged in a riveting installation that dovetails the hot-button topics of climate change, AI and the failure of the American dream.

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Elsewhere across the city, highlights include an ambitious, groundbreaking group show of 26 Japanese women photographers working between the 1950s and today, born between 1899 and 1987, a period in which Japan has experienced immense change but in which the gender gap has hardly narrowed. I’m So Happy You’re Here is possibly too crammed with artists and themes to give enough space to each, but it’s nonetheless a vital reminder of how women have shaped the medium in Japan through the postwar period and beyond.

Many of the artists deal with the socio-political concerns of women in a society that last year dropped in ranking to its worst-ever position in the Global Gender Gap report. Nagashima Yurie – one of Japan’s leading activist artists – literally sticks a middle finger up at the patriarchy in her punchy, provocative nude and semi-nude portraits of herself pregnant, and later with her family, in the 1980s and 1990s. As she puts it: “When you have a camera on a tripod, you have the space in front of the camera and also the space behind the camera. It’s very symbolic. It’s a way of taking action against the historical roles of the male and the female in photography.”

These are juxtaposed with quieter subversions, such as Ushioda Tokuko’s fastidious documents of her everyday life at home – from the old fridge her husband surprised her with that once belonged to American soldiers, to the little feet of her daughter, sticking up delightedly from a pile of sheets, these images tease out a sense of oppression in a subtle way. Photographing domestic things that have meaning and importance to the artist is her way of aggrandising them, of giving them a life that’s bigger than the space they are permitted.

A final unmissable moment at Arles is Mo Yi’s Me in My Landscape, the first survey of the remarkable yet little known Chinese artist’s work. It features 150 contemplative and captivating photographs that showcase the brazen inventiveness of an outsider. Mo Yi was a professional footballer for a decade, who worked for a time as a photographer at a children’s hospital in Tianjin and later trained in meditation. Much of his work is influenced by the rupture he experienced when his family relocated from a rural Tibetan diasporic community in Shaanxi Province to the city of Tianjin after the Cultural Revolution.

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Against the backdrop of an expanding, bustling, rapidly developing cityscape, Mo Yi comes in and out of the frame, scruffily dressed, his presence interrupting the slick and sleek pace of modern life. Struggling to situate himself against the McDonald’s, box fresh sneakers and heaving intersections, the world around Mo Yi becomes shinier and newer as he becomes older, and a stranger in his home.

In the series I am a Street Dog, (1995), Mo Yi attached his camera to the end of a stick and walked around the city, shooting via a remote shutter button to give a dog’s eye view. Another time he attached his Minolta to the back of his neck, his chest or his arm to take pictures on the streets or on the bus – getting closer to the experience of looking and being than constructing and composing frames. Consistently experimental and with an anarchic character, Mo Yi turns the camera from a vehicle of modernism into a complicit companion. In one image, a meditating Mo simply stands in the middle of the frame, serene, eyes closed, as the traffic rushes by behind him. It reminds me of Kafka’s suggestion, that perhaps we photograph things to drive them out of our minds. Then I take out my phone, and take a picture of it.