Imagine Solutions seminar: The Stories Behind Photographs that Changed History
Photography
East Palestine Memorial Library to showcase photography on life after Norfolk train derailment
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News
The photos, taken by photojournalist Rebecca Kiger, will be on display Tuesday, March 26 at 6 p.m.
The Norfolk Southern Train Derailment in East Palestine continues to take its toll on the community – now a unique glimpse of what life was like last year for its residents is being offered to the public.
The East Palestine Memorial Library is hosting a special exhibit of unpublished photos on the derailment that happened there last year. The photos are from a series taken for TIME magazine’s special report on the derailment.
The photos, taken by photojournalist Rebecca Kiger, will be on display Tuesday, March 26 at 6 p.m.
Included in the exhibit will be several themed vignettes of on railroad safety, the aftermath of the derailment and how life was impacted by it. It will also include photos of the EPA, Beyond Plastics and the East Palestine Fire Department.
Additionally, a box of photographs will be available and a rotary phone where residents impacted by the derailment can share their stories and how the photos have impacted them.
Space is limited and those interested should call the library at 330-426-3778 to attend.
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Behind the Lens: Photographers and Live Music
A glimpse into two university students and photographers’ experience shooting live performances and participating in music culture.
To delve deeper into the relationship between photography and live music events, Concordia alum Sydney Gastaldo and third-year student in professional music at Toronto Metropolitan University, alongside third-year photography student Jordan Markle at Dawson College, proudly share their respective journey taking professional photos of live concerts.
Being in charge of capturing a moment in time, especially in an atmosphere as lively and busy as a live music event—both visually and sonically—is no easy task. When asked about photographers’ aim in capturing the energy and emotion of a performance in any venue, Markle said that he really tries to focus on capturing the emotion and energy of live music in Montreal, no matter its scale: “Each picture is carefully constructed in a way that channels the energy and atmosphere of the event, giving viewers a sneak peek into what it was like to actually be there.”
As for Sydney Gastaldo, she personally always tends to come back to the concept of movement and DIY approach in photography since she doesn’t like photos that look staged. “Some of this happens in post/editing but some of this experiment can happen in the moment through experimenting with aperture, angles, exposure etc,” Gastaldo shared. She also noted how some of the best photos she’s taken have come from in-between moments like while the show is being set up, the singer is talking to the crowd between songs, or when the stage is being set up for the next track or right at the end of the act. “It can be a great way to capture authenticity from an artist as they tend to be less “on” during those moments,” she said.
There can also be a process of preparation that happens before the action of a show which can impact how the approach of photographing will unpack. “I start preparing by taking a deep dive into the artist’s discography meaning I’m listening to them all day before the show,” Jordan Markle stated. By doing this, he can understand the emotion and feeling of what the artist is trying to portray to their audience on a deeper level and then capture that energy authentically.
Logistic preparation is also crucial. In regards to this, Gastaldo always ensures she has enough storage on her camera or enough film, as well as charged batteries and a prepared kit. Moreover, she makes sure to back up anything from past shoots and to develop all her older films beforehand. Checking out the weather if it’s an outdoor show is also part of her routine.
Challenges can be encountered when documenting the ephemeral nature of live performances. Markle shared how a venue might only allow photographers access to the photo pit for the first three songs. If this is the case, Markle avoids taking the same type of photos for all three songs to offer more variety in the shorter amount of time that is offered to him. To essentially counter this problem, he experiments with different techniques and employs varied shooting methods, sometimes using long exposures or action freeze frames.
As for Concordia Alum Sydney Gastaldo’s biggest challenge, the lighting for underground or DIY/indie shows can be quite unpredictable. “It can be really hard to capture the in-person feel of a show when it’s happening in low lighting or with flashing light / over-saturated set design,” she said. Matching the pace of any movements on stage is also something to navigate, but these challenges, Gastado said, are just “trial and error.”
A visual artist, in this case, a photographer, retains a certain role in preserving and celebrating music culture since it acts as the bridge between the performing artist and fans, the internet, tabloids, etc. When asking Sydney Gastaldo and Jordan Markle how they see their work contributing to this broader cultural narrative, they provided similar opinions.
Markle seeks that his work tell someone’s story and preserve memorable moments for years to come. “I see it as a means of capturing the intersection of music, art, and human experience […] whether it’s through documenting live performances, capturing intimate moments backstage, I want my photos to tell stories,” he said.
Gastaldo shared how for her, photography in the realm of live music cements these seemingly small moments that can often feel big for those attending. Moreover, her work focuses on underground and more obscure kinds of music or smaller bands/artists existing in the local scene. “A lot of them split apart and/or don’t end up making a living out of their craft and all that is left of their work is people’s memories and photographs/videos. But regardless of how successful they may be in a broader sense, the impact that their music had on their fans and the community and the beauty of their live performances still means something and I think capturing that and cementing it in history can be beautiful,“ Gastaldo proudly answered.
From utilizing a small-budget camera or owning professional high-grade equipment, from capturing a small local stage to a large national music festival, live music photographers, like Sydney Gastaldo and Jordan Markle, make sure to remain intentional with their craft. They deliver the most authentic representation of the evening through passionate intentions for the art and story behind each frame.
Thinking about taking pictures of the eclipse with your phone? Veteran photographer offers these tips
INDIANAPOLIS — When Central Indiana experiences a total solar eclipse on April 8, many of us will be tempted to take pictures with our smart phones.
Veteran news, art and landscape photographer Rob Goebel urges you to protect your phone — and your eyes — from the sun’s bright rays.
“Taking pictures of the sun before the total eclipse is just really difficult to do with a cell phone because it’s so bright,” Goebel said. “It’s so much brighter than the tolerances of the camera can handle.”
David Shank 2017
Goebel spent 30 years as a photographer with the Indianapolis Star and now runs his own graphic illustration business. If you plan on taking pictures of the eclipse with your phone, Goebel has some tips.
Don’t aim directly at the sun
First, he said, avoid pointing the camera directly at the sun. And, whatever you do, don’t look at the sun without those special glasses.
“Look at these. Talk about a fashion statement,” Goebel said, putting a pair of cardboard eclipse glasses on his face. “These are incredibly dense. They’re like, if you took the brightness of the sun and you cut it in half, 15 times, that’s how much this filters out the sun.”
Vic Ryckaert/WRTV
Use a filter or an old phone
Goebel said if you try putting the eclipse glasses over your phone’s camera and taking a picture of the sun, the image comes out fuzzy.
He said you can buy a special filter for your phone’s camera for about $10.
Or, he said, you can use an old smart phone knowing that the one shot of the sun could be the last decent picture it ever takes.
Vic Ryckaert/WRTV
Block the sun to protect your eyes
If you plan on shooting the sun before and after totality, Goebel advised using something to help you aim the camera without hurting your eyes.
He used a piece of cardboard to make a sun blocker.
“And I’ve made this little doohickey,” he said. “It’s just a piece of cardboard, and then I cut out some slots where my hands go. And then this space in the middle here is where the phone goes.”
Vic Ryckaert/WRTV
Wait for totality
The whole eclipse will last several hours, but the time of totality, when the sun is completely blocked by the moon, will only last a few minutes.
“When you reach the total eclipse, that magic two minutes where you can look at the sun safely, you won’t be able to see it through these glasses,” Goebel said. “Then, you know it’s time to take off the glasses.”
2017 Solar eclipse as seen from Madras, Oregon.
Goebel said that’s the time to aim high and shoot the sun.
“You can just point your camera up there and shoot a picture,” he said. “And with a cell phone camera, you’re gonna get a pretty good picture.”
Great pictures won’t all be in the sky
Watch the ground for cool shadows, like the ones Goebel photographed during a partial eclipse in 1994.
“I was standing on Delaware Street shooting up at the sky and I noticed that on the sidewalk by my feet were these little crescent rings of light,” Goebel said. “I shot one like that of just circles and traffic going by on Delaware Street.”
Rob Goebel
While the eclipse itself is a special photographic moment, Goebel said the best photos you can take with your phone are of people wearing those glasses, looking at the sky.
And he said to take plenty of pictures of your friends and family enjoying themselves during this amazing, once-in-a-lifetime event.
Contact WRTV reporter Vic Ryckaert at victor.ryckaert@wrtv.com or on X/Twitter: @vicryc.
Wedding Photographer Charges $8,500 for “Blurry” Photos – Some Are Defending Her Pricing
“As a wedding photographer, don’t bash unless you know the market yourself. People WANT the blurry images. It’s requested in every shoot I have.”
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Things become even more troubling when it comes to art and the story behind artists and artistry, which is the crux of the debate that surrounded the criticism behind a wedding photographer’s prices.
TikToker @tripp.photo posted a video where she shared her starting prices for a wedding package: $8,500. Another user on the platform, after looking through her artwork, @haussdrama, decided to look through Tripp’s work to see what customers were getting for the same price as a used 2012 Scion TC.
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“When someone inquires for wedding photography with a $2k budget and I send back my starting prices of $8.5k,” the stitched video begins with Tripp, who is rocking dyed purple hair and glasses looking into the camera. She lip syncs a country singer saying, “You think I’m psycho don’t ya Mama?”
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The TikToker who stitched her video, Hauss, agrees with that assessment as the video transitions to a screenshot of the photographer’s TikTok page, @tripp.photo. She advertises herself as a Wedding & Lifestyle Photographer who provides her services in North Carolina and California.
“Maybe just a tiny little bit. This photographer is getting a lot of backlash for releasing her prices which is $8,500 starting. Now I took a look at her gallery and let’s see if these pictures are worth $8,500.”
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Hauss then begins to embark on a photo-by-photo commentary of the woman’s pictures, which begins with a pair of undone leather shoes.
“Now with this picture I can see the intent, right? Going for that old, timey, rustic, I dare say you did not capture what you thought you did,” she says sarcastically commenting on the, what appears to be, slightly blurry photograph.
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Next up is a very blurry photo of jewelry scattered on what looks like a counter top. “What I did see is she’s a very big fan of blurry photos. I just feel like the jewelry placement, it’s just not working. It’s really not.”
Another picture Hauss highlights is of a dress on a hanger draped in front of a door, “Possibly one of the most unflattering photos that you could take of a wedding dress is just on a blank wall on a wooden hanger, it’s giving nothing,” she says of Tripp’s work.
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Hauss has positive things to say about the bride featured in the next picture of Tripp’s work, however, she doesn’t really seem to think that the picture taken of the woman really does her any justice: “Now this woman is stunning but this picture looks like it was taken in somebody’s backyard.”
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Next up is a black and white photograph of a bride adjusting what looks like her earrings in the mirror: “Again, she’s stunning she’s beautiful, she is giving. But the photographer it just looks like this is in somebody’s bathroom. There’s nothing special to the photo that’s like that wow factor.”
Following that picture is another picture of a wedding dress hanging on a wall outdoors: “I would say posing wedding dresses for a photo is not her strong suit,” Hauss says.
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“Obviously everybody should charge what they think they’re worth. If you think you’re worth $8,500, go ahead and charge for the $8,500 but if I got my wedding photos back and they looked anything like those I would request a refund. Actually I would dispute it with my card company.”
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“Anyways go and take a look at her photos, come back to this video, let me know if she’s worth the $8,500. I’ll see you guys in the next one,” she says at the end of her clip.
While there were plenty of folks who seemingly agreed with Hauss’ assessment of Tripp’s prices, there were also folks who thought that Tripp’s work was consistent, with some calling it “story driven” and “high end.”
What do you think?
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Photographer Laurence Ellis on the Transience of Tide Pools
Photographer Laurence Ellis on the Transience of Tide Pools | Atmos
03.20.2024
Laurence Ellis explores the teeming biodiversity of tide pools, where the riches of high tide come with crashing waves and the peace of low tide invites heat and predators. In these ephemeral spaces, life finds shelter in shifting conditions.
For a long time I’ve felt drawn to explore ‘in-between’ spaces, a concept which seems to have been shared by ancient cultures since time immemorial. In Celtic mythology, these liminal spaces manifest as an awareness of the unnameable places, not to be found on any map. They can be sites of transition, neither one thing nor the other. A few examples include doorways, shorelines, the forest’s edge, or for this series, tide pools.
Tide pools hold our entire universe and collective consciousness within them. Their transient and chameleon-like nature would not exist if not for the gravity pulling on their delicate waters, a gravity I followed daily while photographing this series in order to chart my visits at high tide. Through capturing life and existence here, this idea of a ‘thin place’ could materialize in a way where the extraordinary was possible, and where the bonds of reality and the everyday could be shed.
A couple of themes emerged while shooting: illusions of land ownership (who can claim space where land stops and sea begins?), as well as the concept of moons and planetary connections to our moving seas. Tides seem to be informed by the simple relationship between ourselves and our moon, a symbiotic embrace defined by orbits immeasurable and our gentle journey within a limitless universe.
We tend to compartmentalize the world into land, sea, and sky; yet, tide pools cannot be constrained to this binary standard of thinking. These photographs speak to the unique life which exists in both land and sea, a balance to be found in one of Earth’s most liminal spaces.
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Google talks Pixel camera, AI magic, and where smartphone photography goes next
The Pixel 8 Pro has tons of AI features in its camera – we found out why (Image: Google)
Michael Specht, Pixel camera product manager at Google working on its smartphone camera team, totally understands if you find the rise of artificial intelligence unsettling.
“I can clearly understand someone like my parents saying, you know, I don’t understand this. This is a little bit kind of scary to me,” Specht said.
Whether you have an iPhone or Android phone in your pocket, there is a lot of technology stuffed into the smartphones we carry around. They have meant that we no longer lug around several different devices – now we have a phone, calculator, notebook, and camera all in one.
Phone cameras have practically destroyed the compact camera market. Because every smartphone camera is already so good, phone makers are now using software and artificial intelligence (AI) to boost pictures and improve them beyond what the viewfinder sees – sometimes by erasing people or objects completely.
“Mobile imaging has evolved to the point that it’s becoming difficult to differentiate an image captured on a mobile camera or one from a dedicated camera that costs ten thousand dollars”
One company leading the way on AI in smartphone cameras is Google with its Pixel phones. Express.co.uk spoke to Google’s Specht to find out exactly what it takes for the company to upgrade the Pixel camera every year on its latest flagship phones – and why bringing as many features as possible to its cheaper Pixel A-series devices is so important to the company.
“Mobile imaging has evolved to the point that it’s becoming difficult to differentiate an image captured on a mobile camera or one from a dedicated camera that costs ten thousand dollars,” Specht told us in an exclusive chat.
Specht is a keen photographer who previously worked at Apple (Image: Google)
“For our philosophy, we want to try to mimic authenticity with how our eyes see it, but give you the creative controls … to then go and make changes, even before you capture the image, or after you capture the image, to go down your own path of artistic vision.”
Specht, who worked at Apple on the iPhone camera team for more than a decade, now helps head up the Google Pixel camera team in the US, recently working on the cameras in the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, Google’s latest flagship Android devices.
Because phones are so small, we have reached the size limit for cameras in phones, which is forcing companies like Google to get creative with software to improve phone photos.
“From our perspective, spec sheets aren’t everything, right? Like, you can have 50 megapixels, you can have different size sensors, but that’s just one small piece to the puzzle,” Specht said.
“If you look at the evolution of mobile photography, the advancements in software and the imaging pipeline have become a result of the form factor and not being able to put a full 35mm sensor in a mobile camera.”
The Pixel 8 has plenty of advanced AI photo tools (Image: Google)
Google integrates AI into its Pixel camera, and has for many years. Ever since the Pixel 3 introduced Night Sight, Google’s night mode, the phones have been using AI to enhance photos. But now that AI is a big buzzword in tech thanks to the popularity of tools such as ChatGPT that can generate text and images, Google’s use of AI is hotting up.
“Our core principle for Pixel camera and capturing images is really rooting it in authenticity. So whether AI or gen-AI is used, our goal is to really enhance the pixels that exist there today, not to create something entirely new,” Specht said.
Newer Pixel features such as Magic Eraser let you erase people and objects from photos, while Magic Editor allows you to change the sky’s colour or enlarge objects. Specht told us the rise of what is known as generative AI (gen-AI) means Google can run complex computations in the cloud or on the device, turning the Pixel into a mini-Photoshop in your pocket.
“From our perspective, spec sheets aren’t everything, right? Like, you can have 50 megapixels, you can have different size sensors, but that’s just one small piece to the puzzle”
“Photoshop has been around for a very long time,” Specht said. “With something like Magic Editor, we’re just replacing the Photoshop process with something way more accessible all in one place. With the same device you capture, you get to edit and make it accessible to a customer that doesn’t necessarily need to go through 10 hours of YouTube videos [to learn how].”
He said phone cameras are getting close to being able to capture what the human eye can see but that it remains a challenge as Google wants to let people get artistic with blur and other photographic effects that have existed for decades.
“From our philosophy, we want to try to mimic authenticity with how our eyes see it, but give you the creative controls … to then go and and make changes, even before you capture the image, or after you capture the image to go down your own path of artistic vision as well”
But these new AI tools aren’t just limited to the pricey £999 Pixel 8 Pro. Some features are coming to older Pixel phones in software updates known as Pixel Feature Drops.
“Purchasing a phone is not something that everyone does every year, and I think making sure that you take care of all your customers, regardless of how often they upgrade, is super important”
“Purchasing a phone is not something that everyone does every year, and I think making sure that you take care of all your customers, regardless of how often they upgrade, is super important,” Specht said.
“I think that’s quite unique to Google. We really take pride in when you purchase a device from us, we want to take care of you, and as we make advances, we want to bring those advances back to you as much as we can. So part of our philosophy is really as we develop these features, which ones can we bring back [to older phones]? What’s feasible for us to actually do?
“You won’t see many mobile camera companies doing this for their customers.”
But Specht was tight-lipped on what Google might have up its sleeve to blow our minds with AI on the camera of the expected Pixel 9 phones coming later in 2024, or the rumoured Pixel 8a that could be launched at Google I/O in May.
“We have big research teams that are always looking multi-years out and looking at the latest and greatest cutting edge of technology. Sometimes those feature developments take a year, sometimes they take five years.
“One thing that I think the average person will probably find surprising is how deeply we think really far out in advance to develop these cameras. It takes a lot of effort.”
