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The List of LUMIX Deals

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For 108 days, Palestinian photographer Motaz Azaiza risked his life in Gaza to tell the story of the war to millions of followers on Instagram, as friends and family members were killed around him. But he has now left his native Gaza, feeling dismayed. CNN’s Becky Anderson speaks to him in an extensive interview about the toll it’s taken on him, and what he intends to do next.

The city of Kyoto wants to stop tourists taking photos of Geishas — with tensions over the issue reaching boiling point.

Geisha, who are women who perform Japanese traditional arts in traditional kimonos and make-up, mostly work and reside in the Gion neighborhood of Kyoto.

However, when these iconic Japanese women commute between work and home, they have to walk through the picturesque streets of Gion.

In recent years, these geishas’ commutes have become a tourist attraction, with throngs of visitors trying to take photos of these women during their walk to work.

‘Geisha Paparazzi’

In 2019, there were reports of tourists and street photographers — who have earned the name “geisha paparazzi” — chasing down geishas with cameras and smartphones, entering private property without permission, and pulling on their kimonos and hair ornaments (kanzashi) to get a photo.

According to a report by CNN, Isokazu Ota, representative secretary of the Gion-town South Side District Council, says that “geisha paparazzi” is still a huge problem.

Ota tells CNN that tourists and street photographers have gotten more brazen in trying to shoot images of geishas and their “maiko” apprentices since the return of mass tourism to Japan after the pandemic.

‘Unenforceable’

In Gion, there are signs in three languages that explain that geisha photography is not allowed without a permit, and that violators could be charged up to ¥10,000 ($67). However, Ota says that this fine is unenforceable.

Amid growing concern, the local council in Gion hopes to make narrow alleys completely closed off to tourists by April 2024. But photography on the main thoroughfare of Gion cannot be banned since they are public streets.

Most maikos and geishas use this road, making it the prime spot for “paparazzi” to gather.

“The people taking pictures of the streets of Gion on the main street and the tourists taking pictures of maiko from afar are probably unaware of the rule against photography,” says Ota.

“But I think the foreign tourists waiting for maiko to come out in the alleys of Gion’s photography-prohibited areas know the rules but are ignoring them.

“Even if we warn tourists, it is difficult to get through to them at this point.”

According to CNN, Ota and other Gion residents are looking for ways to curb the “geisha paparazzi” issues. He has suggested requiring all tourists to the neighborhood be required to have a Japanese tour guide who can educate them about etiquette.

 
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
 

Update 3/1: On publication, Kyoto was incorrectly described as being in Tokyo. This has since been updated.
 

Our perception of photography just changed radically, but you may not have even known it. Seemingly overnight, many major Android manufacturers have started using AI to help enhance photos taken from your smartphone, but that doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly have generative AI inserting giraffes wearing party hats into your pictures.

Instead, super-intelligent AI algorithms trained by companies like Honor, Oppo, and, of course, Google are looking at photos that your phone takes and helping fill in the missing details that tiny smartphone camera sensors simply cannot capture. They’re also solving a huge problem that has plagued photography since the dawn of time: blurry moving subjects.

I’ve written about that particular subject multiple times and nearly always point it out in reviews. When you take a picture of something moving – be it a kid, a pet, or something else – the end result is almost always a blurry picture. Thankfully for us, MWC 2024 has proven that this particular problem has been solved.

What is a picture, anyway?

When the Google Pixel 8 Pro debuted in the Fall, features like Best Take and Magic Editor caused many people to wonder about the nature of a photo. Is a photo the image that a camera sensor captures at the moment, or, rather, should a photo be a proper way to relive a memory? After all, people and pets moving in real life don’t look blurry to our eyes, so why should they look blurry in a photo?

I’ve been using the Honor Magic 6 Pro for the past two weeks and have been enamored with its camera in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time. Previously, the Pixel 6 Pro blew me away with its clever motion mode that keeps a subject crisp and the surrounding areas intentionally motion blurred for cinematic effect.

Honor seems to have tapped into the same kind of AI magic that has made Google’s Pixel phone cameras feel magic for years, and it’s combining that AI with its own years of hardware expertise.

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The company calls its latest innovations “Sportography,” and it takes after similar efforts from companies like Samsung to highlight a particular feature with a cute and memorable name. In Samsung’s case, they’ve been using the term Nightography to describe the Galaxy S series’ penchant for taking great low-light photos.

Honor is using a new brand of on-device AI that’s been trained on millions of images so it can do all sorts of new things. In addition to clearing up potentially blurry photos of moving subjects, it can also take a photo for you when it recognizes specific patterns of movement.

To test this out, I brought my Honor Magic 6 Pro to our local Celtic Fest to capture something amazing. While the Irish dancers were on stage, I held my son with my right arm and held the phone with my left hand.

All I did was open the camera app and point toward the stage. The Magic 6 Pro handled the rest.

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The result is a series of photos that are all usable. Some are entirely blur-free, but most just look like good action shots with clear faces and feet with motion blur applied. I know for sure I could have never captured these images on a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, for instance, as my S24 Ultra camera review proved.

This kind of feature might sound silly at first, but I know without a doubt that millions of parents worldwide will jump for joy at the thought of being able to capture the moment even with a squirming kid in their arms. It’s the sort of promise we’ve heard about AI but have rarely seen it work as effectively as this.

And it’s not just Honor working on this problem. Oppo’s MWC 2024 conference specifically unveiled a new AI algorithm they created that is designed to specifically use AI to enhance photos by analyzing a series of photos, finding all the nitty gritty details, and ensuring they stay visible in the final image.

This side-by-side helps showcase the difference quite nicely. Oppo had two of the same model phones on a dual tripod, each snapping a photo of a spinning wheel. The phone on the left uses antiquated photography methods that rely entirely on shutter speed and ISO levels to create a balanced photo. The right enhances things with AI processing, and the result couldn’t be more stark.

Briefly, here’s how it works: when the camera app is open, it’s constantly capturing image data and lightly processing it. Once you tap the shutter button, the app then takes a series of photos it’s already been capturing and runs them through an AI algorithm that understands what looks best, thanks to its training. The photo you look at after browsing your gallery is actually a composite image of many different photos, all stitched together pixel by pixel to bring out the best details, color, and lighting.

All of this takes 2-3 seconds, depending on how complex the image is. If you’re quick enough, you can tap the thumbnail button and watch the photo transform before your eyes. This process isn’t exceptionally new – Google pioneered it ages ago, and many companies have picked up similar methods since then – but companies like Oppo, Honor, and Google are now using even more complex algorithms that understand motion and expression.

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As someone who has been critiquing smartphone cameras and their general inability to capture any kind of motion, this is a dream come true. The best part is that it’s going to be coming to even more phones by way of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, a processor that’s already powered tons of flagship phones since the end of 2023.

Qualcomm is harnessing the power of Metavision, made by a company called Prophesee, to bring substantial improvements to photography on Snapdragon-powered phones. I don’t specifically know when these updates will make their way to other phones, but I know how much they improve things.

The best part is that it’s not just for photos. Metavision also works for video, and the results can be nothing short of incredible. Ironically, you might have already been using AI on your smartphone’s camera without knowing it. Those great telephoto advancements in recent years are all AI-powered, proving that AI isn’t just a buzzword.

It’s here to stay, and it’s making things better piece by piece.

According to IKEA‘s Life at Home Report, “48% of people globally do not feel that their life at home is represented in the media.” The Swedish homeware brand is changing by debuting its inaugural artist-in-residence initiative with recognized portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz.

IKEA believes everyone deserves a chance to shine, enlisting Leibovitz to capture lived-in homes worldwide. The creative takes her lens inside intimate environments and records her findings through visual language in Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Leibovitz and IKEA have toured 25 households, showing everyday life and sitting down with their inhabitants. While the full range of images is exclusively available to view at the collaborative exhibition in Paris, take a first look at select shots above.

IKEA+ will host a four-day festival in the French capital, recognizing international talent through an interactive music experience led by Rinse Radio. The brand’s TESAMMANS collection will be previewed alongside Raw Color, while six emerging photographers coached by Leibovitz will exhibit their work from the IKEA mentorship program.

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.

Twenty-four floors up a Manhattan high rise, the photographer Ahn Jun sat on her windowsill one crisp day in 2008, dangling her leg precariously outside over the city.

Fearful of heights, the South Korean photographer was beginning a yearslong body of work that pushed her to her limits, placing herself on top of skyscrapers to shoot vertiginous, stomach-dropping perspectives. In the self-portrait series, Ahn sat on roof corners and building ledges, sometimes showing her whole body perched on the edge; in others, just her legs and feet are visible above the straight vertical drop below.

What brought the photographer to the brink? It wasn’t a sudden interest in thrill-seeking behavior, but a more conceptual idea that Ahn was chasing: the sense of the void. As she dwelled on her adolescence ending, she came to define the present as a void between the past and future, she explained over email. The first time she looked out over her apartment’s edge in Manhattan seemed to her to crystallize that feeling.

“I approached the ledge and looked down, and there was the void,” she recalled.

Previously, rooftops had always brought to Ahn’s mind a sense of ease and comfort. On sunny days, she’d enjoyed the warmth and light winds while working from her rooftop as an English-to-Korean translator, which supplemented her graduate studies at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. But as the financial crisis of 2007 cratered the economy, she overheard a stranger at a party joke about his friend, who’d lost a significant amount of money in the stock market, wanting to jump to their death.

She began to think about the rooftop as a dichotomous place. “It’s a place of rest for me, but it can be a place of the last moment of  life for someone in despair,” she said.

Living the high life

For five years, Ahn photographed herself on rooftops — sometimes she wore a mountain climbing harness to keep her steady, but other times nothing at all. Though she sometimes played with perspective, she never used Photoshop to enhance her images, she said. At first, her locations were high atop hers and her friends’ apartment buildings in New York, but over time the project expanded. She secured permission for a shoot at the top of the 63 Building in Seoul, a “symbol of rapid economic development” in Korea, she explained, and she also photographed in Hong Kong with support from its tourism board.

After landing the cover of an issue of the British Journal of Photography in 2013 and receiving online press from outlets like The Guardian, her images went viral.

But that year, Ahn stopped making the series. The way her images were being understood by viewers had drastically shifted with the rise of Instagram in the early 2010s, she said. She had initially thought of her project as a “performance without audience,” but on the nascent social media platform, she explained, the images bled into the “continuous trend of performing our life on camera.” Internet users were also associating her images with the selfie trend of “rooftopping,” she said, where daredevils climb skyscrapers and other tall structures without equipment and pose for selfies at the top.

Soon, she was flooded with emails, Ahn explained, some with positive feedback, but others critical of her work, or sexually harassing her.

She decided to move on to other projects, though some prints have continued to exhibit, most recently at Paris Photo and the Daegu Photography Biennale in South Korea, last fall. In April, she’ll include some of the works in a show at the Irie Taikichi Memorial Museum of Photography in Nara, Japan.

A decade later, the early self-portrait series has proved influential on her later work; Ahn has continued to explore time, space and gravity — after all, she said, she thinks of life “as a process of free fall.” While studying for her PhD at Hongik University in Seoul, from where she graduated in 2017, she became interested in high-speed photography’s ability to snap images that seem to defy physics. In two ensuing photos series, she captures small boulders and apples suspended — perfectly still, and yet inherently in motion — above seascapes and architectural spaces as they fall to the ground.

Since 2021, a small retrospective of Ahn’s work has traveled internationally, titled “On Gravity,” based on the notion of trying to find beauty and meaning in the face of an inevitability, she said. “You can face it and accept, or try to resist,” she said. “For most of us, our life is somewhere in between.”

In the face of evolving technology and economic fluctuations, the photography and videography markets are demonstrating robust growth, challenging the narrative of financial insecurity within the creative industry. Insider Monkey’s recent analysis, leveraging data from the ERI Economic Research Institute, sheds light on which nations offer the most lucrative opportunities for photographers, with Switzerland topping the charts with an impressive average salary of $91,952.

Photography’s Financial Landscape: An Overview

Despite the perceived oversaturation of the market and the advent of AI in creative processes, the demand for professional photography services is on an upward trend. This growth is underpinned by technological advancements that have both democratized and elevated the art, enabling photographers to capture and share their work in unprecedented ways. However, this boom is not without its challenges, as photographers globally continue to grapple with issues of undervaluation and underpayment, a reflection of the broader struggle within creative professions to secure fair compensation for their work.

Where Photographers Thrive: The Top 15 Countries

The list of the 15 highest-paying countries for photographers offers a glimpse into the varying degrees of financial remuneration across the globe. At the pinnacle is Switzerland, renowned not only for its breathtaking landscapes but also for its strong economy, which translates into higher average salaries for photographers. Following closely are Luxembourg and Denmark, both offering competitive salaries that reflect their commitment to supporting the arts. Interestingly, traditional economic powerhouses like Germany and the United Kingdom are conspicuously absent from the list, suggesting that a strong overall economy does not necessarily equate to higher earnings for photographers. This disparity underscores the complex interplay of factors that determine a photographer’s earning potential, from the cost of living and demand for photography services to the cultural valuation of the arts.

Looking Beyond the Lens: Implications for the Future

The insights provided by Insider Monkey’s analysis extend beyond mere numbers, offering a window into the evolving dynamics of the photography industry. As countries with developed economies and a high cost of living dominate the list, it raises questions about the sustainability of high earnings in the face of rising expenses and the impact of technological advancements on the profession. Furthermore, the absence of certain countries from the list invites reflection on the global disparities in the valuation of creative work and the need for a more equitable distribution of opportunities within the industry. As photographers navigate this shifting landscape, the importance of advocating for fair compensation and recognition of their craft becomes ever more apparent.

At the heart of this discussion lies a broader conversation about the value of creativity in our societies and the imperative to foster environments where artists can thrive. The journey of photographers, as chronicled through these statistics, is emblematic of the larger struggle within creative professions to achieve financial stability and respect for their contributions to culture and society. As we look to the future, the resilience and adaptability of photographers in the face of changing economic and technological landscapes will undoubtedly continue to shape the narrative of this timeless art form.

Despite the threat posed by AI and general financial insecurities, the photography and videography markets are doing well, according to a recent report.

But which countries pay the most for photography services? An article created by the stock trading website Insider Monkey has listed the top 15 highest-paying countries.

Insider Monkey says they found the data for average photographer salaries from the ERI Economic Research Institute and compiled the top 15.

15 – France

Starting the list is France with an average photography salary of $50,156.

14 – New Zealand

In 14th place, New Zealand which has an average salary of $50,519.

13 – Norway

The Scandinavian country has an average salary of $54,879.

12 – Canada

America’s northerly neighbor has an average salary of $55,813.

11- Ireland

Pots of gold are available to photographers on the Emerald Isle. Average salary: $56,263.

10 – Finland

The Nordic nation benefits from strong support for the arts and photographers can expect an average salary of $56,531.

9 – Iceland

Many photographers want to visit Iceland to document its natural splendor but full-time photographers there get an average salary of $57,938.

8 – Netherlands

Photographers in the Netherlands may be able to get around on bicycle thanks to the country’s flat nature and excellent cycling infrastructure. Average salary: $57,938.

7 – Australia

At the end of a hard day’s shooting, photographers can relax by placing a “shrimp on the barbie.” Average salary: $58,251.

6 – Austria

The hills of Tyrol have attracted photographers for hundreds of years but full-time shooters can expect an average salary of $60,974.

5 – Belgium

Famed for its good quality beer, photographers in Belgium can expect an average salary of $64,214.

4 – United States

Photographers in the U.S. get an average salary of $64,410. How much of that is helped by the world’s best-paid photographer Annie Leibovitz is unclear.

3 – Denmark

In the battle of the Nordic nations, in which they all appear on the top 15 except Sweden (sorry Sweden), Denmark is crowned Sultan of Scandinavia with an average salary of $67,740.

2 – Luxembourg

The small landlocked European country is the second highest on the list with an average salary of $71,764.

1 – Switzerland

And the winner is Switzerland with an average salary of $91,952.

Notable Exceptions

It is perhaps surprising not to see Germany or the United Kingdom on the list; two economic powerhouses that both have very active photo communities.

Of course, data such as this has to be taken with a pinch of salt because to get figures like this accurate is nigh impossible. But it stands to reason that richer countries with developed economies will top the list.

The flip side to that is richer countries have higher prices generally and good salaries can quickly be wiped out by living expenses, equipment purchases, and the myriad of costs photographers must face.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.