Amid Beatlemania in America, from 1963 through 1964, Paul McCartney was photographing everything he could behind his Pentax 35 mm camera. His collection of images, Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm, has been on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London, England, and is on its way to New York City to the Brooklyn Museum where they will be on display beginning May 3, 2024.

The exhibit will feature more than 250 of McCartney’s photographs from his archives capturing The Beatles during one of the most historic musical moments in time.

[RELATED: 3 of Paul McCartney’s Most Surprising Collaborations]

“Since first arriving in New York in February 1964, Paul McCartney has built a strong, everlasting connection to the city,” said Catherine Futter, director of curatorial affairs and senior curator of decorative arts at Brooklyn Museum in a statement. “His vibrant photographs from The Beatles’ first visit capture the energy of the city, the excitement of the American fans, and the frenzy of the band’s status as celebrities. Yet the images also record The Beatles’ fun and delight with each other.”

Futter added, “Through McCartney’s lens, we feel the intensity of being at the center of such extraordinary events.”

The Eyes of the Storm exhibit also chronicles a longer timeline of The Beatles’ earlier beginnings with photographs of the band playing concert halls in Liverpool and London and the start of their touring internationally, first to Paris and then to the United States. The collection also holds intimate images of McCartney’s bandmates John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr at the brink of stardom.

Once in America, The Beatles enraptured an entire generation, which is evident in many of McCartney’s images of paparazzi and fan frenzy. When the band arrived in New York City, they made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, which was viewed by nearly 73 million people.

[RELATED: Paul McCartney’s Book, Photo Exhibition Captures Cusp of Beatlemania]

McCartney’s photography also expanded into more portraiture, landscape, and documentary-style photographs. In 2023, McCartney also released a more expansive collection of his images in the book 1964: Eyes of the Storm.

“Millions of eyes were suddenly upon us,” said McCartney, “creating a picture I will never forget for the rest of my life.”

Photo: Courtesy of Paul McCartney / Nasty Little Man

The Travel Photographer of the Year revealed the winners of its 21st annual photo competition. The 2023 winners showcase the best in travel photography and celebrate the diverse landscapes, nature, cultures, and people worldwide.

A Slovenian photographer has taken home the top honors for the second year in a row. AndreJa Ravnak is “The Travel Photographer of the Year 2023,” following in fellow Slovenian Matjaz Krivic’s footsteps.

Ravnak’s winning images show rolling hills in Czechia and Italy. The contest organizers describe her images as demonstrating “fairytale beauty.” Ravnak’s “day job” is as an architect, so she is not even a professional photographer.

“Becoming Travel Photographer of the Year is a huge recognition. From my personal experience, I know it’s not easy to judge photography. Images are not measurable, so being a judge is a complex task and responsibility,” says Ravnak. “I would like to thank the panel of judges for recognizing my work. I’ve seen many excellent and creative photos in this year’s TPOTY final and it’s such a great honor to find my work recognized.”

“Congratulations to all the winners; together, we are enthusiastically documenting this wonderful world, and perhaps this is a small contribution, a reminder to preserve its wonder for future generations,” she adds.

“There is a subtle elegance about this year’s winners. This comes through in
both of AndreJa’s winning portfolios; one takes us into simple landscapes, with delicate colors and a textural beauty, the other into the hop fields, out of season and undressed ready for the next planting. Neither are obvious subjects, neither photographed at an optimal time of year, and yet they are both engaging and rather beautiful,” says TPOTY founder Chris Coe.

Young Travel Photographer of the Year

Alongside Ravnak’s victory as Travel Photographer of the Year 2023, the competition also named 14-year-old American photographer Caden Shepard Choi the “Young Travel Photographer of the Year 2023.”

Individual Category Winners

More From Travel Photographer of the Year

This year’s competition was judged by a 16-person international jury and all finalists must provide their RAW/original image files to be eligible to win. The complete gallery of winners and commended photographers is available on the Travel Photographer of the Year website.

Image credits: Photos courtesy of the Travel Photographer of the Year. Photographers are credited in the individual image captions.

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Stare at the lead image of this article. If you’re looking at the image above and not having your mind make so many different associations, you’re probably not very in tune with what’s going on. It’s almost impossible to not see the irony. The man on the phone was quite literally just standing there when I shot the image. You could easily make connotations that the statues behind him represent people who feel like they’re waiting in line forever. But it’s also just against human standards to believe that the man just happened to be standing there. Why? Because it breaks conformity, and that’s a major part of getting people to stare at your photos longer instead of just zipping past them.

Breaking conformity is often a big part of art. And as a photographer, it’s your job to create art — unless you’re a photojournalist, and even then, there are artistic ways to document something happening.

When something defies expectations, your brain notices. Sometimes, we just let it go and move on with our lives. That’s something that we do to filter stress out of our lives. But when people are at ease, they notice these things. People often stop to stare at photographs when they’re at ease, and providing that the stimuli is something unique to them. A great example of this is multiple exposures

Having some sort of mental mold of the world around us makes life easier for our survival. We come to just expect things. But when things don’t happen as expected, we start to question what’s in front of us. That’s something that you can do with your photographs.

A photographer that does this so well is Gundula Blumi, whom we’ve interviewed a few times. Her multiple exposures, also seen on her Instagram page, are something that challenges the ideas of conformity yet make us simpyl stare at the image. Ultimately, they elicit a feeling in us. Some may be perplexed by them while others may be awestruck. The multiple exposure process does that for all of us. At times, it can be a happy accident. But there are other instances where we see the image in our mind’s eye instead of look at it in front of us.

These days, many photographers comform to the idea of making images based on a trend they see on TikTok, Instagram, or other social media platforms. But all you’re doing is conforming to an idea to enrich a platform. What you make for that algorithm doesn’t necessarily enrich you and it surely doesn’t push you to be more creative as a photographer. Instead, you just become a content creator.

The image above was made with second curtain flash and a slower shutter speed. When we look at the photograph, we expect to see the model, Jordana, very sharp and still. But we don’t necessarily expect to see the hula hoops around her waist in the way that we do. We’d instead believe that the hoops should all be sharp. This isn’t the case though. And so it breaks the idea of conformity. To do this, it required a creative touch that can only be done using 2nd curtain flash and some creative freedom.

As you can see, there are several ways to break conformity. We, as photographers, just have to ponder on it more.

Photography has become an important part of the smartphone experience to the point that it could be considered one of the most critical deciding factors in a purchase. Companies have been working left and right to provide an excellent experience, but no matter how good the output is, they still can’t compare with the flexibility of a dedicated camera, especially mirrorless and DSLR cameras. You can only cram so much inside the thin body of a smartphone without either compromising on quality or leaving a distasteful bump on the phone’s back. Technology, however, is starting to catch up with smaller but more powerful sensors and lenses that could really give cameras a run for their money. The OPPO Find X7 Ultra embodies that promise, so we give the smartphone and its cameras a good test to see if it’s worth that large disc on its back.

Designer: OPPO

Aesthetics

If you’re familiar with OPPO’s premium smartphone line, then the Find X7 Ultra will immediately look familiar. But even if you aren’t, you’re still in for a treat with one of the most beautiful devices to grace the market so far. Just like its predecessor, the Find X6 Pro, it bears a dual-tone color scheme and a large circular camera bump that others have dubbed the “camera Oreo,” though a resemblance with the top of a soda can wouldn’t be off the mark either. It’s a peculiar design, but one that has a reason and actually serves another purpose, intentional or not.

That said, the OPPO Find X7 Ultra isn’t just a rehash of the 2023 flagship. The colored vegan leather that makes up two-thirds of the rear area has a pleasant curve that arcs around the camera at a distance where the two elements intersect. It’s a subtle yet significant change that prevents visual elements from just abruptly cutting into each other. It also has the visual effect of giving the camera Oreo more prominence, with the leather seemingly giving way to this important part of the phone’s design.

The color options for the phone differ in more than just their hues this year, though. Both the Orange and Blue colorways do share a similar design, with the white top of the design looking like a familiar ceramic that OPPO has used in the past. The black colorway, on the other hand, has a few more interesting details, like the stitching on the vegan leather surface. Instead of ceramic, the top looks more like metal but still feels like glass. The mid-frame is also different, using some sandblasted finish that complements the phone’s darker looks.

All three do have the same basic design, with a back that curves at the sides toward the edges. On the flip side, the screen is mostly flat but does curve sharply at those same edges, typical of the premium design carried by phones in the past. Admittedly, it’s going to be a divisive design choice, given how flat is back these days. There’s no denying, however, that the OPPO Find X7 Ultra still looks great with this style and probably wouldn’t be as appealing if was completely flat all around.

Ergonomics

The OPPO Find X7 Ultra is a large piece of metal and glass, there’s no getting around that fact. As with any large smartphone, there will be a problem of straining your hand with its weight and making it less comfortable and stable to hold over time. Fortunately, the phone is also unbelievably thin at 9.5mm only, and at 221g, it’s not exactly a heavyweight. It also feels well-balanced and not top-heavy as you might suspect given the size of the camera bump.

Even better, the rest of the phone’s design also contributes to helping secure a more confident grip. The vegan leather, for example, provides enough texture for your skin to grip comfortably. Even that camera Oreo becomes a place where your index fingers can rest when holding up the phone, especially with a ribbed rim that, again, adds texture and friction to stop the phone from slipping out of your hands. You will still have some difficulty reaching higher areas of the screen if you’re holding it in one hand, but other than that, the size of the Find X7 Ultra doesn’t get in the way of an enjoyable experience when using it.

Performance

The OPPO Find X7 Ultra is a premium flagship through and through, which means it also bears the best of the best hardware available in the market to date. That means a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage, right at the top of the list. Suffice it to say, the phone isn’t wanting in terms of silicon power and it blasts through all kinds of tasks, including heavy gaming, without breaking a sweat. Your hands won’t be sweating either thanks to an impressive cooling system. Mind you, it does get a bit warm with heavier loads, but not to the point of making you want to drop it like a hot potato.

It would be such a shame and a waste if those specs were matched with a mediocre screen and, fortunately, OPPO didn’t fail to impress here either. The huge 6.82-inch LTPO AMOLED display is bright, fast, responsive, and vibrant. It perfectly complements the phone’s luxurious back with an equally gorgeous display that supports the industry-standard HDR10+, OPPO’s own ProXDR, and soon, Google’s new Ultra HDR. Given you’ll want to view the photos you take on this screen, OPPO really needed to make sure that it was up to the task.

OPPO crammed a 5,000mAh battery inside, which is both common yet also mildly disappointing. With all its capabilities, a higher capacity would have been a better choice, but that would have also weighed down the phone considerably. Fortunately, it does last a day on a single charger, at least with constant use, and the super-fast 100W charging is enough to bring it back to full in about half an hour. 50W wireless charging is also plenty fast, which is a rarity in this regard.

Quad Main Camera and HyperTone System

Much of OPPO’s rhetoric revolves around the OPPO Find X7 Ultra’s Quad Main Cameras, and to be fair, it does deserve some praise for pulling off what comes naturally to professional cameras but not to smartphones. DSLRs and mirrorless cameras can easily change lenses when they need a different focal length or field of view while keeping the same high-quality imaging sensor built into the camera. Smartphones, on the other hand, use a different camera for different focal lengths, but due to space and price constraints, also use different sensors that aren’t always up to the task.

What the OPPO Find X7 Ultra accomplishes is to have four different cameras with different lenses, all of which have 50MP sensors. Yes, these sensors have different sizes and specs and, therefore, different overall quality, but the differences are very marginal at best. No longer do you have to sacrifice quality just to jump from wide to ultrawide to telephoto, nor will you get that jarring effect whenever you switch between cameras.

The phone’s mighty camera roster includes a 1-inch 50MP Sony LYT-900 with a 23mm focal length equivalent, a 1/1.95-inch 50MP Sony LYT-600 ultrawide (14mm equivalent), a 1/1.56-inch 50MP Sony IMX890 3x periscope telephoto (65), and a 1/2.51-inch 50MP Sony IMX858 6x periscope telephoto (135mm). With this set, the OPPO Find X7 Ultra practically covers the whole range of lenses used by photographers, including 10x zoom at 270mm with some computational photography. OPPO’s software also allows users to select more common focal lengths, like 35mm for the wide (main) camera, though it does that with a bit of cropping.

As you might have already noticed with the camera samples, these aren’t just numbers or empty words. OPPO definitely delivered on its promise of professional-quality photos in any field of view, zoom, or even lighting condition. Part of that magic is thanks to its partnership with Hasselblad, which also led to the Computational Photography aspect of its HyperTone camera system. In a nutshell, it tries to avoid oversharpening, overexposure, and other exaggerations that most camera software apply to compensate for poor image quality, resulting in more natural-looking photos you might have never thought came from a smartphone instead of a pro camera.

Sustainability

As one of the world’s top 5 smartphone vendors, OPPO has taken its responsibility for preserving the environment quite seriously. In addition to a few models that made use of recycled or sustainable materials, the company also has a concrete program for reducing the negative impact its business has on the planet. That involves reducing its carbon footprint, optimizing its packaging and logistics, and offsetting its harmful emissions.

Unfortunately, the OPPO Find X7 Ultra itself doesn’t have the clear marks of a sustainable phone. Sure, it uses vegan leather across all models, but that synthetic material isn’t completely environment-friendly either, despite the name. One upside is that the phone is IP68-rated, which is one of the highest dust and water resistance levels for smartphones, promising a mostly durable product that should last you quite a while before you have to throw it away, responsibly, of course.

Value

If you’re anything of a mobile shutterbug, it’s hard not to get excited over the OPPO Find X7 Ultra. Although it’s not going to dethrone an expensive DSLR, it really comes close to it with its HyperTone Quad Main Camera System. And all that imaging hardware is packed into a thin and stylish device that you can also use for more than just taking photos. What’s not to like?

Unfortunately, the product’s value takes a nosedive because of the fact that, as of this writing, OPPO has no plans yet to bring the OPPO Find X7 Ultra to international markets, making it exclusive to a Chinese audience. Yes, you can probably import the phone through other channels, but that won’t change the fact that the version of ColorOS software running on it isn’t made for global users. Yes, you can install Google Play Store unofficially, but that still won’t give you access to some basic platform capabilities you’d expect from international versions of these devices. It’s definitely a shame that such a treasure would be out of reach, and hopefully, OPPO will change its mind very soon.

Verdict

Smartphones are sometimes a victim of their own success, or at least of marketing hype. It wasn’t that long ago when they were said to devour the lower end of professional cameras, but they haven’t managed to surpass the bulkier and more powerful shooters in terms of flexibility and quality. It’s just impossible, given the restraints on design, price, and engineering, so smartphones have to make do with workarounds and software solutions.

The OPPO Find X7 Ultra, however, comes pretty close to that ideal. It still can’t change lenses physically, but it provides almost the same experience through a perfect combination of hardware and software. Of course, it’s not just a digital camera, and it manages to excel in almost every field with very few flaws. It’s tragic that most people won’t be able to experience all of that, though, but hopefully, they will soon be able to get their hands on what could very well be this year’s most beautiful and most capable smartphone camera.

An Oklahoma anti-porn bill could outlaw any sort of sexualized image — pornographic or not — and ban sending nude photographs outside of marriage.

Last week, Oklahoma State Senator Dusty Deevers proposed the Oklahoma Senate Bill 1976 that will make the production and viewing of consenting pornography a felony — punishable with up to 20 years in prison.

According to a report by Reason Magazine, the wide-reaching bill, which is slated to be formally introduced on February 5, could have potential ramifications for any sort of nudity in photography in the state.

Reason Magazine reports that the legislation targets a broad definition of “porn” that threatens not just “hardcore pornography” but all sorts of erotic expression in media.

The Oklahoma Senate Bill 1976 seeks to define a new category of largely prohibited content called “unlawful pornography.”

In the proposed bill, unlawful pornography is described as “any visual depiction or individual image stored or contained in any format on any medium including, but not limited to, film, motion picture, videotape, photograph, negative, undeveloped film, slide, photographic product, reproduction of a photographic product, play, or performance” when the depiction involves not just any sort of sex act or sexual fetish — but also nudity and partial nudity.

According to the bill, unlawful depiction includes the “lewd exhibition of the uncovered genitals, buttocks, or, if such person is female, the breast” which is “for the purpose of sexual stimulation of the viewer.”

If this legislation is passed in Oklahoma, the buying, viewing, or possession of such “unlawful pornography” would be a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison or a fine of up to $25,000.

All “unlawful porn” would be off limits to produce or distribute unless it was deemed to have “serious literary, artistic, educational, political, or scientific purposes or value.” However, the bill does not explain exactly how the state will judge when a sexualized image has artistic value — or is an illegal obscenity.

Furthermore, Reason Magazine reports that the wording of the Oklahoma Senate Bill 1976 suggests that it would ban and criminalize sending sexualized selfies to someone that a person that is not their husband or wife. The Oklahoma Senate Bill 1976 states that it does not seek to “prevent spouses from sending images of a sexual nature to each other.”

Image credits: Header photo via Oklahoma Senate (left) and legiscan (right).

A nature photographer had a brush with a “very venomous” sea snake which appeared in the mud he was lying in while photographing mudskippers.

Nick Volpe’s hysterical reaction to the black-ringed mangrove snake slithering behind him is justified given that a bite would have been extremely nasty.

“Whilst we were deep in mud photographing mudskippers, I noticed a shrimp goby jump in front of me (initial reaction) before realizing it was being followed by a venomous black-ringed mangrove snake,” Volpe, who is from Australia, writes on social media.

“These snakes are actually a type of sea snake and feed on gobies in mangrove-lined creeks! Best surprise ever!”

In an email exchange, PetaPixel asked Volpe what would have happened if the sea snake had bitten him.

“Not likely, sea snakes are fairly reluctant to bite,” Volpe says. “They are very venomous though so it wouldn’t have been the prettiest situation if I did get bitten, would have had to go straight to hospital.”

A number of social media users were amazed at how depsite rolling around in thick mud, Volpe managed to keep his Canon R5 dry, “It’s just pure determination,” says Volpe.

According to Yahoo News Australia, 26-year-old Volpe is originally from Darwin but moved to Melbourne five years ago and was in the East Point Reserve when the sea snake incident happened.

The video was captured by his partner Lucyna Kania and has racked up hundreds of thousands of views across social media.

“It all happened pretty quickly and it was a bit of a shock, but we were so excited because it was the first one we’d ever seen of that species,” says Volpe, who studied environmental science.

“That snake is usually found in estuaries or rivers where crocodiles are found, and one you don’t get to often see. So to see one up close and fairly safely, we were pretty happy about that. It’s an amazing opportunity to see it, and the best surprise ever.”

More of Volpe’s work can be found on his website, Instagram, X, and Facebook.

Image credits: Photographs by Nick Volpe