Photographer brings nature into classrooms – via the ceiling – CBS News

From World Series winners to baseball dreamers, Jean Fruth has not only seen it all, but she’s also captured it on camera. Fruth is a professional sports photographer and one of the few women covering Major League Baseball.  As a woman in a predominately male industry, Fruth has experienced the pains of breaking through glass ceilings.

“In the early days, I was many times the only woman in the photo wells and you know that had it’s challenges. But, the great news is today we’re seeing more women in the photo wells, more women on the sidelines, and more women in sports photography. We’re seeing team photographers that are women and wire photographers and it’s really an exciting time,” Fruth said during CBS Colorado Mornings at 9.   

Sports is particularly difficult to shoot because of all of the quick action. Fruth has perfected the art of getting the shot within the action.

“Any athlete repeats themselves, like they do the same thing over and over again. They catch the ball the same way. They throw the ball the same way. They kick the soccer ball the same way, so my advice would be the more you know the sport the more you know the athlete the more consistently you’re going to get the shot. So, knowing your sport,” Fruth explained. “And, you know, gear makes a big difference. Gear matters. The cameras that I have… I shoot with a Sony camera that shoots 30 frames per second, so that makes me look like a genius. And now there’s a camera coming out that shoots 100 frames per second, so i would say to get the best gear that you can get for your budget because it does make a difference in capturing that fast action.”

She’s recently published a book called “Grassroots Baseball,” which is an in depth look at how love of the game can bring people from all socio-economic groups together.

“When I travel and I shoot the professional game around the world, I also shoot the amateur game, the grassroots game. It’s my favorite part of the game. It’s before contracts and money. It’s for pure love of the game, and that to me is the joy. So ‘Grassroots Baseball’, my first book ‘Where Legions Begin,’ I connected with Hall of Famers… Baseball Hall of Famers and asked them if they would tell their stories growing up playing baseball in their early years and tied it with these grassroots images. And, that’s how Grassroots Baseball began and came about. And after that, my second book was through my not-for-profit Grassroots Baseball, is now a not-for-profit, and that was along Route 66, when i tied in all the Americana and spent 3-years along Route 66 documenting the game and documenting the Americana,” she said. 

Fruth is in Denver to speak as part of the Changemakers Speaker series at the Lone Tree Arts Center. The Changemakers Speaker series is new to the center. It’s designed to bring together great minds to discuss their lives and work. This first series is featuring three female photographers who have documented the world in distinctive ways. Fruth’s lecture is titled “From Sandlots to Stadiums” and will focus on the role of women in baseball.

“Women aren’t new to baseball. The door has opened and closed for us many years throughout history. But now the door is blown off the hinges, and we are making headlines every week.. on the field, off the field, around the globe so I’m really excited to talk about women and baseball at the theatre tonight. I’m excited to be at that beautiful theatre,” Fruth said.

LINK: Changemaker Speaker Series at the Lone Tree Arts Center

“From Sandlots to Stadium”, Jean Fruth will be speaking at the Lone Tree Arts Center on Friday, January 19, 2023 at 8 p.m. 

This year marks 100 years since J.P. Morgan Jr. transformed his father’s private library into one of New York’s leading public institutions. To kick off the programme for the Morgan Library & Museum’s anniversary year, this exhibition brings together more than 40 previously unseen works from its photography collection (26 January–26 May). Among them are portraits of actors, writers and artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama. Highlights include 100 Boots (1971–73) by Eleanor Antin, one of the best-known works of mail art: 51 postcards of arrangements of boots, which the artist sent to dozens of friends and public figures. Find out more from the Morgan Library & Museum’s website.

Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary

Reading Position for Second Degree Burn Jones Beach, Long Island, New York (1970), Dennis Oppenheim. The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. © Estate of Dennis Oppenheim

Untitled (Self Portrait), (n.d.), Ralph Eugene Meatyard. The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; © Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

100 Boots (detail; 1971–73), Eleanor Antin. The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. © 2023 Eleanor Antin

Flickr’s most popular camera is still the iPhone if we’re broadly judging what a camera is. But if you’re speaking about devices primarily made with the idea of image capture, then things are a bit different. Sony doesn’t dominate the space on Flickr — which is still for photographers who are serious about their craft and not all in for content creation. The platform caters to photographers first. With that said, Flickr’s most popular camera should come as no surprise.

Flickr’s Most Popular Camera: The Canon EOS R5

The dedicated camera that is rated as Flickr’s most popular camera is the Canon EOS R5. According to the Camera Finder link, amongst the list of cameras used, the Canon EOS R5 is the most popular. This shows a lot of really fascinating data:

• Since the camera came out relatively recently, photographers aren’t necessarily stuck in the DSLR world. This means that it’s not necessarily a platform for aging photographers. Instead, it could also mean that those we might consider to be aging photographers are also adapting and using cameras that they find to be great.
• People didn’t necessarily move away to Sony because of all the marketing hype.
• Photographers didn’t necessarily switch to medium format Fujifilm. In fact, the GFX lineup isn’t even very highly rated
• As far as other brands go, the Nikon D850 is still highly trusted amongst many photographers.

If you go through the most popular photos using the Canon EOS R5, you find beautiful imagery made with the camera for landscape photography.

Sure, Flickr has aged quite a bit. But if you’re still a serious photographer, it’s a very important place for many of us. Flickr’s groups still hold lots of great images in the same way that sub-Reddit groups and Facebook groups do. They’re home to many conversations and have equal amounts of trolls and passionate photographers who do this for the love of it. It’s also not dictated by the same kinds of algorithms. With that said, nudity still surely gets you more clicks and views. But it’s not the driving factor. The platform isn’t also absolutely dominated by it the way that 500px is.

The Canon EOS R5 is a Landscape Photography Powerhouse

So what makes the Canon EOS R5 so good? Well, it had to do with the sensor. This isn’t the same sensor that’s present in several Sony cameras. It does color very well and has access to several lenses that are beautiful in their own right. Canon photographers might use lenses that they had previously with the EF mount system, but Canon’s RF lenses are great for landscape photography too.

It’s still my personally used most favorite camera when it comes to doing actual work. And here are several reasons why that are backed up in the review we did:

• Weather resistance: this camera can keep working pretty much no matter what. It has never failed on me,
• Autofocus that works: the only issues I’ve ever had with autofocus on this camera have to do with low light and people of color moving quickly
• Good selection of lenses: All of Canon’s L glass is pretty unique
• 45 Megapixels is enough: 45MP can print really large and it gives you enough dynamic range while also giving you a lot of nice color depth
• Images right out of the camera look great: Canon’s image quality right out of the camera is some of my favorite. It’s not quite Fujifilm or Leica. But it can do things comparable to Panasonic’s Real Time LUT feature — though only applied to the JPEG files.

We’ve interviewed two photographers who adore the Canon EOS R5 for landscape photography. The first is Paul Zizka, who considers Canon to be essential to his creative vision. Photographer Lalo De Almeida also uses the Canon EOS R5. He’s not a gear fanatic, but he makes incredible images using the camera.

Bruce Gilden was seen rockin out to WPDH and The Doors in his car on Instagram.

Bruce Gilden is an American street photographer from Brooklyn, NY that is best known for his candid close-up photographs of people on the streets of New York City, using a flashgun. He’s had various books of his work published, and has received the European Publishers Award for Photography and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He’s been a member of Magnum Photos, an international photographic cooperative since 1998.

Also See: Museum at Bethel Woods Nominated For Prestigious Honor

Gilden has photographed people on the streets of New York, Japan’s yakuza mobsters, homeless people, prostitutes, and members of bike gangs between 1995 and 2000.  According to Gilden, he was fascinated by the duality and double lives of the individuals he photographed. He has also photographed rural Ireland and horseracing there as well as voodoo rituals in Haiti. He was the subject of the 2007 documentary film Misery Loves Company: The Life and Death of Bruce Gilden.

Bruce Gilden Loves The Doors, and Apparently the Home of Rock n Roll

In a video posted this week to his official Instagram page, which he has 279,000 plus followers, Bruce Gilden can be seen rockin out to The Doors “Break on Through” on 101.5 WPDH! No word on where Gilden was traveling, but we assume he was somewhere in the Hudson Valley blastig the Home of Rock n Roll. In the video, he is seen singing along to the Doors classic, and really getting into it. He then comments, “this was my favorite record when I was a kid”. Great to see that Bruce Gilden loves rockin out to WPDH like the rest of the Hudson Valley. Keep on rockin Sir!  See the Instagram video below.

Some of the classrooms at Taft Elementary in Santa Clara, California, have one flaw in common: They don’t have windows. That’s true for Logan Earnest’s fifth grade classroom, and he felt it was affecting his students.

“Most of the day, 7/8 of the day, they’re inside,” Earnest told CBS News. “And they don’t really get to see any trees, they don’t get to see grass, the blue sky.” He said the drab, beige walls could be draining on the kids and may effect their attention span and even their attendance. 

Former school psychologist Ernesto Rodriguez told CBS News the lack of windows does affect kids, because research shows being in and around nature eases anxiety and has benefits for students. 

Rodriguez is no longer a practicing psychologist – but perhaps he knows now more than ever the impact nature has on mental health. He became a park ranger on Southern California’s Catalina Island and began focusing on his passion, landscape photography. 

It was during his training to become a park ranger that he learned a fact that stuck with him. “Kids who have views out windows to trees do better academically, emotionally and creatively. And more graduate and go to college,” he said. “I thought, why isn’t this being used?”

He had an idea to bring nature into rooms that were lacking and developed hospital curtains that he could print landscapes onto as a way to brighten dull rooms. Then, he had an aha moment to bring landscapes in classrooms – via the ceiling. 

“Having been a school psychologist, you don’t touch teacher’s walls. You do that, and they cut your hand off – both of them,” Rodriguez joked. “So I thought, well let’s use the ceiling, because they don’t typically use the ceiling.”

Rodriguez uses his photography skills to taken 360 degree shots of tree canopies, then he prints them and fits them onto ceiling tiles, so when you look up, it feels like you’re sitting under a tree. “And it has all those elements of the science that helps calm you down, helps you focus and communicate,” he said.

He created a nonprofit called Nature in the Classroom and he’s installed the tree canopies in 10 school districts so far. He takes all the photos himself and the canopies are often donated to teachers.

CBS News was there when he revealed the canopy to Earnest’s fifth grade students. “Beautiful,” one student said as she entered the room and saw the new addition.

A student named Octavio told us trees bring him peace. “It is surprising to see because any time you’re inside of a school, you mostly don’t see plants. Or trees. But now it’s surprising to see that there’s trees here,” Octavio said. “I would say that it’s pretty great and beautiful.”

Earnest said he thought there would be many positive effects on his students. “I think my attendance is going to go up. I think kids are going to want to come in here more frequently. Overall, I think the kids are going to be happier,” he said.

Rodriguez says if you still don’t believe in the science behind the art, you can try it yourself by going outside and looking up at the trees. 

“This is a marriage of both my careers as a school psychologist and a photographer,” he said. “And to be able to create imagery – and spend time out in nature creating imagery that I know is going to help people – is really a motivator.”

Caitlin O’Kane

Caitlin O’Kane is a New York City journalist who works on the CBS News social media team as a senior manager of content and production. She writes about a variety of topics and produces “The Uplift,” CBS News’ streaming show that focuses on good news.

The winners of the 2023 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Competition have been announced with a picture of a paddling monkey taking home the grand prize.

This year, there were 14 categories covering all aspects of underwater photography; but it is the winner of the Portrait category that was crowned Best in Show.

Suliman Alatiqi’s shot of a crab-eating macaque swimming around the Phi Phi Islands in Thailand where the photographer spent two weeks observing and documenting the species impressed the judges enough to call it “the world’s best underwater image.”

“Although the AI revolution has quickly changed the global photographic landscape, this year’s winners are a testament to humanity’s creative perseverance over machine,” the competition’s organizers, Underwater Photography Guide, write in a press release.

“With new rules against the use of generative AI imagery in our primary categories, these photos are 100% real.”

Over $120,000 worth of prizes were handed out. For more information and to learn more about this year’s contest, head to the competition’s website.