In the mesmerizing world of photography, there’s a new star on the horizon, and it’s none other than the Leica MP “Space” by the legendary artist, John Dowell, also known as King Nerd. This remarkable camera takes photography to a celestial level, with its one-of-a-kind hand-engraved design that’s truly out of this world.

John Dowell is renowned for his intricate hand-engraving techniques, and he has left his indelible mark on the Leica MP with a starry motif that adorns both the top and bottom plates. But this is no ordinary starry pattern – it’s a cosmic masterpiece complete with spaceships, astronauts, and celestial bodies. What makes it even more remarkable is that this celestial artwork reveals the camera’s signature brass material underneath, adding a touch of vintage elegance to the whole ensemble.

The Leica MP “Space” is based on the MP model, which harks back to the basics of photography. It’s a fully mechanical camera designed for purists who appreciate the art of photography in its purest form. With a Leica M mount, mechanically controlled shutter, image field selector, and a selective light meter, this camera ensures that every shot you take is a work of art in itself.

But what truly sets this Leica MP apart is its connection to the cosmos. It’s not just a camera; it’s a portal to the stars. With each click of the shutter, you’ll feel like you’re drifting into the vastness of space, capturing the mysteries of the universe through your lens.

If you’re an art collector, photography enthusiast, or just someone with an eye for the extraordinary, you won’t want to miss out on the opportunity to own this masterpiece. The Leica MP “Space” by King Nerd will be up for grabs at the Leitz Auction on November 24th. It’s a chance to own a piece of history and a ticket to the stars.

For more information and to stay updated on this stellar auction, visit leitz-auction.com. Don’t miss your chance to own a piece of the cosmos through the lens of King Nerd’s Leica MP “Space.”

Elevate your project. Advertise with stupidDOPE today!!

Shymanski’s business partner spoke to WUSA9 about his art and how he plans to continue his legacy.

Photographer Markus Hofstaetter is well known for his excellent analog photography and fun do-it-yourself projects. The Austrian photographer is spoiled with opportunities to get new gear, including at Joe Geier’s Mint and Rare Store, which organizes a biannual analog flea market called Wiener Fotoboersë.

Hofstaetter visited the most recent edition and has shared his experience on his blog. The photographer notes that the event has gotten so popular that it has morphed from a way for people to find new (used) gear to add to their collection into a larger celebration of analog photography. Hofstaetter had a booth at the market where he put some gear up for sale and shared information about his photography and workshops.

Before heading to the market, Hofstaetter loaded a dry plate into his large format camera, “just in case” he spotted an interesting subject on the way home. Sure enough, he did.

What made Hofstaetter’s photo opportunity all the more challenging is that his Zebra dry plate has an ISO sensitivity of just 2, meaning that he needed a very long exposure, even during the day. Further, the plate is only sensitive to blue wavelengths. “Because It was late afternoon and it was already getting darker and that means less blue light,” Hofstaetter explains, making the exposure even longer.

“A lot of cars were passing by, while I was standing there and looking at the image I wanted to capture. So I came up with the idea to use the lights of the cars to light my scene. Now I had another problem, I did not know when cars will pass me, so I just trusted my ears and before a car arrived I put the lens cap of for the exposure. You can see how I did it in the video,” the photographer adds.

Ultimately, Hofstaetter’s latest blog post and accompanying video showcase a thoroughly lovely day of analog photography, from seeing unique gear to capturing a photo on a dry plate.

Markus Hofstaetter offers many more interesting posts on his blog, including a recent one that shows people how to do a DIY UV exposure build, complete with a dimmer and timer.

Image credits: Markus Hofstaetter

A new photography project recording sensitive and precious personal experiences and mātauranga of kaumātua has been launched today in Tāmaki Makaurau.

Kaumātua is a three-year-long project created by photographer Sarah (Hera) Tautuku Orme, of Ngāti Awa, Te Arawa, Ngāti Whākaue, and Ngāti Tarāwhai.

“With this kaupapa, we hope to bring mana to our kaumātua, read what they share, and ignite further kōrero. The aim is that as many people have the opportunity to engage with this project as possible,” Orme says.

The stories and portraits of the first four kaumātua were revealed and celebrated at Te Noho Kotahitanga Marae, Ōwairaka yesterday in Auckland. They include Rānana Paul, of Ngāti Maniapoto and Ngāti Rereahu; Hēni Goldsmith of Ngāti Ranginui and Ngāi Te Rangi; Lynda Toki of Maniapoto and Hare Paniora, of Ngāpuhi.

Some of their experiences include being made to not speak te reo Māori at school in the late 1930s; not getting moko kauae because of not being accepted into society at the time; domestic violence; incarceration; and overcoming the challenge of speaking te reo on the marae.

“Everyone has a story to share. Kaumātua, elders born around the 1940s and earlier, have lived through a lot of societal change in Aotearoa. Kaumātua are pātaka kōrero and we continue to learn from them, moving into the future with their words, soaking up the richness of their kōrero. Kaumātua are healers who share their stories of a past so that it will be remembered,” Orme says.

In Hēni Goldsmith’s excerpt, she shared her experience about being told not to speak te reo in school.

Her expert said,”One day when I was about seven or eight, we were at school and a bus pulled up with a Māori driver [who said to] us kids, in Māori: ‘E tu ngā tamariki Māori e haere ki te waka.’ (Stand up children who are Māori and get onto the bus.) The bus took us to Te Paeroa Native School in Bethlehem, about 20 miles from where we lived. We were no longer allowed to go to our old school. No one explained why and no one was consulted, we were just sent off in another direction. Before we got off the bus, our driver said, ‘You’re not allowed to talk Māori here once you go through the gate. You’ll all get punished for speaking Māori.’ We were all worried because most of us were quite limited with English. We never knew why we were being shipped off. I only found out recently that it was because the Pākehā parents got together to get us out of the school.”

Lynda Toki shared what it was like when her grandmother was influenced to not get a moko kauae, a tradition that had lasted for generations in the whānau, because of the threat of not being accepted into society.

“I grew up around moko kauae – they were everywhere. There is just one generation in my whakapapa that did not get their moko kauae, and that was my grandmother’s, during the 1920s. Eleven of them, including my grandmother, were going through the three-stage process with their tohunga kai tā. After the second stage, they chose not to continue to get their moko kauae, because they would have been “marked” and not accepted into society at that time. They were a generation caught up in the colonial thinking process, which interfered with our tikanga. I feel gutted when I think back to this time–knowing that without this Pākehā interference I would have been part of an unbroken whakapapa of moko kaue,” Toki said in her excerpt.

Of Orme’s work, actor Rena Owen said, “Having the privilege of being photographed by the gifted Sara Orme, I couldn’t think of a better photographer to capture our kaumātuas’ uniqueness. Who Sara is allows one to be vulnerable, which then enables her lense to see and capture deep within”

Kaumātua will be produced as a publication and an exhibition, engaging with the communities that the kaumātua come from. It is intended to be a three-year project to continue photographing and sharing the stories. Additional kaumātua will join for an exhibition at Auckland Central City Library Tāmaki Pātaka Kōrero in 2024.

Helmut Newton, the German post-war fashion photographer who notoriously posed a model on a bed in a Paris hotel with a saddle on her back, is the focus of a new retrospective in the port city of A Caruña in Galicia, Spain. Counter intuitively, it is a sophisticated showcase of female empowerment as much as erotic suggestion. Stockings, suspenders, jodhpurs and leathers are all worn without apology.

Staged at the city’s Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation, “Helmut Newton – Fact & Fiction” explores a career spent shooting for magazines such as Vogue, Playboy and Harper’s Bazaar from the 1950s through to the early 2000s, as well as a mercurial character that fused together playfulness and angst.

A Newton picture can be many things at once: provocative, titillating even, but also amusing and confusing. His iconic ‘Big Nudes’ prints from 1980 are larger-than-life-size and full frontal. Yet, his nudes exude armor. His celebrity portraits framed actresses — from Raquel Welch to Charlotte Rampling — in challenging stances. And in the 1970s, photographing with carte blanche for Vogue France, he invented a bold monochrome visual language — black lingerie, insouciant countenance, power plays and decadent interiors — that has been widely imitated in the years since.

The heavy contrasts in his work were echoed in the reversal of fortunes in his life story. He was born Helmut Neustädter in 1920 in Berlin into a family of Jewish industrialists. Fleeing the Nazis in the late 1930s, he was exiled first to Singapore and then Australia. One of his early models, the Australian actress June Browne, became his wife in 1948. Browne was the template for his later models — striking and intelligent — and, working under the name Alice Springs, had a successful photographic career of her own. They were married for more than half a century.

Newton’s work in the 1960s emphasized his early inspirations, such as the noir-like images of Hungarian photographer Brassaï and the shockers of Alfred Hitchcock (a Newton shoot for Christian Dior echoes “Vertigo”). He soon began celebrating the sculptural qualities of women’s bodies and portraying men as silly, servile, or dead.

In the mid-1970s, Newton met Philippe Garner, then a young photographs specialist at Sotheby’s, who has now curated the Spanish show with Matthias Harder, director of the Helmut Newton Foundation, and the British art dealer Tim Jefferies. In Newton, Garner recalled a friend who “created a parallel universe but rooted in everything you know and recognize.”

It is curious that Newton’s take on sexuality hasn’t come into the crosshairs of cancel culture. “The work has such layers, such contradictions, such ambiguities, this weird hovering between fact and fiction,” said Garner. “That makes it very hard to confront and condemn full on.” And, he adds, “Helmut was perfectly happy for people to loathe his pictures.”

But could a photographer today frame a woman as a horse to be ridden? “Every photographer starting out now should have the courage of their perspective,” said Garner. “What Helmut’s pictures have is a kind of integrity.”

In 1976, Newton snapped his infamous equestrian model at Hôtel Lancaster on the Champs Èlysées. The shoot was for Hermès but, as with much of Newton’s work, the product feels secondary to the composition. As Garner notes, he took “pictures that stopped you in your tracks.” It’s fashion photography but the clothes are bit-part players.

Paris wasn’t Newton’s only metropolis. He had an eye for glamorous cities — taking commissions in Monte Carlo, Berlin, and Vienna — working in color in the bright light of California and the south of France. A friend joked that “only mad dogs and Helmut Newton go out in the midday sun.” Newton wintered in Los Angeles, where he died of a heart attack in 2004 at the wheel of his Cadillac.

The photographer’s fetishistic interests and natty style are illustrated at the exhibition by the inclusion of some his possessions — bondage Barbie dolls, cigarette holders, falsetto-heeled shoes, a travel-battered monogrammed Louis Vuitton camera case. And there are surprises among the works: a portrait of a subtly nervous Margaret Thatcher glimpses a crack in the iron, while a series of brooding landscapes provide a window on Newton’s more pensive side.

The MOP Foundation is based in a complex of former warehouses and silos on the city’s port. The galleries play to their industrial heritage — all bunker-chic and salted metalwork — and are neatly configured around the geometric Atlantic harbor. It’s an appropriately dramatic stage to present Newton and, cleverly, the curators show his smallest works — exquisite test-shot Polaroids — in one of the vast silos. Visitors peer voyeuristically into palm-size soft-hued images of semi-dressed models sprawled on Parisian sofas, New York balconies and the decks of Mediterranean yachts.

Marta Ortega Pérez, whose foundation hosts the show, is the chairwoman of Inditex, the Spanish multinational clothing company founded by her father. She said her foundation focuses on three things: Fashion, photography and her hometown. “We want to push our city to the world and bring the world to our city,” she said, and added that it is a “really nice challenge” to have.

A strong woman reframing the narrative? She could be the subject of a Helmut Newton photograph.

“Helmut Newton – Fact & Fiction” until 1 May 2024. Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation, A Coruña, Spain.

It’s time for great photography savings with some of the biggest deals of the year. If you happen to be looking for new gear, a faster or easier way to edit your photos, or a more efficient shooting workflow, here are offers that will help.

Skylum

Year’s Best Deal: Unmissable Black Friday Sale on Luminar Neo photo editor with 85% off plus a special gift!

Luminar Neo is the photo editor for photography lovers who look to express themselves through their favorite hobby by giving them creative freedom and empowering them with advanced but fun-to-use tools.This Flack Friday, enjoy an incredible 85% off on the Year’s Best Deal and get the Creative Assets Collection of presets, overlays, skies, and more as a gift. The offer is available till November 27 only. Get your gift here. 

Topaz Labs 

Save 60% on the Ultimate Bundle to supercharge your photo and video production with the power of AI. Trusted by major film studios, photographers, and creative pros everywhere.

Includes Video AI 4, Photo AI 2, Gigapixel, DeNoise, and Sharpen for just $299.

Loupedeck

Loupedeck, maker of custom consoles for total control of livestreams and creative editing is offering deep Black Friday discounts from November 20 – 27, including their first-ever holiday discount on the new Live S. Loupedeck’s new partnership with Logitech now connects users to an entire ecosystem of hardware and software perfect for all kinds of creators, which will only make users’ experiences more connected this holiday season and beyond:

Imagen

Imagen is the ultimate post-production tool for Lightroom Classic, redefining the standard for photographers with AI-driven efficiency, creative freedom, and secure cloud backup.

To celebrate Black Friday, Imagen offers a fantastic deal! New subscribers can enjoy a massive 30% discount on their first month of use. This special offer covers all of Imagen’s features, including AI editing, Cloud Backup, and more advanced AI capabilities. Take advantage of this limited-time opportunity to maximize your post-production workflow!

Subscribe to Imagen by November 30, and you’ll enjoy an exclusive 30% discount on your invoice for the first month, with culling, cropping, straightening, and subject mask included. 

Simply subscribe and enter the code “blackfriday23” during checkout.

This offer is valid from November 16th through November 30th.

Pixellu

We’re celebrating a decade spent helping photographers do what they love with a sale — photographers can enjoy 40% off our All Apps Bundle for one year.

Our All Apps Bundle includes unlimited access to all of our quality apps created specifically for the world of photography. Each tool improves and refines the image delivery process:

• Pixellu Galleries puts the world’s most beautiful client galleries at photographers’ fingertips.

• SmartSlides for delivering wow-factor slideshows.

• SmartAlbums for designing stunning photo albums in minutes, which can then be client-approved quickly and easily using Cloud Proofing.

For the month of November, photographers can grab our annual All Apps Bundle at 40% off for one year, giving them more value for less than purchasing a top-tier subscription to any one product alone.

BH

BH is offering some incredible prices on all sorts of gear, from cameras and lenses to any accessory you need. Check out there savings now.

Radiant Imaging Labs

Get your hands on one of the best photo editing tools for 75% off!

This bundle features Radiant Photo (includes a license for the standalone & plug-in versions, plus a Toolkit with presets and training worth $179), 1-year Mylio Photos back-up & sync between all devices ($99 value), and a Viewbug Platinum membership ($144 value).

Normally everything would cost $471 but is all on sale for only $99.

iPhone Photo Academy

Our friends over at iPhone Photo Academy are selling their full tutorial for only $39 (84% off). With it you’ll learn to take advantage of your phone’s camera and take stunning photos in all situations. 

Check it out here!