Emirates Post, the official postal operator and leading express provider in the UAE, launched the Postal Portraits Photography Competition with the aim of fostering connections within communities through the art of photography. The competition, initiated last month, invites participants to capture the essence of the UAE’s rich cultural heritage and way of life.

Structured around distinct quarterly themes, the competition will offer a dynamic display of the diverse way of life that define the Emirates’ cultural landscape. Running until September 30, 2024, this initiative invites participants to capture the vibrancy of the Emirates’ postal experiences through their photographic lens.  

Participants in the competition can showcase their talent but also win rewards. Each month the photographer with the best submission will receive AED 2,500, in addition to carefully curated giveaways.

Emirates Post encourages all photography enthusiasts in UAE to participate in this photographic venture. The initiative demonstrates Emirates Post’s commitment to promoting community engagement and capturing the rich cultural heritage of the UAE.

Interested participants can visit https://www.epg.ae/postal-portraits-photography-competition for further information and submission guidelines.

For further information, please contact:
Orient Planet Group (OPG)
Email: media@orientplanet.com
Website: www.orientplanet.com

Lighting in Murky Depths

As one dives deeper into the underwater world, visibility can become a key challenge. The availability of natural light diminishes and managing artificial lighting becomes critical. The right strobes and reflectors can circumvent these challenges, adding depth and detail to images, and transforming what could be murky snaps into vibrant photographs.

When choosing a strobe, consider the environment in which you’ll be diving. If you’re shooting in clearer waters, high-powered units can provide optimal light. It could be preferable to use lower-powered choices, though, if your dive site if visibility is low or especially poor at specific times of the day (such as early morning or late afternoon).

But what about when your photos are less than perfect? This is where post-production techniques come in.

Employing Post-Production Techniques

Post-production plays a pivotal role in transforming raw underwater images into vibrant, compelling narratives. Key techniques, such as colour grading, light balance, and photo or video editing, revive photographs beyond simple snapshots and elevate them into awe-inspiring tales of the deep.

Color Grading and Light Balance

Subaqueous photography presents unique challenges with lighting and colour representation, which are addressed during post-production. Colour grading enables photographers to restore or enhance the hues, saturation and contrast obscured by underwater lighting. Moreover, well-adjusted light balance ensures an accurate depiction of the blended natural and artificial light sources in underwater photography, giving your images a closer resemblance to real-life underwater scenarios.

Photo or Video Editing

While still images capture a moment, adding motion to those moments can weave an even more intriguing narrative. Here’s when editing videos and photos come in helpful. Detailed editing, whether of still images, animated images such as compressed GIFs, or moving clips, can stitch together a cohesive storyline, adding depth and dimension to your underwater narratives. Mastering the art of editing not only enhances the visual appeal of your captures but also helps convey the emotion and drama of the underwater world engagingly and effectively.

Whether you’re detailing a coral landscape or documenting the behaviour of marine life, post-production is where your images transform into stories. It is an art form of its kind, where you blend technique, creativity, and meticulous attention to detail to reveal the untold mysteries of the deep.

Laura Pannack first went to Romania in 2012; she’d been living in a shared house in London and, after the death of a friend, needed to step out of the pace of that life, find a place where time might seem less fleeting. Over the following years she spent extended periods in remote Romanian villages, taking pictures. A translator she was working with had mentioned to her a particular local folktale called Youth Without Age and Life Without Death; the story, about a prince who goes in search of a land where time stands still, gave her the idea for a book of photographs.

In that book, published this month, Pannack has created strange and haunting pictures with some of the villagers she met and lived among to illustrate ideas from that story. This photograph arises from a particular line: “then the sisters made their guest and his hosts known to all the wild beasts”. It happened, Pannack explained to me, that she had been walking along a lane in one village one morning when she met three sisters and started chatting about her project. They entered into the spirit of the story “100%” she says, and helped her make this picture.

Working on these images, inhabiting these small daily adventures, helped Pannack reframe her “always-existing anxiety that time is running out”. In the folktale, when the prince eventually finds the land where time stops, he discovers all the people he loves have died; “the moral,” she says “is that we should not seek infinite time, but spend the time we have with people we love”. Pannack is working on a “second chapter” of the project, this time following the threads of certain German folktales into the forests of north-eastern Germany.

• Youth Without Age and Life Without Deathis published by Guest Editions (£45)

Photographer Rhona Bitner is fascinated by spaces, capturing them alongside the people and objects related to theatre, music and dance in an exhibition at The Wellin Museum of Art.

   Seven photography series, dating from 1990 to the present day, take us into the circus and the ballet, on to the street and on tour, in a sumptuous capturing of the mundane. ‘What interests me is the idea of performance and what it represents,’ Bitner tells us. 

   ‘“Resound,” my first major museum exhibition, at the Wellin Museum of Art, and presents 30 years of work around this idea. I am fascinated by the parallels between the theatre and the camera: both are black boxes, or spaces, within which an image appears. And that image or experience acts as a laboratory of human experience outside the black box. Samuel Beckett said: “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.” This is what drives my work. There are seven series of photographs presented in the retrospective including the Circus project which explores the language and gestures of the performer and includes images from 10 years of following one-ring circuses around Europe. The Stage project is about the sense of anticipation and excitement as the show is about to begin. And the Listen project focuses on the histories and inner architecture of American popular music.’

When viewed through Bitner’s lens, images become imbued with a nostalgia, felt especially in spaces she photographed which went on to close, or present in artefacts from past performances. ‘CBGB’s [New York club open for 33 years] eminent closure gave birth to the Listen project and it, like the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, is one of only a few venues in the Listen project that are no longer around. But the project features hundreds of venues that are still thriving, from Electric Lady Studios and Radio City Music Hall in New York to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals or the Austin City Limits soundstage or First Avenue in Minneapolis or First Church of Deliverance in Chicago or The Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles or even Folsom Prison or Graceland. It is the memory (sometimes legendary) of what happened in these places that inspires me. The photographs present the spaces empty of the people and performers that made them famous, leaving room for the viewer to imagine themselves in the space.’

      Ultimately, Bitner is searching for a sense of place in the stories she captures. ‘[What draws me] depends on the premise of a particular project. The Listen project was entirely about the history of the space and what happened there. The Stage project was about the proscenium itself, so I sought out a variety of theatres and visual elements, mostly in Paris because I had access there, but I was also determined and succeeded in gaining access to the (then) State Theater at Lincoln Center in New York where I saw my first performances as a young person. My other projects, Circus and Pointe for example, focus on the performer or the material trappings of performance such as the shoe a ballerina wears when she performs.’

Rhona Bitner: Resound is on at Wellin Museum of Art until December 9 2023

hamilton.edu/wellin/exhibitions/detail/rhona-bitner

Google has kept its innovation engine going with new additions to every Pixel phone. Here’s a look at what the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro offer in the camera department

Launched in 2016, Pixel and Pixel XL were Google’s first in-house smartphones. Right from the get-go, Google’s approach to the Pixel was very clear – a clean Android experience with great camera. It offered great colors, superlative bokeh effect that made for terrific portraits, and that signature high contrast.

It was the best camera on a smartphone, and while most manufacturers moved to dual or triple camera setup, Google stuck with a single camera and focused on its machine learning tech and computational photography for long (Pixel 4, launched in 2019, was the first one with a dual camera).

Also read: Google Pixel 8 Pro review: The right idea for the future of phones

Around that time though, Samsung too upped its game and has been trying to stake a claim as the best camera on an Android smartphone. Meanwhile, the Apple iPhone has also delivered stellar advances to share the honors if not reclaim the crown.

But Google has kept its innovation engine going with new additions with every iteration. Whether it was Night Sight (more details in low-light conditions with less motion blur) on the Pixel 3/3XL or the astrophotography capabilities introduced with the Pixel 4/4XL or the AI-powered Magic Eraser (that removes strangers and unwanted objects with one tap) on the Pixel 6 series or the Photo Unblur (removes blur and visual noise in photos) on last year’s Pixel 7 and 7 Pro.

While the competition caught up, and aced in some departments along the way, Google Pixel smartphones have always been on the table in consideration for industry-leading camera capabilities.

Which brings us to the new Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro.

What’s new with Google Pixel 8?

Let’s get done with the camera hardware details first.

Both Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro have the same flagship 50-megapixel (f/1.6 aperture) main camera capable of shooting 4K video and a 10.5-megapixel (f/2.2 aperture) front camera. The sensor and lens on the main camera have been upgraded on both phones for better light sensitivity.

The ultrawide lens on the Pro is 48MP with autofocus while it’s 12MP on the younger sibling. However, the ultrawide camera on the latter too includes autofocus now — first time outside of the Pro series.

Pixel 8 Pro also comes with an additional 48MP (f/2.8 aperture) rear telephoto lens with 5x optical zoom.

Pixel 8 can zoom up to 8x (Google calls it ‘Super Res Zoom’) while Pixel 8 Pro can go up to 30x zoom.

More interestingly, it’s the first time that Google offers Pro Controls on the Pixel. The Pixel 8 Pro (not Pixel 8) provides greater control of the camera settings allowing you to not just control white balance, exposure, and shadows brightness but also manually adjust focus, shutter speed, and ISO.

But, of course, Pixel has never been about the specifications.

Google’s pitch through the years has been focused on the computational photography elements of Pixel phones but this time around, there’s significant effort towards enhancing the video capabilities – seemingly to offset the delta it has from iPhone’s spectacular videography prowess.

A new Google Pixel 8 Pro Phone is seen in New York City, U.S., October 4, 2023.
(Reuters)

Dual Exposure

The Dual Exposure technology makes videos sharper and less grainy in scenes with tough lighting, like a sunset backdrop. Dual Exposure essentially takes two images simultaneously – one optimized for low-light and the other for high dynamic range – and produces natural-looking videos with vivid colors and low noise.

Best Take

It’s always tricky to capture group photos – my six-year-old is often making faces and the missus is either blinking or looking away. In such cases, Best Take can fix my family photos.

This new feature uses an on-device face detection algorithm to match up people’s faces across group shots taken in a 10-second window. You can manually select the best look from available facial expressions. It’s wild and works for the most part.

But it’s also strange in a way. That frozen moment never happened, but most people wouldn’t mind that philosophical conundrum. Everyone wants a nice group picture for the ‘gram.

Best Take is exclusive to the Google Pixel 8 series at the moment. It might trickle down to older Pixel phones, as has been the case with some past marquee features. Since the feature is part of Google Photos, it may also come to non-Pixel smartphones (like Magic Eraser did). That said, right now on a Pixel 8, you can use the Best Take feature for existing bursts of images taken with other smartphones.

Magic Editor

The new Magic Editor takes the existing Magic Eraser feature to the next level. Now, you can’t just erase but also reposition objects or people in the frame (with AI filling the gaps) and improve the lighting and background, like changing the color of the sky. This feature, available via the Google Photos app, is powered by generative AI.

Once you select an edit, Magic Editor gives you multiple result options to choose from, so you can get the look you want.

Like Best Take, Magic Editor is very, very good when it works. It’s almost like creating a new moment, a new picture. While professional image editing tools like Adobe Photoshop can do much more, this feature available broadly to average users with no learning curve is mindboggling and scary at the same time.

Audio Magic Eraser

There’s an audio feature that augments camera capabilities? Something like that, yes.

Audio Magic Eraser identifies different background sounds in your videos using advanced machine learning, like speech, crowd, wind et al, and sorts them into distinct layers that can be individually controlled.

This new feature brings computational audio functionality like Magic Eraser for photos. It removes unwanted distracting sounds from your videos – like you’d remove a photobomber from a photo via Magic Eraser.

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Apart from these new enhancements, there are a few more features that were introduced in the previous generation of Pixel smartphones but continue to be marquee highlights of the Pixel camera experience.

Google Pixel 8 and Google Pixel 8 Pro phones are displayed during a Google product launch event in New York on October 4, 2023.
(AFP)

Real Tone

Unfortunately, cameras have historically centered on light skin – a racial bias that has crept into most modern digital imaging products. Often, people with darker complexions appear darker, brighter, or more washed out than they do in real life. Essentially, their photos are inauthentic.

It is, of course, critical that cameras work equitably for everyone. Real Tone is a work in progress towards inclusive photography. Google began working on Real Tone in 2020 and introduced its attempt at image equity with Pixel 6.

The idea is to correctly represent skin color in pictures, make skin brightness appear more natural (not unnaturally darker or brighter), reduce washed-out images, and sharpen blurry images even in low light. The improvements also extend to Google Photos, which allows optimizing color and lighting in any picture, across diverse skin tones.

Guided Frame

Guided Frame uses a combination of audio cues, high-contrast animations, and haptic feedback to help people who are blind and have low-vision take photos.

This feature now works on both the front and rear cameras (it was conceived as a way to take selfies) and it recognizes more than just faces now – like pets or food items – to automatically take a photo when such things are centered.

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And then there are some new features that are coming soon. Google did showcase a few camera capabilities at the launch of Pixel 8 that aren’t available right away but will be available as a feature drop later.

Video Boost

Google claims its new Video Boost feature can record smoother videos and uses cloud-based processing to automatically adjust color, improve dynamic range, lighting, and stabilization, and reduce graininess in videos. It’s an approach to computational video just like HDR+ helps you capture stunning photos via computational photography.

Processing even a one-minute 4K video is quite intensive, and therefore Google brings together the Tensor G3 chip on the phone as well as the company’s data centers to produce a cloud-enhanced video that shows up in Google Photos after a while. This feature also makes Night Sight Video possible, allowing for better videos in low-light situations, like dimly lit restaurants or cityscapes at night, for instance.

Zoom Enhance

This new feature will allow you to zoom in on any photo and crop to what you want the focus of your photo to be. On top of that, using generative AI, Zoom Enhance intelligently fills in the gaps between pixels and predicts fine details to produce a photo that’s enhanced and sharper than the pixelated one as is often the case.

The AI-powered software magic

In its early days, camera phones focused on doing old-school optics right. As lenses and sensors improved, the biggest advancements now come with the fusion of artificial intelligence and machine learning. These allow Pixel (and other smartphones) to offer professional camera and editing capabilities powered by computational photography… things like taking sharp photos in low light, adding blur to portraits and selfies, removing distractions from a photo, unblurring photos, etc.

For example, the HDR+ feature snaps a dozen or more pictures in rapid succession and then AI aligns and combines them to form a single image that’s free of any blur from camera shake.

Some of Pixel’s camera capabilities (and other features on the phone), mind you, are further enhanced by the Tensor G3 chip that powers the Pixel 8. It’s a custom-built processor that allows the camera to perform complex AI tasks.

Is Pixel the best camera phone?

That depends.

A lot of reviewers do believe that Google Pixel 8 Pro is the most consistent camera across a wider range of scenarios, even if the Apple iPhone 15 Pro trumps it in many departments or goes neck-in-neck. A lot of people who just want a solid point-and-shoot experience over a range of shooting environments prefer a Pixel. Additionally, the introduction of manual shooting controls on Pixel 8 Pro – something which the iPhone doesn’t offer – is a pretty solid differentiation.

In a fiercely competitive market, it is unfair and dishonest to crown one of the smartphone cameras as the absolute best. The phone needs to respond to your individual needs and expectations.

Also, there’s much more to smartphones than just their camera packages. In the case of an iPhone vs Pixel debate, for example, one would also have to consider their comfort with the operating system. Android users may also consider a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra for its stellar camera setup and a well-rounded Android experience or the new challengers like the vivo X90 Pro and Xiaomi 13 Pro, overlooking absolute camera comparisons but basing their purchase decision on user experience, design, ancillary features, and after-sales support.

Abhishek Baxi is a technology journalist and digital consultant.

Also read: Google Pixel 7a review: a better deal than the Pixel 7?

Fake photos are practically as old as photography itself.

French photographer Hippolyte Bayard felt he had missed out on the recognition for inventing photography and had it taken from him by Louis Daguerre. In protest, he staged a picture of himself, Self Portrait as a Drowned Man, and wrote a note in which he said the man depicted had been “lying in the morgue for days, no-one has recognised him or claimed him!”

He signed it himself: “H.B. 18 October, 1840”; the usually accepted beginning of photography is 1839. As soon as we knew what photographs were, we used them to trick people.

Kilcullen Photography Club calendars for 2024 are now available in Woodbine Books, Nolan’s, the Kilcullen Parish Centre and from club members.

Photographs use Policy — Privacy Policy

In 1997, photographer Mario Brenna found himself in an unusual position: a paparazzo who’d become the subject of headlines himself. That summer, Brenna had snapped some photos of Britain’s Princess Diana with her new boyfriend Dodi Al Fayed while the couple were vacationing on the yacht of Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed. The photos, which ran in the Sunday Mirror on August 10, 1997, showed the princess and Dodi kissing, and served to break the news of what would become the royal’s final romance.

The story of those photos, and the ensuing fallout, feature on the latest season of Netflix’s hit historical drama, The Crown, including a suggestion that Brenna was able to capture the photos with the aid of Dodi’s father, Mohamed. While there’s no evidence that the former Harrod’s owner was involved in the taking of the photos—Brenna told the New York Times that the idea that Fayed hired him was “absurd and completely invented,” after season six premiered—Brenna really did snap the pics, and he really did make millions in the process.

Here’s what we know about the paparazzo.

Brenna, an Italian man reportedly lived in Monaco in 1997, making his living as a fashion and society photographer, even serving as an official photographer to the Versace fashion house, according to The Independent. He was described by a fellow photographer at the time as “a very smooth chap,” while an unnamed journalist praised his adaptability, saying, “The most successful people in this business are the ones that can cross from one sort of thing to another. He’s one of them.”

According to Jason Fraser, who stated that he was tipped off about the trip by Diana herself and later acted as Brenna’s agent for the sale of the photo rights, Brenna independently found the yacht—then named the Jonikal—off of the Sardinian coast and snapped the infamous pictures before flying to London about their potential sale.

(Authors Tim Clayton and Phil Craig allege in Diana: Story of a Princess that Fraser was the one to give information about Diana’s whereabouts to Brenna. Brenna himself said in 2023 that he was summering in Sardinia and simply happened across the Jonikal, mistaking Diana from a distance for a friend of his. He called the situation a “great stroke of luck.”)

“Mario wouldn’t tell me what he had over the phone. He flew to London, came to my house and simply said: ‘You’re not going to believe this. You might want to sit down.'” Fraser said in 2013. “When he showed me the prints, we spread them out over the kitchen floor and we sat in silence.” Fraser said that he ultimately decided to help with the sale of the photos, as he felt it was what Diana wished. Brenna is said to have received £250,000 from the Sunday Mirror, with additional photos sold to other British publications at £100,000 each—further international rights were also sold with Brenna’s ultimate take coming in around 1.7 million pounds, or $2.1 million, within the following six to eight months.

Less than a month after the publication of the photos, the princess and Dodi were tragically killed in a car accident in Paris while being followed by paparazzi. When he learned of her death, Brenna says the he cried. The idea that his photos, “could have contributed to fueling the hunt for Diana and Dodi obviously saddens me,” he told the Times. Subsequently he says he decided, “not to speak or disclose anything about the incident until William and Harry reached adulthood,” out of respect for Diana’s children. However, he adds, “If it hadn’t been me, someone else would certainly have captured those images.”

Brenna himself has largely disappeared from the spotlight since the famous kiss photos. He now lives near Lake Como and continues to photograph celebrities. While in The Crown his character speaks of his cut-throat attitude toward his work, opining that paparazzi have to act like “killers,” Brenna reportedly doesn’t share the sentiment (“I do not identify with the term ‘killer,'” he told the Times) and says the show did not contact him about his experiences.

Writer

Lauren Hubbard is a freelance writer and Town & Country contributor who covers beauty, shopping, entertainment, travel, home decor, wine, and cocktails.