By Laura Sharman and Ailbhe Macmahon For Mailonline

Published: 12:20 EDT, 31 October 2023 | Updated: 12:33 EDT, 31 October 2023

I’ll be straightforward here and start by establishing that I’ve usually been a spectator who wished she could accomplish what those aesthetic Instagram accounts do. Most of the accomplishments I’ve had on Instagram have been interacting with friends and having a few likes on my stories. I had a pretty disorganized profile a few years back, where I would share whatever came to mind and post it with half-thought-out captions. This changed at one point and I decided to keep my same account but remodel it so I archived all of my posts instead of deleting them, because they were nice memories. At the end of the day, I still wanted to be true to myself and post things I liked, I just made them look pretty. I felt like my profile had to reflect me while not compromising my safety or oversharing. I decided that if so many content creators can share those aspects of their lives in an aesthetic and uncompromising way, then it’s doable for anyone. Based on this, I went ahead and said “It’s time to fill up my profile with some great pictures and well-thought captions.”

I decided that, to have good things, you need to plan them and have a base for how you’ll start. So, the first step was doing research. I looked through all those accounts I follow and love. I considered the aspects that most resonated with me and why. The things that most caught my attention would be the pictures. Instagram is mainly that, but I focused on the quality of the pictures and what they said. The type of pictures you take makes an impact on the way you want to transmit a story or catch someone’s eye, all the while telling them a bit about yourself. The quality made it more intriguing to stay on their page or look at what they had to show. The bottom line for quality pictures, anyone can take them, you just need to know how to work your device to achieve the goal you want. 

Editing is also a great tool for this. I found some good apps that could help me achieve the desired effect I wanted, mainly any free editing app for PCs or laptops is a great way to start. The one I use is Photodirector 365, which is very beginner friendly. Then, I noticed that what was in the picture was of great interest to people. Some influencers love to just photograph their face, and that’s great and all, but I felt like the platform has more to offer than just sharing pictures of our faces. This took me to the next step of planning the portfolio, which was a theme. Although the whole profile does not need to be tidy and planned out, it was an important first step. I needed to collect a whole batch of pictures and set the tone. In July of 2023, I had the great opportunity of visiting Alaska. For the trip, I saved some money so I could get great pictures of the landscape. What better way to start the portfolio than basing it on all the great nature pics and photos of me and my boyfriend I got the chance to take? 

Since my interests lie in great quality photos, nature, time with my boyfriend, and beautiful landscapes, that’s what I based the first photos of my profile on. Keeping in mind I wanted to achieve something attainable in a few first steps and then decide along the way if I was willing to post other things. It came down to 9 posts about my trip. It worked out since I took way too many pictures. Considering it was my first time using my camera, everything came out pretty decent. I started to recollect what were the things I wanted to highlight about the trip. First I made sure to add pictures of landscapes and nature, which included bears, lakes, and forests, I chose some and started editing them. Multiple pictures in one post are the way to go. It serves as a nice collection of photos while bringing the nice aesthetic people desire in the initial look upon the profile. For the captions, I wanted to be as authentic as I could be. The main idea was to be honest and say that I was sharing some vacation photos. In other instances, I just highlighted how worth it it is to visit Alaska and how everyone should go if they are essentially nature lovers. The posts that got the most interactions were the ones with my boyfriend and me, mostly due to the fact that people honestly look at your profile to see the most of you, but that’s fine. You can see the final product of my profile here.

The bottom line is that your profile is your space and it deserves to bring you comfort. At the end of the day, it is not about the likes or comments, it’s about the joy it brings you to share photographs that are meaningful to you and show the effort you went through to take them.   

NORTH READING — The Merrimack Valley Camera Club presents “Feeling the Joy of Photography,” a collection of photos by Newburyport resident Sandra Emro and other club members at  Flint Memorial Library, 147 Park St., North Reading.

The exhibit runs at the library through Dec. 1 during normal hours, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed Sunday.

In existence for over eight decades, the MVCC’s members comprise beginner photographers just learning how to use their cameras internalize the rules of composition and other aspects of photography through professional photographers who have honed their craft for years and the exhibit organizers encouraged every member to submit photographs to display, especially if it is their first time exhibiting a piece of work.

“It’s a very different experience between showing your work digitally, on social media, to friends and family, and the experience of seeing your image printed, matted, mounted, framed and hanging on the wall for all the world to see,” exhibit organizer and MVCC member Maryellen Stone said.

Emro, a member of MVCC for four years, has lived in Newburyport for 35 years.

She selected her piece, titled, “Iris,” because the flower makes her smile, she said.

“This plant melds both of my passions, gardening and photography. I am an avid gardener, and the iris is my favorite summer flower. I love the variety of colors they offer, but since yellow is a happy color, I chose a yellow iris for this exhibit,” she said .

Emro said she took up photography as a result of, in large part, her gardens.

“I started using photography as a means to document the season, sort of in a photojournalistic manner. Soon I realized how much creativity the camera could offer in garden photography, and expanded my use of the camera beyond documentation. Since then, I’ve taken many photography courses, and now find that I’m allocating more time to enrich my photography hobby than that of gardening,” Emro said.

The MVCC holds photo competitions, hands-on workshops, talks and demonstrations, and regularly scheduled field trips. Visitors, guests and new members are always welcome. The MVCC, which is based in North Andover, Mass., has members hailing from all around the Merrimack Valley, from southern New Hampshire towns such as Sandown, Windham and Pelham, to Newburyport, Haverhill, North Andover, Middleton, and the many towns in between and adjoining.

Architectural photography is a challenging and rewarding genre that requires a lot of technical know-how and specialized skills. If you are interested in architectural photography and ready to grow, check out this fantastic video tutorial that features an experienced architectural photographer sharing in-depth knowledge about everything you need to know to create stunning images.

Coming to you from Ben Harvey Photography, this wonderful video tutorial will show you everything you need to know to create compelling architectural images, including the necessary gear, focal length, lighting, perspective, composition, post-processing, and much more. Architectural work can be a very technical pursuit, and because of that, a lot of photographers get the misconception that there is no room for an artistic approach in it, but nothing could be further from the truth. The technical side enables you to deal with issues like ensuring correct geometric rendering, but once you have that down, there is a ton of room to add your personal touch (and you absolutely should)! Check out the video above for the full rundown from Harvey. 

And if you would really like to dive into architectural photography, be sure to check out the full range of tutorials on the topic in the Fstoppers store.

The winners of the 2023 Dog Photography Awards have been announced with a pooch doing parkour and a doberman performing ballet among the winners.

Four category winners were announced with $513 (500 Euros) being handed to each victor in the Portrait and Landscape category, the Action category, the Studio category, and the Dogs and People category.

Sanna Sander from Sweden took the photo of her azawakh (a breed of dog from West Africa) called Soleil climbing a pile of logs as the Sun falls on her serendipitously.

“Soleil (who’ll turn 10 in a month) is an avid fan of jumping up on things,” Sander writes on her Instagram page. “I do parkour/barkour every walk with her and she willingly held the pose for me while I took a few photos.”

For more about the competition, head to the Dog Photography Awards website.

I tell myself it’s the lighting in my apartment that has kept me from becoming an Instagram cooking sensation. I have southern exposure, perfect for growing tomatoes on my slip of a balcony but not for any sort of windowsill photo shoot. The sunlight is too harsh, the shadows too long, and I never seem to be able to find an angle that doesn’t reveal the silhouette of my hand over the bowl.

But if Instagram and TikTok are to be believed, now is my time. The gauzy, filtered light favored by social media food influencers just a few years ago has given way to what looks like perpetual late morning or late afternoon. In food photos, warm, direct sunlight makes for deeply saturated colors, and the occasional glint off of a shiny glaze, and everything is given extra definition by long, sharp shadows. It doesn’t even matter if your hand gets in the way, or if the light is dappled through leaves or window bars. This style of lighting has been embraced by restaurants, independent bloggers and more established chefs, everyone from Rick Martinez to Molly Baz to the New York Times.

Recipe developer Nasim Lahbichi says he began using this style of lighting, which I’ll call sun-and-shadows light, around 2020, and it was mostly out of necessity. His Brooklyn kitchen window is surrounded by neighboring buildings, limiting his access to natural light. But on sunny days there are a few hours where “beautiful direct sunlight shines through my kitchen, illuminating everything it touches.”

Sophie Waplington, aka @sophsplantkitchen, also makes use of the brief moment, she says around 20 minutes, when sun shines into her kitchen. She began noticing sun-and-shadows light more in food photography a few years ago and favored the look herself as she was starting out. She says she often waits to do her final shots when the light is right and the shadows are long. “If you’ve got something quite texturized like a chickpea dish, you can really pick up some interesting textures and shapes. I think that that really adds to a video and it helps subtly convey an emotion.” Colors look brighter, toasted bread looks crunchier. It makes you want to eat.

Capturing this light takes a lot of work. Lahbichi says he tries to shoot between 10 a.m. and noon on sunny days. He has an Ikea wooden work table next to the kitchen window, which he moves to catch the rays. In summer, this means things get overheated fast, and sometimes he has to put his phone in the freezer to cool it down. The bright, direct light can also make editing an issue. “Having colors washed out and shadows can be extremely difficult to work with when it comes to focusing on key subjects in the video,” he says.

Waplington says her schedule doesn’t always allow for waiting for that perfect moment, but it comes around 4 p.m., depending on the season. She also bought a smaller wooden table to shoot right next to the window and a hot plate so she can cook in the warm afternoon light. However, the hot plate makes a lot of noise, so sometimes she’ll run a dish from the stove to the table, while it’s still sizzling, to capture both the sound and the light.

Sun-and-shadows lighting conveys feelings of coziness and comfort in the food. “This lighting evokes a sense of home,” says Lahbichi. And importantly, it’s a sense of viewers’ own homes. Embracing direct sunlight is a departure from the diffused, slightly sterile lighting favored by food influencers even a few years ago, which made everyone’s feed look like it was shot in a professional kitchen. That light was meant to be placeless, a scene that could exist anywhere so theoretically anyone could connect with it. Here, the point is the specificity of the time of day.

For all the planning and waiting and extra supplies involved, shooting in this warm, direct light is ultimately meant to make things look not planned at all. “That kind of sun-kissed look being totally natural and it being unplanned, because it’s such a short window of time … it doesn’t feel staged,” says Waplington. “It just feels more authentic.” In general, influencers have shifted away from the impeccably staged in favor of the messier and more realistic. That authenticity is important currency on social media, where building a career requires that viewers feel a personal connection with creators.

So with this light, you are not just in any kitchen, you’re in their kitchen. And it’s not just any time, it’s a lazy, sunny afternoon. Maybe you can see the half-chopped garlic in the background, or the shadows of their fire escape shifting along the wall. It’s perfectly imperfect. It’s human. And it tells you that you don’t need professional lights to make something that looks this good. You could do it too. It could always be sunny in your kitchen.

Idea

11:20

The authenticity of images from Gaza is now automatically doubted

by Mary Harrington

A Palestinian child in the aftermath of an Israeli bombing. Credit: Getty

Are we entering a new age of CGI war propaganda? At the weekend Chei Wenhua, a reporter for the CCP-run China Daily propaganda outlet, tweeted an image purportedly from Gaza alongside the caption, “Atrocities endorsed by the collective West.” The image depicts a man helping five small children through blasted rubble: three on his back, a baby in his arms, another holding his hand.

Twitter’s Community Notes fact-checking group swiftly flagged the image as AI-generated, pointing out a number of suspect features — including an odd distribution of limbs, the wrong number of toes, and other “uncanny valley” quirks typical of AI imagery. Even so, the picture has received 1.1m views at the time of writing, and a glance down the quote tweets suggests at least some have taken it at face value.  

We should expect such propaganda imagery to become both more frequent and more difficult to detect, as AI imaging gets more sophisticated. And one disturbing potential consequence may be a critical loss of faith in the kind of reporting able to galvanise humanitarian efforts during wartime. 

The twentieth century was the great age of war reporting — and especially of its pity and horror. From Holocaust footage through Vietnam war reporting to the broadcasting of both Iraq wars, journalism stripped away older narratives about heroism, focusing on the suffering of innocents. This helped energise a wave of efforts to impose restrictions on warfare with the aim of minimising such casualties.

More recently, too, it has impelled a new kind of propaganda warfare, as belligerents compete for the sympathy of an implied global digital audience. This has been powerfully in evidence from the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with reports and counter-reports of gains, losses, and atrocities eagerly circulated online by and for warring political tribes, well beyond the physical battlefield in a competition for international public sympathy. 

If secured, this public sentiment can tilt the scales on real-world decisions, for example in helping to grant political legitimacy for military or financial support from foreign allies. So it’s well worth the effort to try and shape it. And in the digital-era media battles that do so, a picture is proverbially worth a thousand words. But this twentieth-century relation between media and warfare has grown more ambivalent, especially as the world has become increasingly multipolar and the internet has de-centralised broadcasting. 

Today, a multiplying number of actors with an interest in shaping public opinion struggle for influence, across multiplying media outlets. The heavily youth-focused (and CCP-owned) platform TikTok, for example, has been linked to overwhelming support for Palestine among US youth. Russian TV produces fake BBC bulletins linking Ukraine with Hamas. And against this backdrop of intensified propaganda war, we must now also reckon with a rising tide of increasingly convincing AI imagery. 

The aggregate effect is already discernible in the Israel-Palestine conflict. As reports and counter-reports of atrocities circulate, it’s increasingly common for overseas supporters of the warring sides to each dismiss the other’s claims simply as fake: not just exaggerations but pure fabrication. 

Beyond the immediate conflict between Israel and Palestine, we should expect this new landscape to degrade the media’s relationship to humanitarianism. For the power of such calls on public empathy was always predicated on a shared belief that there was at least some relationship between the images in circulation and what’s happening in the real world. What happens, though, when fakery is so good we can no longer take this for granted? 

The end of trustworthy battlefield imagery is the end of wartime humanitarianism. If no one is willing to believe anything they see or read about foreign atrocities, because no one is willing to accept media evidence, we will slowly lose our grip on every postwar convention governing human rights during wartime. It is a sobering prospect.