Dalton Junior High School ninth-grader Taylor Nietzsche did not realize how convenient today’s generation has it when it comes to capturing a moment in time with the quick snap of a camera button.

That was until she learned about creating cyanotypes in her Photography I class, a process that captures an object in time through unconventional ways by today’s standards of photography.

The class, taught by art teacher Kristi Harvey, recently had students create chemical cyanotype photographs, one of the oldest photographic printing processes in history dating back to 1842 when it was discovered by scientist Sir John Herschel.

“I didn’t know it was photography because you’re not actually taking pictures,” Nietzsche said.

Instead, cyanotype photography, known as a “sun-printing” process, involves using a specialized white paper coated with a solution of iron salts created by combining potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate, which becomes sensitive to ultraviolet (UV) light.

An object is placed on the paper and then exposed to sunlight (or a UV lamp). When sunlight hits the paper, the area not covered by an object will react and turn blue, while the area underneath the object will remain white, effectively imprinting its “shadow” on the paper.

The paper is then processed and rinsed in water to stabilize the material and create a deeper shade of blue while the print of the object remains white.

Cyanotypes derive their name from the cyan shade of blue created. Originally popularized as a way to study botany by capturing plants, cyanotype photography was later used by engineers to produce copies of architectural drawings, coining the term “blueprint.”

For the class project, Harvey ordered cyanotype paper that had already had the solution added. Students used anything they had available in their backpacks to create their prints, ranging from hairbrushes and candy wrappers to earphones and charging cases.

Kaylen Chitwood, who used a pack of gum for her print, said the process was fascinating.

“I didn’t realize after the paper had dried, it would completely change colors again,” she said. “It turned a lot darker.”

Mary Sharp and Marley Barmore both said the results were unexpected after using a bracelet, hair bows and pencils for their prints.

“After we came back inside, we submerged them in water to stop the thermal process,” Barmore said. “It was cool to see how it worked.”

“You could see the shadows of the objects (on the paper), which I didn’t expect,” said Sharp. “You could see the reflection of the pencil on the paper in a lighter color. It’s cool because you could see different results with each try if you wanted.”

Harvey, who began her second year as a visual arts teacher for Dalton Public Schools this year, has taught photography classes for seven of her 20 years as a teacher.

Harvey also teaches drawing and painting, pottery and ceramics and eighth-grade general visual arts classes. Ninth-grade students are able to receive a high school fine arts credit by taking art classes at the junior high.

Harvey said educating students on different forms of art is essential.

“The purpose of (Photography I) is to educate these students about careers as they start high school,” she said. “Right now, things like technology, cellphones, photographs, social media, kids are exposed to all of these things. What I hope to do is show them that they can look deeper into what they see. Like how to tell a story with the photos (they) take or how to capture a moment in a more aesthetic way.

“I think it engages and creates more visual literacy and allows students to think a little tighter, so to speak. Instead of just that click (of a camera), they’re really analyzing what they’re seeing and doing, so I want them to know about careers that they may not have realized could involve the art of photography specifically.”

Principal Matt Phillips said Harvey and her students are a “great example of what can happen when you combine talented students with amazing teachers.”

“Allowing students to engage in multiple forms of visual art is vital to a well-rounded educational experience,” Phillips said. “Having a quality, engaging art teacher such as Ms. Harvey is a valuable asset to any school staff, and we are thankful for the way she connects with our students and their interests. She makes relationships with her students and uses those relationships to connect them to art that interests them.”

Harvey said her goal is to have students leave the classroom with a new perspective.

“What’s interesting is there are things like this that they never knew about that came before the cellphone in their hand or a DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera,” she said. “They have really taken to it well.”

Chitwood said she has a different outlook after the project.

“I didn’t realize there were ways to take pictures other than using a camera,” she said. “It made me respect the people who used this back then.”

Sharp shared similar sentiments.

“It made me realize that I’ve grown up very limited, just taking pictures on my phone and that was all I knew,” she said. “It was so cool to experience this.”

Harvey said the class will revisit cyanotypes later in the semester.

“That way they can apply what they learned the first time around and maybe do things differently.”

With the plethora of mobile and digital cameras available, film photography might sound like an art form from the past. But for Justin Layug ’25, it is his present and future.

Half of the enjoyment Layug gets from shooting film photography is the 30-40 minute process that goes into developing the film. This time has become a sort of meditation away from his everyday stress.

“I can’t be on my phone doing stuff,” Layug said. “I sit there and just center myself. That is the meditation aspect of it.” The dark room in Boland Hall on the Hawk Hill campus is not the only place Layug develops his film. He has learned how to do the developing process in his apartment bathroom, saving him time and money.

Layug’s go-to film is the Kodak Max 800 he purchased on eBay, which sells for $28.99 for 4 rolls. This film was originally used in single-lens reflex cameras in the 2000s but is no longer manufactured. The expired film he uses gives his photos a unique color palette.

Layug’s grandfather, Dr. Pelagio Layug, used to be a film photographer in the ’50s and ’60s. Recently, Layug found a bunch of his grandfather’s slides in his basement and has since digitized them.

“I can see a similar style to him, which is super weird,” said Layug, who described his style as surrealist and natural. He takes inspiration from Patrick Joust, another film photographer from Maryland where Layug grew up.

Layug said when his grandfather first saw the newly digitized versions of his old photos, he was ecstatic. His grandfather died in July 2022.

Layug pointed out that shooting film photography might sound easy on paper, but it is a process with demands that digital photography does not have.

“Once you start doing the process, you realize you either have the patience for it or you don’t actually enjoy it,” Layug said.

This is what Layug said separates the people that do it because it’s “hip” from the people who actually appreciate the art of film photography. Layug compared film photography to today’s recent trend seen in vinyl records.

Adjunct art professor Maurene Cooper, who currently teaches dark room photography at St. Joe’s, attributes film photography’s resurgence in popularity to the pandemic.

“I think people across all age groups want things they can touch again, and they want to have those kinds of experiences,” Cooper said.

Layung said others who want to get into film photography should gradually start gathering supplies.

“Once you get everything to be self-sufficient with film, it cuts down a lot of the costs, making it into an affordable hobby,” Layung said.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF JUSTIN LAYUG ’25

Obviously there were exceptions, but within the United States in particular, you had widespread circulation of derogatory images in the forms of minstrelsy and Currier and Ives, all telling one kind of story about Black individuals. But Van Der Zee is really telling, visually, an extraordinary story and a really distinct one that is influenced by his innovations.

Speaking of these innovations, Ansel Adams once said, “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” What were some of the techniques Van Der Zee used to “make” his photographs?

There was a high level of artistry involved. He really took his time—as opposed to peers who just had people coming into their studios, getting their photograph taken, and leaving, and then having more subjects come in. By contrast, Van Der Zee limited his visits to four or five per day. It’s important to think through what this means for his practice—what the extra time affords him when it comes to thinking through the final product with these photographs.

Some of the things he did were on the surface of the photograph. He was in the habit of hand coloring on the very surface of the photograph. He also did a lot of superimposing on the images. For example, he would add the text from a poem directly on an image. And then other times he would add little illustrations to the image. So, if he’s taking a photograph of someone who was in the service, he would add an illustration of a flag in the upper left-hand corner.

Xiaomi has unveiled its new 13T Series smartphones, made with the help of Leica to help customers take great photos. These phones aim to capture the classic Leica photo experience.

The Xiaomi 13T Series makes professional-level photography accessible. Both the Xiaomi 13T Pro and Xiaomi 13T have a triple camera setup with lenses made with Leica. This includes a 50MP wide angle and telephoto camera, and a 12MP ultra-wide-angle camera, suitable for panoramic shots and landscape photos. The cameras support high dynamic range shooting and have a wide color range for capturing detailed and vibrant photos.

They come with two original Leica photographic styles, Leica Authentic Look and Leica Vibrant Look, for striking images with natural color, contrast, and shadow definition. There are also six Leica filters including the latest Leica Sepia and Leica Blue. Under Pro mode, users can adjust Tone, Tonality, and Texture before shooting, saving these settings for future use.

The Xiaomi 13T Pro enables advanced video recording with 10-bit LOG 4:2:0 H.265 and 8K video shooting capability. The phone’s 50MP wide angle camera supports both OIS and EIS for steady videos. The Xiaomi 13T rear cameras support 4K video recording at all focal lengths. The phones come with a video editor feature for easy editing, captioning, and soundtrack addition.

The phones sport a 6.67″ CrystalRes Display with up to 144Hz refresh rate and 1.5K (2712 x 1220) resolution. They have high brightness and support 68 billion colors, providing HDR10+ compatibility for enhanced contrast in images. They also support Dolby Atmos with built-in dual speakers for a rich audio experience. Users can enjoy 100GB Google One cloud storage for a 6 months trial and 3 months of ad-free YouTube Premium.

The Xiaomi 13T Pro is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 9200+ chipset and the Xiaomi 13T by a MediaTek Dimensity 8200-Ultra. Both phones have enhancements for power efficiency and performance, ensuring a smooth and long-lasting smartphone experience. The Xiaomi 13T Pro supports Xiaomi 120W HyperCharge for quick charging.

Available in Alpine Blue, Meadow Green, and Black, the phones come with IP68 ratings for water and dust resistance. The Xiaomi 13T Pro and Xiaomi 13T will include four generations of Android OS upgrades and five years of security patches. The 13T Pro starts from EUR 799 and the 13T from EUR 649, available in various storage options.

Since 2010, I have been involved in the animal welfare world. By starting at my local animal shelter as a People Care Specialist, I found my love for shelter animals. Throughout my years of being employed at this shelter, I saw that many of our images didn’t represent our pets in a great way. By picking up just a basic point-and-shoot camera, I started my journey of pet photography.

As the years went by, I continued to develop my craft and started volunteering at other shelters across the United States, mainly in Wyoming, to help increase the chances of adoption for the shelter animals.

In this short series, you will find a comparison between a shelter dog’s intake photograph and the ones I took on my camera.

Most shelters are overcapacity and staff and volunteers are overworked and drained, mentally and physically. With increasing numbers of pets being surrendered to shelters, the animal welfare problem is at an all-time high.

Even having an intake picture like these ‘befores’ is better than the animal having no picture at all.

I step in to help, to hopefully alleviate some of the stress on the staff, and to also help those animals find forever homes.

More info: wyomingpetphotography.com | Facebook | pinterest.com | twitter.com | Instagram

A Michael Willson photo is instantly recognisable. He captures the aching pathos of sporting loss, and the simplicity and stillness in an inherently chaotic game. Many of his shots rank among the most iconic football photographs taken this century. He captured Tayla Harris at full extension, and in doing so triggered some of the more reptilian online brains. He was on hand for Lance Franklin’s 1,000th goal coronation – a shot he calls the perfect mix of due diligence and blind luck.

Whether it’s a long-sleeved Jack Silvagni celebrating in teeming rain, Trent Cotchin being hoisted off or Gary Ablett Jr bowing out – they all have Willson’s indelible stamp, and they all feature in his exhibition, Beyond the Boundary, which wraps up at the Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery on Sunday.

The key, he tells Guardian Australia, is the ability “to see a picture within a picture.” “You can teach someone the technical aspects of what we do, but the creativity is something you’re born with I think.”

Willson was a mad Collingwood supporter growing up in Swan Hill, and vividly recalls the 1990 grand final, recording it on the VCR and later taking photographs off the TV screen. “Even when I was 12 or so, I was fascinated with still images,” he says. He worked as a graphic designer for seven years, but photography was always his passion and dream. He backed his talent and honed his skills, shooting amateur games for free on weekends, and seized his opportunity at the highest level.

Being a sports photographer is physically demanding and requires technical prowess, unsocial hours, an innate news sense and soft eyes. The very nature of Australian rules football, he says, adds another layer to the challenge. “Footy is played on a massive field, it’s played at such a great speed, it’s so unpredictable and the players are so fit and fast now. Besides, there’s always a lot of obstacles in your way – umpires, water carriers, even pigeons.”

A grounding in amateur and country football has held Willson in good stead. He played in a premiership with Lake Boga exactly 20 years ago. He was a classic opportunist, the sort of player who could craft goals out of nothing. “The intrinsic nature of the game, the reading of the play, the bounce of the ball – it all helps to have played the game. I played it from the age of six until I was 30 and the feel of the game comes naturally to me. Most of all, it gave me a sense of what footy means to communities.”

Every fan has their favourite Willson photo. One of mine is of Nick Daicos being pursued by a trio of helpless Bulldogs. It’s all there – the proprioception, the effortless superiority, the futility of the chase. One of those Bulldogs is Marcus Bontempelli, arguably the best footballer in the country. But in that moment, the football world belongs to the young Magpie. “You definitely have a heightened awareness of the superstars,” Willson says. “But they can he harder to shoot. They do things that split second quicker than other players – a quick give, a change of direction. They can be more unpredictable, and you have to be particularly hyper-vigilant around the high-flyers.”

The architecture of Adelaide Oval and the SCG, he says, offers photographers all sorts of artistic possibilities. But many of his best and cherished photos have come on grand final day at the MCG. “A bright sunny afternoon at the MCG is just about my perfect shooting scenario, particularly later in the afternoon, just before the sun goes down, when you get these long shadows.”

His favourite spot is in the forward pocket, under the Shane Warne Stand, at the Punt Road end. That’s where Dom Sheed lined up in the dying minutes of the 2018 grand final. Willson was in his back pocket, and produced a series of iconic shots. “On grand final day there’s so much stuff and a lot of crap on the sidelines. Luckily, this shot was so clean. As a Collingwood supporter, it was a hard one to swallow. But I pride myself on not getting emotionally involved. I’ve got a job to do. If you’re riding every bump, you’ll miss something important and it’ll be gone for ever. At that moment, I had a front row seat to one of the most clutch shots in the history of football. And when the luck falls your way, you’ve got to take it. It’s so rewarding when it all falls into place.”

On grand final day, my eye is often drawn to the losers, to the desolation. In 2018, as the Collingwood players slumped to the turf, the photographers huddled around them like they were at a crime scene. But Willson’s shots never feel intrusive. A couple of years earlier, he captured a crestfallen Kieren Jack being consoled by his besuited bother, Brandon. The latter wrote a book about a career lived on the fringe, and devotes a passage to that moment. “I really wanted that one,” Kieren sobs. “It’s just football,” his brother tells him. He’s right. But at that moment, his words are hollow. And no one in football captures those moments better than Michael Willson.

His name is Charles Martin.
He send us these photographs along with this text.

Henri Cartier-Bresson often referred to geometry, so evident in his photos, as essential to visual art. People delight in form. Alfred Stieglitz, photographer and advocate of art, was famously appalled at the idea that the power of his photography came from its subject matter. Stieglitz wanted to show that photography could be more or less free of reference. Reformulated, the thought might be that sight, itself, can ultimately be the primary subject. What do people really see in a photo? A trustworthy explanation of the photographer’s relationship to subject matter? Or an image?! Quite a few of my photographs I call “Glass Constructions” – reflections not usually in mirrors, but in windows and other spaces of glass. Rather than being “mirror images,” they are transparent labyrinths drawn from surfaces, interiors and reflections.

Photography has come to me in starts and stops, a few leaps forward and an occasional step back. I methodically applied myself to it while in graduate school in Afro-American Studies before my first visit to Brazil, but the first photographers in my life were my parents. Mom used automatic cameras and Dad amused himself with a thirty-five mm Exacta and a Rolleiflex that I still have. He wanted a Hasselblad, too, but balked at the price. A few neighbors had such cameras. Mostly they did not use them, and family photos usually came from the automatics. My father, embarrassed at the site of my mother using so simple a tool, gave her a RolleiMagic, an auto exposure camera, essentially a point and shoot Rollei. Though she accepted the camera, she preferred and continued to use the simple Kodak, which is where I started, too. The Instamatic 404, with its wind-up, spring-loaded film advance, was for years my ready recorder.

My dad turned a corner of the basement into an occasional lab, a darkroom with faint yellow safelight that dimly showed the contours and objects of the room. Prominent also was a timer with luminescent hands, essential for observing the appropriate lengths of time. In the darkroom, Dad unspooled the film from the cameras and processed the negatives in canisters before hanging them to dry from overhead pipes. The next step, usually days later, was printing. People speak of the magic of seeing the image come up on the paper submerged in a chemical bath in the developing tray, but for me the interval was simply boredom, with the interesting part of the experience being watching my dad. Family photos—by any of us—sometimes went into the scrap books that my mother meticulously kept and labeled in her handwriting. My older brother, Henry, didn’t much get the photography bug, but his art connection was criticism and one of his first books was on the sculptor Arman (who I later photographed on occasion).

Portraits that I have taken are done by access and fortuitous chance, encounters with both friends and strangers, improvised and carried out quickly. Of many possible definitions, for me portraits primarily are records of moments of complicity: the person sees that the photographer is up to something, and the person allows the image to be. Portraits come through seeing people, not knowing them. Would you say that the portraits here tell which of the figures I knew and which I did not? Walking one evening in the Village, New York, I crossed paths with someone whose face I knew only from of his work. “Duane Michals!” I said in surprise. He stopped and questioned, “Do I owe you money?” I laughed and said “no.” I didn’t want to bother him, but I asked him if I could take his picture. “I will not take off my clothes,” he replied, again with humor. I asked him to move a few feet into better light and he did. Four or five snaps, and I thanked him, and we went on our ways. A few weeks later, this time with my wife, I ran into him again in about the same spot. I introduced my wife to him and have never happened upon him again.

At a gallery in New York, I asked a question about a photo I was looking at, and the receptionist answered by going into another room and bringing back with her the photographer, Frank Horvat. We chatted briefly and, at my asking if I could photograph him, he said he didn’t much like being photographed, but it was okay. I took two exposures – back when I was a Leica M2 user, no light meter, of course—one horizontal and one vertical. I got his address from the gallery and later sent him the horizontal. He wrote back, giving me a photo of his, and asking for more prints of the image I had sent, saying he liked it very much and would use it for publicity. Whether or not he did, I do not know. We did correspond a little, and I ended up, for “Entre Vues” on his Horvat Land website, translating into English three interviews that he had done with Edouard Boubat, Joseph Koudelka and Sarah Moon.

Ed Clark, abstract expressionist artist, was a great friend. Aside from my shows in New York, Ed saw two of them in Paris, which is where we met. Paris was special to him and he spent most summers painting there before returning to New York for the rest of the year. I had presented a paper, “Coloring Books: Black Ideas of Europe,” at the African-Americans and Europe International Conference, at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, February 5-9, 1992, organized by Michel Fabre, a professor who wrote a biography of author Richard Wright. About a year later, again in Paris, I showed photographs to Fabre, and one of them, taken in New York, was of poet Ted Joans. Fabre asked if Joans had seen it, and I said no. He told me that Joans was a regular at Café Le Rouquet, gave me the location, and suggested I go there to show Joans the photo. When I did, Joans was in the company of Ed Clark and some others. Ed and I became friends and, back in New York, after finishing a day of teaching Comparative Literature classes at Queens College-City University of New York, often I would drop by Ed’s place, around the corner from the Flatiron Building. Usually I would at some point have a look into the studio in the back to see what he had been painting. One day I asked him if anybody had ever done a movie about him. He replied that someone was always saying they were going to, but no one ever did. I told him I was going to do it, he said okay and suggested people who might be interviewed. I convinced a director, for whom I had once shot stills, to be the cinematographer for the project, and despite his initially finding it odd to be directed by his former set-photographer, the documentary was made: A Brush with Success.

Cameras have accompanied me since childhood and stay within reach, occasionally capturing a dream or a nightmare concocted from glass, metal, water, sky and light.

Charles Martin
[email protected]