Category Archives: Photography

Jan. 8—LIMA — The ArtSpace/Lima Juried Photography Exhibition awards ceremony was recently held. The show has been held for over thirty years. Originally hosted by the ArtSpace Photography Club, this exhibition honors that club by continuing the yearly tradition.

Sally Windle, curator of ArtSpace said, “It’s over 120 artists that have been able to exhibit here and we also have really high quality. There’s a lot of new artists, new photographers as well as some of the people that have always given us quality work.”

The winners of the Juried Photography Exhibit at ArtSpace Lima are: Best of Show, “Butterfly Blues,” Dominique Ysquierdo; First Place Award, “Unveiled (Morality),” Christine Herman; Second Place Award, “Glimpse of the Future,” Jacob Collins; Third Place Award, “In the Morning Light,” Matthew Stanford; Honorable Mention Award, “Transvaal Daisies,” Jonathan Dickey; Honorable Mention Award, “Starlight Sunset,” Jodi Knoch; Young Photographer Award, “Whimsical Leap,” Carson Caprella; Young Photographer Award, “Inside Story,” Spencer Davis; Black and White Award, “1972,” Margaret Green; Color Award Light, “Play #34,” Barbara Ward; Photography Club Award, “Lean In,” Christine Herman.

The show will be on display through February 4th. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m at ArtSpace/Lima at 65 Town Square.

Reach Dean Brown at 567-242-0409

Guwahati: This weekend saw Guwahati alive with the spirit of photography – with experienced and novice shutterbugs coming together for a photography tour led by a celebrated photographer Himadri Bhuyan and mentor Uma Shankar Das.

‘Street Stories, organized by the ‘Out of Range’ group, took place in the vibrant neighbourhood of Tokobari – known for its many bylanes – and focused on the art of story-telling through images. The event brought together more than a dozen photographers to the vibrant neighbourhood of Tokobari for a lesson in street photography in the wee hours of Saturday.

LIMA — The ArtSpace/Lima Juried Photography Exhibition awards ceremony was recently held. The show has been held for over thirty years. Originally hosted by the ArtSpace Photography Club, this exhibition honors that club by continuing the yearly tradition.

Sally Windle, curator of ArtSpace said, “It’s over 120 artists that have been able to exhibit here and we also have really high quality. There’s a lot of new artists, new photographers as well as some of the people that have always given us quality work.”

The winners of the Juried Photography Exhibit at ArtSpace Lima are: Best of Show, “Butterfly Blues,” Dominique Ysquierdo; First Place Award, “Unveiled (Morality),” Christine Herman; Second Place Award, “Glimpse of the Future,” Jacob Collins; Third Place Award, “In the Morning Light,” Matthew Stanford; Honorable Mention Award, “Transvaal Daisies,” Jonathan Dickey; Honorable Mention Award, “Starlight Sunset,” Jodi Knoch; Young Photographer Award, “Whimsical Leap,” Carson Caprella; Young Photographer Award, “Inside Story,” Spencer Davis; Black and White Award, “1972,” Margaret Green; Color Award Light, “Play #34,” Barbara Ward; Photography Club Award, “Lean In,” Christine Herman.

The show will be on display through February 4th. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m at ArtSpace/Lima at 65 Town Square.

Reach Dean Brown at 567-242-0409

After disrupting the world of illustrators, artificial intelligence is causing controversy with a new type of machine-generated content: AI photography.

While many artists were furious about the impact of AI on their authorship—both commercially and ethically—others are exploring the possibilities offered by AI photographs, hoping to escape the same risk of copyright infringement.

Instead of mimicking human-made drawings and illustrations with a high level of fidelity, like painting the Mona Lisa in the manner of Jackson Pollock, AI photography works by portraying non-existent subjects or events that never happened as if they were shot on a camera in real life.

Since their release this year, visual artists have opposed text-to-image AI art generators, like DALL-E and Midjourney, accusing them of theft and copyright infringement, claiming their work was used to train AIs without their consent.

But AI photographers, who mostly come from artistic fields other than photography, believe that their medium does not exploit other people’s style, as it consists of fake photographs of fictional subjects.

“As an illustrator first and foremost, I try not to use Midjourney to create works that are too similar to the pieces I make by hand. It feels wrong, and disingenuous,” artist Gossip Goblin, who specializes in fantasy illustrations, said to the Daily Dot.

“However, I appreciate the AI’s ability to mimic photography, and to generate realistic compositions of fictional people and places that would be extremely difficult to create otherwise,” he added.

AI photography exploded on Instagram in November, after the release of the latest art generators, with Midjourney v4 the preferred choice of many artists contacted by the Daily Dot. 

The hashtag #AIphotography on Instagram now has over 47,000 posts.

The medium attracts unique and disparate visions, ranging from retro-futuristic scenarios to nostalgic tributes to 1980s television and monsters, but they all have one thing in common. They couldn’t be photographed in real life.

More of a tribute or re-imagination of a specific period’s aesthetics and mediums, rather than an actual copy of an author’s style, AI photography might escape the same copyright concerns that marred AI-generated illustrations.

Gossip Goblin created a National Geographic-style series exploring an imaginary Asian country called Urumquan, where he fuses Japanese cybergoth with late 1980s Soviet aesthetics, without using specific artists as references.

Sam Finn (@Ai.s.a.m), a 3D artist who uses Midjourney to recreate a slightly off version of 1970s America, said to the Daily Dot that he does not command AI to work in the style of specific artists, individuals, or movies. 

He asks the software to replicate the output of a specific medium as if it was using “70s stuff like cameras, isos, filmstocks,” he added.

Artomaton works on his retro-futuristic series by patchworking many 1960s references, “primarily the 1964 World’s Fair,” he explained to the Daily Dot, “but also movies like Logan’s Run and early James Bond films, TV shows like The Avengers.”

As with other forms of AI art, a user needs to feed the art generator a text, or prompt, to create a picture.

In his prompts, Artomaton admits asking Midjourney to recreate specific styles, though not that of photographers.

“I sometimes use fashion stylist Pierre Cardin for the uniforms, and director Mario Brava for his lighting, architect Eero Saarinen for the backgrounds,” he specified.

Does that mean infringing someone else’s copyright? 

“Not at all,” said Artomaton, “because these names are mixed with each other and many other words I use in my prompts. The names influence some of the shapes, but the images don’t copy existing buildings, they simply evoke them.”

To obtain their preferred style in AI photographs, Gossip Goblin feeds art generators a string of specific terms like, “hyper-realistic, 80s mood, blockbuster movie,” and the medium, as “photographed on Arri Alexa, Super Panavision 70.”

These AI-powered photographers are indeed conscious of the ethical issues surrounding art generators but believe that by giving the output an original meaning as part of conceptual experimentation, they can reclaim its artistic singularity.

For Gossip Goblin, that means re-prompting the images several times until any resemblance with other artists’ styles is canceled.

“It’s possible that, for example, adding ‘blockbuster’ [to the prompt] will bias the composition towards Hollywood hits, thereby creating works that are more derivative, but this is typically offset by further modification,” he explained.

From this perspective, mimicking the output of a specific camera or the style of a specific period isn’t different from using a filter on Instagram.

Additionally, every picture on Gossip Goblin’s profile is accompanied by a text description that constructs a narrative, something that many of these AI-generated series have in common.

“The power of AI image production lends itself to, in my opinion, much more fascinating experimentations in storytelling and cultural collage than simple mimicry,” Artomaton pointed out. “I want to transport people to a past that never existed, evoking a future that was never meant to be.”

But that diving into the past can delve deep into the intimate, creating an uncanny world people may have not consented to being a part of. 

Part of the data that AI is trained on consists of people’s pictures uploaded on the internet, as made clear by Manufactured Memory, an Instagram profile run by veteran art director Ryan Wendell Bauer, who posts fake family albums created on Midjourney.

“I was fascinated by the idea of manufacturing new memories,” he told the Daily Dot. “I reckoned that if these neural networks were trained on millions of images from the entirety of visually recorded human history, our regular everyday memories were in there somewhere too.”

The concerns and the risk of impersonation make AI art and photography authorship controversial among artists.

Illustrator LRNZ is starting a campaign to police the companies behind AI art generators. He told the Daily Dot, “It is OK if you take an AI-generated image and give it a different meaning, but you cannot say that the image is yours.”

But Bauer believes differently, that these images and their usage can help bring back a time when the internet was less concerned about ramifications and more about people’s unique ability to use technology to bring about community. 

“I want to help people remember the way things used to be,” he said. “There used to be all these weird little corners of the internet, and the only way you could find them was to be turned onto it by some cool, weird friend.”

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Steve McCurry is one of the most legendary and renowned photographer of all time. Steve McCurry doesn’t need much of an introduction amongst the photographers as well as the ordinary people knowing not much on photography, his name has been a constant ring and more than an iconic voice in respect to the contemporary street, travel and documentary photography of today.

In this amazing video, COOPH explains 9 Photography Composition Tips with the help of Steve McCurry’s Iconic Photos.

For more photography tips and tutorials visit COOPH Youtube Channel and Website.

Final Words:

Steve McCurry Says: Remember the composition is important but also rules are meant to be broken. So the main point is to enjoy yourself while you’re photographing and photograph in your own way and your own style.

With 2022 in the rear-view mirror, a British news agency has shared some of the most dramatic and impressive photographs they have seen – including shots of a Siberian tiger and a castle that looks like it’s floating in the sky.

The picture editors have picked from hundreds of images to display some of the most captivating they have run on their service. Now the public can vote to decide which of these images will be crowned SWNS Picture of the Year 2022.

SWNS picture editor Jon Mills says: “We are very grateful to all the talented photographers who trust us with their pictures. A great news photograph can be many things, but its core quality is that it tells you a story that lives in your memory.

“Many of the pictures in our gallery are stunning images of this beautiful world, some show moments of intense emotion and others touch on the tragedy that is a very real part of our modern society.”

To see the full selection of pictures please click here.

A stunning Siberian tiger pauses in a quiet forest in this jaw-dropping picture captured by wildlife photographer Sascha Fonseca. Sascha, from Germany, says the image is special as Amur tigers are endangered and this was an undocumented male. He explains: “A male Siberian tiger passed by my camera trap deep in the forests of far east Russia.”

© Provided by The Independent
A photographer captured a lightning storm on camera (Ronald Kotinsky/SWNS)

Ronald Kotinsky, 52, fought off Florida mosquitoes to document what he called “crazy lightning bolts”. The spectacle occurred 20-30 miles offshore of the city of Crystal River. The 52-year-old, from Valrico, explains: “Normally lucky and happy to get one bolt from the blue but this storm kept dropping them; the price I paid in blood paid dividends.”

© Provided by The Independent
Thousands of Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis pose for a ‘class picture’ outside of Chabad World Headquarters in New York (Adam Gray/SWNS)

© Provided by The Independent
Brianne Surgeoner, from Paisley, was born with no arms and applies make-up with her feet (Katielee Arrowsmith/SWNS)

Brianne Surgeoner, 21, has amassed more than 5 million TikTok views for her make-up tutorials. She has astounded fans with her skills because she’s a double amputee. She uses her feet and her upper arms to apply a professional standard of make-up – including dramatic eye shadow looks, delicate eyeliner and intricate skin prep.

In a break from ceremonial duties and London city life, the cavalry are pictured on Holkham Beach on their first ride-out since the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

The regiment uses the wide-open space to practice equestrian and military skills, building bonds between horse and rider, and improving their prowess as professional soldiers.

Dad-of-two Brian Smith, 55, was leaving work on Tuesday when he saw the historic castle covered in snow. Fog and clouds parted above the building, which is on a steep hill, so Bill took a picture with a long exposure. Brian, a college lecturer, said: “It looks very festive.”

© Provided by The Independent
Brody Roybal, who is missing the bottom half of his body, with his girlfriend at home in Smyrna, Tennessee, before beginning his third Paralympics Games (Adam Gray/SWNS)

© Provided by The Independent
A fighter jet zooming at low level through a city (David A Kapernick/SWNS)

Australian Air Force airplane F/A-18F Super Hornet was photographed flying over Brisbane’s Story Bridge. The image was snapped during the Brisbane Riverfire festival. The photographer said: “It had been raining in the morning, so lots of moisture in the air, which created the vapour trail over the aircraft, which made it all that more special.”

SWNS

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