Clumsy cub and smiling fish among Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards winning images

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An image of a 3-month-old lion cub falling out of a tree has been named the overall winner of this year’s Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

The moment was captured by Jennifer Hadley in the Serengeti, Tanzania, late one afternoon, and the image fought off competition from 5,000 other entries.

“It didn’t even occur to me that he would make a go of getting down by himself in the most un-cat like fashion. I mean, how often do cats fall out of trees?” Hadley said in a press release from the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

“No one expected this to happen and of course we were concerned for his safety but happily as cats do, he righted himself just in time and landed on all fours and ran off with his siblings. A happy ending for a hapless kitty who didn’t quite know how to get down from a tree.”

Hadley also won the Affinity Photo 2 People’s Choice Award for her image of a standoffish penguin snubbing his mate, titled “Talk to the Fin.”






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Hadley won both the overall award and the People’s Choice award. – Jennifer Hadley/Comedy Wildlife 2022

As well as providing some light-hearted fun, organizers want to raise awareness around wildlife conservation. According to the press release, 10% of net revenue will be donated to the Whitley Fund for Nature – a UK charity that supports conservation leaders working in their home countries across the Global South.

A photo of two gray triggerfish smiling broadly for the camera won the Underwater Category Award for Arturo Telle Thiemann, while Jia Chen won the Amazing Internet Portfolio Award for her series of photos depicting a Cooper’s Hawk playing football with a pine cone in Canada.

The image of a serene heron oblivious to the wide jaws of a hippo yawning behind it won the Creatures of the Air Category Award for Jean Jacques Alcalay, and Arshdeep Singh won the Think Tank Photo Junior Category for his shot of an owl winking inside a pipe.

In addition to the category winners, there were 10 entries that were recognized as highly commended winners.

In 2021, the overall winner of the competition was Ken Jensen’s picture of a monkey caught in a painful position on a wire.

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Best astrophotography cameras 2022 | Live Science

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Tired of just stargazing? The best astrophotography cameras will enable you to enjoy and explore the heavens above in ways that your telescope simply can’t compete with.

Rather than just staring at the stars, you can capture the cosmos for artistic expression or scientific record keeping. However, you can’t get satisfactory images with just any old kit – the best cameras for astrophotography are finely tuned imaging devices with very specific properties. 

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The Ballermann and the wonderfully shot-up audience

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Vivian slip was born in southern Germany in 1994 and has been studying photojournalism and documentary photography since 2013 Hanover. She is currently in her seventh semester and mainly works on free projects. For the „German Holiday Paradise“ photo project, she rented a place on Playa de Palma in Malle for three weeks. And just watched. For us she answered questions in the interview:

ZEITjUNG.de: You rented a room in Playa de Palma for three weeks for your photo project – why are you so fascinated by the people who fly to Mallorca to see Ballermann?

Vivianrutsch: I’m interested in bizarre places and events and wanted to find out to what extent the clichés in my head correspond to reality. It fascinates me to become part of a microcosm and to dive into a world unknown to me. I wanted to find out which people flock to Ballermann and what motivates them to do so.

 

Why is Mallorca so popular with Germans anyway? After all, you can also party in your hometown.

I perceived the German holiday culture as a large community. At Ballermann, where I primarily stayed, the mood was always boisterous and uninhibited. Anonymity certainly plays an important role here. I think people find a place here that doesn’t exist in their home country. Age and profession are secondary, which is certainly one reason for the fascination that Ballermann exerts on German audiences. Especially for a generation for which there is actually no party culture on this scale in Germany. This exuberance would be unthinkable in Germany, for many, celebrating at Ballermann also means being free – without being judged for it.

 

What bizarre encounters were there during this time? For me, the entire time at Ballermann was a bizarre encounter. A small excerpt from my notebook: „I sit down with my camera on a wall between the beach and the promenade and watch the hustle and bustle. A woman sits next to me, brown perm, gold hoop earrings, and a gold necklace lying on her liver-spotted skin. She begins to smoke, drags heavily on her cigarette, her long red fingernails flash at me, the nail polish is peeling off at the ends. I want to take a picture of her, we start a conversation. I photograph her, with the Black Sea behind her. The lanterns cast yellow light on her brown hair. She says she’s alone, we’re going for a beer together. The room is crowded and loud, people sing along to German hits. Several monitors show a boxing match. Sandra says she loves fights, then she can’t stop staring. She got that from her mother, who put her in front of the television at the age of five and let her watch the heavyweight class. When she was 17, she went to a bar where the boys fought. There she stood in the first row and went home with blood spattered on her heels.

So I’m sitting with Sandra on wooden stools in the Bierkönig, three beers later three men join us. All between 48 and 50, paunchy and graying. They introduce themselves as Hubert, Guido and Winnie. After a short conversation, Sandra and Winnie kiss, although Sandra actually had her eye on the somewhat arrogant Guido in leather pants. We accompany the three of them to the „Rutschbahn“, an oldie disco with a small wooden slide that leads down to the basement. Similar to what you know from coal mines. There is dancing. Hubert sits down with me at the bar. After the seventh beer they buy us, we go home. Sandra still didn’t want to sleep with Winnie, maybe he should have withheld from her the fact that he is married and has two daughters.

Thanks for this interview! You can find Vivian’s photo projects here, her Instagram page here.

   



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Committee recommends long-term protection of Holyoke’s Whiting Street Reservoir

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HOLYOKE — The Whiting Street Reservoir Study Committee released a final report in November that said the reservoir should be used as a place for passive recreation into the future while remaining a potential water source for the city.

The City Council formed the committee in 2019 after it recognized Holyoke Water Works faced significant costs to repair the reservoir’s spillway. The committee was tasked with reviewing what it would cost to maintain the reservoir and repurpose the area all the while “ensuring that reasonable environmental considerations are maintained.”

The seven-person committee reviewed current environmental laws, regulations, protections and how they affected how the reservoir was currently used and neighboring properties. The process included a series of public meetings and considering “potential new resources including expanded uses.”

The report emphasized protecting Whiting Street Reservoir through restrictive conservation measures.

According to the report, the reservoir was built around 1890 to store water from a smaller reservoir to the east. Whiting Street owned a massive parcel that stretched along the foot of Mount Tom.

Holyoke Water Works owns and operates the facility, and the Water Works Commission controls access and uses. Though a nonpotable water resource, Whiting Street Reservoir must abide by “strict” safety and environmental regulations.

Permitted activities inside Whiting Reservoir include walking, jogging, hiking, biking, nature photography and other passive pursuits. Swimming, fishing, boating, dog walking, horseback riding, motor vehicles and alcoholic drinks are forbidden.

“Structural safety of the reservoir is an important issue since Interstate 91 is only 1,000 feet due east and downstream from the Whiting Street Reservoir dam and main outfall, and dozens of residences are directly downstream of the reservoir,” the report states.

The study offered several key recommendations, such as making sure the area is available for Holyoke residents for passive recreation through conservation restrictions while keeping its 550 million gallons of water capacity available to the city, should a future need arise.

The committee also recommended creating a statement and a plan in order to help direct the area’s use and manage its resources, implementing it with an “Areawide Management Council” that includes neighboring property owners to help “coordinate area management.”

In talks with the committee, the Water Works clarified that the City of Holyoke would need the reservoir’s water capacity in the future.

“Furthermore, regulatory agencies that oversee public water supply are also likely to require water filtration at all City reservoirs,” the study states. “The filtration requirements will allow the (Whiting Street Reservoir) to maintain its standby public water supply status or to meet standards if pushed into service to meet water supply needs.”

A spillway renovation project is slated for 2023 was dubbed a “significant financial commitment,” along with installing a filtration system.

“This means that public access, and the type and intensity of public recreational uses, will need to be planned, controlled, and limited to protect the reservoir,” the report reads.

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Astrophotography brings out passion and a feeling of permanence for this Colorado Springs woman

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Storing telescopes, mounts, tripods and cameras inside their home, the couple takes out all the heavy equipment to their backyard to try and capture an element in our universe not seen by the naked eye. This method of photography is called astrophotography — it goes beyond landscape photography to use a combination of lenses, computers and telescopes to capture a moment in deep space.  

“You can go out in the summer and set up a tripod and a camera and a wide angle lens and do a long exposure … and get to see the stars in the Milky Way in the core and some beautiful details of the sky,” Marcus explained. “I would say the biggest difference between that and deep space astrophotography is with deep space astrophotography, you’re looking way closer in on a target.” 

To do that, Marcus and Miles must understand and keep track of what is happening in the sky above and when. Then given those parameters, they pick a target or two for the night, set up their equipment to get it polar aligned and then take long-exposure pictures for as long as possible — often lasting throughout the whole night.  

The idea is to capture a series of long-exposure images, which invite more light into the lens, to gather as much visual data as possible. Marcus and Miles’ equipment keeps them on the target throughout the night as the subject moves across the sky. The series of photos, which will be later layered on top of each other, add more detail to the image.  

As one might imagine, this hobby isn’t best served by partial commitment.  

“If you meet anybody in the astro[photography] community, they’re going to talk about the time that they spent on this,” said Marcus with a smile.  

On top of the time it takes to capture the images overnight, it takes about an hour to set up the equipment and a little bit less than that to take it down. While a lot of technology helps Marcus and Miles, they still must constantly check on the equipment throughout the night.  

“We got up to the observatory property last Friday night at about 7:00 and we left the next morning at 7:30. So, we were there for 12 and a half hours,” said Marcus.  

Marcus and Miles often take the deep space photos from just their backyard, but they also have connected with a person who has an observatory near Florissant, about 11 miles west of Pikes Peak. There they have access to power to operate their equipment, and it’s under a dark sky protected area and at high elevation. These conditions give Marcus and Miles an even better chance of capturing the beauty of the stars above.  

“When I go to a dark sky and I look up and I see these things, these stars, these brighter stars, it’s like I reaffirm that they’re still there as am I. Me and the universe, we’re on the same terms,” said Marcus.  

When Marcus returns to inside her home, she then has the immense task of stacking the images and pulling out the beauty from them. A single image can look like a smattering of stars, but as she is able to put several images together, nebulas, galaxies and other targets really start to take shape.  



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DJI launches stripped-back Mini 3 drone

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Drone manufacturer DJI has announced the DJI Mini 3, a stripped down version of the Mini 3 Pro that loses that drones forward and rear obstacle detection, the company’s ActiveTrack following system and the higher-end video specs of its big brother, but starts at a farily competitive price of just $699.

The Mini 3 next to the Mini 3 Pro. Image: DJI/Supplied
The Mini 3 (right) next to the Mini 3 Pro. Image: DJI/Supplied

Like the Mavic 3 Classic DJI launched last month, the Mini 3 is aimed at users who don’t need all the functionality of the company’s premium models. 

Image: DJI/Supplied
Image: DJI/Supplied

DJI Mini 3 features a 12MP (1/1.3-type) CMOS image sensor combined with a 24mm (f1.7) aperture lens. The onboard camera shoots images in RAW/JPEG mode and videos in 4K HDR at 30 fps, compared to 4K 60 fps on the Mini 3 Pro, and videos can be shot in portrait mode with DJI’s True Vertical Shooting mode.

Image: DJI
Image: DJI

According to DJI, in live feed, a video of 720p can be relayed from a distance of up to 10 kms away. With a wind resistance at up to 10.7 m/s, DJI says the Mini 3 can hover steady and keep a stable image, and standard DJI features like the Return To Home (RTH) mode in event of a signal drop are also included.

The drone weighs just 248gms (which makes it eligible for flying without any registration), and has an estimated flight time of 38 minutes on a single charge of the standard onboard battery. If you want to fly further, the Intelligent Flight Battery Plus accessory takes the total flying time out to a whopping 51 minutes. 

Image: DJI/Supplied
Image: DJI/Supplied

DJI Mini 3 will be available in five different configurations – each one having a different combination of accessories. 

DJI Mini 3 is available for purchase from store.dji.com and authorized retail partners in five configurations. The cheapest form is the DJI Mini 3 (Drone Only), which does not include a remote controller or charger. It will set you back $699. The DJI Mini 3 configuration includes DJI’s RC-N1 Remote Controller. It’s $829, or the same package with the DJI RC controller is $1,019. 

In addition, the DJI Mini 3 Fly More Combo Plus includes the DJI RC-N1 Remote Controller, Shoulder Bag, Two-Way Charging Hub, and two extra Intelligent Flight Batteries Plus. It’s $1,188, and the final offering is the DJI Mini 3 Fly More Combo Plus (DJI RC), which includes the DJI RC Remote Controller, Shoulder Bag, Two-Way Charging Hub, and two extra Intelligent Flight Batteries Plus. Yours for $1,378.

 For more information on all the new features, accessories, and extras, visit dji.com/dji-mini-3.



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Two Cochrane wildlife photographers make short list for international competition

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Cochrane photographers and good friends Jo-Anne Oucharek and Jacquie Matechuk went on the same trip to Alaska this fall.

Cochrane photographers and good friends Jo-Anne Oucharek and Jacquie Matechuk went on the same trip to Alaska this fall. They often stood shoulder-to-shoulder, looked at the same scene, and each applied their own creative lens to the wildlife they observed.

Now, they both have been named to a short list of wildlife photographers who will represent Canada in the World Photographic Cup (WPC), an annual nature and wildlife photography competition.

And they are each other’s biggest cheerleaders.

Matechuk, a bronze medallist at the WPC in 2020, is thrilled to see her friend enjoy the fruits of her creative labours, just as she herself did a couple of years ago.

“It’s kinda fun. I had a huge opportunity a couple of years ago in the competition, I got my time in the spotlight so it’s fun to step aside and share it with someone else,” she said. “It’s really exciting for her.”

She said she doesn’t feel like she’s competing with Oucharek at all. The longer the conversation goes, the more it starts to sound like a ‘passing of the torch.’

Matechuk is getting a kick out of watching her close friend’s enthusiastic response to the recognition.

“This is her big breakthrough for an image that is fantastic, really – and I couldn’t be more excited for her. I can sit back and take in her excitement, listen to her tell her story and light up like a tree,” she said.

Matechuk flew to Rome, Italy in 2021 for a WPC-sponsored event, where she rubbed shoulders with an even larger group of talented photographers – previous award winners from around the world. It’s an experience she won’t soon forget.

“It was the most amazing time – I made friends from all over the world, most [of whom] I’m in contact with today,” she said. “It was incredible. It was funny how much we all had in common.”

Matechuk is also an ambassador for Canon Canada, which entails putting on seminars and training talks for budding photographers. Getting paid for doing something she loves is a dream come true.

“It feels like that’s my retirement, and I won’t be working anymore,” she said.

She’s been a Cochranite long enough to remember when there were no traffic lights in town.

“Back when we used to exchange phone numbers with just the last four digits,” she said with a laugh.

She is also co-owner of Cochrane Floors and More with her husband.

Matechuk’s Reportage category entry, ‘Connected’ is a picture of sockeye salmon clustering in a stream while a park ranger approaches the school of fish. Her wildlife entry, ‘The Tender Side’ is a shot of a mother grizzly nose-to-nose with her cub.

Oucharek’s entry, ‘The Catch’ depicts an Alaskan brown bear right before it catches a salmon in its jaws in Katmai National Park in Alaska.

“We chartered a float plane, flew into remote areas and hung out with the brown bears,” Oucharek said.

As a certified bear guide, she said she is aware of the sensitivities involved in encroaching on their habitat.

“It’s amazing watching how they react to people, to other bears,” she said.

A passionate nature photographer, Oucharek took a course to obtain her bear guide certification earlier this year, and is currently enrolled in an ornithology course. Capturing images of birds in her backyard was where it all started several years ago.

International judging for the WPC has already concluded and the World Top 10 images will be announced in January, followed by the big reveal on March 17, 2023, when the WPC panel will unveil a new collection of visual artistry live from Singapore. The ceremony will recognize outstanding achievements in each of the eight categories before tallying combined points to present one country with the World Cup.

Canadian entries can be viewed on the Team Canada website: wpcteamcanada.com.

Some of Oucharek’s work is on display at the Route 22 Artist’s Collective Gallery in Cochrane. Her work can also be accessed at natureinmybackyard.ca.

Matechuk’s work is available on her website: broughttolife.shootproof.com. Her next free workshop, scheduled for Jan. 16, is on sports and action photography. For more information, go to canoncreatorlab.ca/events.



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What time will the full moon eclipse Mars on Dec. 7?

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Update for Dec. 8: The rare Mars eclipse by the full moon thrilled skywatchers around the world. See photos and video of the Mars occultation. Also, don’t miss your second chance to see Mars on Dec. 8 during these Mars opposition webcasts!

This week offers an excellent opportunity to view Mars in the night sky as it puts on quite a show for observers on Earth.



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Adobe demos true HDR support in Adobe Camera Raw, giving a glimpse of photography’s bright future: Digital Photography Review

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We’re not able to directly show you what a true HDR image looks like, as it’s difficult to ensure it’s viewable correctly even if you’re using an HDR-capable device. Instead this image shows ACR’s Visualize HDR regions display.

The latest version of Adobe Camera Raw brings a feature which for years we’ve been asking: support for true HDR editing for those with an HDR display. It’s a Mac-only option described as a ‘Technology Preview’ for now, but it brings the ability to create lifelike HDR files from existing Raws as well as the ability to open and edit HDR HEIF files created by Canon and Sony cameras.

It’s distinctly rough around the edges, but it finally offers a way to exploit the capabilities of high dynamic range displays using familiar photographic tools, enabling you to make your photos ‘pop’ like never before.

The infrastructure doesn’t yet exist to reliably share the images, but gaining the ability to view and edit HDR stills gives us a glimpse of a dazzlingly bright future for digital photography.

What type of HDR are we talking about?

Just to be clear, this article is not about trying to tone-map extra dynamic range into the range that can be shown on a standard DR (SDR) display. Instead we’re talking about true HDR, where an image is edited so that it takes advantage of the wider DR (brighter brights and darker darks) of the latest display technologies.

At present, it’s newer TVs that are most likely to have this capability, with HDR being part of the ‘UHD Premium’ standard for 4K TVs. As tends to happen with new technologies, there are a number of standards for HDR and some brands willing to use the name even where it’s not necessarily deserved, but so long as your TV conforms to the pretty widespread HDR10 standard, you can give ACR’s HDR Output feature a try.

How do I use ACR’s HDR Output mode?

The first challenge in using ACR’s new feature is to connect your TV or HDR monitor to your Mac. You’ll need a relatively recent Mac (generally post-2018) and a compatible USB-C to HDMI adapter, and then jump through whatever hoops are required to get your TV to accept an HDR signal (I had to engage ‘Enhanced HDMI’ mode on the compatible inputs, on mine).

If you connect a TV or monitor that Mac OS recognizes as HDR-capable, you should get a checkbox in the Display Settings panel letting you send it a 10-bit HDR signal.

If it’s working, you should get an ‘High Dynamic Range’ checkbox in the Display Settings panel of System Preferences. If you don’t, then there’s a problem with either your HDMI adapter, TV’s settings or HDMI lead.

Once you’ve got your display connected, you need to engage the ‘HDR Output’ option in Adobe Camera Raw’s preferences, then restart the software. Once enabled, you should see an HDR colorspace listed at the bottom of the ACR panel (the software supports HDR variants of sRGB/Rec.709, P3 or Rec.2020), along with a note that it’s working in a 32-bit space.

You should also see a button marked ‘HDR’ at the top right of the edit panel. If you’re working with a sequence of bracketed images and have used the ‘Merge to HDR’ option, the HDR mode should automatically be selected, but for single Raws you’ll need to engage it yourself using the button.

The HDR editing interface

When you hit the HDR button, your oddly flat-looking Raw file should burst back into life, as ACR expands the data to make full use of the HDR space you’re going to be working in.

Note that the histogram at the top right of the panel has suddenly been split in two: the conventional SDR range is on the left and the expanded HDR part of the range extends on to the right. Raws with data you were previously having to pull back into your image with the exposure or highlights sliders will show them rendering without any adjustment.

When you engage HDR mode the SDR portion of the image stays on the left, but the previously clipped highlights expand into the HDR region on the right.

Adobe has broken this expansion up into four stops, and a yellow bar underneath the HDR section of the histogram shows you how much of this your TV/monitor is able to display.

Armed with this knowledge, you can start editing your images using most of the standard ACR editing tools. You’re likely to find an immediate problem with this: if you’re working with a Raw file you exposed for SDR (which you probably did, without even recognizing that you were doing so), then the mid-tones and shadows of your image are likely to look absolutely normal to start with. Most of the flexibility you gain in HDR mode is in the highlights: how bright they can be and how the roll-off is handled.

This essentially leaves you with only the Whites and Highlights sliders to play with, since the ‘Exposure’ slider is likely to already be in about the right place. Personally I found the Curves tool to be the most useful in manipulating the HDR region of the image.

The ‘clipping’ warning indicators in ACR become more sophisticated in HDR mode, with yellow showing the regions that are brighter than an SDR display can show, and red showing the regions too bright for your HDR display to show.

As you start applying various tonal adjustments, there are two preview modes that become very useful. The first is an updated version of the highlight clipping warnings. If you hover or click at the top right of the histogram, you’ll find that all the areas brighter than the SDR range light up yellow and all the areas clipped on your HDR display are indicated in red. This gives you a rough idea of the extent to which you’re utilizing the extra headroom.

The High Dynamic Range tool tab includes a checkbox to indicate the HDR regions of the image.

There’s also a more sophisticated warning display, though. At the bottom of the ‘Basic’ adjustments tab is a High Dynamic Range tool. This includes a ‘Visualize HDR’ checkbox that overlays the HDR regions of the image with different colors, depending on how many stops above the SDR cutoff they are. You can mouse-over the relevant regions of the histogram to highlight just the areas that are 2 stops over, or just the areas that are 3 stops over, for instance.

The ‘Visualize HDR ranges’ feature highlights in cyan, blue, purple and magenta the areas that are 1, 2, 3 and 4 stops, respectively, into the HDR region, letting you see how bright they are.

Below this is a panel that lets you fine-tune the SDR rendering of your file, if you plan to make a more accessible version. These adjustments are somewhat limited in scope (it’s unlikely you’ll be able to make the SDR version look as good as a file directly edited for SDR), but crucially do not alter the appearance of your HDR edit, and mean you don’t necessarily need to make two completely distinct edits of your image.

Is it worth the effort?

As soon as you make basic edits to a couple of files, it becomes clear why the feature currently holds ‘Technology Preview’ status. Some tools, such as the recently-added ‘Color Grading’ wheels, don’t really work in HDR mode yet: the three wheels are supposed to let you individually edit the hue, saturation and brightness of the shadows, midtones or highlights, but these ranges are pinned to the SDR values, meaning the ‘highlights’ wheel only adjusts the upper-mids of an HDR image, with everything brighter than that remaining unaffected. Other tools, such as Curves, gain greater importance but end up collapsing the ‘Basic’ tab (with the HDR tools panel) if you have ACR set to its default behavior. This is the sort of detail Adobe is typically still working on at the preview stage.

I got my image to look like the sun flaring through the trees, rather than looking like a photo of the sun flaring through the trees.

But the results you can get can be dramatic. Even on my LCD-based HDR TV I was able to push the bright regions of my image far beyond the brightness of the midtones, making the scene highlights appear almost as dazzling bright as they had in reality. ‘You can make the highlights brighter’ might not sound like the ‘dazzlingly bright future for photography’ I alluded to at the start of the article, but with a bit of tweaking I got my image to look like the sun flaring through the trees, rather than looking like a photo of the sun flaring through the trees. This added capacity for realism is only likely to increase as higher DR display technologies such as OLED and QD-OLED* gain wider acceptance and become more affordable.

It seems fair to assume that many of the initial teething problems will be resolved as HDR Output moves from ‘Technology Preview’ to fully-fledged feature. The bigger issues perhaps lie outside Adobe’s direct control. There’s Windows support to think about, which means implementing the feature on a wider and less tightly-controlled range of hardware. But the arrival of proper HDR editing tools serves to put pressure on the biggest roadblock to use and acceptance: the challenge of sharing files so that other people can see the images the way you intend them to look.

The HDR future is not here…yet

Armed with HDR capabilities, you’re likely to find yourself looking back through your recent photos, trying to work out which would benefit from highlights that ‘pop’ more than they could when you edited them for SDR. It’s possible to make the bright sunset on the right of this image really glow, without losing highlight saturation and without risking the rest of the image looking flat.

Frustratingly, I can’t easily share this with you, even if you have an HDR-capable screen to view it on.

Anyone who’s already tried the Output HDR feature in ACR 15.0 will have found themselves limited to JPEG XL as an output format, ironically just as Google announced it will be removing preliminary support for it from its Chrome Browser. However, v15.1, released today, adds support for Google’s preferred AVIF format, which can only be good for compatibility.

There are other hurdles still to overcome though. The most widespread HDR-capable devices tend to be smartphones and UHD Premium compliant TVs, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll engage their HDR modes even if they encounter HDR content in a compatible browser. We know that several of the larger companies are working together to improve support and consistency, but just having files in a supported format may not be enough to be confident that they’ll render correctly.

As things stand, the arrival of HDR editing in Adobe Camera Raw doesn’t fully open the door to a more realistic photographic future, but it gives it enough of a shove that you can start to see light through the crack.

*Quantum-dot Organic Light-Emitting Diode (a technology that uses color-shifting materials to deliver red or green light from individual blue OLEDs), a brighter version of OLED technology, not to be confused with QLED, which uses color-shifting materials to help more light from an LED backlight get through an RGB color filter layer.

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Popular Eastern Iowa Ski Team Victimized by Massive Theft

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The Five Seasons Ski Team, who puts on shows and events to entertain the Cedar Rapids community all summer long, is dealing with an incident of theft of two of their trailers, containing what club organizers say is upwards of $12,000 in missing sound equipment.

The vice president of the ski team, Ryan Furnish first discovered the theft on Thursday, according to KCRG.  Amps, speakers, microphones, and other pieces of the sound system for the show were gone. Club members want to emphasize it’s not just their specific group that suffers from such a theft.

“There’s a lot of fans and members, people that’ll come watch our show every Thursday, and it’ll change it for them too,” Furnish said. “And they’ve put in a lot of work and they’ve helped donate to us and keep us going and so they stole from the community, not just from the Five Seasons Ski Team.”

It’s an extensive loss for the team, as Furnish told KCRG:

Every year we struggle just having enough fundraising to cover operating costs. As small as we are, to fundraise $12,000, it’s going to take a lot of work

If you’d like to help them recoup some of their loss you can find out how to donate at the Five Seasons Ski Team website. A Facebook post on the team’s page also tells you how to donate to the team’s Venmo or Paypal.

They’ve also posted photos of the items stolen for the public to be looking out for.

 

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LOOK: See Photos of the Year From the International Photography Awards

LOOK: 50 images of winning moments from sports history

Sometimes images are the best way to honor the figures we’ve lost. When tragedy swiftly reminds us that sports are far from the most consequential thing in life, we can still look back on an athlete’s winning moment that felt larger than life, remaining grateful for their sacrifice on the court and bringing joy to millions.

Read on to explore the full collection of 50 images Stacker compiled showcasing various iconic winning moments in sports history. Covering achievements from a multitude of sports, these images represent stunning personal achievements, team championships, and athletic perseverance.



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