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The rise of digital photography seemed to signal the end of analog for a Longview resident, but he’s aiming to change that by bringing film back to the community in a familiar way.

Jamie Maldonado is a local photographer with a master’s degree in studio art from Texas A&M Commerce. He previously served as an assistant at Kilgore College, where he said he fostered his love of photography. Now, Maldonado wants to give back to the community by opening a nonprofit community darkroom he’s calling the Piney Woods Darkroom.

Over the last several years, he’s been thinking of ideas related to film photography and the one he kept returning to was of a film lab, he said. After speaking with a fellow photographer friend who runs a community darkroom in California, Maldonado was struck by the similarity to what he used to do at Kilgore College.

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As photographic technology evolves, so should the tools that harness it. This is the crux of my argument for why Leica, the legendary camera manufacturer with its roots firmly planted in the soil of tradition, should consider introducing an electronic viewfinder (EVF) into its iconic M-series cameras and moving away from rangefinder focusing.

The rangefinder system has its merits – it’s known for its precision, tactile engagement and its capacity to operate effectively in a variety of lighting conditions. But it only uses a central area of the imaging frame, it takes a while to get used to and it can be hard to see the two images that must be brought into register.

And then there’s the framing. The viewfinders in Leica M-series cameras don’t show the view through the lens, instead they show the direct view through a window in the camera body. This means that framing created by the lens has to be indicated using bright lines and the imaging area decreases dramatically in size as the focal length increases.

To be fair, Leica offers an optional electronic viewfinder that can slot into the hotshoe of modern M-series cameras. But as you might imagine, it’s not a cheap addition and it’s time for a shift to a more versatile and innovative solution.

The introduction of an integrated EVF would bring a series of benefits to the Leica M-series. For starters, EVFs show the image from the sensor and that means the view is through-the-lens with real-time exposure previews. This not only facilitates accurate exposure settings but also allows for immediate adjustment in dynamic lighting situations. With an EVF, what you see is literally what you get, a massive boon for photographers striving for accuracy and efficiency.

Secondly, the inclusion of an EVF paves the way for easier manual focusing. While the manual focusing of a rangefinder can be an engaging and gratifying experience, it does come with limitations, particularly when shooting in challenging conditions or with fast-moving subjects. A modern manual focus system, coupled with an EVF, would provide the M-series with a level of speed and accuracy that could broaden its appeal and practicality.

Thirdly, focus peaking and magnified views – essential features for many of today’s photographers – could be a game changer in an M-series Leica with an EVF. The current cameras already have these technologies, but they can only be used when composing images on the fixed rear screen or using the optional EVF. Accessing them from a built-in electronic viewfinder would make achieving precise focus so much easier, particularly in macro photography or in situations where shallow depth of field is employed.

EVFs are also of huge benefit to videographers, and while M-series photographers have been vocal in their demands to not have video technology, perhaps they would find it more attractive if it were easier to use? An EVF would provide accurate framing, focus and exposure control in video mode, making these cameras a more viable option for serious videographers.

Leica’s M-series cameras are renowned for their superb image quality, iconic design, and the engaging experience they offer. Incorporating an EVF would not subtract from these strengths, but instead, add to them, ensuring the M-series remains competitive in today’s rapidly evolving photographic landscape.
It’s important to remember that an evolution of tools doesn’t have to mean an erosion of the craft.

After all, Leica itself is a testament to this principle, having popularised 35mm film in the 1920’s and later transitioned from film to digital technology while maintaining its commitment to image quality and user experience. The introduction of an integrated EVF in M-series cameras could be another step in this evolutionary journey, keeping Leica at the forefront of photographic innovation while preserving its rich tradition.

It’s time for Leica to embrace change, and an EVF in the M-series could be a progressive step in the right direction, providing a blend of tradition and innovation that caters to both seasoned rangefinder users and photographers seeking the versatility that comes with modern technology.

Check out our range of camera buying guides to find the best option for your needs

David Hockney’s limpid stretch of radiant blue broken by tangled lines, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)”, scintillates across the central gallery in Capturing the Moment, the new exhibition at Tate Modern in London about the relationship between painting and photography. As his source, Hockney took numerous snapshots of the pool (in St Tropez) and the downward-gazing observer (his former lover Peter Schlesinger, in Kensington Gardens). Collaging the disparate images, the painting captures a joyous instant of sun hitting water and, in a breath, a glance, complexities of desire, loss, regret. Hockney spent more than 200 hours depicting what appears as this single decisive moment — a virtuoso imitation in paint of a photograph that never was.

Taiwanese entrepreneur Pierre Chen bought the painting for $90mn in 2018 — breaking the record for a living artist. It returns to the UK as one of a score of stunners from his Yageo Foundation, the only lender to the show (everything else comes from Tate’s collection). Chen’s paintings range from Picasso’s brutal-delicate “Buste de Femme” (1938), face fractured yet somehow jaunty beneath a comic feathered hat, a work never before shown in Britain, to Peter Doig’s cinematographic fluorescent green “Canoe Lake” (1997-98), among his earliest, eeriest pieces based on an uncanny scene from the horror movie Friday the 13th.

Tate’s theme is laid out in a Picasso quotation in the opening gallery: “Photography is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, even from the subject. So shouldn’t painters profit from the newly acquired liberty to do other things?” This is modern art’s foundational narrative — painting set free from the documentary impulse — and a hopelessly broad, well-worn premise for an exhibition: anything at all from Tate’s collection would fit it. The surprise and delight of the Yageo loans alone make a visit worthwhile.

Chen was a teenager when he launched his electronics business in 1977, and he began buying art around the same time: ironically enough, a fortune made from mechanisation — his company supplies mobile phone and computer components — allowed him to amass a supreme collection of handmade works.

He also takes risks. First star here is Picasso’s disguised self-portrait of wartime claustrophobia “The Sailor” (1943) — club-like fist, anguished expression, skewed perspective — which Chen bought after it was punctured by a metal rod ahead of its expected sale at Christie’s in 2018. Another is Francis Bacon’s “Study for a Pope VI”, last of six depictions following Velázquez in an important 1961 series. In the others, the pontiff is upright, gesturing, desperately trapped; here he slumps, head tilted as if he has given up and fallen asleep. His surplice dissolves into dripping white paint on raw canvas. Flamboyantly offhand — or just unfinished? — it’s a potent emblem of pathos and defeat.

“The Sailor” has not been in the UK since Tate’s 1945-46 Picasso show, and the “Pope” not since the museum’s 1962 Bacon retrospective, for which the series was made. Fabulous, historic loans, then, to demonstrate how 20th-century figurative painting survived by becoming ever more sensational, exaggerated, responding to harrowing times. “The age demanded an image/of its accelerated grimace,” Ezra Pound wrote.

From Taiwan there’s Bacon’s “Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud”, also not seen for decades — head shattered, then rebuilt to shudder in and out of deep walls of red paint, one hand raised in defence against the mangling — alongside Tate’s early Freuds. A highlight is the menacing/vulnerable “Boy Smoking” (1950), a young criminal with furrowed brow, too-wide eyes, too-thick lips, cigarette casting a livid shadow down his chin. It shows Freud’s life-long quest “to move the senses by giving an intensification of reality”, outdoing the camera’s objectivity with his own mix of monstrosity and indifference.

Freud stuck doggedly to it while his contemporaries in the 1960s started pulling photographs directly into painting. Robert Rauschenberg (“Almanac”, a flux of everyday images over-scrawled in white paint) and Andy Warhol (“Double Marlon”, Brando as gang leader in The Wild One) screen-printed photographs and movie stills, appropriating their banality or glamour.

Gerhard Richter copied old snapshots, blurring them into uncertainty by grisaille paint. The Yageo’s “Aunt Marianne” is based on a sweet photo of baby Richter held by his smiling aunt — whom the Nazis would diagnose as schizophrenic and leave to starve to death in a psychiatric institution. Richter questions layers of collective denial in post-Nazi Germany. The camera can lie, his paintings assert, and no image is immune from manipulation for political purposes.

German photographers playing on ambivalence between the camera’s neutrality and austere formalist composition, derived from painting, continue the thread: Andreas Gursky’s panoramas of crowds and apartment blocks “May Day IV” and “Paris, Montparnasse”, Thomas Struth’s and Candida Höfer’s geometric, precise museum and library interiors. These comprise half the small photography section — scanty for a show subtitled A Journey Through Painting and Photography.

Finally come recent Tate acquisitions, tremendously varied in quality. Heaven help “painting in the digital age” if its future is as bloodless and pointless as Laura Owens’ “Photoshop marks” layered on grids (“Untitled”, 2012) and Christina Quarles’s “transforming random marks into stretched human figures” (“Casually Cruel”, 2018), explained as gender politics: “Whereas gestural painting is traditionally associated with heroic, masculine actions, these artists use digital rendering to create carefully controlled gestures.”

Saviours are two major pieces by the freshest and most sought-after names, entering the collection thanks to Tate’s Africa Acquisition Fund. Michael Armitage’s “The Promised Land”, dreamy fantasia turned terror scenario, bodies metamorphosing under tear gas, references news images of a fatal protest in Kenya. Seeking “a visual metaphor for the multiple sources of influence on people’s experiences”, Njideka Akunyili Crosby collages kaleidoscope-bright photographic fragments representing Nigerian culture — hip-hop musician Nneka, novelist Chinua Achebe, Nigeria Airways — in the engrossing domestic scenes “Predecessors”. Both assimilate photographs into vibrantly contemporary works celebrating painterly possibility.

Several elements here could have made an intelligently focused independent show — the Yageo collection itself; 21st-century painters’ evolving engagement with photography — rather than the mere glimmers of interest offered in this lazy apology for an exhibition.

To January 28 2024, tate.org.uk

Jun. 18—Studio Q Photography in Amherst is marking 10 years of service in 2023 with a series of celebrations throughout the summer.

Since its inception a decade ago, the company has dedicated its time to capturing life’s precious moments.

“It is with great joy and gratitude that we celebrate our 10-year anniversary,” said Michael Ciu, co-owner of Studio Q Photography. “We started this journey with a simply goal in mind: to freeze the beautiful moments that pass by in the blink of an eye.”

As part of the celebrations for the company, Ciu and his wife, co-owner Marie, decided to honor their clients with special free events during Walkin’ On Wednesday celebrations in Amherst.

“I am very grateful to the people of Amherst,” Marie Ciu said. “They have welcomed us with open arms over the past 10 years, and it has been a great community for us to be a part of.”

Throughout its 10-year journey, Studio Q Photography has amassed a loyal clientele that extends from individuals and families to businesses and organizations.

Their diverse portfolio showcases a range of creative and striking imagery, capturing emotions and nuances that make each photograph a story.

“As part of our celebration, we have a bunch of free prizes for guests to enjoy,” Marie Ciu said. “Inside the studio, we have a spinning prize wheel with small giveaway items as well as a guessing game for the community to try their hand at.”

The studio also is showcasing some of its new products through a raffle giveaway.

“As a token of thanks to our community, we also will be offering free activities during Amherst’s Walkin’ On Wednesday events throughout the summer,” Marie Ciu said.

The studio brought on Vicki Barbaro of Fancy Faces Painting for free face painting June 14.

For July 12, the studio will partner with Northeast Ohio Creatives welcoming some fan favorite princesses for free photos and meet and greets.

“We are very excited to be able to reach this milestone in Amherst and are looking forward to many more to come,” Marie Ciu said. “As always, we have the community to thank and are immensely proud of our achievements and the incredible relationships we have built along the way.”

(c)2023 The Morning Journal, Lorain, Ohio Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Studio Q Photography in Amherst is marking 10 years of service in 2023 with a series of celebrations throughout the summer.