Shadow & Light Monthly #47

Shadow & Light is a list of curated photography stories, features, techniques, news and inspiration that I’ve come across this month.

In this edition we see how photographers have captured the first year of the war in Ukraine and look at the career of music photographer Richard Kelly. We discover how a Raspberry PI has been used to create a camera that creates images using AI and watch the laborious (and arguably pointless) task of painting a classic SLR.

So, with no further ado, I give you this month’s Shadow & Light Monthly. Go grab yourself a cuppa and enjoy this month’s selections below. Please let me know in the comments what you think.

Pick of the month – Ukraine: A War Crime

The FotoEvidence Book Award is usually given to an individual photographer for a project on human rights chosen from submissions. But with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Svetlana Bachevanova, the publisher of FotoEvidence, decided to change direction for this year.

“When Russia invaded Ukraine and we witnessed what Russians are capable of again I decided to dedicate the 2023 FotoEvidence Book Award to the war crimes committed on Ukrainian soil. There are stories and images in the book that cannot be denied and will be remembered.”

To gather the work for a book on the War in Ukraine, FotoEvidence put out an open call to photographers to send along photographs and witness accounts through their website, social media, and direct emails. They ended up receiving over 6000 photographs from more than 100 photographers along with written accounts.

From this trove of photographs and writings has come Ukraine: A War Crime. At 540 pages, the book contains 366 photographs and witness accounts, both in English and Ukrainian, from 93 photojournalists from 29 countries spanning the first year of the War in Ukraine. Its size and weight emphasising the importance of the subject matter it contains.

You can read more Blind Magazine.

Additional reads

Richard Kelly: Music Photographer Tells of Life Snapping Stars

The BBC had a great feature on music photographer Richard Kelly this month.

Across a career that has seen him photograph some of music’s most recognisable faces, Richard Kelly has built a portfolio and a reputation many can only dream of.

He even became Arctic Monkeys’ go-to man, documenting the band as they rose from relative unknowns to stadium stardom – and his photos have now formed the basis of a new exhibition in Manchester.

You can read the full article and see more of Kelly’s work over on the BBC website.

Raspberry Pi Camera Takes Photos Using AI Instead of Lens

Everyone’s talking about AI at the moment. In amongst the discussions about Photoshop’s insane new AI features and discussions on whether photographers are going to be out of a job, I came across this bizarre contraption this month.

This Raspberry Pi camera project, created by Bjørn Karmann, has no lens at all. In fact, Paragraphica, as he calls it, uses AI to generate an image based on your location data as well as a few other descriptors like date and weather.

The device looks somewhat like a classic camera. It has a huge cover over where a lens would be that resembles the nose of a star-nosed mole. The viewfinder is a screen in which you can adjust the settings for the generation of your picture. It also has a series of dials that can be adjusted to set things like film grain and sharpness for the AI program to integrate into the photo generation process. Pressing the capture button will trigger the system to generate a photograph for you based on the selected parameters.

Data used in the image generation is gathered using various open APIs. This includes things like your location, date, time, as well as nearby landmarks. Paragraphica uses all of this information to process the final photo using text-to-image AI.

You can read more about this quirky little thing over on Tom’s Hardware.

And finally – Repainting an Iconic 1980s Film Camera is a LOT of Work

I have a bit of a fascination with dismantling, fixing and cleaning old cameras. That said, it’s never occurred to me to paint one. Mainly because, well… why on earth would you want to?

I saw this paint job by Patrick Nichols pop up this month. He took apart a Minolta X-700 35mm SLR down to its core components to be able to redecorate his camera. He even removed individual springs, cogs and clips to be able to put paint exactly where he needed it and nowhere else.

I have no idea what the point of painting a camera is BUT I certainly admire the commitment and attention to detail Nichols took here. If you find this kind of thing as fascinating as me you’ll probably enjoy the video below!

Until next time…

I hope you enjoy the articles above. Don’t forget you can follow my Shadow & Light magazine over on Flipboard if you’d like to see more of what I’m reading if you like what you’ve seen here.