Anyone at home can now view the vast and varied beauty of Colorado through the eyes of the state’s most celebrated landscape photographer.
History Colorado on Tuesday announced it had finished digitizing, cataloging and organizing a repository of more than 6,500 images of John Fielder’s illustrious career spanning close to 50 years. History Colorado had previously announced Fielder donating his life’s work in hopes of inspiring an appreciation of nature and climate action.
The photos found on the John Fielder’s Colorado Collection webpage can be pulled for private and commercial use. The site includes curated lists for viewers to explore the mountains and plains of every county in the state just as Fielder did.
For decades, the photos have been seen in coffee table books and across walls of homes and offices everywhere. That includes the office of Gov. Jared Polis.
“This photograph is a constant reminder of the natural wonders found in our state, which generations of conservationists, lawmakers and everyday people have fought to protect for the enjoyment of future generations,” Polis said in a news release. “This collection, and the exhibitions that will come from it, are a chance for us to celebrate John and all he has accomplished, but more importantly, to honor the legacy he has created and the gift he is giving to the people of Colorado.”
Later this summer, History Colorado expects to open an exhibit at its downtown Denver center affording a more intimate journey through Fielder’s career. Much of that career has been dedicated to conservation; Fielder has always sought lands and waters to photograph and show to lawmakers in charge of protection.
The collection “is a profound opportunity for Coloradans to see the breathtaking vistas that define the Centennial State,” History Colorado Executive Director Dawn DiPrince said in the news release, “and evaluate if the relationship we have with the land will allow for our grandchildren to experience the same wonders.”
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Upon the announcement of his donation, Fielder in an interview explained how he had seen landscapes change since he started photographing in the 1970s. In a life that saw him lose his wife to illness and son to suicide, Fielder described the loss of nature as heartbreaking as well.
“It’s like losing a wife and son, you think about them every day,” he said. “So too do I think about the impact humans have on Earth and what it’s going to be like here.”
In preparation for the donation, sifting through tens of thousands of files from his pre- and post-digital camera days gave him that reflection. It has been a deep time of reflection for Fielder, 72.
After months of quietly battling pancreatic cancer, he recently went public with the diagnosis.
One “incredible asset to (organizing the collection) is I revisited all these places that have defined my life, the most sublime places in Colorado,” Fielder said in a previous Gazette interview. “That was an incredible treat.”
He thought back to his father from his North Carolina childhood. He remembered the man for volunteering and raising money for charitable causes.
“He was a man who believed you have to give back to your community,” Fielder said. “I’ve been able to give back to my community, and I feel like no matter what happens to me, I’ve achieved all of my goals.”
Recently, a friend sent me a picture she had taken of a partially albino fawn deer that was found on her lawn. My friend knew not to disturb the fawn since the doe would be nearby.
Spring is here and young wildlife will frequently be seen. When encountering young wildlife, with no mother in sight, it is often believed the animal has been abandoned. This is when some people decide to intervene. However, in most cases, these young animals have not been abandoned.
The mother is nearby but out of human sight and watching over her young from a distance. Young fawns are camouflaged, with spots, to blend in with their surroundings. This provides protection from predators. An albino or partially albino will not blend in as well and not be as well protected. A partially albino animal is known as piebald.
The word piebald originates from a combination of pie, from magpie, and bald, meaning white patch or spot. The reference is to the distinctive black-and-white plumage of the magpie. Piebald refers to the absence of mature melanin-forming cells in certain areas of the skin and hair.
It is a rare autosomal dominant disorder of melanocyte.
We humans seem to seek the unusual, such as looking for a four-leaf clover, hoping that it will bring us good luck. However, walking under a ladder, breaking a mirror or a black cat crossing our path are all considered signs of bad luck. The belief that a broken mirror brings bad luck arises from the ancient Greeks, who believed spirits lived in reflective pools of water.
The fate that awaited the Greek mythological figure Narcissus could have grown out of this belief. When Narcissus saw his reflection in the water, he fell in love. Although in the beginning, Narcissus did not realize that it was just his own reflection and fell into despair when he understood that his love could not materialize and committed suicide.
Many stories have been told of hunters shooting white deer and never being lucky enough to kill another deer during his or her remaining years of life. This superstition of shooting a white deer comes from our Native American tribes, who considered the white deer sacred and bad luck for a hunter to kill.
These white deer were often called ghost deer and were a symbol of a spirit and an omen of good luck.
Albinos are individuals that show a lack of pigmentation and thus appear white or whitish. Technically, this abnormality results from a failure of the body to produce or distribute coloring pigments to the skin, hair, or feathers. Usually, this is an inherited trait, but it can occasionally result from an accident, improper diet or even psychological shock.
Albinism is known to affect mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Of course, albinism occurs in humans as well. People with albinism are generally healthy, with growth and development occurring as normal.
However, humans will suffer from impaired vision, with varying degrees. While albinism is a condition that cannot be cured or treated, small things can be done to improve the quality of life for those affected.
Many animals, with albinism, lose their protective camouflage and are unable to conceal themselves from predators. Usually, the survival rate of animals with albinism in the wild is quite low.
Albinism had been documented in 304 different species of birds, with the American robin being the most prone. Total albinism occurs when a bird or animal is entirely lacking color, being pure white with pink eyes. A partial albino animal is known as piebald or calico, showing a complete or partial lack of coloring in certain body areas. An animal is not a true albino if it lacks pink eyes.
Bill Bower is a retired Pennsylvania Game Commission Wildlife Officer. Read his blog and listen to his podcasts on the outdoors at www.onemaningreen.com.
An astro-photographer who captures the Goldfields skies has encouraged locals to appreciate the local starry nights.
Astro-photographer Graham Conaty said he did not think people realised how lucky they were to observe the skies in Western Australia — particularly not in Kalgoorlie-Boulder.
“It’s estimated that around three quarters of the world’s population have never seen the Milky Way with the naked eye and yet, you can walk out into your backyard in Kalgoorlie and make out that faint dust cloud of the Milky Way,” he said.
“You can very easily go into a lot of locations in and around Kalgoorlie where you can see almost make out with your naked eye the cloud of the Milky Way.
“You can point your camera up there, take an image for 20 or 30 seconds and the level of detail you’ll see and the formation of the Milky Way cloud on the back of the camera will be pretty instant.”
Starting his photography career as a sports photographer in 2014, Conaty said demand dried up during the COVID-19 period as no sports were being played.
“I’ve always done a lot of sort of landscape, nightscape and Milky Way in Kalgoorlie during that time, and I thought I’d pick up a telescope — if I can’t travel, then I’ll put my camera on the back of the telescope and just shoot some images from the backyard,” he said.
“So that’s kind of how it started with an intention of just attaching a DSLR to the back of the telescope.
“I very quickly ended up with a full dedicated astrophotography setup with a dedicated camera which has got a cool sensor and narrowband filters and things like that, so I just started off capturing sort of deep-sky nebula from the backyard and then moved into their using remote telescopes.”
Conaty explained each picture was a project which took him several weeks to produce using hydrogen, sulphur and oxygen filters.
“The more time you spend, the more integration time that you get on an image, the more colour and the more detail you get out of it and then the less noise so the less grain you get out of it as well,” he said.
“I will usually enter into the software, the type that I want to want to shoot so in this case, the Statue of Liberty nebula. That then automatically calculates the coordinates of where that’s located in the sky and it’ll give me the best sort of time to shoot that based on how high above the horizon that target is going to be.
“Because I use dedicated astrophotography mounts, the laptop sends those coordinates to the mount and then that automatically moves the telescope into the right position.”
He noted each picture was shot in black and white, before being assigned a colour to produce a coloured image.
“A lot of these —99 per cent, if not 100 per cent — of these images are completely invisible to the naked eye and that’s because there is very specific bandwidths of lights that allow those sort of details to be visible,” he said.
“By using dedicated filters, it blocks out a lot of that light and really sort of allows the specific wavelengths to come through to the camera. That’s what shows the details.
“If I photograph in hydrogen, so what you typically find is a lot of the red colours that you’ll see in nebula in the sky, are typical of hydrogen.”
He said astrophotography could be as expensive or cheap as people wanted it to be, with phones now able to capture stars with dedicated nightscape modes.
The Prospect Heights Natural Resources Commission (PH-NRC) and the Prospect Heights Public Library are co-sponsoring an entertaining and educational program by Peter Cairns, executive director of SCOTLAND: The Big Picture, via a virtual presentation from Scotland at 1 p.m. Thursday, April 20.
As a renowned visionary whose inspiring earth changing project has been highlighted by National Geographic, securing Cairns to speak is a major coup for the commission and library.
It wasn’t so long ago that vibrant, wild forests stretched across much of Scotland. Beavers and cranes were abundant in its extensive wetlands. Salmon and trout filled the rivers. Lynx, wolf and wild boar stalked wooded glades.
But today, Scotland has become one of the most ecologically depleted nations on Earth.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
A bold vision for the future is slowly emerging where native woodlands regenerate at a landscape scale; where damaged peatlands are restored; where rivers run freely and where oceans are full of life. This is the vision of a wilder Scotland — a place where nature works, where wildlife flourishes and crucially, where people thrive.
Using stunning imagery created by the SCOTLAND: The Big Picture photography team, this presentation showcases the country’s beauty and drama, but also poses an intriguing question: What should Scotland look like?
Peter Cairns has spent nearly three decades as a conservation photographer, videographer, nature tourism operator and environmental communicator. A longtime advocate for rewilding, Cairns previously directed major conservation media initiatives such as Tooth & Claw, Wild Wonders of Europe and 2020VISION. Five years ago, he founded SCOTLAND: The Big Picture, a charity that works to drive the recovery of nature across Scotland.
The Zoom program is free, but registration is required. To register, call (847) 259-3500, ext. 35, visit phpl.info or stop at the library’s information desk.
The program will be recorded and encore presentations will be shown at a later date.
Nature Speaks is a partnership between Prospect Heights Natural Resources Commission and the Prospect Heights Public Library.
Additional information about the Natural Resources Commission’s numerous native prairie restorations and other activities can be found at www.phnrc.com. One can also learn more about our area’s natural resources, native prairies, volunteer activity days, and other conservation information there as well.
SALT LAKE CITY — In a universe full of irony, one contradiction is this: Dark skies are not dark. When our sun sets at night, the “lights in the firmament” come out in the thousands, lighting the night sky.
But in the age of artificial lighting, these brilliant stars have, in many places, been extinguished by the lesser lights on Earth — incandescent, fluorescent, LED. Truly dark skies do not exist for much of the world’s population.
Yet in Utah, where Gov. Spencer Cox has declared April as Dark Sky Month for a third straight year, Utah’s dark skies still burn bright. Virtually all of Utah’s population is an afternoon’s drive away from one of the state’s 24 International Dark Sky Association-approved Dark Sky Parks or Places. In this unique place in the world, the dark skies movement continues to receive support from all sectors.
“We wish to recognize the efforts and advocacy of federal, state, local and non-profit agencies, as well as Utah’s recreation, tourism and education sectors, which make night sky opportunities in our state available for all to enjoy,” Cox’s declaration states.
Convincing the public that protecting the night sky is important, however, is difficult.
Why protect the darkness
Herriman city planner and International Dark Sky Association advocate Laurin Hoadley said the most common misconception about the organization’s movement is that “dark skies means ‘turn off all your lights.'”
Hoadley, who graduated in the first cohort of the Dark Sky Studies minor at the University of Utah, explained that the first step to reduce light pollution is for individuals to simply replace a bright light bulb with a warmer one.
“Personally, I feel like it is a no-brainer to at least try,” she said.
Astrophotographer and founder of NightSkyScience.com, Ryan Andreasen, has found more success in advocating for the night sky by personal experience than by any amount of scientific persuasion.
“I’ve got to have them touch it,” he said. Andreasen regularly teaches astrophotography classes at Antelope Island State Park. Going to a designated dark sky park and seeing the night sky for one’s self, he said, gets a person out of his or her “fish bowl” and leaves a lasting impact.
However, Utah’s growing population still threatens the night sky of at least one dark sky park designation. Antelope Island State Park assistant manager Wendy Wilson has long been a champion of Utah’s night, helping her park reach International Dark Sky Association standards in 2017. She explained that ever since then, the night sky over the island has grown brighter, as evidenced by regular measurements she takes by pointing a small sensor straight up into the night.
“It is minor,” she said, but lights from growing communities to the south and north of the island are suspect.
“More development means more lights; more lights means more light pollution,” Wilson said, adding that some communities are not as good as others at enforcing lighting ordinances.
Layton, which is east of the island, has one such lighting code. A city official told KSL.com that the city can only enforce the code on properties built under a specific code, but that city officials “definitely take all complaints seriously.”
We are protecting the highest concentration of accredited dark skies in the world.
–Lisa Stoner
Light pollution comes in four basic forms: glare, skyglow, light trespass and clutter. Skyglow, which washes out the stars, happens when light shines into the night sky “needlessly,” as most dark sky advocates will point out. By fully shielding, or covering light fixtures, “useful light” shines on the ground and not into the sky, according to the International Dark Sky Association website.
Once you’ve shielded your fixture, a warmer light — at 3000 Kelvins — will further help the night sky, said Wilson and Hoadley.
While Wilson and Hoadley, as well as Andreasen, each point out these measures individuals can take to help, many municipalities throughout the state have or are in the process of adopting dark sky lighting ordinances. A walk down the amber-colored paths winding through Ivins, in southern Utah, shows the fruits of their long-adopted ordinances. A survey of all residents last fall confirmed the importance of the night sky.
Torrey and Helper already hold the association’s Dark Sky Community status. The cities of Moab and Park City, as well as their respective counties, have adopted dark sky-friendly ordinances, which go into effect at the end of 2024.
How do you bring all these disparate groups together? That is the mission of the Colorado Plateau Dark Sky Cooperative, headquartered at Utah State University.
“We are protecting the highest concentration of accredited dark skies in the world,” said coordinator Lisa Stoner, who added that many of those designated dark sky parks fall within state boundaries.
On April 5, the Colorado Plateau Dark Sky Cooperative will host the first of four Quarterly Connections meetings, where it hopes to bring together people “ready to engage,” said Stoner, in the cause of the night sky. The cooperative also works with state and national park officials to enhance astro-tourist activities.
More than enough to share
Utah is also willing to share the night sky with others.
“We identify dark skies as an important travel motivator,” said Utah State Office of Tourism public relations manager Anna Loughridge.
This is because of the benefit that small, dark sky-friendly communities reap from visitors stopping and staying the night, so they can take in the night sky. Gas and a Snickers, Loughridge and Hoadley pointed out, turns into gas, dinner and a hotel room.
The Utah Office of Tourism has said that astro-tourism contributes to the state’s “Red Emerald Strategic Plan,” which promotes attractions that are “rarefied, distinctive, unique to Utah and highly coveted,” according to the office’s website.
“The night has a thousand eyes,” mused the poet Francis William Bourdillon, illustrating the stars that seem to blink. He continues pointing to the importance of the skies, and the sun, in particular.
While many human eyes, these days, cannot behold a truly dark sky, advocates and activists in Utah are hard at work to keep Utah’s dark skies shining.
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Ryan Boyce is a lover of science and history. His first writing project was compiling the history of space exploration on his 3rd grade teacher’s computer, and he hasn’t stopped writing since.
As astronomy enthusiasts from across WA, Australia and the world come to the Gascoyne to witness the upcoming solar eclipse, they will also be able to take a look at works from some of the State’s most talented astrophotographers at the Carnarvon Library & Art Gallery.
Visions of the Cosmos: Visionary Astrophotography is an exhibit which will feature a collection of West Australian astrophotography nighttime landscapes, constellations, deep space, planets, time-lapse images and of course, solar eclipse photography.
Organiser Dr John Goldsmith said astrophotography was all about finding new ways to look at our night sky, and he looked forward to sharing these examples with guests.
“As photographers, we love to document these amazing events, they often happen in fairly remote areas, and then through the exhibition we get to share them with the broader community,” he said.
Dr Goldsmith said his favourite piece was a photo featuring the Milky Way over Lake Ballard, near Kalgoorlie, featuring one of its well-known statues.
“It’s just a remarkable image,” he said.
For astrophotographers, moments like the upcoming eclipse are experiences to be treasured, and bring together likeminded stargazers from many corners of the globe.
“Total solar eclipses attract visitors from around the world . . . there’s going to be many international visitors, people from WA and around Australia as well.
“It’s definitely a highlight, astronomical events can be extraordinarily beautiful and memorable.”
The images will also be featuring in a book of the same name as the exhibition, which will launched at the same time.
The exhibition will launch the Carnarvon Library & Art Gallery on April 14 and run until May 20.
Digital Photography Review, a popular online resource for photographers, is shutting down after 25 years of service.
The website’s closure is part of the restructuring plans announced this year by Amazon, which acquired DPReview in 2007.
“The site will remain active until April 10, and the editorial team is still working on reviews and looking forward to delivering some of our best-ever content,” DPReview said in a message posted on its website on Tuesday.
“This difficult decision is part of the annual operating plan review that our parent company shared earlier this year,” it confirmed.
DPReview added that “everyone on our staff was a reader and fan of DPReview before working here, and we’re grateful for the communities that formed around the site.”
Within hours of DPReview announcing its closure on Tuesday, another site dedicated to photography, PetaPixel, revealed it was offering a home to Jordan Drake and Chris Niccolls, whose YouTube channel, DPReview TV, shares camera and lens reviews, along with photography tips and other related content.
The pair will be the faces of a new PetaPixel YouTube channel launching in May and offering similar content as DPReview TV while exploring a number of new photography-related themes.
It’s not the first time Drake and Niccolls have shifted sites, as five years ago they moved from The Camera Store to DPReview.
“The show is going on,” Niccolls said in a video posted on Tuesday. “Everything that you know and love about [DPReview TV] , you’re still going to know it, you’re still going to love it, we’re still going to be doing our technical gear reviews out in the field, which means out in freezing cold Calgary, Canada. That’s not going to change.”
So vast is DPReview’s database of reviews and other content that it’s likely you’ve landed on the site whenever you’ve researched a camera or lens, or sought out news related to the industry. It’s not clear if the site will remain online so that its valuable resources remain accessible to photography fans, but it will certainly feel like a waste if the site simply disappears from view next month.
The land of majestic saguaros attracts many visitors from across the pond each year. The diverse and prickly plant species that stand tall, like guardians that watch over the Sonoran Desert that is home to many resilient creatures. Even the kaleidoscope-colored sunsets are second to none. Many who leave, inevitably get back to where they once belonged.
Perhaps these are just a few reasons why Linda McCartney (nee Eastman) felt a kinship to Tucson.
UA’s Center for Creative Photography is hosting the North American premiere of, “The Linda McCartney Retrospective,” from Saturday, Feb. 25, to Saturday, Aug. 5.
It celebrates McCartney’s barrier-breaking career that spanned across three decades.
“We will have not only the exhibition at the CCP, but also an incredible range of campus and community events and opportunities for engagement,” said Andrew Schulz, dean of the College of Fine Arts.
The exhibition, which will include about 200 pieces, will be divided into three broad groupings including “Artists,” “Family” and “Photographic Exploration.” McCartney’s work opens avenues for investigation and exploration, Schulz said.
Roots in Tucson
Born and raised in New York state, McCartney was an UA art history student. Her formal photography training extended to just two lessons at a night school.
Once she married Paul McCartney, the two bought land here in Tucson, a ranch in the Tanque Verde area, near the Rincon Mountains.
“In addition to exposing the public to Linda McCartney’s iconic work, this collection will allow our students and faculty throughout the university to learn from her innovative creative process and devotion to important societal issues,” said UA president Robert C. Robbins in a statement.
“The McCartney exhibit is allowing us to really showcase the other extraordinary pieces of the CCP,” added Staci Santa, interim director of the Center for Creative Photography. “A lot of people don’t know that we have a robust archives collection and the breadth of work we have under that little roof, millions of objects and for us to be able to showcase that in a meaningful way while we’re engaging the music scene in Tucson.”
The Center for Creative Photography houses the work of more than 2,200 photographers including co-founder Ansel Adams, David Hume Kennerly, Lola Alvarez Bravo and W. Eugene Smith and houses close to 9 million objects.
Rebecca Senf, chief curator of the Center for Creative Photography, said it has an extensive history with the McCartney family in addition to their long-standing relationship to Tucson.
“I think the landscape here meant a tremendous amount to her and she’s a horsewoman so being in Tucson allowed them to keep horses,” Senf said.
A McCartney archive is in London where Paul and their children live. Senf and Megan Jackson Fox, associate curator of the Center for Creative Photography, visited the archive to see primary source documents and talk with the archivist Sarah Brown about McCartney’s work.
“Being in the archive and working with the archivist allowed us to do a kind of research that augmented the retrospective as it was seen in other locations,” Senf said.
In terms of Tucson, Senf said Fox is doing a show about McCartney’s teacher, Hazel Larsen Archer, which expands the discussion about McCartney’s photographic education as it happened in Tucson.
Archer was an American female photographer during the 20th century, who attended and taught at Black Mountain College in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was a hub for intermedia, cross-medium avant-garde work in the United States for dance or photography for painters, musicians and architects.
The “vibrant community” was known for matriculating influential individuals of the latter half of the twentieth century including Willem de Kooning, whose work “Woman-Ochre”’ was recently returned to the UA’s Museum of Art after being stolen in 1985.
In Tucson, Archer worked at Pima Community College and the Tucson Art Center, later known as the Tucson Museum of Art. She also helped found other colleges as a photographer, photo educator and art educator.
“She brought all of that knowledge, energy and dynamism with her,” Fox said. “That was really the foundation for Linda McCartney and her education in photography.”
Senf said the Center for Creative Photography wanted to explore McCartney’s work further and look at how she had experimented in photography through her process and practice by analyzing the results she had obtained through various experimentations.
click to enlarge
(Photo Courtesy of UA Center for Creative Photography)
To curate the exhibit, Fox said, took intensive research. From the McCartney archives to the Archer estate in Tucson. Fox said she worked closely with it and Archer’s daughter.
“We have a really long runway for creating these exhibitions, they can be three to five years if not more,” Fox said.
Additionally, about 50 undergraduate students from the college of humanities are working with the Center for Creative Photography, learning from the Archer images, materials from the McCartney exhibit and El Pueblo Neighborhood Center and building community projects.
“We’ll have the Hazel Larsen Archer exhibition open with the McCartney exhibition and then in May we will put the students’ projects in the center of that exhibition,” Fox said. “So, you have this intergenerational conversation happening.”
As a photo historian, Senf said that one of the center’s strengths is moving from archive to exhibition and using materials so audiences can benefit from the wealth of an archive.
“I think that it was really fun writing the labels of the musicians’ section because I was imagining various audience members seeing pictures of Neil Young, Jim Morrison or Bob Dylan from the time that they were young and listening to these musicians as young people,” Senf said.
The Center for Creative Photography has been working with students from the Honors College, building audio tour guides for the exhibition. “Sir Paul McCartney has even offered to respond to any of their questions that they have,” Fox said.
McCartney’s photographs include some of the greatest artists and cultural icons of all time such as Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix and, of course, The Beatles.
“These are people who changed the course of American culture and Western culture and so it was really interesting to think about all of that and how to provide the supporting information that would allow different audiences to deeply appreciate the photographs that were there,” Senf said.
The more profound images include intimate family photographs of Paul, Linda and their children. Of Linda McCartney’s level of fame and visibility, Senf said that she displays a level of joy of family life the way anyone else might or playfulness between two romantic partners.
“I think she did a really exceptional job of making people comfortable in the presence of the camera so that you see people in a candid way,” Senf said. “The way she helped people feel at ease and able to be more themselves.”
McCartney’s techniques
McCartney mostly worked with a 35-millimeter handheld camera, which Senf said suits her style and her approach, allowing her to be more spontaneous and less obtrusive.
The exhibition will also include a group of about 60 Polaroids, or facsimiles of Polaroids because Polaroids fade really quickly when exposed to light. This feature of the exhibition can convey to the audience McCartney’s spontaneity and snapshots of casual moments.
“If you think about Linda McCartney as the centerpiece of the project, then everything is kind of coming from and inspired by her right as a photographer, as a person as an activist,” Fox said.
Calling the exhibition the heartbeat of McCartney’s photography, Fox said that there will be an accompanying lecture series starting on opening day.
“Women’s rights were an important part of her activism and her interests and so we’re going to have two photographers who are also entrepreneurs who are going to come and speak about their projects, on women in photography and what they’re doing to help amplify women in photography and to help steward their careers inside of the larger photographic field,” Fox said.
McCartney who was also a food and animal activist was well known for her vegetarian lifestyle. Fox said that the Center for Creative Photography will have a photographer and artist who works at the intersection of food studies talk about her work inspired by indigenous foods.
In addition to the lecture series, the Center for Creative Photography is planning pop-up community tables at the Children’s Museum, farmers markets and the Phoenix Art Museum to talk about sustainability and food issues, food equity in relation to photography.
“That’s another way for us to build bridges from the institution to your everyday world and I think that’s really important that we break the four walls of a gallery so that we are very open,” Fox said.
The Center for Creative Photography will also have weekly live performances from musicians. “That also harks back to Linda for her love of music and her relationship to music over the context of her life,” Fox said. “We’re trying to create doorways for every interest.”
Fox said that she hopes museum visitors get to know McCartney as an amazing photographer, but also as someone who had a variety of interests.
“You bring all of that life into an image and into a practice,” Fox said. “I hope we as an institution continue to do this for the photographers that we exhibit, that we show this entirety of a person and what that means to the photographs themselves.”
With less than two months to go, the full line-up of events forming the Dark Sky Festival has been unveiled as preparations for the April 20 total solar eclipse intensify.
The four-day festival will take place across the shires of Exmouth, Carnarvon and Ashburton to celebrate the rare, global spectacle which is happening right in our own backyard.
Thousands will flood to the region, which will offer the world’s best views of the eclipse, with accommodation in the main towns more or less sold out.
Live music, family-friendly activities, unique dining experiences, stargazing tours and photography lessons for budding astronomers are all part of the Dark Sky festival program.
The festival will include the inaugural Jamba Nyinayi Festival, a Baiyungu Aboriginal Corporation event hosted by traditional owner Hazel Walgar at Cardabia Station near Coral Bay on April 19. It will feature a drone show by Fremantle Biennale with storytelling from traditional owners as well as local and original Indigenous music, dance, food and fire.
Music lovers will be able to enjoy live performances from local and Perth musicians over three days at SolFest to be staged at Exmouth’s Talanjee Oval from April 19-21. SolFest is free to attend for those with existing accommodation in Exmouth.
A seaside seafood barbecue will be held in Exmouth, as well as a “Totality Brunch” at the town’s yacht club.
Fremantle Biennale’s Aboriginal-inspired drone show will also take place on Exmouth’s Town Beach in Exmouth on April 20.
The program also consists of a series of stargazing sessions with Astrotourism WA astronomy guides, an astrophotography exhibition and workshops, SciTech STEM-based activities for children and public talks, including from popular WA astronomer Greg Quike.
Carnarvon will host the April 2023 Rocks Carnarvon Festival from April 15-22, which will offer community star gazing, virtual reality experiences, Aboriginal night sky stories with bush tucker and a day-long music festival on April 20.
The eclipse will occur over a three-hour period, with totality — when the sun, moon and Earth align — expected at 11.29am in Exmouth.
Exmouth will experience 100 per cent of the eclipse, while Onslow and Coral Bay will experience 99 per cent darkness and Carnarvon about 95 per cent,
The McGowan Government has invested almost $22 million to prepare for the eclipse, including improving the region’s infrastructure.
Tourism Minister Roger Cook said the Government was committed to making the eclipse and surrounding events a memorable experience for visitors and creating a “lasting legacy” for Exmouth, Carnarvon and Ashburton shires.
“The eclipse is not only going to be an extraordinary and rare astronomical event. It will also be an experience to remember for visitors who spend time in the region,” he said.
“This festival will also act as a celebration of Aboriginal tourism and culture, and Western Australian food and wine, for the lucky visitors already heading to the Shires of Ashburton, Carnarvon or Exmouth for the solar eclipse.”
Ticketed events for Dark Sky Festival went on sale last week. For more information, visit ningalooeclipse.com.
Mayor Cllr Sandra Holliday presented certificates to the winners and highly commended
To celebrate 35 years of twinning between the twin towns of Cheltenham and Weihai in China, an amateur photo competition was organised, with the theme ‘One planet … many ways to care for our environment’.
The entries were judged by representatives of Cheltenham Twinning Association and Cheltenham Camera club, who felt the successful photos captured people’s interactions with nature illustrating images that motivate us to live sustainably.
The winners:
Steph Gore, Ist place with the image ‘Peace at Last’
David Elder, 2nd place, ‘Weeding in Naunton Park’
Balcarras school pupil Joha Nawar, 3rd prize with the image of ‘Save the Bees’.
Highly commended went to Tim Howarth and David Hyett.
Mayor Cllr Sandra Holliday said: ‘’It’s always a privilege to see people’s creativity flourish to mark a special occasion. I was impressed by the quality of entries that demonstrate interactions with nature to help motivate us to live sustainably. Congratulations to all and special thank you to Cheltenham Camera Club for their assistance with this project.’’
All images can be viewed on the Cheltenham Twinning Association website.
For press enquiries contact communications@cheltenham.gov.uk 01242 264 231
Image single use only. Steph Gore with Mayor of Cheltenham Cllr Holliday.
