Sunday Stills: Signals From Djibouti - photo tips from Nat Geo

Watch: Mesmerizing "Stormscapes" Dominate Skies View the email on a web browser. Sunday Stills ISSUE 11 Sunday, February 23, 2014 PROOF Signals From Djibouti PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN STANMEYER Photographer John Stanmeyer on “Signals,” named the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year: “Speaking to many of them, the stories were always the same: the desire to reconnect to family, asking for remittance or updates on emigration papers from family living in Europe. Not all attempts to catch the signal were fulfilled. Some would stand in one place for 20 to 30 minutes, waiting for their phone to grab the faint signal that never appeared, only to return another evening to try once more.” READ PROOF Photographer Adrienne Grunwald on Her Artifacts PHOTOGRAPH BY ADRIENNE GRUNWALD “When I left for Brazil in 2010, I packed up my studio apartment and put all of the seemingly unnecessary possessions from my previous life in boxes. Four years later, I have yet to open most of those boxes and am not sure that I ever will. This collection of artifacts [includes] some of the things that I have kept close. In a way, what I have collected are small clues to my history, a narrative toward the future I intend to live, and some reminders of the lessons that I have learned along the way.” LOOK YOUR SHOT Capturing Nostalgia PHOTOGRAPH BY Margherita Vitagliano Margherita Vitagliano works with her subjects to find a photo of them when they were young. “I relate the memories that the photos arouse in them, the music, smells, and flavors of those special moments, and when I [have them] close their eyes, it is they who are reliving that past. When I have them open them, it is as a spectator looking into their eyes that I can feel on my skin what they have heard with their eyes closed.” This passion for portraits and old photos had very personal origins. “The first photograph that meant something to me was of the hands of my grandmother holding an old photo. All of it happened one afternoon when I looked at old photographs in black and white, found in an attic in a box,” Vitagliano reminisces. READ PROOF Aaron Huey Remembers a Folk Art Visionary PHOTOGRAPH BY AARON HUEY Photographer Aaron Huey on Leonard Knight: “This week America lost one of its greatest living folk artists, a man who I had photographed many times, a man who had become my friend. His name was Leonard Knight, and he was the artist who built the monumental work known as Salvation Mountain. “Leonard was one of those men who was so singular of vision that from a distance some would bush it off as crazy. But it didn’t take much to realize what Leonard was. Just a conversation and you would know—this man was a saint, an American sadhu in the desert of southern California. The mountain was his living daily meditation.” READ WEIRD AND WILD ‘There’s a lot of complexity to be had in a fish.’ PHOTOGRAPH BY Adam Summers Adam Summers, a professor and associate director at the Friday Harbor Labs at the University of Washington, has been taking überintricate photographs of fish for about 18 years to help him in his biomechanics research. “I suspect that part of what makes these fetching is that there’s an almost unlimited level of detail,” said Summers, who was also a science consultant for the movie Finding Nemo. “The images allow you to look really, really, really closely, but they also allow you to step back and sort of appreciate a large form. To get to that level of fractal detail is somehow viscerally appealing to people.” READ CORRECTION: In Issue 10 of Sunday Stills, Felix Baumgartner’s coach and mentor was misidentified as Joe Kissinger. His name is Joe Kittinger. Show Your Support: SHOP DONATE SUBSCRIBE TRAVEL BECOME A MEMBER You are receiving this email because bpi.hgmp.jusgein@blogger.com is signed up to receive National Geographic communications. If you prefer not to receive emails from us, please unsubscribe. To ensure that you receive your National Geographic emails, please add ngs@e.nationalgeographic.com to your address book now. Learn how. Contact Us | Privacy Policy | About Us | Customer Service National Geographic | 1145 17th Street N.W. | Washington, D.C. 20036 Copyright © 2014 National Geographic Society. All Rights Reserved.