I gathered in one album what I consider the best black and white images I made in 2020. Topics include Covid, the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September, the dedication of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, also in September, and the November election. Through it all Washington, DC remains a beautiful, inspirational city.
What will 2021 bring?
Stella Tennant, iconic model and fashion designer, died in Scotland on December 22, 2020. She was 50 years old.
Culture and style critic Guy Trebay, writing for The New York Times, explains that Tennant had deep aristocratic roots but “wore her rarefied heritage lightly throughout her three-decade run in fashion.”
She was photographed by top photographers including Steven Meisel and Bruce Weber.
The end of an era, way too soon.
I recently started using Color Fidelity camera profiles in Adobe Lightroom. Color Fidelity camera profiles are an alternative to the standard camera profiles that come with Lightroom. To my eye, they look better. I use them as a starting point for my editing in Lightroom. They save me time.
There are several profiles for each camera model. I bought profiles for the Canon R5 and the Ricoh GRIII and am happy with them.
The profiles cost $15 per camera model. The developer improves them from time to time and emails the updated profiles for no additional charge. The profiles are small files and easy to install. He includes installation instructions with each purchase and update. I think they are well worth the money.
You can learn more about the profiles in this helpful video by John Gress:
Stacey Kent is an American jazz singer with a glorious voice. She was born in 1965 in New Jersey and is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College. Her paternal grandfather was a Russian who grew up in France. He later moved to the United States where he taught Kent French. Once she learned French, it was the only language she spoke with her grandfather. Kent travelled to England after college to study music in London, where she met saxophonist Jim Tomlinson, whom she married in 1991.
I have the impression Kent is better known in France than in the United States. Her album Raconte-moi was recorded in French and became the second best selling French language album worldwide in 2010.
Kent has also faced serious health challenges. In a 2004 interview with Robert Kaiser of The Washington Post, Kent recounted that she’s been in comas three times caused by brainstem encephalitis:
Each time, baffled doctors were not certain they could bring her back. The last coma was in 1999, and Tomlinson nursed her through it. On doctors’ advice, he brought records to her hospital room. When she awoke he was playing Mildred Bailey, one of the great jazz singers of the ’30s. “There’s just so much emotion in that voice,” Kent says. “It’s a cry - even when she’s singing a happy song.”
I love Stacey Kent’s music and discovered this marvelous 2018 interview en français with her. The interview is also available as a podcast.
From 2000 until 2009, Cultural Tourism DC led “Art on Call”, a city-wide effort to restore Washington’s abandoned police and fire call boxes as neighborhood artistic icons. Cultural Tourism DC partnered with the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the District Department of Transportation on this initiative. The project is now managed by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
Timothy Libert, a computer science faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, wrote in The New York Times in 2019:
The press has performed admirably in reporting on privacy violations by the National Security Agency and major internet companies. But news sites often expose users to the same surveillance programs and data-collection companies they criticize. Even articles that explained how the N.S.A. was using Google cookies to “pinpoint targets for hacking” often included the exact same cookies revealed by Edward Snowden. Likewise, articles about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica often include Facebook tracking code, allowing Facebook to keep tabs on what people read.
Libert points out that surveillance on news sites can reveal personal information like political leanings and health interests.
We all need to protect ourselves even when visiting “trusted” sources.
Fortunately, Libert’s site reports no trackers.
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