【推荐1】Participating in photography competitions can bring you various benefits. The following are four great photography competitions you may want to attend this year.

Communication Arts Photography Competition

Most photo competitions come with cash prizes. This competition doesn’t. But it is still a respected competition. To be qualified (符合资格的), your images need to be first produced or published in a period from the previous March to this March. Each participant can present five images at most, and the images must be created for the same project. The winning images will spread worldwide in Communication Arts and on commarts.com.

Sony World Photography Awards

The competition provides winners with cash prizes as well as Sony equipment. Another great thing about this competition is its travelling exhibition. No matter which country you are in, you can always notice the winning images. Participants are allowed to present five to ten images. You will love this competition because it is free to enter, and you can choose from many different categories (类别).

Moscow International Foto Awards

The goal of the competition is to discover and recognize talented photographers worldwide and introduce them to the creative community in Russia. There is a discount on entry fees for students. Participants can enter up to twenty images, both individual images and photo series in any of its nine categories.

Nikon Small World

Being a long-standing camera producer, Nikon has been running this competition since 1975. This competition is all about photomicrography. Anyone can enter, and each participant can present three images. If you don’t feel like entering even if it is free, checkout the previous winners. The images are amazing, and that might just get you in the mood for application.

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The National Gallery of Art is a public art museum in Washington, D.C. It contains a large collection of paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and other works of art. Come and enjoy some wonderful shows.

Present Exhibitions

Going Through Hell: The Divine Dante

April 9 — July 16, 2023

West Building, Main Floor, Gallery 10-11

Dante was an Italian poet and writer. His Divine Comedy has been one of the most powerful works in western literature for over 700 years. Come and explore the impacts of this great work in the collection of some 20 works, including the early prints of Divine Comedy, drawings on paper from the 15th to 20th century and more.

Drawing in Britain, 1700-1900: New Additions to the Collection

April 2 — August 6, 2023

West Building, Ground Floor

This exhibition includes about 80 recently acquired artworks. You can see not only traditional landscape paintings, but also many life-like portraits (肖像) and paintings of historical scenes.

These pieces are sure to give you an understanding of British art over two centuries.

Philip Guston Now

March 2 — August 27, 2023

East Building, Hall

Philip Guston is one of America’s most influential modern artists, famous in his time and in ours. Through more than 150 paintings and drawings, you can get a sense of the change of his artistic style through the years. His works continue to raise thoughts about beauty, freedom, and more.

Opening Times

The National Gallery of Art is open from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, including public holidays. Last admission is at 4:00 pm, one hour before closing.

Parking

There is no public parking at the National Gallery of Art, but limited parking spaces are set aside for visitors with disabilities. Parking is available on surrounding streets and in commercial garages.

If you have any questions, please call (202)737-4215 or send us an email at visit@nga. gov.

【推荐1】It’s time to put down the phone and look away from Instagram (一款照片分享应用程序): Researchers found that people who look at pictures of food are less likely to enjoy the next meal they eat.

Ryan Elder and Jeff Larson of Brigham Young University asked 232 people to look at photos of food and rate them. The researchers divided the participants into two groups-one group looked at 60 photos of desserts, while the other examined 60 photos of sally foods. Participants (参加者) ranked each photo based on how attractive the food looked. Afterward both groups enjoyed a snack of salted peanuts. The group that looked at pictures of salty foods liked the peanuts less than the group who looked at desserts, even though no one saw photos of peanuts.

“If you want to enjoy your meal, avoid looking at too many pictures of food,” Larson said. “Even I felt a little sick to my stomach during the study after looking at all the sweet pictures we had.”

The researchers believe that food doesn’t taste as good after viewing all those photos because looking at many photos makes people feel as if they have already experienced the sensation (感觉) of eating. Whatever someone eats after looking at photos doesn’t seem as good as what she saw.

“In a way, you’re becoming tired of that taste without even eating the food,” said Elder. “It’s sensory boredom-you’ve kind of moved on. You don’t want that taste experience anymore.”

But there is some good news: People need to look at a lot of food photos to experience sensory boredom. So if you want to enjoy your next brunch, play it safe and stay away from your foodie friend’s photo albums.

【推荐1】The 19th century landscape paintings in the museum looked awfully familiar to climate physicist Albright. Artist Turner’s signature way of covering his views in fog and smoke reminded Albright of her own research — tracking air pollution. After all, Turner —a forerunner of the impressionist movement — was painting as Britain’s industrial revolution gathered steam and smoke.

To find out how much realism there is in impressionism, Albright teamed up with Harvard University climatologist Peter Huybers. Their analysis of nearly 130 paintings by Turner, Paris-based impressionist Claude Monet and several others tells a tale of two modernizing cities.

Low contrast and whiter colors are typical of the impressionist style. They are also typical of air pollution. Tiny aerosols (气溶胶) can absorb or distribute light. That makes the bright parts of objects appear less bright while also shifting the entire scene’s color toward white.

Albright and Huybers distinguished art from aerosols by first using a mathematical model to analyze the contrast and color of 60 paintings that Turner made between 1796 and 1850 as well as 38 Monet works from 1864 to 1901. They then compared the findings to sulfur dioxide emissions (二氧化硫排放量) over the century and estimated from the trend in the annual amount of coal sold and burned in London and Paris. When sulfur dioxide reacted with molecules (分子) in the atmosphere, aerosols formed.

As sulfur dioxide emissions increased over time, the amount of contrast in both Turner’s and Monet’s paintings decreased. However, paintings of Paris that Monet made from 1864 to 1872 have much higher contrast than Turner’s last paintings of London made two decades earlier. They owed the difference to the much slower start of the industrial revolution in France. Paris’ air pollution level around 1870 was about what London’s was when Turner started painting in the early 1800s. It confirmed that the similar progress in their painting styles couldn’t be coincidence, but was guided by air pollution, the pair concluded.

【推荐2】In the west of Melbourne, more than 300 kids from six primary schools are going to use special school bags that can also check air quality. This helps scientists find ways to reduce air pollution. It’s part of a study called “Breathe Melbourne”, where kids will become air quality scientists by collecting important information while going to and from school.

Schools in this areas were picked for the research because they have high levels of air pollution and a lot of kids with asthma (哮喘病). This is because these areas used to have a lot of factories.

More kids in these areas go to the hospital for asthma compared to other parts of Australia. Professor Irving from a hospital said, “The Breathe Melbourne study is very significant because it focuses on children who are already at risk because of bad air quality, and it aims to reduce that risk and help with asthma.”

An engineer named James explained how the air quality readers work. There’s a fan in the bag that pulls in outside air towards the sensors (传感器). The bag also has a GPS tracker that helps experts see which areas have more air pollution.

In a recent study, the schoolchildren and some of their teachers are seen wearing the air quality bags on four days each week for a few months. Children change their roads and the ways they go to school in the experiment as healthier choices are found. In the research, children can be educated and will learn more about air pollution.

Dr. Kate Lycett, the lead researcher, hopes that the information they collect will force officials to take action. She said, “Every child should have fresh air to breathe. Where they live shouldn’t decide how clean the air they breathe is.”