Mt. Rainier is seen in this photograph taken in June 2015. Photo by Matt Dieterich. Dieterich is represented by Capestany Films / Creative Endeavors Talent Management

Most people alive today have never seen the Milky Way.

It’s a void that Matt Dieterich, a night sky photographer, has spent his life attempting to fill.

“Humans connect to the night sky, and it’s gone back for centuries,” he said. “As long as people have been around, we’ve wondered.”

When Dieterich took the photo seen above, he was working as an intern astronomy ranger in Mt. Rainier in 2015, educating visitors about the night sky. He used a Nikon D750 with a 24mm lens, a tripod and a shutter cable release. He took 200 photos, each on an eight-second exposure, and combined the backgrounds from each of those photos to form the photo’s backdrop.

The result is stunning: an image of stars in motion. The photo was just selected as a new Forever stamp to commemorate the centennial of the National Parks Service.

A photo posted by Matt Dieterich (@mattdieterichphotography) on Apr 17, 2016 at 12:15pm PDT

Dieterich’s fascination with the night sky has inspired him to become an art-driven activist against light pollution, which he says is “only getting worse as development continues in cities.”

“We can reclaim the night sky,” he said. “We can change the way we light cities. We can reclaim a resource that inspires science, that inspires religion and art.”

Dieterich, who is working now as a research geologist in West Virginia, said he hopes his photographs will encourage people to limit light pollution.

A photo posted by Matt Dieterich (@mattdieterichphotography) on Apr 7, 2016 at 8:05am PDT

Dimming the lights at night and reconsidering the positioning of city lighting would help, he said. Bright lights aimed upward, such as at billboards, add to light pollution. So do lights that shine continuously instead of operating on a sensor, he said.

“My goal is to get folks outdoors. To get them involved to protect the night sky,” he said.

The post This stargazing photographer wants to inspire an end to light pollution appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Mastodon— Mastodon at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. Try to get a variety of shots, including full band shots, in addition to close-ups of single musicians. Photo by Leon Armour Jr./Visual Stimuli Studios

WASHINGTON — Leon Armour Jr. was photographing the hardcore punk band the Cro-Mags in Washington, D.C., when a stage-diver crashed into his camera.

“This kid climbed up on the stage and landed on me and kicked me. Everyone was laughing. I turned around and hit him upside the head with the camera. It stunned him pretty good,” he recalled.

The camera, an old titanium Nikon, was fine. And the concert-goer lived to see the encore.

That’s the life of a concert photographer.

“You can’t stop a mosh pit,” said Armour, of Visual Stimuli Studios, who has photographed hundreds of shows. He gave us five more tips on how to take great concert photos:

1. Make nice with your neighbors

Tell people around you that you’ll be taking photos of the first few songs to encourage them not to bump into you. “Try to get them on your side,” Armour said (although it might not have helped at the Cro-Mags).

Andrew Stockdale of Wolfmother. A single colored light can affect your image and draw in the viewer. Photo by Leon Armour Jr./Visual Stimuli Studios

2. Don’t use a flash

Bands don’t like it. Instead, use the stage lighting to illuminate the musicians. Scope out the stage lights before the concert begins, if you can.

“I like to look at the setup of the stage, the lights and band equipment beforehand so I can know what kind of lighting to expect,” said Armour.

During the show, the lighting goes from light to dark, and colors change. Use a camera with a lens that has a wide aperture — which collects more light — to help in dim settings, he said.

This photo of Body Count is an example of getting to know the size of the room, where you can and cannot shoot from, the size of the stage and the kinds of stage lighting. Photo by Leon Armour Jr./Visual Stimuli Studios

3. Vary your shots

It seems counter-intuitive, but don’t shoot directly in front of the lead singer, Armour said. “The mic is often blocking their face. You’re always shooting up. Rarely are you on their level. The best angles are from the side,” he said.

Try to get the musician’s dominant side. If they’re holding a guitar, and it points to the left, they’ll lean to the right. That’s where you want to be. “You’ll get more of their face that way,” Armour said.

Not every shot has to be a head shot. Get some full-body ones, some with the instrument, some just of the instrument, and some with the whole band.

Get to know the size of the room and whether you can move around or not. If you can back up far enough, take a few pictures that include part of the audience for variety.

4. Don’t erase your photos until you get home

It’s tempting, especially if you’re using a camera phone with limited space, to delete photos that you think aren’t good. Resist the temptation.

“Even a shot that’s not completely in focus can still really be a good shot. It could be the essence of the band. Look at them in a separate setting. Look at them all,” Armour said.

Drummer Brann Dailor of Mastodon. This photo shows how even in low light, if the colors are soft (red) and bright (yellow), they can make an image pop and draw in your eyes. Photo by Leon Armour Jr./Visual Stimuli Studios

5. Be flexible and patient

Bands can decide, even up to the last minute, that they don’t want pictures or videos taken of their shows. Abide by their decisions.

“Sometimes it has nothing to do with the photographers at all; maybe they didn’t have the right wine backstage,” said Armour. “Be prepared to change.”

Or wait. Armour was photographing an after-hours party in New York City where Grace Jones was supposed to perform, but she was three hours late. He stuck it out while the other photographers left.

During the delay, Armour met one of Jones’ friends and got to go backstage to meet the singer. “She was very nice,” he said. “She was shorter than I thought.”

Roll with it, and embrace the unexpected. “When you’re shooting a landscape, you know exactly what you’re going to get,” Armour said. “One of the reasons why I love shooting live bands: each experience is a different one.”

The post 5 ways to take great concert photos without being a jerk appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

On Sunday, we lost one of our own.

David Gilkey, an NPR photojournalist who documented both tragedy and hope, was killed in Afghanistan along with NPR's Afghan interpreter and fellow journalist Zabihullah Tamanna.

David joined NPR in 2007. His work added the visual to an organization devoted to sound. David's images presented the atrocities of war, the destruction of nature — and most importantly, their impact upon people. His photographs and videos were haunting in their beauty and poignant in their nuance. Every person and every scene was captured with care, moving beyond the news to the personal struggle and perseverance of the people who lived it.

David covered war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti and the Ebola epidemic in Liberia. He spent time with Syrian refugees in Toledo, Ohio, and captured the stories of schoolchildren in Kabul. He took us to the edges of India and into the homes of Americans. He felt especially close to U.S. servicemen and women, taking every opportunity to highlight the sacrifices they made in the face of grave danger. But he also found humor in the dark moments, recognizing that even in the worst times, there could still be tenderness.

David brought us the world and made us all care.

"It's not just reporting. It's not just taking pictures," he said about the work he did in Haiti. "It's, 'Do those visuals, do the stories, do they change somebody's mind enough to take action?'

"So if we're doing our part, it gets people to do their part. Hopefully."

What follows is but a small selection of David's remarkable work.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

I first met David at a departure gate in the Miami airport. It was January 2010, and Haiti had just been hit by the devastating magnitude 7.0 earthquake. The Port-au-Prince airport was heavily damaged, all flights were canceled, and we were trying to figure out how to get there.

It was the start of what I came to call my "Travels with Gilkey." We did multiple trips that year to Haiti to cover the immediate aftermath of that quake— and later the slow, slow process of rebuilding.

We also caught a military cargo flight into Tacloban in the Philippines after it had been shattered by Typhoon Haiyan. The flight landed in the middle of the night. We tried to sleep under a tarp next to the runway but ended up lying there awake.

"The most bizarre thing last night was getting off that plane," he said to me as the sun started to come up. "Because when you got off the plane and you walked over to the terminal, there was some sort of light behind it, so it was backlit like a haunted house. And you realize there are probably a thousand people there cowering under plastic because it was raining.

"I turned on my headlamp and all I saw were eyes — did you see that? Really weird. I've never come in anywhere where — like, even in Haiti, where ... we sort of knew where to go to set up a base. And this really was ... we still don't have the foggiest idea what we're going to do."

Our lives seemed to converge in some of the most difficult places in the world — in the midst of disasters, disease outbreaks, wars — and David was always ready to jump right in. He'd say, "Hey, man." And off we'd go.

Physically, David was big, and at first he could come across as gruff or imposing. He shaved his head and often sported a short beard. But underneath his burly exterior he was incredibly thoughtful, and very sensitive to the plight of people we were trying to cover.

We covered the 2011 tsunami in Japan and the ensuing Fukushima nuclear disaster. In the aftermath, David and I walked through a field of rubble.

"This guy goes riding past me on a bicycle," David recalled in an interview on NPR a few months later. "And I just kind of watched him go off into the distance. He went sort of climbing up into the remains of this house, and I went over, and he picked up this shoe. And he just held it up and he started crying. I wasn't taking pictures, and he said, 'This is my mother's. This is all I have.' "

Eventually, after we'd interviewed the man, David snapped, in his words, "a couple of frames" — and those frames captured the enormity of this tsunami. They took an unfathomably large disaster and distilled it down to one man's story, one man's grief, one man's loss.

Those shots also showed his style. They showed how he engaged with the people we were documenting.

He would do that on story after story.

We often just referred to him as "Gilkey."

"Who you traveling with?" "Gilkey."

"We've got some Gilkey photos to go with the story."

"Where's Gilkey flying in from?"

He was a quirky guy to travel with. On all the trips we did to incredibly hot places, he always refused to put on sunscreen — even when his shaved head was peeling and red. But then at night he would pontificate on the secrets of skin care in the desert: "Moisturize, moisturize, moisturize!"

He viewed frequent flier miles as a competition, which I always was losing. He loved to tell the story about the time he cashed in 100,000 miles or something like that, and upgraded to a first-class cabin on Emirates where you could arrange a shower and order a medium-rare steak from a giant touch screen in front of you. Just days before that, he'd been embedded with U.S. forces in Afghanistan, eating PowerBars and sleeping in the dirt.

He wasn't a cowboy. Some might think that anyone who spends that much time in war zones must be cocky and believe they are invincible, but David wasn't that way.

He knew the dangers. He thought about the dangers. He saw the people being blown up and killed around him.

Speaking to Scott Simon in 2010 after seven weeks in Afghanistan, he questioned whether he was pushing his luck.

"I go back and forth between Afghanistan every year. I went to Iraq every year," he said. "And it was always the question among the journalists, I think: 'When you leave, do the dice reload? Or are you just stacking up bad karma?' And I don't have an answer to that."

David didn't just do war and disaster photography. He shot a travel series on Siberia, covered the U.S. elections, did a project on gray wolves in Montana. On a trip to Cuba he defied his editor's anti-cliche edict and shot a sequence on vintage cars— photos the editor ultimately loved.

Recently he'd told me that he felt it was getting harder and harder to cover the world's wars and armed conflicts. He often talked about how important the war in Afghanistan was, but how it might get to the point where you just couldn't cover it.

His dedication to that war already had cost him dearly. He'd watched relationships fall apart. He'd lost friends and seen others badly wounded.

On Sunday it cost him his life. David Gilkey was 50 years old.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

How do you cover an incomprehensible disaster and make people connect with the real lives behind the headlines?

David Gilkey knew how.

His photos have helped define our coverage of global health and development at Goats and Soda. They have a tremendous warmth and humanity that reflects his own compassionate heart and soul.

Gilkey was killed Sunday, on assignment for NPR in Afghanistan. His interpreter Zabihullah "Zabi" Tamanna died as well during a grenade attack on their Humvee.

We asked his NPR colleagues, present and past, to pick a favorite photo and share a memory.

What A Funny Man

They all laughed when they saw him. What a funny man, with his sunburned cheeks and baseball cap. Cameras dangling off both shoulders. So tall! The 6- and 7-year-olds were most impressed. They moved around the trunks of his legs, cautious at first and then, when he looked down at them, all crinkly eyes and conspiratorial smile, a bit more daring. They pulled on his pants legs, jumped in front of the camera. Boys in front, girls around the edges. And he just waited and looked down at them, and shrugged at Zabi and me as we watched and laughed at him.

All morning he stood in that school courtyard in Kabul, Afghanistan, being his funny self until the kids were so comfortable they mostly forgot he was there. Eventually, they left his side in twos and threes, headed for the snack lines. Girls on the left, boys on the right. And when a 6-year-old girl emerged grasping her lunch, he stooped down and she looked up.

-Rebecca Hersher

Dawn In Afghanistan

This was dawn at Camp Dwyer in Helmand. It was superhot, and the early mornings were about the only time of day where the temperature was tolerable. We were two weeks into a monthlong trip, and had spent time with U.S. Special Forces in Wardak province, and then covered the closing up of the last U.S. Army outpost in the Arghandab River Valley. The last time David and I were together at Dwyer before this, it was all tents and baby powder dust, but by 2013, when I took this photo, there were hard roads and plywood buildings.

-Graham Smith

Portraits With Dignity

David shot dignity. That was the secret to his amazing portraits, which I saw him take from Alaska to Pakistan — people knew when they met him that they counted to him.

I'm hearing from American war vets he covered — some when they were climbing mountains, some when they were hitting rock bottom. One formerly homeless vet wrote, "I remember him being a kind man who tried to help me steal a cot, and bought me lunch. Thank you for the opportunity to meet him ... Til' Valhalla brother."

Afghan friends are calling me in grief and disbelief — guys who broke bread with David every time he visited Afghanistan, stayed with him when they came to the U.S. His loyalty as a friend met their standard. His dedication to those people leaves us with a terrible burden to pick up. I'm afraid no one can.

-Quil Lawrence

A Dying Boy

It's one of the most poignant images of the Ebola outbreak: a tiny, 10-year-old boy sick with Ebola lies dying in an alleyway in Liberia's capital as a neighbor covers him with a blanket.

"It was just gut-wrenching," Gilkey later told NPR's All Things Considered. "Because he was lying there all by himself, and everybody was walking by him, and he was, you know, slowly being covered in flies. It was really a scene of sort of a slow death. ... You just wanted to pick him up. You wanted to get him dressed, and you wanted to get him somewhere safe. But you couldn't."

You couldn't because Ebola was so contagious. And Gilkey didn't take the threat lightly. I remember sitting with him and NPR producer Nicole Beemsterboer in an airport lounge en route to Liberia. As we hammered out our plan, it became clear that David was really worried about the possibility of contracting Ebola. Nicole and I exchanged glances. This was one of the most battle-hardened photojournalists in the business — a man who had survived firefights in Afghanistan yet kept going back. If he was this afraid, what were any of us doing here?

But as soon as we hit the ground, we learned the true nature of David's celebrated bravery: It's not that he was fearless but rather that he was absolutely committed to putting his fears aside to do his journalism. And it's not that he was reckless, either. He was zealous about taking precautions. But there are risks you cannot control. We talked about this one night, when I confessed to feeling waves of dread wash over me each time we drove back into a particular neighborhood where we had been caught up in a violent riot a few days earlier. Sometimes, David counseled, you just have to push through the fear. It became our little mantra as we set out each morning. "Push through the fear!" Gilkey would call out, flashing his wry, crooked little grin.

-Nurith Aizenman

Following The Body Collectors

David spent two days shooting "They Are The Body Collectors: A Perilous Job In The Time Of Ebola." He followed a team charged with removing bodies of people who had died of — or were suspected of dying of — Ebola.

It was the most dangerous story we did. One drop of infected body fluid from a known victim of the virus could kill you. Yet he followed the collectors into houses and approached the bodies with them. He wanted to get it right.

I think that bears repeating: He went into the houses and up to the bodies, and he wanted to get it right.

This was August 2014. Our reporting team — David, myself and correspondent Nurith Aizenman — were among the first in Monrovia to document the Ebola crisis. No one was shaking hands for fear of transferring the virus; we soaked our shoes and hands in chlorine wash every time we went in and out of our hotel; officials took our temperature every time we entered a government building. People were so scared that there were fewer than five international journalists in all of Liberia.

David wanted to get it right because he knew that if he did, people would sit up and pay attention.

He spent another day on the script and "tracking" the video — that's the term we use to refer to a reporter's narration. We holed up in a hotel room, crouched over a laptop, going back through the video again and again and again, getting the script right, the words right. Then he burrowed away in a closet with a towel over him to track, with me just outside of it, holding the mic. He went over every word, every intonation, again and again, until he got it right.

The video and David's images were published, and people did sit up and pay attention. Thinking about that day and that trip, I can't shake this sinking feeling that there is so much work for him now left undone.

-Nicole Beemsterboer

A Delight To Edit

I mean, look at this guy. Gilkey made photo editing such a delight. I remember when this one came through. The story was about a rally in a remote Afghan village, where president Hamid Karzai was campaigning for re-election. People showed up in droves, some dressed to the nines. This photo has been hanging in my home for years, maybe because I've always thought this guy was like Gilkey's Afghan spirit animal, with a camera in hand and a clear appreciation for fine fashion accessories. He's wearing a DG (Dolce & Gabbana) belt. Rest in peace, DG.

-Claire O'Neill

Too Close With Comfort

In January 2009, David filed a heartbreaking story from the Gaza strip. I remember flipping through his images and being absolutely gutted by this portrait of 16-year-old Ahmed Samouni. David broke so many of the rules I had learned studying photojournalism. Editing his images was a re-education of sorts — extreme light, getting impossibly close to the subject, subjects dead center, like Ahmed, for maximum impact. I couldn't shake the innocence lost but captured in this image. Sitting at my desk, far from the reality of this moment, I became profoundly aware of the toll living through these images must have taken on him. I'm deeply thankful for all he taught me as a photographer, and for all his tips when it came to our shared love of leather boots and expensive bags. I hugged him goodbye the day he left for Afghanistan and said, as always, "see you soon." How sincerely I wish that were true.

-Becky Lettenberger

David Gilkey (or just "Gilkey" as we all called him) had an amazing ability to see both lightness and darkness — and to photograph the edges between the two. In this photo of a boy in Gaza after an Israeli attack destroyed his town, we see the boy, staring straight into the lens, haunted and traumatized, a shaft of light illuminating just half his face. But the photo takes on a deeper meaning when we start to think about the lightness and darkness within us all. David was able to take his camera to the darkest places in the world and with his camera would find the lightness of spirit that connects us all.

-Coburn Dukehart

Little Buddies

The images that I remember the most aren't the ones we edited for his stories, but the images in between the action. The images where you could feel David's presence in the room. David was a big dude — over 6 feet tall, bald, with a beard. On top of that, his slightly round belly made him seem like a real-life Santa Claus or a big, gentle bear. Awestruck at the sight of him, children would stand at attention and just stare. Then they'd start to smile and inch near to touch him — and his camera would catch them.

We'd affectionately call the children in these images his "little buddies." And while they rarely made the final cut into our stories, they are the ones that I think about when I think of David. He talked often of the hope that his images would have an impact on our audience. But I like to believe he had an equal impact on the people whose stories he told.

-Kainaz Amaria

The Lady In Red

I just love this picture because it captured the starkness of the hospital — these two drab, white tents which are the wards — and this regal figure in a bright red dress, walking through the middle of the frame. Gilkey took this picture in February when we spent a week at the Doctors Without Borders field hospital in a refugee camp in South Sudan.

-Jason Beaubien

A Dad And His Son

We came to Northern Nigeria in 2012 to look at the efforts to wipe out polio in Africa. This boy, being carried by his father, was one of the last cases on the continent. That photo captured for me how awful polio is for a father. There's something about the body language of the father that says a lot, and it seems to me that Gilkey was great at capturing very human moments like that.

-Jason Beaubien

A City He Loved

I did this profile of a rowing coach in Portland last fall, and David was around then — he lived in Portland — and shot photos. I remember thinking what a cool, humble guy David seemed like. My story hardly was about famine or war, but David didn't make it seem as if a sports story was beneath him. Because I don't think he felt that way. He was engaged, and you can see the care and interest and love of the city through his work. He was a journalist and artist, whatever the subject. A kind person as well. Quite a mix.

-Tom Goldman

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The de Blasio Administration is eyeing 73 blocks around Jerome Avenue in the Bronx for a rezoning. The city says the goal is to revitalize the area, while protecting existing residents and businesses. With good transit access and space to build taller buildings, officials envision more affordable housing, diverse retail, new green space and safer streets. They’re meeting with stakeholders all summer to get input before releasing a plan this fall. 

But people who own or work at local businesses — florists, locksmiths, barbers — worry about their future in this vision of a new Jerome Avenue. The avenue's many auto mechanics are especially concerned: They say auto shops already have been squeezed out of places Willets Point, and there aren't many industrial areas left for them to move to.

To capture this moment, members of the Bronx Documentary Center have been photographing the businesses and the people behind them, while they’re still there. 

Rebecca and her sister Beatrice Twumasi own the God Is Wonderful Hair Weave & Braiding Center on Jerome Avenue.

(Adi Talwar/Bronx Photo League)

Giovanni Ortega is the co-owner of Mount Eden Muffler on Jerome Avenue.

(Jesus Emmanuel Rodriguez/Bronx Photo League)

Raymond Herskovits at Mel’s Locksmith on East 170th Street. His grandfather opened the store in 1932.

(David “Dee” Delgado/Bronx Photo League)

Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. moved with his family to Chicago, where he was to spend a year laying the groundwork for bringing the civil rights movement to the North. The campaign came to be known as the Chicago Freedom Movement — a broadening drive against segregation, which was often as thorough in practice in the northern states as in the South, especially when it came to housing.

Bernard Kleina was there, too. The Chicago native and former Catholic priest documented the King-led demonstrations in the city — and he did so in rare color photographs.

"In Chicago, I was involved in some of the marches and in other marches I tried to document what was going on," Kleina recalls. "There was a great deal of criticism of Dr. King, saying that he was the one causing the violence, so I wanted to show the truth of what was going on."

Kleina was a newcomer to photography, and especially to photojournalism. "I only — before that — took photos of my family and vacations."

As a young priest, Kleina was drawn to the civil rights movement. He followed King to Selma, Ala., in 1965, but he says he couldn't take photographs there for fear his camera would be destroyed. But in 1966, when King moved to Chicago, Kleina says he was thought it important to use his camera to document events, especially to document that the demonstrators were peaceful and not the ones provoking the riots.

As for why those photographs are in color? Well, that was kind of an accident.

"Virtually no one else shot in color at that time of demonstrations, because at least the pros wanted to be sure that their images would be in newspapers and magazines. I definitely didn't realize at the time I was photographing Dr. King that history was being made," Kleina says.

"Even now, it kind of surprises me when I look back at my own images. But I like to tell people that if you wait until you're completely qualified for something, maybe it's too late."

His time following Martin Luther King Jr. in Chicago inspired Bernard Kleina to launch a career as a professional photographer. His work is now included in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the Smithsonian Institution.

He eventually left the priesthood and also worked as a fair housing advocate.

"Because of Dr. King and his focus on open housing, I became involved in a fair housing center outside of Chicago. For the last 41 years, I tried to use my photography to help people understand the hurt of discrimination," he says. "The Chicago Freedom Movement started in 1965, but it's still going on, and it's up to us to carry on his work."

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Legendary New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, beloved for his street-style images, has died at the age of 87. Cunningham's death was reported by The Times and confirmed by Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the newspaper.

His death comes two days after he was reportedly hospitalized following a stroke. He had photographed for the Times for nearly four decades, beginning in 1978 after a chance photograph of Greta Garbo got the attention of the paper.

"To see a Bill Cunningham street spread was to see all of New York," New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet said in a tweet posted to the newspaper's Twitter account Saturday afternoon.

A Boston native, he attended Harvard on scholarship but dropped out in 1948 to move to New York City. Cunningham then worked a number of jobs including advertising, writing a freelance column for Women's Wear Daily and served a stint in the U.S. Army before he got his first camera, the instrument that transformed his life.

Says the Times:

"Around 1967, he got his first camera and used it to take pictures of the 'Summer of Love,' when he realized the action was out on the street. He started taking assignments for The Daily News and The Chicago Tribune, and he became a regular contributor to The Times in the late 1970s, though over the next two decades, he declined repeated efforts by his editors to take a staff position."

Cunningham was noted for his individual flair for fashion — including his trademark blue jacket — and personal expression. This fashion sense was evident in his eye for candid photos of everyone, ranging from the everyday person to celebrities and socialites.

He also photographed clothes at Easter parades, jitterbugging fetes on Governor's Island and summer street fairs.

"He was everywhere," Jacki Lyden reports for NPR's NewsCast. "At Met Galas, the Chelsea Piers, New York Fashion Weeks — all on his beloved bicycles. He wore a French blue working man's jacket, had a crown of white hair and he ignored hubbub for what he saw in his lens."

His life and work were the subject of 2010 documentary, Bill Cunningham New York. Four years later, many of his early photographs — long before his images graced the pages of the Times— were featured in a series by the New-York Historical Society.

"Taken between 1968 and 1976, he worked on a whimsical photo essay of models in period costumes posing against historic sites of the same vintage," The Associated Press says of the series.

Cunningham received many accolades for his work, among them the Officier de l'ordre des arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2008 and the Carnegie Hall Medal of Excellence in 2012.

"His company was sought after by the fashion world's rich and powerful, yet he remained one of the kindest, most gentle and humble people I have ever met," Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the Times' publisher and chairman said.

"We have lost a legend, and I am personally heartbroken to have lost a friend."

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

What's your night sky look like?

For most of the world, it's not a pretty sight. A new study has found that 80 percent of the world can't see the stars at night because of light pollution.

But the other 20 percent can. So last week, we asked folks via Twitter to share their photos from the 20 top countries where city lights aren't blocking the stars. Many of these countries are part of the developing world that we cover in this blog: for example, Madagascar, Tanzania and Uganda.

We got more than we asked for: photos from around the world as well as pockets of the U.S. lucky enough to have unfiltered views of the galaxy.

Here are some of the submissions where you can really see stars:

Chile

Myanmar

New Zealand

Tanzania

Uganda

United States

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Before the folk rock band The Lumineers released their newest album, Cleopatra, in April, they played a series of secret shows. Emphasis here on "secret."

"There was a large concern about the album being sort-of released via grainy video and leaked out online," said Wesley Schultz, the band's lead singer.

So the band decided to lock up people's phones — not take them away, exactly, but just lock them up for the show. Like a timeout.

At the concerts, The Lumineers started working with a company called Yondr, which created a locking pouch for people to hold their phones in during performances. Audience members keep the pouches with them, and they stay sealed as long as they're inside an established "phone-free zone," but unlock outside of that.

Schultz said he was surprised at how well it works.

"If you can set it up so that people can't get to their phones as easily or are deterred, people actually really welcome that," he said. "It's just such a strong force of habit in our lives right now."

Schultz has taken it a step further and adopted the mentality in his personal life: At his wedding, he and his wife asked guests to check their phones at the door.

"It wasn't because of any sort of a, 'I don't want photos of anyone at the wedding' — it was more, we wanted people to be present," he said.

That's become somewhat of a mantra for entertainers these days.

As Beyonce herself told fans at a recent show, "Y'all gotta put the camera phones down for one second and actually enjoy this moment."

Adele, too: "Yeah, I want to tell that lady as well, can you stop filming me with a video camera? Because I'm really here in real life — you can enjoy it in real life."

Smartphones may be ubiquitous, but there are still limits to common courtesy. Recently the movie theater chain AMC backed off a proposal to allow texting in cinemas after it garnered enormous public backlash.

Schultz thinks that sense of decency should extend to live music.

"I think of it like, if we had that same attitude and you went to see Hamilton, people would be totally up in arms about that," Schultz said. "But for some reason it's completely acceptable to do at shows."

(That said, Hamilton isn't immune to cellphone faux pas either. As The New York Times reported, the musical's star Lin-Manuel Miranda once chastised a certain celebrity on Twitter for incessant texting. Meanwhile, Patti LuPone grabbed a phone away from one audience member in the middle of Shows for Days.)

In this environment, Yondr has found fans of its own in artists like Alicia Keys and comedians like Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K. and Hannibal Buress.

It's not just about cutting the distractions of glowing screens and, worse, ringing phones. For some, there's also a concern of creative security.

According to a Washington Post article, Keys hired Yondr for a concert where she planned to premiere new songs from her first album since 2012's Girl on Fire. Louis C.K. did the same when he was trying out a new set at the Comedy Store in West Hollywood.

A new patent granted to Apple — for infrared technology that could disable smartphone cameras remotely from the stage — might make those pouches obsolete one day. But the idea is the same.

Not everyone has reacted positively to the idea of a "phone-free zone," however.

"Even at one of the shows, a guy brought in a knife with him — just, he usually carries a knife, I guess — and he tried to stab through the case," Schultz said. "And it's got steel, I think, woven into it. So his knife got stuck in the thing, and then when he had to leave, he had the embarrassing deal of having to tell the people that he tried to open it, and they had to pry his knife loose."

Will Yondr, or methods like it, eventually become the norm in entertainment? Schultz thinks so: "Something tells me in a little while we'll kinda look back and say, 'We were a little out of control with our use of phones — we didn't really know boundaries. We were sort of working it out.' "

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Photographer Binh Danh spends his summers tooling around various national parks in a distinctive white van that doubles as a darkroom. "I nicknamed it 'Louis' after Louis Daguerre," the 38-year-old says, smiling from behind his professorial glasses. Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype in the 1830s, and Binh Danh has reinvented it for today. Using handmade materials, Danh coats sheets of copper with silver, polishes the plates to a blinding gleam and synthesizes them with iodine to create crystals that act as pixels.

Danh's work is part of a larger tradition: More than 100 years ago, early photographers helped publicize the beauty of the national parks. Indeed, the parks might not have existed if it weren't for photographers like Carleton Watkins and Charles Weed, whose Yosemite images helped persuade Congress to establish the first national park.

But Danh brings a contemporary perspective to his work. Now a professor at Arizona State University, he and his family arrived in the U.S. in 1979. "We were the second waves of Vietnamese refugees leaving Vietnam," Danh says. He, his parents and his three siblings fled civil unrest through jungles and over the South China Sea. They spent months in a Malaysian refugee camp and eventually landed in Northern California when Danh was 2 years old. His parents spoke no English, but they managed to open a television repair shop in San Jose. "I spent all my time there," Danh remembers. "It was school, then back to the shop to work."

Starting at age 5, Danh worked as the shop's janitor, cleaning the bathrooms and floors. Even though they were only a few hours from Yosemite, Danh says the family never visited the national parks — after their experience fleeing Vietnam, his parents weren't interested in roughing it outside. But Danh fell in love with the pictures of the parks he saw on calendars. He became a photographer, he says, when his father gave him a camera right before a school camping trip in fifth grade.

Today, Danh's silver daguerreotypes of national parks are superreflective, like mirrors. "I want viewers, when they look at my work, that they see themselves in the picture," he says, "that they also become part of this land; that they, in a way, merge with the land — but they don't quite disappear into the land. That they still see themselves in it."

Not disappearing into the landscape is meaningful for immigrants thinking both about the challenges of assimilation and being overlooked. In the Ken Burns documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea, Carl Pope, former director of the Sierra Club, says the parks "are the meaning of home for many of us. They're what it means to be an American and to inhabit this continent. It's the end of the immigrant experience. And they're what takes you and says, 'Now, I am an American.' "

Danh can recite that passage nearly from memory. He says it can be hard not to be overwhelmed by the power of the parks and how they stand for an American ideal that sometimes feels as though it's slipping away. (He's also thoughtful about the parks' histories with Native Americans, who were violently displaced when some parks were created, including Yellowstone and Yosemite.) The photographer has visited about 15 national parks for his daguerreotype series, but the best-known images are from Yosemite. Images from the series have been exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, N.Y.

"We loved those Yosemite images," says Kristin Poole, artistic director of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Ketchum, Idaho. Poole invited Danh to be part of a project about Idaho's Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. It might be one of the weirdest national parks — a vast, forbidding black volcanic field. Poole calls it a study in contrasts: "That really, really pitch black dark craggy landscape with this stunningly blue Idaho sky, and then the sparks of green that are made up of the limber pine trees that grow there," she says.

Danh made daguerreotypes of the landscape and film portraits of the park's rangers cradling big chunks of volcanic rock — 19th century equipment to create decidedly 21st century views.

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As of this morning, there were 7.3 billion-plus people living on Earth, according to the Census Bureau's World Population Clock. And the number goes up second by second because babies keep being born.

That's a statistic to ponder today, July 11, which has been designated World Population Day by the United Nations Development Program. The idea is to focus on "population issues," which touch on many pressing concerns in the world today — from maternal mortality to climate change. This year's theme is "investing in teenage girls" — making sure they can stay in school and get the information they need about health, human rights and reproductive rights.

It's also a day to think about the living spaces of the world's ever-growing population. The 2016 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest gives you an idea of how crowded a world of 7 billion can feel: People literally live on top of one another in China's high-rise dormitories. Yet there is still great solitude in some of Earth's remote spots, like a mountain village in India.

Here are some images that showcase our populous planet.

Note: The captions were provided by the photographers and were edited for length and clarity.

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