Robin Layton is that rare combination of photojournalist and artist who can render a writer’s words superfluous. Her eye is not only unerring, it’s uncanny.

Those of us who worked with her at the Seattle P-I in the 1990s knew it the first time we worked on assignments with her. Where most of us saw reality, she saw possibility. Where some might see cliche, she sees clues to thoughtful expression, greater exposition.

Layton now spends most of her time in Los Angeles, where she has become an in-demand photographer to the glitterati. Her client list includes Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Aniston, Sarah Jessica Parkers, Kenny G, Sidney Poitier, Tobey Maguire. She has traveled the world doing expensive shoots in exotic places.

he exhibit incorporates Layton’s photographs into and onto found objects such as old farm equipment. The image of the Space Needle shown here is 6 feet tall, framed in what Layton describes as “fantastic blue iron scaffolding.”

Layton’s affinity for focal distortion reminds me at times of Emily Carr. It’s not quite photographic abstractionism. More like post-Impressionism, in that she subtly alters real-life forms for expressive effect.

Thursday’s exhibit is open to the public from 6 to 9 p.m., with free comestibles courtesy of Seattle chef Tom Douglas.

Music photography is about conveying the feeling of being at a live show, and when a band is energetic and moving around on stage, that can require more than just freezing the moment with a bright flash and fast shutter. This shot of the band Goes Cube was taken at Magnetic Fields in Brooklyn. I used a Canon Rebel XTi, a Canon 450 EX flash, and an EF-S 10-22 mm lens. The ISO was set to 400, the aperture was at f/3.5, and I had a 1/2 second exposure time.

The streaking light effect was caused by a combination of four elements: the camera-mounted flash, the movement of the camera, the subject’s movement, and the lighting in the background. I set my flash to second curtain sync flash (also called slow sync, or on a point-and-shoot it’s sometimes called the “night portrait” mode) and started the exposure as the musician began to move closer to the camera. The first flash fired and the initial light streaks were created, with the second flash firing just at the point where his guitar was closest to the camera.

[Bryan Bruchman is a Portland, Maine based photographer (bryanbruchman.com) and music blogger (hillytown.com)]

Want to submit your own photo to our Snapshot series? Send the photo (or a link to the photo) and a description of how you got the shot to digitalphoto@macworld.com. Include the text “Snapshot” in the subject line. We’ll pick our favorites and feature them on our Website. Chosen photographers will receive a free printed copy of our Digital Photography Superguide.

A tiny village of 50 residents straddling the former border dividing East and West Germany and nicknamed “Little Berlin” has preserved its own 100-meter section of the Iron Curtain — for tourists.

For more than 38 years Moedlareuth belonged to two different countries and ideological systems. The 2.5 meter (eight foot) high Wall, similar to the famous Berlin Wall, remains a fixture in the village center even 20 years after Communism collapsed.

Nowadays the farming hamlet that lies some 300 km (186 miles) south of Berlin has become a prime destination for tourists searching for the remnants of the Communist era when East and West Germany were divided.

“Visitors can come here to get a real glimpse of what it was like to live here with the Wall running through the middle of the village,” said Robert Lebegern, director of the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum in the heart of Moedlareuth.

For four decades the villagers of Moedlareuth were divided by the Iron Curtain. Half of the village was in the old German kingdom of Bavaria, the other part lay in the eastern state of Thuringia. It was one bizarre aspect of the country’s division.

A neighborly cup of tea is now a mere matter of a few steps, but traces of the old division still persist: there are two different post codes, two dialing codes and two different school systems.

Those living in the former East greet each other with “Guten Tag” (good day) while their neighbors from the heavily Roman Catholic state of Bavaria tend to use the traditional greeting “Gruess Gott!,” literally translated as “Greet God!.”

In addition to the original segment of Wall — which looks like a compact version of its big brother in Berlin — the old border posts, watch towers and barbed-wire fencing still stand in their original positions.

The occasional barking dog — an eerie echo of the past border control — interrupts the droning of a tractor in the nearby fields. But gone are the armed guards who once surveyed residents. Instead snap-happy tourists arrive by the busload.

The inhabitants of sleepy Moedlareuth have grown used to the constant influx of visitors who shuffle to the museum to watch a 20-minute film documenting the peculiar split reality that became normality for nearly four decades.

NO WAVING

More than 60,000 visitors came to Moedlareuth in 2008 and the museum expects a similar number to make the trek to the isolated village this year as the 20th anniversary of the Wall falling approaches.

“It feels very frozen in time,” said Huw Diprose, 20, a student of International Politics at Aberystwyth University in Wales, who was on a walk along the former Iron Curtain.

“I was barely a year old when the wall fell. I wanted to come here to get into the mindset of what it was like back then.”

East Germany started to fence itself off from the West in 1952 — a border that for centuries had been administrative then divided families, friends and neighbors. East Germany built the Berlin Wall in 1961 and at the same time in Moedlareuth.

Even neighborly greetings were outlawed.

“We could wave to our friends on the other side of the wall, but they weren’t allowed to acknowledge us back,” said Karin Mergner, a 62-year-old farmer living in western Moedlareuth.

When the Wall finally cracked open in 1989, eastern Moedlareuth was overwhelmed by the sudden media attention. Residents quickly became resentful of visitor stereotypes of backwardness and reports of bitter East-West division.

It took a while for the small town to reunite. Four weeks after the Berlin Wall was opened on November 9, 1989, a direct border opening was finally made in Moedlareuth on December 9 1989 but everyone was still required to present their passports.

It wasn’t until six months later, on June 17, that people were allowed to cross the border in “Little Berlin” freely, after the mayor on the Bavarian side, Arnold Friedrich, knocked down larger chunks of the Wall with a digger.

“It was a great moment of celebration,” said Lebegern, director of the museum. “But afterwards some East Germans complained that he had damaged East German property.”