So, you've got a camera and you've taken some pictures. But now you have to figure out how to transfer photos to a computer!

Whether you want to email your photos to relatives, share them on social media or get them into an editing app to make some tweaks, knowing how to transfer photos to a computer is your first step in getting your shots off your camera and onto a proper screen.

Here are three easy methods, including one that might just be a life saver when you're away from home and you don't have any of the leads or equipment you need…

How to transfer photos to a computer: USB connection

This is the simplest way to transfer photos to a computer, though it isn't necessarily the fastest as it depends on multiple factors (namely the speed of your camera's USB connection, the speed of your USB cable and the speed of your computer's USB port).

Simply connect your camera to your computer or laptop using a USB lead. If one has been provided with your camera, that is usually the best one to use – in fact, some older cameras can only transfer files using the manufacturers' proprietary USB cable.

How to transfer photos to a computer: Card reader

Some laptops have an SD card reader built in, but you can also connect an external memory card reader that plugs into a USB port either directly or via a lead. You will need an external reader for non-SD formats such as CFexpress and CompactFlash.

This is typically the fastest option, as direct memory card transfer is the most efficient way to move data. However, there are a few factors that might limit your transfer speed even if you have a fast memory card: the speed of your reader, the speed of your USB lead (if required) and the speed of your computer's USB connection (USB-A, for example, will be slower than USB-C).

How to transfer photos to a computer: Your phone

Okay, the first two methods are fine – provided you have a USB cable and / or a card reader. But what if you're at a cafe, on a day trip or anywhere else where all you have in your bag is your laptop? Luckily, there's a third sneaky method that's completely wireless!

Sadly, no current cameras are able to transfer directly to a computer via WiFi or Bluetooth. However, every camera brand has a dedicated smartphone app for wireless transfer – such as Canon's Camera Connect app, pictured above.

This enables you to quickly transfer photos onto your phone or tablet. Then you can either send them via email or an app like Dropbox, or use AirDrop or Quick Share to wirelessly beam them to your computer.

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Dramatic weather, shifting atmospheres and rare celestial events offer some of the most powerful and visually striking opportunities you can capture – when you're willing to embrace the elements and leave the house.

While shooting in these conditions isn't always comfortable – or predictable – they reward preparation and adaptability.

Understanding when and where to shoot, how to protect yourself and your gear, and which camera settings to use can make all the difference between a missed opportunity and portfolio-worth shots.

With the right approach, even the most challenging environments become your creative playground. Here's how to safely photograph thunderstorms, harness the mood of mist and fog, and plan for awe-inspiring celestial events.

Thunderstorms

Best shooting times: Most frequent in spring and summer, especially on hot and humid summer afternoons and evenings.

Safety precautions: Always photograph from inside a building or a car to dissipate any potential energy from lightning strikes.

Camera settings: Focus the camera lens on infinity, use a low ISO of about 100-500, aim for a medium aperture of f/8, and lengthen your shutter speed to 5 to 20 seconds.

Tips: To effectively convey the size of the lightning flashes, consider incorporating landscapes or cityscapes into the composition rather than solely focusing on the thunderstorm. This approach accentuates the dramatic impact of the storm.

Additionally, creating a series of images showcasing the lightning flashes enables you to merge frames in post-processing, enhancing the photograph’s overall dramatic effect. Don’t forget to secure your camera on a tripod to facilitate a seamless merge process during editing.

Mist & Fog

Best shooting times: Mostly common in the early morning hours or evening hours.

Safety precautions: Humidity, condensation and water in the air can ruin non-water-sealed gear and create the conditions for fungus to grow. When you are back home, dry your kit to maintain its quality and longevity.

Camera settings: Use a lens of 70-200mm or even 100-400mm to compress the distance and heighten the effect of the mist.

Tips: Most common near the shores or water. Getting on a high viewpoint and shooting down is an effective way to showcase the mist or fog. Photographing in a dense forest is also great for showcasing both, especially when changing the perspective and shooting straight upwards into tree crowns, which mystically become enveloped by the conditions.

Celestial events

Best shooting times: Apps such as PhotoPills can help you find specific dates.

Safety precautions: Visit the location beforehand to get familiar with the surroundings. On the day, ensure you’re in place before it gets dark. Take a head torch to help you see in the dark environment.

Camera settings: Mount the camera on a tripod, focus the lens to infinity, use an open aperture and a shutter speed of approximately 1/4sec, push the ISO higher if needed, and use the self-timer shutter option.

Tips: To showcase the night sky, stars or other phenomena with a clear approach, light pollution is your biggest enemy. It is caused by surrounding light sources and is a common problem in urban areas. Aim to visit places that are far away from the city and check the light pollution intensity online. These maps determine the intensity of light pollution, using the Bortle Scale on a measure from one (dark sky) to nine (severely light-polluted).

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If you've been scrolling social media lately, you've probably seen the 'pixel stretch trend' all over your feed. If you don't recognize it by name, this trend does exactly what it suggests: it stretches a slice of pixels from a photograph to create a dynamic sense of motion – and even leading lines.

This isn't the first time the pixel stretch trend has done the rounds on social media. It first surfaced back in 2008, then it appeared again about four years ago. Now it's back a third time, thanks to Gen Z, and if you want to get in on the trend all you need is a photo editor like Photoshop.

It helps to have an image where your subject – specifically its color palette – is distinct from the scenery, as the effect will be far more pronounced than if the subject blends into the background.

The pixel stretch trend works with everything from landscapes to street photography, provided there's a sizeable subject or object to work with. I'm going to use one of my portraits for this example, which I'll edit in Photoshop – but the principles are the same whichever app you're using.

How to do the pixel stretch trend

1) Separate your subject

Use whatever tool does the best job or that you're most comfortable using. Photoshop's Select subject button does a pretty good job, but feel free to go freehand, use the Magnetic Lasso Tool or anything else that gets the job done. Once you've selected your subject, hit Ctrl+J on a PC or Cmd+J to duplicate it as a new layer.

2) Create a pixel strip

On the background layer, use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to create a thin strip down the edge (or close to it, if the edge of your subject is uneven). Then hit Crtl/Cmd +J to duplicate it to a new layer, which should be sitting beneath the subject layer you created in step 1. If you want to, you can repeat this process on the same or different parts of your image.

3) Stretch your strip

Hit Ctrl/Cmd +T to activate Free Transform, which will give you a bounding box with transform points around the strip. Click and hold the middle point and simply drag it to the edge of the image to stretch it out. (You might need to hold the Shift key while you do this, if dragging this point stretches the subject in all directions.)

4) Switch to Warp

For some images – such as those with a flat or geometric subject – a simple, straight pixel stretch might be all you want. But to create dynamism, there's more to the process. While in Free Transform mode, click the icon indicated in the image above to switch into Warp mode. Alternatively, with your stretched pixel layer selected, go to Edit > Transform > Warp.

5) Warp 9, engage!

Now you can get creative! Using the anchor points you can drag, stretch and twist your stretched pixel strip. There are no hard and fast rules here; your shapes can be subtle or spectacular. The only thing to bear in mind is keeping colors or other characteristics in line with their source points on your subject, to support the illusion that its individual pixels are being stretched from their origins.

6) Complementary stretches

If you're adding more than one pixel stretch element, make sure that they complement one another – or, at the very least, that they don't clash. You can use them to create leading lines, to help guide the viewer's eyes around the image, and you can even use the Dodge and Burn Tools to lighten and darken the image to create more depth and dimension. Just experiment and see what works best. Have fun!

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Exploring Morocco is like stepping into a whole new world of vibrant sights and bustling markets. But when the excitement of the lively streets starts to wind down, there's a whole other adventure waiting in the southern deserts.

During our three-week photography adventure in Morocco, we couldn't resist the attraction of the Sahara's sweeping sand dunes. Compared to the hustle and bustle up north, the desert felt like a different universe where time slowed down and conversations flowed freely.

One of the highlights? Riding atop camels as the sun dipped towards the horizon. With the help of our friendly Berber guide, we snagged some stunning shots of these majestic creatures against the golden sky. It was like something out of a dream, and we couldn't have asked for a better photo opportunity!

Top tips for great results

1. Plan ahead
Hiring a professional guide who can navigate the local terrain and handle the camels will increase your chances of capturing great photos, so you can focus on your photography.

2. Timing is key
Plan your shoot around the golden hours of sunrise and sunset when the light is soft and warm, casting beautiful shadows and enhancing the colors of the desert landscape.

3. Try these settings
Get to know your camera before the photo shoot so you can make adjustments as the environment changes. Depending on the subject movement, 1/250-1/500sec is usually a good starting point for shutter speed, with the aperture set to f/4 and sensitivity to auto ISO.

4. Create depth
To enhance the visual appeal of your photos, consider incorporating natural elements such as sand dunes, desert vegetation or distant horizons. These elements can add depth and perspective to your photos, and make them more interesting to look at.

5. Experiment with angles
Get creative with your composition by shooting from various angles – from ground level to capture the camels' majestic stature or from above to showcase the vastness of the desert.

Heading for the trip of a lifetime and want a new Canon camera to take with you? Here are the best ones available. You don't want to drop your camera though, so why not invest in a new camera strap? Alternatively, travel light with a convenient compact camera.

Lightroom Classic’s Lens Blur tool uses AI to achieve something rather remarkable, inferring depth and distance in a two-dimensional image. It’s designed to offer a digital simulation of the kind of shallow depth of field you get from very wide lens apertures.

It’s not just a stylistic decision but a compositional tool, too, because it can help separate subjects from their backgrounds so that they stand out more clearly with fewer distractions.

Early versions of this tool tended to struggle with areas of background seen through holes in the main subject, but as this tool has evolved with successive versions of Lightroom it has become much more capable. Here’s my guide to the main features of the Lens Blur panel, what they do and how they work.

Focus range

This is the central tool in this panel. After Lightroom’s AI analysis, it presents the distance range in the image from closest (left) to farthest (right).

Within that range it displays a bounding box, which Lightroom thinks represents the key subject in the scene. You can accept and work with this as it stands, but you can also drag this box left and right to change the ‘focus distance’ and you can also drag on the left or right handles to adjust the near and far focus distances.

It’s easy to adjust this sharp focus range manually, but it’s not always easy to improve on Lightroom’s initial estimate!

Blur Amount

You can use this slider to adjust the blur in out-of-focus areas, and you might find that you need to keep coming back to this adjustment as you make other changes (to the focus range, for example). It’s easy to get carried away, but it’s important to keep the results realistic.

Blur can backfire if you push it too far! In our sample image, the degree of background blur could easily make the motorcycle look like a model shot from close up

Bokeh shapes

Bokeh is a characteristic of lenses that can be replicated surprisingly well digitally. With this tool, though, the differences between the different bokeh shapes (such as circle, bubble, hexagon, ring, cat eye) are not always easy to see, so it’s up to you how long you want to spend on this.

Bokeh shapes show up most clearly with out-of-focus specular highlights or light sources in the background

Auto / manual subject detection

When you first use the Lens Blur too, Lightroom will attempt to identify the key subject automatically. These days it rarely gets this wrong, but there may be times when you want to shift the focus to a subject or area in the background rather than the foreground, so this is how you do it.

Visualize depth

You can generally see pretty clearly how the Lens Blur tool is focusing and defocusing different parts of the image, but if you need a little help, check this box. It adds a color-coded overlay to the image, which illustrates different distances and defocus amounts with different colors.

Focus and Blur tools

You’ll find these in the ‘Refinement’ section at the bottom of the Lens Blur panel, and you can use them to manually paint in or paint out areas of sharp focus. (Lightroom uses ‘focus’ to mean objects or distances in sharp focus.)

This is all done with a simple manual brush tool, but that’s fine – if you do need to alter the depth mask and subject selection, it’s because the AI hasn’t got it quite right and needs the skill and judgement of the human eye.

Do pay attention to the Size, Feather and Flow sliders. Very often you’ll be trying to blend in the focus adjustment subtly, building up the effect gradually rather than trying to achieve pixel-perfect masking

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While you can file playing marbles at school in the same memory drawer as hopscotch and riding around on your chopper bicycle, they do make a great subject for an abstract macro project. Don’t worry about braving cobwebs and setting off your dust allergy by scrabbling around in the attic looking for them, though.

For some reason they are plentiful and cheap on Amazon, or even some toy shops if you can still find one. The big question is what type to get and why? You can get some with interior swirls and colors, but they can be distracting and less abstract than clear ones.

My suggestion is to look for those devoid of interior design, but ranging from completely transparent to ones with a range of colors. You’ll also need some colored, reflective card and perhaps some additional light to introduce color and highlights and also help with the reflections.

It’s worth starting with the clear marbles first, arranging them on top of your reflective card, with a card at the back to bounce light back into the scene. Unpack your macro lens and focus on one of the marbles at the front of the scene that leads into the rest. You should show some empty space in the foreground because the light reflections will appear there as well.

Setting it up

1. Camera position

It’s a very simple setup because it’s a macro shot, it’s just a case of getting in close enough. The more interesting element is arranging the marbles so that there is a key marble, and that there is space for reflections and others in the background.

2. Key light

This is the main light, which is set to a color temperature of 5600K along with the camera. Yes there’s window light, but it’s not as dominant as this light. I also decided to leave the curtains open, so that the shape of the window was reflected in the marble and because it also registered as more blue in color.

3. Box of marbles

It’s up to you what you use, but marbles without an interior pattern – being clear or colored – give a more interesting, abstract result with better reflections. Try different types, though, to see what you like. It’s also interesting to combine different colors of marbles with the color of the secondary light.

4. The background

For some shots with clear marbles I used this red, reflective card and also set the color of the light on the right to red as well. Then I tried the light with blue. The other combination was to used gold card for a more neutral effect, blue-colored marbles and a blue light to the right.

5. Secondary light

This was here to add highlights and additional reflections. On some of the shots it was red, on others it was blue. With the key light being set to 5600K, that’s why the white balance on the camera was manually set to 5600K to ensure this color registered.

Step by step guide for shooting macro marbles

It’s all about colors, depth of field and the types of reflections and highlights you can create.

01 Setting up for color

If you’re intending to use colored lighting in your photos, then you need to pay attention to the white balance setting on the camera so that it doesn’t attempt to filter it out. The key light was 5600K so, to get the color of the secondary light to register, the camera white balance was set manually to 5600K.

02 Release or timer

After a few shots it became evident that a narrow aperture was going to be the order of the day, which meant a low shutter speed. Even though the camera as on a tripod, it’s safe to either use software or a camera remote to fire the shutter. Or use the self-timer like here, setting it to five seconds, giving enough time for movement to cease.

03 Metering options

As there are some very bright highlights on the marbles from the lighting, one option was to use Highlight Metering to minimize them and then restore the shadows in post. This worked, but I found that I preferred center-weighted metering – which created larger hotspots but, when the focus of the camera was on the surface of the marble, the hotspots became more blurred.

04 Camera settings

In the end I used manual focus because the AF would pick out the reflections, rather than the surface of the marble. I used aperture priority mode so I could cycle through various apertures and upped the ISO to 200 just to lower the chances of camera shake, even with using the timer.

Aperture – How much depth of field do you get?

Well the answer to that on a 105mm macro lens is not very much. At the widest aperture, which worked out at something like f/4.8, there was only a few millimeters of depth of field. If you look at the example, it meant that the edges of the key marble were completely out of focus and the clear marbles in the background virtually disappeared.

A choice of f/11 produced more depth and made the background visible, but still not enough for an entire marble (which was about 10mm in size).

Before you go....

To shoot close ups like this you need a macro lens, some modern LED lighting and a decent tripod.

Color Grading is widely used in video editing to create a consistent look across a series of clips, but it’s now common to find color grading tools in photo editors too, like here in Lightroom Classic. Color grading works by splitting the image up into three tonal regions – shadows, midtones and highlights – and then adjusting the hue, saturation and luminance values for each to produce a range of cinematic or atmospheric effects.

Color grading is carried out using individual ‘color wheels’ for the shadow, midtone and highlight regions, and quick and intuitive control points for adjusting the color shift. It might look complex but it’s actually quite easy to do, and if you create a color grade you like that you want to re-use in the future, you can save it as a preset. Many Lightroom presets are based around these color grading tools.

3-way adjustment

You choose how the color wheels are displayed and adjusted using this set of buttons running across the top of the Color Grading panel. In the 3-way adjustment mode currently selected, you can see and adjust all three color wheels at once – the one you’re currently adjusting is highlighted while the others are greyed out.

This is a quick and simple way to work if you already have an idea how you want the image to look and you need to adjust shadows, midtones and highlights to get it.

Shadows, midtones, highlights

You can use these buttons to adjust the shadows, midtones and highlights color wheels individually. This is useful if the effects you want to achieve uses only one of these tonal ranges, which is not uncommon.

You can use the shadows color wheel to add a deep, rich color to the darker tones

Adjusting the midtones only will preserve neutral shadows and highlights

Global adjustment

You might just want to apply an overall color shift, and the global adjustment option is the way to do it. It’s also the simplest way to add a color grade to a photo.

Color wheel

This is the heart of Lightroom’s color grading tools, and it uses a draggable control point to adjust hue and saturation. Initially, this will be at the center (neutral) position in the color wheel, and you then drag it towards the edge in the direction of the color you want to apply. You can drag the control point around the wheel, not just outwards. The further you drag it towards the edge, the stronger the saturation of the color tint.

Hue control

You’ll see another control point on the outside of the color wheel showing the hue you’ve selected. You can move this control point around the outside of the color wheel to change the hue. It might look as if it’s doing the same job as the main control point, but in fact it adjust the hue only, not the saturation, and it allows much more precise control – especially when the main control point is very close to the center and small movements have big effects.

Luminance slider

The control wheel only allows you to adjust hue and saturation, but the luminance sliders let you change the brightness of the shadows, midtones and highlights too.

Try reducing the luminance for the shadows to make them richer and deeper

Increasing shadow luminance can create an attractive vintage ‘matte’ effect

Blending

BLENDINGIf you are using different color values for the shadows, midtones and highlights, they blend together progressively for a natural-looking color transition. This slider lets you adjust this blending effect to be more abrupt and pronounced or smoother and less visible.

Blending adjustments can be quite subtle but they are still worth experimenting with

Balance

Normally, your shadows, midtones and highlights adjustments will get an ‘equal share’ of the tonal range, but you can use the balance slider to push the effect of your shadow adjustment further into the tonal range, for example, or bring your highlight adjustment further down into the midtones.

The balance slider make quite a difference to the way an image looks, but also introduces another variable that complicates things – you might find it simpler just to tweak the look with the color wheels

Lightroom Classic’s Distraction Removal panel can easily get overlooked. But rather than spend time manually cloning out dust spots or unwanted passers-by with the cloning and healing tools or AI Remove tool, take a look at the Distraction Removal panel first.

It uses AI to automate tasks you might previously have done manually – so no more brushing, no more object selection, just one-click fixes for three common photo-editing scenarios.

Remove mode

This is the mode you need for any image retouching or object removal jobs in Lightroom. The top panel, just called ‘Remove’, is where you’ll find the regular Heal, Clone and AI Remove tools.

The Heal tool has always been useful for blotting out sensor spots, while the Clone tool is still best for pinpoint image repairs where you need to copy nearby details under full control over the size of the repair, the source area and the brush properties.

Distraction Removal

This is the second panel in the Remove mode and it has three sections: Reflections, People and Dust. These are normally collapsed, so if you select one the others shrink back to just the title, but we’re showing them all open here.

Between them, these three Distraction Removal options cover a lot of the everyday retouching scenarios that photographers are faced with.

Reflections

Have you ever photographed a display through a shop window or display case but had the picture ruined by reflections? This tool will automatically find any reflections in your photo – no need for any manual masking – and will subdue the reflection while magically revealing the objects behind the glass.

Like many of Adobe’s AI tools, this sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t – but when it does, it’s like magic

People

This tool tackles a problem faced by every travel or architectural photographer: the scene is filled with passers-by. It would take an age to remove everyone in this shot manually and there are few ‘clean’ areas to clone from – but the ‘People’ Distraction Removal tool does an amazing job, identifying practically every figure then removing them almost invisibly.

This is another tool where you just have to try it and see. I have another shot of the same scene from a slightly different angle where it didn’t work well at all, mainly because it couldn’t figure out complex stepped railings and other irregular objects in the background.

People masking

As soon as you open the People panel, Lightroom will scan the image for people and highlight them with a red mask overlay. All you need to now is hit the Remove button and Lightroom will erase all these people from the scene.

Don’t worry if the mask doesn’t follow the outline of people closely – it’s using surrounding regions, not just the figures themselves.

Keeping people in

The People tool will highlight people and groups of people with a red mask overlay – but very often this is not one mask but several, so that you may see a series of mask ‘pins’ dotted around the image. You can select these individually and delete them if you want to keep these people or groups of people in the scene.

If you are selecting some people for removal and others to keep in, it’s probably going to be easier to use the regular tools in the Remove panel.

Dust

The Reflections and People tools are attempting to achieve complex adjustments that sometimes work well and sometimes don’t. The Dust tool, though, is so effective that you can forget about manually blotting out sensor spots and use this instead. It will even show you spots you hadn’t seen with the naked eye.

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Lightroom Classic’s masking tools use a combination of AI subject recognition and regular brush and gradient tools to offer huge scope for local adjustments and enhancements. But you can get even more control by using masks in combination – in other words, with ‘sub-masks’.

There are many situations where this can be useful, but our sample image shows a very common one – where you want to darken a sky progressively towards the horizon but without darkening any buildings or other objects that jut up into the sky.

In our example, a linear gradient produces the right gradual darkening but would also darken the building. A sky mask would darken the whole sky, right down to the horizon without any natural gradation in tone.

But by ‘intersecting’ a sky mask and a linear gradient, we can get a gradual tonal gradation that affects only the sky. Our cheat sheet shows the location of the key Lightroom Classic masking controls.

Masking mode

To create and edit masks in Lightroom Classic you need to swap to the masking mode. This panel will give you a list of mask types to choose from. When you choose one, it appears in the Masks panel which opens out to the left of the tools sidebar.

Main mask

The Masks panel will show the area affected by your mask as a tiny thumbnail. Each new mask you add to your photo will appear as a new thumbnail. Any or all of these masks can include sub-masks.

Sub-masks

Every mask will have at least one sub-mask. If you’ve just used a single masking tool it will still appear here. Sub-masks become important if you want to combine or edit the masks that Lightroom has created.

Sky mask

To demonstrate this powerful ‘intersect’ command we’ve started off with a sky mask and used the adjustment tools in the right sidebar to darken it. This produced a very ‘flat’ adjustment that didn’t look natural. This is a common issue with sky masks if they are used on their own.

Sky masks identify sky areas very well but don’t offer any natural gradation towards the horizon.

Linear mask 'intersected'

The ideal way to darken a sky progressively is with a linear mask, but these are indiscriminate in that they darken everything at the top of the frame whether it’s actually part of the sky or not.

This is where an ‘intersected’ sky mask and linear mask can achieve what’s needed – a progressive darkening of the sky with other objects in the foreground left untouched. The linear mask achieves the gradual tonal adjustment, while the sky mask restricts it to the sky alone.

Gradient sub-masks remain editable, e.g. you can move them around even if they’ve been ‘intersected’, added or subtracted from the mask.

Add/Subtract buttons

The Masks panel can look pretty busy, especially if you have all your masks expanded to show sub-masks too – so how do the Add/Subtract buttons fit in? In fact, they apply to the main mask you’ve selected. When you use them, they add new sub-masks. They do not apply to sub-masks.

Adjustment tools

Keep in mind that Lightroom’s local adjustment tools apply to the main mask. Any sub-masks you create simply change the area covered by the mask. These sub-masks do not have their own adjustments. If you need to create a new set of adjustments for a different part of the image then you will need a new mask.

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Tone Curve adjustments are a very powerful way to modify the tonal range and contrast of your photos. The basic principle is simple – you drag on the curve to change its shape to alter the brightness of different tonal regions, from the shadows on the left to the highlights on the right. However, Lightroom Classic’s Tone Curve panel has hidden depths which are easily overlooked but make it a much more powerful and intuitive tool. Here’s a guide to the key features…

Parametric Curve

This is an alternative way to make curves adjustments. Instead of dragging control points directly on the curve, which can sometimes be a bit imprecise, here you get sliders for the Highlights, Lights, Darks and Shadows so that you can adjust these tonal regions individually. Adjustments made with one slider will ‘push’ slightly into the others in order to maintain a smooth tone curve.

• Try boosting the Lights slider to add brightness and sparkle to flat looking images
• Try reducing the Shadows slider to add depth and contrast to an image

Adjust tool

Click on this tool to activate it, then click and drag up or down on any area or object in the image to adjust its tone value – you’ll see this reflected in the tone curve. This is a good way to target specific tonal values and objects only.

• You can use this tool to increase the contrast between two similar tonal values. Click and drag on one area to lighten it then click on the other and drag down to darken it

White point and black point

You can drag the white point to the left if the image histogram doesn’t quite stretch to the right-hand side and you can drag the black point slider to the right to meet the left edge of the histogram. Lightroom Classic does not have a separate levels adjustment, but this does the same job.

• For a faded analog ‘matte’ look you can drag the black point slider upwards so that the darkest tones in the image don’t quite go to a solid black

RGB color curves

Normally you would work with the combined curves adjustments to adjust all three color channels in the image at the same time. However, you can also edit the red, green and blue color channels individually to create a huge range of color shifts and effects.

• Using RGB curves to adjust colors can get confusing. Try the Color Grading panel instead!
• If you want adjust individual colors, you need the Color Mixer panel, especially its Point Color mode

Curve shape

To change the shape of the curve, just drag on the line or click to add a control point which you can then move around to reshape the curve. You can add as many points as you like but things can quickly get messy, so try to keep it simple.

• A classic ’S-shape’ curve will add midtone contrast to a photo without clipping the shadows or highlights. Use on control point to lower the darker tones and another to raise the lighter tones

Curve presets

This little drop-down menu is easy to miss but very useful if you find yourself making the same curve adjustments again and again.

• To save a curve preset, make your curve adjustments first and note the menu now shows ‘Custom’. Open the menu, choose the Save option at the bottom and name your new preset.

Lightroom Classic has powerful options for black and white photographers, even without delving into the masking tools for dodging and burning. Unlike color photography, where you can often use image straight from the camera, black and white relies on a little extra work in the digital darkroom. Images shot in black and white modes on the camera typically benefit from some careful contrast, clarity and color mixing adjustments to really bring them to life. So here are some key tools in Lightroom Classic to help achieve that monochrome mastery.

B&W button

This simple button at the top of the Basic panel switches the Develop tools from regular color editing to monochrome. The key difference is that what would normally be the Color Grading panel now swaps to the B&W panel, where you can apply the same color mixing tools to your black and white images that feature in Photoshop’s Channel Mixer and B&W adjustment layers.

• You could convert color images to black and white simply by reducing the Saturation value to zero, but B&W mode is designed specifically for this kind of work

B&W panel

This displays eight different color ranges which you can adjust and ‘mix’ to create your black and white conversion. When you reduce the value of a color it comes out darker in the black and white image; when you increase the value, it comes out lighter. To make blue skies darker and foliage lighter in landscape shots, for example, you would reduce the Blue value and increase the Green.

• If you apply larger adjustments, trying shifting adjacent color sliders slightly in the same direction to blend in the adjustment more subtly
• Look out for edge effects around objects if you apply too strong an adjustment to darken blue skies, for example
• The Adjust gadget can save you a lot of time. Just select it then drag up and down on areas of the image to darken or lighten those colors

Tone adjustments

These work in the normal way, but you’ll find you can often push the Contrast and other values further than you would with color images. Black and white is more forgiving of extreme adjustments, which can often add to the graphic impact.

• By all means use the histogram display at the top to check for clipping, but you can often afford to lose more highlight and shadow detail than you can with color

Presence sliders

The Presence sliders need to be used with a little care when you’re working on color images, but in black and white you can afford to go wild. As a medium it’s already more dramatic and theatrical than color, and the Texture, Clarity and Dehaze sliders can really add to the impact of an image.

• The Texture slider is good for adding micro-contrast to details in the image
• Use the Clarity slider to make objects really stand out and give a lift to flat-looking images
• The Dehaze slider adds drama to skies and gives darker tones a lift too. In color it can often add too much color saturation, but in black and white that’s not a problem!

Profiles

It’s easy to overlook the Profiles in Lightroom Classic, and while the default Adobe Color and Adobe Monochrome profiles will do a decent job, it’s definitely worth clicking the Browse button to look through all the other profiles available. Lightroom comes with a selection of bespoke B&W Profiles which all deliver a unique ‘look’

• These profiles are not like presets. They are like a kind of pre-processing step that doesn’t involve the editing tools at all

Effects panel

The Effects panel has two great tools for black and white photographers. The Post Crop Vignetting tool adds subtle corner shading to increase the contrast in your photos and add a framing effect to aid the composition, while the Grain effect offers a very realistic simulation of actual analog film grain.

• You can get into the nitty gritty of the Grain Size and Roughness sliders if you like, but for quick and convincing results you can leave them at their defaults and just use the Amount slider

One of the great things about shooting on cameras with APS-C or Micro 4/3 sensors is that the crop factor these formats apply can help us achieve even greater magnification from our lenses, macro optics or otherwise.

In close-up photography, this can be a benefit, especially if your lens doesn’t allow life-size magnification on its own. However, the closer crop means, if we shoot at a life-size 1:1 setting, we exclude much of the background.

While this might not sound like a problem in many cases, there are times when you want both incredible detail in your subject – the level only seen at life-size – and location elements behind it, to set the scene.

This is one advantage of shooting macro on a medium format camera; you can get close to small subjects but the larger sensor captures more of the surroundings. This creates a unique blend of wider composition and attractive bokeh.

In digital photography, we can take things even further.

By stitching multiple macro images together, we can create a shot with huge amounts of detail in the subject, plenty of background elements, for context and beautiful bokeh to smooth out any distractions.

This blended image is impossible to create in a single frame, truly giving it the wow factor. It’s important, however, to carefully follow the workflow shown here
to achieve reliably successful results.

The setup

Mirrorless or DSLR camera
A camera with advanced live view features is particularly helpful.

Dedicated macro lens
An optic capable of 1:1 life-size magnification allows extreme detail capture.

Low-level tripod
Being able to remove, swing or reverse the centre column allows near-ground level work.

Ball head
This type of head allows maximum freedom of camera placement.

Shooting steps

1. Match subject height

Although a common tip for extending depth-of-field in macro photography is to shoot at 90° to the subject, and our goal is to reduce DOF, lowering the camera to ground level enables an interesting bug’s-eye view. It also allows for attractive natural backlighting.

2. Choose maximum f/stop

To maximize the visibility of the ‘impossible’ depth-of-field effect, choose your lens’s smallest f/number, in this case, f/2.8. This is especially helpful where you don’t own a true macro lens and have to shoot from further away.

3. Find closest focusing distance

Capture as much subject detail as you possibly can by ensuring that you are using maximum magnification. Set the closest focusing distance your lens provides, frame the subject and then slowly move the camera back until you can achieve a sharp focus. Zoom into the preview image to check critical detail.

4. Shoot centre frame

Compose the first frame so that the composition is optimal for the subject. Use this frame to ensure you have sufficient space above and below the main areas of the scene to allow for cropping or filling of stitching ‘gaps’ during editing.

5. Reframe and refocus

Rotate the camera or, if using a rail, slide it to the left to compose a frame to one side of the subject. At such close focusing distances, even small shifts in focal plane position can blur the subject, so zoom in to check identical focus placement.

6. Shoot excess frames

Repeat the step above, but this time, capture an image to the right of the main subject. Once you’re happy with it, try shifting the camera up and down to capture more ‘space’ to work with in processing. This will allow you to have multiple crops and formats to suit the scene. Scrutinise each frame for sharpness.

Pro Tip

Introduce flash to ensure consistency

One of the challenges of stitching panoramas in software is changes in lighting between shots, which can create further blending inconsistencies. While this is difficult to control in landscape photography, in macro, we can maintain global exposure and lighting direction by overpowering the ambient light with flash.

Use a low power output, diffuse the light by shooting through a diffusing material and mimic the position of the sun with flashgun placement.

Editing steps

1. Sync settings

Select all your frames and activate the synchronise settings function. You can then apply basic adjustments, including Exposure, Contrast and Temperature across all images to be stitched. Also, reduce noise and apply essential sharpening at this stage.

2. Create panorama

In Lightroom, keep the images selected and go to Photo > Photomerge > Panorama. Leave the photomerge method as Cylindrical or Spherical. Ensure images are arranged in the correct sequence before merging.

3. Realign segments

Due to the expanse of bokeh, your software may struggle with the panorama. Here, a gap was left between two segments. Since we chose to retain layers, we selected the orphaned image and, with reduced Opacity, manually placed it.

4. Retouch seams

Due to the blending challenges and manual placement, there were some remaining seams where segments met. Using the Spot Healing Brush and Patch Tools, we brushed over gaps and cropped white spaces at the edges, choosing a wide aspect.

5. Dodge and Burn

Duplicate the Background (Ctrl/Cmd + J) and navigate to Filter > Camera Raw Filter. Randomise the light by adding some exposure spotlights with the Radial Filter. We also dodged some background highlights to give the raindrops some extra sparkle.

6. Adjust color balance

Re-open your merged image in your RAW editor to apply final colour adjustments. In our shot, we felt that the green stems were too visible, so reduced Yellow Saturation in the HSL tab. We also tweaked the petal colour using the Calibrate tab.

Before & After

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If you’re shooting in manual mode but you still find yourself wrestling with your camera automatically changing the exposure, you need to check your ISO setting. If it’s still on auto, you’ve found the problem.

Auto ISO is a fabulous invention – if you are using auto exposure modes. What it does is adjust the ISO, shot by shot, to maintain a minimum ‘safe’ shutter speed to prevent camera shake even in really low light. You can specify the maximum ISO you want the camera to go to, and the minimum shutter speed you want it to use. It’s brilliant.

But if you don’t switch auto ISO off when you swap to manual exposure mode, something else will happen. The camera will keep adjusting the ISO to give you what it thinks is the correct exposure with the manual settings you’ve chosen. You’re in manual mode, but you’re still getting auto exposure, this time via the ISO setting. What the heck?!

This is especially annoying if you're doing any night photography in the city. You want manual exposure control and a low ISO for quality and long-exposure times to capture light trails. You don't want the camera to bump the ISO through the roof in search of a fast shutter speed.

ISO and the exposure triangle

These days, people talk about the exposure triangle, which consists of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Manual mode puts shutter speed and aperture directly under your control, but you also need to select a manual ISO setting to finish the job.

Really? It’s true. It’s easy to switch your camera to manual mode, but that doesn’t automatically set the ISO to manual mode at the same time. You have to do that with a separate button, dial, or menu setting. If you don’t, manual mode will only do half a job. It will let you set the shutter speed and the lens aperture manually, but it will still use automatic ISO adjustments to get the ‘correct’ exposure. You might think manual mode will give you full control over the exposure, but it won’t, as the camera is simply making decisions behind your back.

Some cameras even make a feature of this. Pentax’s TAv mode (Time and Aperture Value Priority) is found on the best Pentax cameras and is designed so that you can set whatever shutter speed and aperture you like, and the camera will use ISO to adjust the exposure (it’s more effective in low light, where the ISO setting comes into play, not so much in bright light).

For most people, the whole point about manual exposure is not just that you can change the shutter speed and aperture settings directly, but that you can control the brightness of the image at the same time. And for this to work, you need to set the ISO manually.

Personally, I don’t much like using ISO for shot-by-shot exposure control in manual mode. I think it just confuses things. I think it’s much better to choose an ISO setting appropriate to the conditions and then adjust the exposure using shutter speed and aperture alone. That already gives you plenty to think about, whereas one more exposure variable – ISO – just tips things over the edge. If you realise your ISO setting is wrong for the conditions, then sure, change it, but don’t treat it as a third exposure adjustment for every single photo.

So remember, true manual control requires choosing your ISO manually, not just your shutter speed and lens aperture. Otherwise, if you leave auto ISO enabled, you're just using a different version of auto-exposure.

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With the Chinese New Year / Lunar New Year upon us, firework events will illuminate the night sky across the world from February 17. And while many of the biggest and brightest displays will take to the skies across Asia, incredible fireworks celebrations will be popping off across the West, too.

I like to think of fireworks photography as a specialist form of light painting. And while a fully manual camera and a sturdy tripod will enable you to capture the best fireworks images possible, the best camera phones are becoming incredibly adept at handling the unpredictable lighting conditions of a fireworks displaytoo.

Heck, if you’re lucky enough to own the Nikon Coolpix P1100, it even has a dedicated ‘fireworks show’ mode setting.

So, whether you’re thinking of saying goodbye to the Year of the Snake and seeing in the Year of the Fire Horse in New York, London, Sydney or elsewhere, here are my top tips for cracking fireworks photography.

Fireworks photography: Lenses

It might make sense to think of fireworks photography as low-light photography, since it usually happens at night, but fireworks are bright. As such, you don’t need a ‘holy trinity’ zoom or a super-fast prime; you can capture lovely fireworks images with a kit lens if you have to.

If you’re lucky enough to own a large selection of glass, you can choose the focal length that best suits your vision. If you’re photographing a sprawling display against a city skyline, you can opt for a wide-angle lens.

However, telephoto lenses may come in handy for displays that are further away or if you want to crop into the scene and focus more on the abstract patterns created by the fireworks. If you still can’t decide, then take a standard zoom lens as a middle ground.

Fireworks photography: Composition

When composing fireworks, you can attempt to frame the fireworks or frame an attractive scene and then allow the fireworks to populate the frame. The former is more suited to those with a longer lens who want to fill the frame with fireworks, while the latter is more suitable for locations with additional interest.

For example, if you’re photographing a display over a historic building, you could frame the building first and allow the fireworks to then populate the frame.

The challenge in either scenario is that you can never be entirely sure where the fireworks will be. As such, it’s always worth pulling back from your composition slightly to leave a little more room than expected. You can always crop if you need to, but you can’t ‘uncrop’. And of course, you can continuously refine your compositions during the display.

Arguably, the most photogenic locations to capture fireworks are directly above bodies of water. This enables you to balance the frame by capturing not only the fireworks, but their reflections in the water. A good tip for more inconsistent displays is to capture multiple identical frames and blend a few together using the best photo-editing software.

Fireworks photography: Focusing

There’s no point trying to focus on the exploding balls of light themselves as your autofocus system won’t be able to keep up. Instead, you’ll need to switch to manual focus and either set your focus ring to infinity (look for the ‘∞’ symbol) or prefocus on an object in the distance.

Alternatively, you can focus on an object on the same focal plane as the fireworks. If you’re using a wide-angle lens, you can approximate the hyperfocal distance by focusing a third of the way into the scene or employ double-distance focusing.

If you're prefocusing, make sure you switch to manual focus (if you haven't already) after you've locked your focus onto your desired point. Otherwise, you'll inadvertently end up engaging the autofocus when you fire the shutter button. (Note, this won't happen if you're using back-button focus.)

Fireworks photography: Exposure

Switch to manual mode and set your aperture to f/8 and your ISO to 100. This will give you a good base to work from, so you can tweak your settings accordingly. When it comes to the length of your exposure, you’ll want to experiment.

Exposures from one to ten seconds tend to work well, but you can experiment with longer exposures, too. The longer the exposure, the larger each explosion will appear, while potentially increasing the number of fireworks captured as more are launched into the sky.

While bulb mode is rarely necessary due to there being ample light, it can be used to activate the shutter upon a firework launching and then manually closing the shutter once it’s ended.

Whatever method you choose, you’ll need to keep a keen eye on the playback screen to ensure you’re getting balanced exposures. You can always increase your ISO or open up your aperture if you need to gather more light, or lower your ISO or narrow your aperture if you’re getting overexposed images.

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As the need for a castle gradually declined in the UK, noblemen and landowners looked for something more comfortable, but just as grand and imposing, to live in. The stately home, built and owned by the ruling upper classes, became a statement of wealth and power. They were also a hub for social events and provided employment for the local workforce.

Today, there are still over 3,000 stately homes in the UK, many owned by English Heritage or the National Trust when running a vast estate became unaffordable for individual families, thanks to taxes and upkeep costs.

The stately house

There are two ways of approaching photographing the house. Either you show it as part of the landscape, so place it in the distance with gardens and lakes in the foreground, or you shoot from closer up, from an architectural perspective. Let’s take the distance shots first.

Only the biggest and most popular stately homes are open during the winter months, when you have the chance to get sunsets and sunrises, because of the times they will be open. Mostly, opening times are March/April to September/October, so it’s late in the year when you might get a sunset, right at the end of the day.

Normally, though, it’s best to either hope for sunny days for color photography, or billowing clouds for conversion to mono. Flat, grey skies are friends to no-one.

The objective, then, is to show the country house as the dominant feature in the landscape, with other elements, such as lakes, pathways, gardens, trees and so on, as compositional elements that draw the eye up to the house.

The rule of thirds here would have you place the house and horizon on the top horizontal third, but rather than keep the house central, unless there’s a distinct symmetry to the shot, position it on one of the vertical thirds. A wide-angle lens is usually required, which means (depending on what’s in front of you) anything from 18 to 28mm.

You’ll usually need plenty of depth of field, so dial in f/16 or f/22 and focus a third of the way into the scene. Aim to have the sun either behind you, or to one side, so that the light falls on the stonework and the house isn’t backlit. It can be worth deploying a circular polarizer filter to enhance the skies, especially if there are some fluffy, white clouds about, as this will help make them stand out.

Bear in mind that there’s usually a 1 or 2-stop hit to the light levels when using a polarizer, so when combining that with an f/22 aperture you may need to up the ISO, find something stable for the camera to rest on or resort to a tripod.

The other use for the polariser is if you manage to compose the scene with a lake in the foreground. Here the filter can be used to either maximize the reflections on the water or, the opposite, reduce them so that you can see through to the lake bed.

The other approach is to feature the house much more prominently and use the gardens in the foreground as the lead-in detail.

The danger of getting much closer is that the verticals of the house start falling away, unless you can employ a specialist tilt-shift lens to correct this, or you fancy having a go at free-lensing where you detach the lens from the camera body and try angling it yourself.

If you’re going to correct the verticals in Photoshop afterwards, make sure there’s some space on either side of the house because the correction process itself will use up some of that. With less scenery to encapsulate, focus a third of the way into the scene and use an aperture of around f/11.

If you’re shooting early in the morning, it’s worth keeping an eye on the white balance as the light might have more blue tones than you want. Ideally shoot RAW files, so that the color temperature can be more easily tweaked later. Otherwise, try some of the sunny sky or cloudy sky presets, or dial in 5600K or 6500K to ensure the stonework retains a nice color in the sunlight.

What to find outside

The other attractions of stately homes are the gardens and the interiors. For the gardens, it can be anything from close-up or macro shots of some of the flowers, to an interesting architectural or landscape feature in the garden.

On a recent trip to Bowood House in Wiltshire, I discovered a purpose-built waterfall behind the lake, while other properties often have a folly or arboretum. On the bigger estates you can also find the vast tracts of parkland are inhabited by herds of deer, which is an opportunity for telephoto work and wildlife photos.

Discovering the treasures inside

The interiors present a range of challenges, starting with the fact that flash photography and tripods are usually not allowed. So, reduced available light means fighting with the shutter speed to avoid camera shake.

A wide-angle lens helps here, the shorter focal lengths enabling handheld shots where a telephoto wouldn’t. Plus, with restricted access to most rooms, you want a wide view, unless it’s down a corridor. Anything from 16 to 28mm works well, but be wary of objects close to the camera becoming unduly distorted.

What aperture to use, though? How much depth of field do you want in a scene that consists of just a room? Well, the wide-angle lens gives more depth of field than a telephoto, so try f/5.6 in aperture priority mode and see what kind of shutter speed you get.

Your camera type, whether the lens has optical stabilization, and how steady your hands are, all determine the minimum shutter speed you can hand-hold at. Personally, I draw the line at 1/20 or 1/30 sec before I reach for the ISO dial.

If the shutter speed is too slow, increase the ISO by whatever you need to get that minimum speed, rather than just letting auto ISO take over. This isn’t a fast-shooting situation; you’ve got time to work it out.

As well as the interesting personal rooms on offer, there are other places that offer photographic value, such as hallways with ornate, vaulted ceilings; kitchens, with old fashioned equipment; chapels; and spiral or grand staircases.

What almost all the scenes will have in common, though, is mixed lighting. There will generally be incandescent or tungsten lamps inside and daylight coming through the windows.

Firstly, it’s tricky to get a correct exposure for situations like this, and if there’s too much contrast between light and dark then it might not be that practical. Generally, if you expose for the room, the highlighted windows will blow out, but if you expose for the windows, the rest of the room will be pitch black.

Obviously shooting RAW is essential here, but it’s safer to get an exposure that retains the highlights, because you can pimp the shadows in Photoshop later. An HDR mode will also help because it’s likely that you won’t have access to a tripod, so taking multiple exposure to combine them later will be impractical.

With the mixed light sources, the other issue is going to be white balance. The incandescent lamps will have a temperature of around 2800K, tungsten halogen is 3200K, fluorescent light comes in a bit higher at around 4,500K but the daylight coming through the window can be 5,000-6,000K for sunny weather and up to 8000K for cloudy days.

So in practice that means that the window light areas tend to be blue, the desk lamps tend to be orange. The camera generally only applies one setting to the whole scene, so if it sets the white balance at say, 3,000K to make the light from the desk lamps more white, then the rest of the scene, illuminated by daylight, will become noticeably blue.

It’s much better to go the other way, tweak the white balance up to 6000K to make the daylight areas a nice, neutral color, and let the areas around the desk lamps have a more golden orange tone. You can either do it in camera at the time, or adjust accordingly when processing the RAW files.

Custom white balance

This scene has competing light sources with incandescent to the left and window light at the back. That means the color temperature on one side is different to the other. Here, a custom setting of 6,000K was used to stop the window light turning blue, while retaining a pleasant orange glow around the desk lamps.

To shoot stately homes you'll need a wide-angle lens. Obviously you'll need to carry all your kit about in a handy backpack as well.

The relentless march of time and technology means that today’s camera tech becomes tomorrow’s obsolete junk. However, give it enough time and that junk will slowly become collectible. When it’s passed from useful to decorative, that’s the time to set your camera collection up for a macro shot.

For this image I’ve set the cameras up on a table with window light in the background. However, the front of the cameras is lit by a tungsten lamp with a color temperature of around 3000K. The camera's auto white balance has catered for this, which means that the highlights on the tops of the cameras have a contrasting blue cast.

A wide aperture was used to give a shallow depth of field, with the focus on the front features of the central camera.

Behind the scenes

The setup has some other cameras at the back to fill in the gaps between the ones at the front. It was simpler than propping up a background. The tungsten lamp provides the light for the camera to meter from.

Essential settings

This was the widest aperture available at this focus point for the Sigma 105mm f/2.8 DN OS HSM macro lens. An ISO of 200 ensured a fast shutter speed to make a tripod unnecessary.

Post production

As these are vintage cameras, the image was given a warm red tone tweak using Color Balance, with a mask used to make sure it didn’t affect the blue highlights.

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When travelling abroad there’s one location that’s almost guaranteed to offer a wealth of photographic opportunities, and that’s the local market. From the Souk Semmarine in Morocco to the Dong Xuan market in Vietnam, the world of bazaars, souks and street markets are bustling with color, texture and character.

There are a number of approaches you can take with your camera, including finding interesting vendors for portrait studies, wide-angle shots to show the scale, and tight telephoto crops to focus on the hustle and bustle.

The other option is to focus on what is being sold, to illustrate the patterns, textures and vibrant colors of foodstuffs, jewellery and fabrics. For this you’ll need to either crop tightly to exclude the surrounding stall and just showcase the items, as in the main image here, or look to compose the image in terms of the shapes and patterns of what’s on offer.

Working in enclosed spaces, it’s often the wide-angle lens that comes into play, but a short telephoto will certainly give you the flexibility to go wide to encompass the whole scene and then zoom in for more individual items. Even in bright, sunny conditions, the stall and goods themselves are likely to be in the shade, so any close up work might require increasing the ISO and using a wider aperture like f/2.8, f/4 or f/5.6 to avoid the shutter speed dropping too low for a handheld shot.

For the wide-angle view, showing the market itself, rather than a specific stall, you want more depth of field, so switch to f/11 or f/16 if there’s a really big area to capture. With bright, overhead sunlight and the stalls in shadows, they might have a blue color cast thanks to the AWB only catering for the sunlight. So, either shoot in RAW so it’s easy to tweak later, or use a manual white balance setting of 6,500-7,000K.

A versatile compact camera can be ideal for travel photography, so here's the best ones around at the moment. Consider taking a drone to fly over the market, if it's safe and legal. These are some to consider. Of course you'll want to show off your photos when you come back, so why not use one of these digital photo frames?

While canal building has been around since Roman times, when the industrious conquerors built the Fossdyke to connect Lincoln to the River Trent, it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that it really took off in the UK.

Burgeoning industry needed a better method of transporting goods and raw materials than by road, and canals offered the solution. A horse could tow up to 50 tons of cargo in a boat, connecting mines with factories and factories with cities. There was a frenzy of canal building, from 1759 to the end of the 18th century but it was to be short lived as a competing, integrated national railway took shape by the middle of the 19th century. The profit in canal building disappeared and the waterways slowly fell out of use for industry. It took nationalisation in 1947 to save the remnants of the canal system and then it was down to mainly leisure activities that put them to use.

What, when and where to shoot

Canals are interesting in that they can be found in the countryside, complete with greenery and pleasant paths used for leisure pursuits, but their original purpose was industrial transportation, so are present in cities, with buildings and artificial lighting as backdrops. There are also associated elements, such as bridges, docks or marinas for the boats, toll houses and, of course, locks, enabling the canal to climb over elevated stretches of terrain.

Let’s start in the towns and cities, which are the most interesting ones, with the docks for the canal boats which, at this point, are usually marinas for pleasure craft. Sunrise and sunset are obviously key photographic opportunities, but in a city the setting sun is often obscured by buildings and in the other direction, those same buildings can stop light falling onto the areas surrounding the dock.

If it’s a cloudless sky, so you don’t get any visual pyrotechnics, or, at the other end of the spectrum, it’s actually cloudy, then waiting until dusk is a better option. Now the sky deepens to a blue color and the artificial lights of the buildings are reflected in the water. As the water in the dock isn’t going anywhere, it’s only the wind that’s going to affect the reflections. If this is the case, then use a longer exposure to blur the ripples - something like 15 seconds. Don’t focus on the water either; focus on the nearest building or boat that’s moored up. The idea is to shoot across the water, towards the points of interest, using a wide-angle lens. The size and distance away of those objects determine what kind of focal length to use.

In the case of the photo of Leeds Dock (above) it needed an 18-35mm lens, at the widest setting and an aperture of f/14 in order to get an exposure of 30 seconds as the wind was causing a lot of rippling on the water.

Zone/Evaluative metering is generally okay for this kind of shot as there isn’t too much difference in the light in the sky compared to the water. Using centre-weighted and metering off the buildings would be an equally valid option. The other thing to consider is whether to use a polarizing filter to ensure maximum reflection on the water. It will extend the shutter as well, which will be an advantage on those windy days.

Once away from the dock, look out for bridges, canal paths and locks. For these an aperture of f/5.6-f/11 should be fine, focusing on the important element. For shots that involve a longer stretch of water, consider switching to portrait orientation and using a narrower aperture to keep more of it in focus. The tricky shot would be shooting back towards the setting sun - see the photo of the bridge, above - where the light in the sky is much brighter than on the water or the parts of the embankment that are in shadow.

A graduated ND filter will certainly help but even so, you may need to shoot in RAW and lighten the dark areas up in post-processing. The important thing is not to lose the highlights.

Into the countryside

Once the canals head out of the close confines of the city then, invariably, you’ll be on the towpath. Now you’re looking for areas that aren’t completely enclosed by trees and where there are attractive and colourful longboats to photograph. Look for corners and curves in the canal that add a little more visual interest than straight lines. For a shot with lots of boats in view, focus on the first one and use an aperture of f/16-f/22 to keep the rest acceptably sharp. If the shutter speed falls too low and you didn’t want to lug a tripod about, then simply increase the ISO rating. If your lens has IS/VR or the camera has IBIS, then you get away with a slower shutter speed, but this is your call based on your own equipment. For just one boat in view, use f/8 and focus on the prow.

One feature to look for is where the canal has to climb over a natural rise and uses locks to do it. For these switch to portrait orientation and focus on the first lock, showing the rest rising up behind. Some early morning or late afternoon sun will help here as otherwise the locks may largely be in the shade.

Finally, look out for interesting historic buildings along the canal path or even some examples of wildlife such as herons. Use a telephoto lens for these and a wider aperture to lose the background and make the bird stand out. Focus on the eye and compose so the bird is looking into the scene.

To photograph canals and locks you want a wide angle lens and a telephoto lens for close-up shots of boats and locks. Don't forget to take a tripod for those long exposure shots as well.

While portraits at country houses, out in the fields, or simply in a studio setting, are all perfectly valid location for entirely pleasant portraits, it’s only when you head into the city that the environment lends a sense of drama, foreboding and danger to the mix. That’s what we’re looking at here, with a selection of urban portraits.

1 Look miserable

First rule of urban photo club is no-one looks happy. Subways are a great location, but they invariably mean that your subject will be backlit, unless it’s really dull overhead or actually night time. So, use fill-flash to light the subject. Even better, use a flash that you can position and bounce light off the ceiling or nearby walls. Use a wide aperture to lose the distant background.

Photo: 1/250 sec, f/3.5, ISO 100

2 Get low down

Take a low position, looking up, to give a distorted view, completely at odds with most portrait styles. If the subject has trendy footwear use a really wide-angle lens and get right down to ground level to shoot up. If you’re going to use colour, something that contrasts with a close background is a good idea.

Photo: 1/160 sec, f/4.5, ISO 1250

3 Use alleyways

Get the subject into narrow alleys and streets to emphasise the city bearing down on them. Use a slanted shot for a more dynamic result.

Photo: 1/80 sec, f/5.6, ISO 1250

4 Make use of decay

As well as graffiti, as seen in the first shot, look out for crumbling buildings, post-industrial decay, and soulless machinery. Here we have a grim, urban backdrop with fences and a gas storage holder. To keep all that in focus, an aperture of f/14 was used, as well as off-camera flash to the left and spot metering, as the subject was significantly backlit by the sun.

Photo: 1/250 sec, f/14, ISO 200

To shoot urban portraits you need a portrait lens, as well as a camera bag that doesn't attract attention. Also, why not consider travelling light and getting into a Micro Four Thirds system?

Around 4000 BC the landscape of Britain was a wild, forested place, where tribes of hunter gathers roamed freely. However, the British Isles were still attached to mainland Europe and over this landbridge came settlers with ideas of agriculture, community and religious rituals. The age of Neolithic Britain had begun and was to transform the landscape over the next 1,500 years, clearing the woodlands and building impressive stone structures that were to last through until the modern day.

The most famous Neolithic site in Britain is, of course, Stonehenge, though it’s not the best, so that’s where I headed, followed by a visit to Avebury, which is much more interesting. The thing about Stonehenge is that you don’t want to visit at mid-day, which is when the light is right overhead, especially in summer. Winter is a good time, because with sunset around 4pm, you can catch the late afternoon sun (if there is any) before the site shuts.

1 Catch the sun

Just before sunset the light changes color to a more golden hue, which particularly suits things like standing stones. Compose the shot so that you can see the spread of stones, like here at Avebury, and that they are facing into the sunlight. Focus on the nearest stone with f/8 aperture.

2 Wait for sunset

Now sit and wait for sunset and see what light you get in the sky. Change the composition so you are facing towards where the sun went down. Either bracket the shot for combining later, or meter from the sky and bring the light up on the foreground later when editing the RAW file.

3 Hillside carvings

Technically speaking, hillside carvings of horses, giants and the like started to appear around the time of the Bronze Age, but hey, if you’re out looking for ancient elements in the landscape, then why not. Try to show the carving in the context of the landscape itself. You may need a telephoto lens for this.

4 Discover entire villages

One of the most spectacular Neolithic villages in the world, and the best preserved settlement in Western Europe, Skara Brae on the Orkney Islands is older than Stonehenge. Use a wide angle lens to show as much as possible, with an aperture of f/5.6 and focussing on the nearest stonework.

5 Going underground

The final item of Neolithic life to look for is how they preserved the dead, with burial chambers. Either go inside, open up the aperture and use a torch to light up details and rooms, or shoot from the outside showing the overall construction. For the interiors a tripod would also help avoid having to use high ISOs.

Essential kit

You’ll need a wide angle lens for some locations, but also a short telephoto if you’re cordoned off from getting too close, like a Stonehenge. The main image used a 24mm focal length. It’s worth using a circular polariser to enhance clouds and overall contrast, and an ND filter for controlling the exposure when shooting towards a sunset.

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Look Up Tables (LUTs) are traditionally used to give a consistent look and feel to film projects or commercial photos but there’s no reason why you can’t use them to give your images a different look. They work by creating a table consisting of the original color values in an image and transposing them into different shades. Not only can you use the ones supplied with Photoshop, you can create your own to be used on new images. That’s what this tutorial is about. It’s also important to realise that if the image you apply the new LUT to doesn’t contain any of the shades that are in the table, then nothing will change! For that reason, it’s best to create the LUT from an image that either has a good range of colors, or a specific set and you name the LUT accordingly.

1 Find a suitable image

You can create LUTs for specific styles and types of starting image, but this one is for general purpose use as it has reds, greens and blues in it. The light is fairly flat as well, which makes it a good starting point. So, go to the Layers palette and click on the New fill or adjustment layer icon, then select Curves. It’s not quite an S-shape as the shadows are deep enough, but it brightens the highlights.

2 Color changes

Now add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and select the blue channel at the top. Use the dropper tool from this palette and click on the blue car to make it more accurate. Now change the Hue slider until it’s a red colour. It will also affect the sky. You can select other colors in this palette but you get more control if you create new adjustments for each color as you can adjust the opacity.

3 Change the grass

The big change for any landscape is the green/yellow component. Create another Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, select the green channel at the top and use the color dropper to click on the grass itself. Use the Hue slider to change this to a red color as well. A final adjustment comes by adding a Photo filter adjustment layer and selecting Warming Filter (85). Increase the Density to 50.

4 Save the LUT

Now, this is quite a radical color shift, to demonstrate how it works. In practice, you can create more subtle ones as well those that are themed to particular color shifts. Go to File> Export> Color Lookup Tables. In the dialog box give your LUT a meaningful description and select .Cube as the most commonly LUT type. Then click OK. Navigate to where you want to save it and name the file accordingly.

5 How to use your LUTs

To use this LUT and any others you create, load an image and go to the Layers palette. Select New adjustment layer again and select Color Lookup. In the Properties panel, click on Load 3D LUT and then Load 3D LUT again for the file browser. Find the one you created earlier, select it, and it will now be loaded as an adjustment layer that you can control.

Just because it is winter doesn’t mean you should stay inside hibernating until spring. I mean, you can if you want to, I won’t be checking up on anyone. However, it’s more fun to pack your camera, tripod and umbrella and head for a scenic coastline to discover the photographic treats that await.

You could probably go with just a flexible lens, like a 24-200mm superzoom, which offers a very handy wide-angle end and a decent amount of telephoto. However, if you want more flexibility, then a really wide-angle lens, say 18mm, adds more drama and a macro lens will let you poke your camera into rockpools for interesting macro shots. You could also bring a really big lens if you want to chase seagulls around a harbor.

1. Try an ICM seascape

Intentional Camera Movement doesn’t just have to be trees and, in fact, the sea makes an ideal subject for panning from one side to the other. The idea is to get the shutter speed down to 1/15-1/20 sec and move the camera as you shoot. Even on a grey day, that needed ISO40 and an f/22 aperture without using filters.

2. Head for port

The great thing about shooting a harbor is that it doesn’t really matter what the weather is like, unless it’s a storm, in which case head for the pub until it blows over. Wait for sunset, set the camera on a tripod and use a shutter release cable or a timed delay release. A long exposure will smooth out the water.

3. People in the landscape

Unless you’re at some forgotten corner of north Scotland, there will be people, no matter what the weather. Unpack your long lens (180mm here) and look for the strange spectacle of people determined to enjoy themselves, dispute the lack of sun and, in this case, anything comfortable to sit on.

4. Shoot through the mist

This particular day was like shooting from under a wet blanket all day long. Instead of cursing the fact that you could have gone to Portugal for the same money, look for interesting combinations that include the swirling mist. Black and white is also an option here.

5. Who lives here?

Where there are rocks at the coast there will be rockpools. Wait for the tide to recede then grab your macro lens and go see what’s living, or has been trapped, in them. Those which never really dry out are likely to have more interesting things growing in them. Remember, the closer you get, the less depth of field there will be.

Before you go...

Heading for the coast you'll need a flexible wide angle lens for general use, a telephoto lens for bird photography, and a macro lens for close up work.

Black-and-white photography is all about control – and one misstep in post-processing can completely limit your creative potential. Understanding how to handle grey tones properly is the key to impactful monochrome images – no matter what genre you're shooting.

One of the most common mistakes photographers make when editing black-and-white photos is converting files straight to greyscale. While it sounds logical, this instantly discards valuable color data – and with it, your ability to precisely control luminosity contrast and tonal separation.

For context, the color information is crucial to control luminosity, which heavily influences the visual outcome of black-and-white photographs. The result? Flat, lifeless black-and-white images.

Instead make use of the Black & White Adjustment Layer, which enables you to individually control the colors' grey shades via luminosity. In general, working with Adjustment Layers only is the way to go. This has the benefit of maximum control over the editing process, as you can always go back to the specific layer to reset or readjust settings.

Let's take a look at the powerful – and flexible – tools for optimizing your monochrome images. From simple adjustments to advanced conversions, these techniques will help you fine-tune your black-and-white work with intention, creativity and full control.

To demonstrate the effects, we're editing images by Mostafa Nodeh, an award-winning photographer known for his minimalistic black-and-white photography.

The top four

1. Control luminosity

Use the color information to visually set elements apart in mono. Add a Black & White Adjustment Layer and a window opens showing color tones from Red to Magenta. This adjustment works similarly to the in-camera color filters but, with access to specific sliders, you have maximum control over the luminosity levels.

2. S-Curve 

To enhance or decrease the contrast of your black-and-white shots, add a Curve Adjustment layer. Here, most frames benefit from a classic curve. Click on the anchor points and adjust these into an S-shape. However, it is worth experimenting with settings as each frame is different.

3. Dodge and Burn

To fine-tune specific image elements in contrast and luminosity, use Dodge and Burn tools. With these, you can target the tonality of subjects (Dodge) or add contrast (Burn) by painting in the frame. Don’t forget to specify the tonality range to either work on shadows, midtones or highlights.

4. Texture overlay

Adding some fine-grain noise or a pattern overlay is a clever technique to add a more classical analog touch to your monochrome shots. Texture filters are available, but you can also raise the texture slider in your RAW Editing Converter. Here, bear in mind that the latter can not be fine-tuned after the setting has been applied.

Toning effect

High key 

Add a Curve Adjustment Layer. Now raise the curve via the anchors to lighten the grey tones in your image. Keep an eye out so that you don’t lose any details in the highlights.

Sepia

First, add a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer. Now set the Hue value to around 30, while dragging the Saturation slider to around a value of 25. Tick the Colorize box.

Cyanotype

Add a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer. Set the Hue value around 220 and Saturation to 35. Tick the Colorize box. Open the Curve Adjustment Layer and add contrast via an S-curve.

Split-tone

Use Split Tone panel or Gradient Map Adjustment Layer. Set shadows to one colour and highlights to another. Complementary color combinations such as red and blue work best.

Advanced conversions

Step 1: Create Gradient Map

Click on the half-white and half-black circle found at the bottom of the Layers panel. Now select the Gradient Map. Then a window will appear in the Properties panel.

2. Open dialog box

Simply click on the gradient shown and the Gradient Editor opens. Under Presets, you will find a Basics folder. Open it and select the third option shown named Black, White.

3. Add Level Adjustment Layer

To reduce the contrast, set the black output level to around 25. To enhance the contrast, set the white point to 10, mid-tones/brightness to 1, and the black point around 200.

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Snow is one of the most challenging subjects to photograph correctly. While it appears white to the eye, cameras often interpret snowy scenes as blue, grey or overly warm – especially in winter light.

This appears because incorrect white balance (WB) exaggerates color shifts, while snow reflects surrounding light more intensely than most surfaces. Even a small adjustment error can change the mood of your images.

Understanding how to achieve correct white balance in snow photos will instantly elevate your winter photography. Clean whites, balanced tones and accurate color help your images feel natural while preserving atmosphere.

Correcting white balance doesn't always mean removing all color; cooler tones or warmer yellow hues can be used intentionally to enhance mood, as long as the choice is creative rather than unwanted and accidental.

(If you're new to this topic, here's a simple explanation of what is white balance in photography is and why it matters.)

Follow these five simple editing steps – demonstrated in Affinity Photo 2.0, but easily transferable to other editing software like Photoshop – to regain control over color, fix unwanted tints and ensure that your snow photos look exactly as you intended, before the next snowfall arrives.

Before and After

Editing tutorial

1. Open WB settings

When working with RAW images in Affinity Photo 2.0, the Develop Persona option opens automatically when you open the image. This gives you access to the White Balance control sliders. For JPEGs, simply add a White Balance Adjustment Layer above your Background Layer.

2. Select the reference hue

Select the Picker tool located at the bottom-left of the White Balance dialog box. Click on an element of the photograph that appears relatively neutral – it is best to focus on white and grey frame areas. This process may require a few attempts to get right.

3. Set the balance

Affinity Photo automatically adjusts the White Balance and Tint sliders based on the chosen reference color. It’s beneficial to experiment with the Picker tool to see how different selections affect the image. Once you’re satisfied with the result, close the dialog box.

4. Control highlights

Next, add a Color Balance Adjustment Layer and set the Tonal Range to Highlights. This enables you to control the colors of the highlights. To introduce a cooler tint, move the Cyan/Red slider to the left and the Yellow/Blue slider to the right. To create warmth, do the opposite.

5. Boost colors

To edit specific hues, add a Selective Color Adjustment Layer. Look where you might benefit from a boost to enhance color contrast and where you can minimize it to make it more neutral. Select a color and adjust the sliders. Work with the Neutrals and Whites options to optimize the snow.

Key tip

Don’t underestimate contrast 

When working with snowy scenes, adding either subtle or strong Contrast can enhance the visual impact. As a final step, add a Curves Adjustment Layer and tweak the tones to your preference – both approaches have their merits.

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What's more festive than transforming a room in your house into a dreamy, fairy-lit world, perfect for a spot of creative portrait photography?

The concept is simple – by sticking a fast prime lens onto the front of your DSLR or mirrorless camera and taking advantage of its super-wide aperture, we'll be able to create a nicely blurred background to transform those tiny, twinkling points of light into beautiful bokeh balls.

This project really is as quick, easy, and fun to do as it sounds.

Essentially, all you need is your camera, a fast lens (be that a prime or a zoom with a wide max. aperture between f/1.4 and f/2.8), a few strings of fairy lights, and a willing volunteer to pose for you.

Professional photographer and videographer Tom Calton shows how to bag the shot and demonstrates a simple but effective colour treatment in Photoshop to make it really stand out.

The setup

Warm lights
We've opted to use warm fairy lights to give the shot a cosy, wintry feel. However, you could experiment by using white or multicoloured lights (or a mixture of the two). Just ensure the lights that are used are bright.

Twinkling backdrop
Our background is a simple net of fairy lights hung against a blank wall that is free from hanging ornaments and picture frames.

More lights
A few additional strings of lights are needed for the model to hold to illuminate their face. You can also try draping lights across the bed and elsewhere in the room to increase the effect.

Blackout
To capture the full effect of the fairy lights, it’s important that they are the only light source in the room. Turn off all the room lights and block out the windows.

Shooting steps

1. Block out the light

To get started with this photograph, make sure that the fairy lights will be the only source of light in the room. Block out any window light and close all of the blinds and curtains. Switch off any room lights and lamps as well.

2. Set up the background

The next step is to hang the net of fairy lights in the background to create a nice, twinkly backdrop for our shot. Hang the lights from a shelf above the bed, or alternatively, try and drape them over a backdrop stand or hang them between two light stands.

3. Use a fast lens

In order to turn the fairy lights into twinkling orbs in the shot, use a lens with a wide aperture. Prime lenses are the best choice, as they generally offer a wider maximum aperture than zooms. Here we used a FE 50mm f/1.4 GM lens on a Sony A7 III, which is a great option for portraits in general.

4. Add more fairy lights

Ask the model to sit in position. Drape one set of fairy lights around where they are sat and then carefully ball-up a second set of lights and place them in the model's hand – these will be used to illuminate the model's face.

5. Camera settings

Switch the camera to Aperture Priority mode, and then set the widest aperture possible. Frame up the shot and adjust the ISO until the shutter speed is reading a value of 1/250sec or faster. This will help to ensure a sharp shot while shooting handheld. Finally, set the camera so that it shoots in RAW.

6. Take the shot

Frame up the shot and make sure that the active AF point is positioned over one of the model’s eyes. Then focus and take the shot. Check the results to make sure that the model is sharp and in focus, and repeat the shot if necessary.

Pro Tip

Keep your distance

Although using a wide aperture will give you the best chance of transforming all of those small points of light in the background into big, beautiful orbs, distance is also another factor you'll need to keep in mind.

In short, the greater the distance between the lights and your point of focus (the model's face), the more blurred the background will become and the bigger the orbs of light will be. So bear this in mind while setting up your shot.

Editing steps

1. Contrast and color

Open the RAW photo in Photoshop, and the Camera Raw Interface will appear. Crank the Contrast slider to +100 and the Clarity to +50. Then, set the Vibrance to +30 to bolster the colors.

2. Lift the shadows

Don't worry if the photo has too much contrast as this can easily be fixed by increasing the Shadows +50 and the Blacks to +60. This will brighten the shadow detail for a more balanced result.

3. Split toning

Click the Split Toning tab at the top right of the screen (beneath the histogram). Under the Shadows section, set the Hue to a value of 230, then increase the Saturation to 80 to turn the shadows blue.

4. Curves

Click the Curves tab at the top, then underneath the Curves diagram, find the Output box and set it to a value of 16. This will crush the blacks within the image to give it a much softer appearance.

5. Blue curves

Staying in the Curves tab for the moment, locate the Channel option above the Curves diagram and change it from RGB to Blue. Then, set the Output to 10 in order to add more blue to the shadows within the image.

6. Brighten the model

Finally, grab the Adjustment Brush from the toolbar at the top of the screen and brush over the model’s face. Pull the Exposure slider to the right to brighten their face – a value of +0.85 worked for our image here.

Before/After

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There’s no better date on the calendar than new camera day, but getting to grips with a new device can be a bit of an awkward experience. I’m always using different cameras, and I can tell you from experience that it’s easy to get frustrated – especially if you’re grappling with a new menu system and/or control layout.

New camera owners are usually faced with one of four scenarios: they’re staying within the same system, they’re switching systems, they’re moving from a DSLR to a mirrorless camera, or they’re purchasing their first fully manual camera.

The first scenario is the easiest, because you’ll already be used to the menu system and control layout. The differences in menu system and control layout between two Canon EOS cameras, for example, will be minimal.

Switching systems is much harder because not only will you have to grapple with a new menu system and control scheme, you’ll be fighting against the muscle memory you've carefully honed when using your previous system.

Switching from a DSLR to a mirrorless camera isn’t overly strenuous if you’re sticking with the same manufacturer (although there are some specific considerations) and, if you’re not, revert to my last point.

And finally, if you’re a complete beginner, you’re sailing into uncharted waters. The good news is that you don’t have to undo any muscle memory or relearn things, because everything is new to you, so you have a chance to start everything off on the right foot. Let’s get into it…

1. Set your camera up

Before you’re tempted to head out and about with your pride and joy, hold your horses and take the time to set it up properly. The first thing I do when I get a new camera is to set it to RAW. Most cameras will be set to JPEG by default, so if you’re a RAW shooter, this is a very important step.

I then take the time to go through the menu system bit by bit, making sure that everything is set up to my liking. I’ll have the manual to hand, too, so if I find a setting I’m not familiar with, I can look it up.

Finally, I’ll make sure that I map out any custom function buttons. If you’ve never done this before, buying a new camera is a great excuse to start – because you’ll have to get used to the new control system anyway, so you might as well make your life easier by mapping custom buttons and building up the muscle memory for everything at the same time.

2. Set up your video settings

Videographers and hybrid creatives will head straight for this option by default – but if you only shoot video occasionally or hardly ever, you might not think to set up your camera’s video preferences.

However, just in case inspiration strikes, it’s always a good idea to set up your video settings from the outset. That way, if you suddenly find yourself wanting to capture some footage, you can simply switch to video mode and start shooting.

3. Set up your EVF accordingly

If you’re picking up a mirrorless camera for the first time, it’ll likely have an auto EVF (electronic viewfinder) setting where the rear LCD screen switches off when you bring the EVF up to your eye. This can present something of a problem if you’re shooting video or framing photos using the rear LCD.

This is because something like a gimbal or even your torso, if you’re shooting from the hip, can trigger the sensor and switch off the rear LCD. As such, make sure you find your camera’s EVF settings and set this function to your preference.

4. Use your camera at home

I’m not saying you shouldn't get outside with your camera on Christmas Day – who wouldn’t want to? – but don’t be afraid to pick up your camera and play with it at home.

Just handling it, fiddling with a few settings, and taking a few pictures of the cat all go towards building that crucial muscle memory that will eventually have you wielding your camera like it’s an extension of your arms.

5. Keep your camera with you

The more time you spend with your camera, the quicker you’re going to become one with it, so it’s crucial at this early stage that you keep it with you as much as possible.

Walking the dog, heading to the shops, visiting the in-laws… make sure your camera is always by your side so that you’re encouraged to use it.

6. Know that mirrorless cameras can drain batteries faster

This one’s for anyone moving from DSLR to mirrorless. Depending on which mirrorless camera you have, you’ll probably find that the battery drains much quicker than your old DSLR’s battery. This is because either the EVF or the rear LCD, along with the sensor and possibly the stabilization system, are constantly working while the camera is switched on.

As such, you’ll need to get into the habit of switching your camera off when you’re not actively using it, ensuring that your batteries are fully charged on every shoot, and keeping an eye on your battery indicator.

The battery life of mirrorless cameras has definitely improved over time, and some higher-end models do boast very good battery life, but if you’ve been a DSLR stalwart all this time, this is something that can catch you out.

7. Avoid important shoots

Whether you’re a jobbing photographer or a keen enthusiast, you might want to think twice before taking out your new pride and joy on an important shoot if you haven’t spent the time getting to know the camera first.

Granted, this only works if you still have your old camera – but if you have the choice, I’d recommend sticking with your old kit until you’re comfortable using your new kit.

After all, you don’t want to be wasting valuable time trying to find out your new camera’s flash sync speed, finding yourself completely bamboozled by all the new AF settings, or inadvertently shooting JPEG for the entire shoot because you forgot to employ tip number one.

8. Learn to use the viewfinder

If you’ve only ever used camera phones or compact cameras with no viewfinder, I think it’s extremely important that you get used to shooting through the viewfinder.

I’ve written about this in the past and am in no way saying that composing through the viewfinder is better than composing via the rear LCD. Plenty of incredible photographers – especially in this modern age of camera phones – do so.

However, if you’re starting your photography journey, I think it’s worth learning both ways. Why? Because if you start to use longer lenses, you may find yourself struggling to steady the camera effectively if you insist on shooting via the rear screen.

And if you find yourself shooting in bright sunlight, you might not be able to even see the image on the rear LCD due to glare. I say, get it out of the way now and learn to use both.

9. Put on a camera strap

I’m guilty of not using my camera with a strap. Then again, I do a lot of product and landscape photography where it’s secured on a tripod, and sports photography where the camera and lens combination is simply too heavy (for a neck strap at least).

However, if you’ve bought a camera that can be comfortably worn around your neck or over your shoulder, it’s worth attaching a strap. Not only will this avoid unwanted drops, but it’ll keep your camera always available to you, meaning you’ll use it more and are less likely to miss the moment.

10. Know your exposure settings

If you’re using a fully manual camera for the first time, it can be a very daunting experience. So much so that plenty of beginner photographers buy manual cameras, switch them to auto mode and never get the best out of them.

I therefore wholeheartedly recommend that you take the time to learn the exposure triangle and the settings on your camera so you can begin to wield it like a pro. However, you needn’t take the training wheels off in one go.

A great starting point is aperture priority. This setting enables you to control your aperture and thus your depth of field, while the camera automatically sets the shutter speed. You can then choose to set your ISO manually or set it to auto ISO, so you only have to worry about your aperture.

This is the first step into the world of manual photography and is a great way to get started without relying on auto mode.

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Adobe Firefly is behind a number of key Photoshop updates – but a key change for the photo editing giant in 2025 is the ability to choose third-party AI models. Photoshop now allows users to use Nano Bana Pro or Flux.2 AI image generators instead of its own Firefly for Generative Fill. But that, of course, begs the question – when should photo editors use a third-party AI model?

I directed exactly that question to not just a Photoshop expert but Adobe Photoshop’s Senior Director of Product Management, Stephen Nielsen. Here’s when (and why) photo editors may want to try a third-party AI.

Adobe Firefly

Best for: Commercially-safe AI

Adobe Firefly has a key feature for creators: it’s built on licensed content, not photos scraped from the internet. That makes Firefly safe for commercial use, Adobe says.

Firefly is the safer choice – and the more ethical option for creatives, as many generative AI platforms do not share where the training data comes from. There are a number of lawsuits and legal questions surrounding AI and what constitutes fair use for training data.

Photoshop’s third-party AI models are also considered a premium generative AI feature, whereas Firefly is considered a standard feature. That means that, depending on what subscription you have, you may have to purchase extra generative credits to use the third-party models, where some standard generative credits are included in some Adobe Photography plans.

Nano Banana and Nano Banana Pro

Best for: Legible text and signs, understanding instructions

AI image generators are notoriously bad a generating text, but Google’s Nano Banana Pro shows significant improvement. For editors who need to generate text, Nano Banana may spit out the most usable options.

Nano Banana Pro is also able to understand instructions. Firefly wasn’t built to use instruction verbs like “change this to that” in the prompt, so using those types of prompts can introduce unintended errors. Editors using prompts with instruction verbs may want to experiment with Nano Banana inside Photoshop.

Flux.1 and Flux.2

Best for: Realism, maintaining image “identity,” understanding instructions

Black Forest Lab’s Flux AI models are known for realism, and that can extend into Photoshop’s Generative Fill. Editors may also want to experiment with the Flux models for maintaining “identity” or keeping more of the original intact and staying in line with the original image.

Like Nano Banana Pro, Flux models' training allows them to handle instruction verbs in the prompt better than Firefly at times.

Currently, third-party AI models are only available in Generative Fill inside Photoshop. Third-party models are available by using the drop-down menu next to the prompt text box in the Contextual Task Bar. Third-party AI model support was introduced in October 2026, and a software update is required for those running older versions of the software.

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We all know that setting up a photography business is not an easy undertaking – and although you will struggle to do it for free, it doesn’t have to be as expensive as you might first anticipate. There are a few key areas where you are going to need to invest; some will require money, but other areas will only require your time.

You don’t need a professional camera body or lenses to become a professional photographer. In fact, I’d say that if you have the determination and flexible skills, you can probably make do with the kit you already have and build up your gear collection slowly.

If you think a camera body upgrade is absolutely necessary, I'd advise you to think about what sensor you’re going to need for the work you want to take on (for example, is a full-frame camera a necessity?) and then work out your budget.

It doesn’t matter if you choose the cheapest camera available, as lenses are really where putting your money pays off. Good-quality glass and faster lenses make more of a difference to your overall image quality, although you don’t need to spend a fortune here either.

I’ve been asking photography pros for their best advice on working with a limited budget when you first get started…

Pro Advice

Second-hand and renting

Photographer Dave Kai Piper is a portrait and fashion photographer, and has some useful advice when it comes to setting up your business on a budget.

“To be a photographer, you need a camera, lens, possibly an external light source and a phone,” he advises. “Let your income dictate the purchase of gear, not your lust for new things. Marketing firms and influencers will do their best to tell you that you need the latest stuff. It’s a total lie, don’t believe the hype!”

When it comes to buying gear, remember that you don’t need to buy new. There are many great second-hand outlets online, such as KEH and MPB to name just a couple.

These websites are legitimate companies that thoroughly check the kit as it comes in and offer a guarantee. However, note that this may not apply to every product, so check before purchasing.

When buying lenses, tripods, accessories and lighting kits, second-hand is the way to go if you want to save money. Camera bodies are a little riskier on the second-hand market, but nevertheless you can get some good deals if you shop around.

Make sure you look at the shutter count of the camera body you intend to purchase, to give you a good indication of the life left in it. Many professional camera bodies should last 200,000 clicks or more. You can also trade in your old gear, which may get you a few extra quid – every little helps!

Dave also makes a good point about renting gear. “If you find you need a certain item, rent it unless you are using it every day.” Although more advanced photography gear can still be pricey to borrow in the short term, this is a better solution than buying it (even second-hand).

Companies like Hire A Camera have a great range of products that can be borrowed from a day rate up to a two-week period.

Take some risk

It takes guts to put money into your business (especially if you’re uncertain of the outcome), but self-belief is a good philosophy to keep in mind. While I don’t advise you to borrow massive amounts of money you can’t repay, sometimes you have to take a bit of a risk to get somewhere, like photographer Suzanne Porter:

“I’ve always had a tendency to just go for it and deal with the consequences, and manage to convince myself what I want is worth the money… Hence, a number of my projects have left me in debt! But that is also what drives me. If I’ve overspent on expensive items, then I damn well have to go out and get the work.”

Invest in yourself

Dave Kai Piper is a great believer in investing time in yourself and the people around you. “Create a network of like-minded people that you can go to for advice and help,” he suggests.

“You can share gear and resources, and help each other. Many people think being a photographer is a solo game, but I can tell you from my heart, there is just no way I would have done half of what I have done without the support of friends and family.”

He continues, “You can have a fancy office, the best cameras with all the technical training, but if you don’t have customers, it’s worth nothing. Talk to everyone about what you want to do, keep going, and with hard work you’ll get rewards.”

Online presence

To get yourself noticed and to build up your network, it is recommended that you have some type of online presence. This doesn’t need to be in the form of an expensive website; you can simply set up free social media sites that sell your brand.

Instagram is a great way to visually entice people to look at your work, and a thought-through Facebook page provides you with a platform for people to get in touch and book business directly with you.

Don’t be under any illusions, though, that you’re suddenly going to get loads of work through these platforms as soon as they go live; you’ll need to network in person as well. “Social media is a bit of a rabbit hole,” Dave says. “It can be easy to spend a lot of time without any reward. Use it wisely!”

When thinking about your marketinf strategy, look at other photographers you admire and take note of how they brand themselves. While imitating someone’s business like-for-like is a big no, taking a little inspiration is flattering.

Resist unnecessary temptations

When it comes to looking at your budget, don’t make any extravagant expenditures. While Suzanne Porter invests her money in some areas of her business, such as her kit, she has found it beneficial to reel the budget back in others.

“Since starting the online marketplace, I’ve come up against many situations where I would love to spend the budget on areas outside my comfort zone, for example, PR and marketing, analytics, social media, and even to have a lovely office to disassociate from home life,” she says.

“But I have managed to resist these things, and I am learning to do much more myself. This is empowering and invaluable, even if I farm out the work at a later date. Do as much as you can yourself, at least in the beginning (there are tutorials for everything online); start small, go slowly and believe.”

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This head-turning effect may look like it was created entirely in post-production, but it’s less complicated than that. To achieve it, you’ll need to get hold of a glass prism, which can easily be found in all shapes and sizes and to suit all budgets on sites like eBay and Amazon. A 4-inch glass prism can be sourced from eBay for less than £10/$10 and is a great way to get started. If you like the prism technique, you may want to upgrade to a Fractal Filters Classic 3-pack, which is more versatile but comes with a premium at $119.

Bear in mind that the prism needs to be long enough to cover the whole front element of your lens (for most 35mm, 50mm and 85mm prime lenses, the 4-inch version will be fine). Requiring hand-holding, the prism needs to be long enough to avoid your fingers appearing in the shot. 

Start in Aperture Priority mode and select the widest aperture on your lens, such as f/1.8. This will not only throw the background out of focus but will also render the prism in the foreground out of focus. Adjust the ISO value until you can shoot with a shutter speed of 1/200 sec or above to eliminate camera shake and enable any image stabilisation.

Now it’s time to start shooting and asking your model to experiment with their poses.

Gear advice

Commonly referred to as a ‘nifty fifty’, a 50mm f/1.8 lens is usually priced around the $100-150 (£100-150) mark and even less on the second-hand market. With a brilliant focal length for portraits, when used on a full-frame camera, the wide maximum aperture of f/1.8 will create separation between your model and the background by turning the latter into blurry ‘bokeh’.

See some of our best 50mm lens options

Fractals Filters Classic review: a three-pack of prisms for portrait photographers - 

Have a go using prisms at home with still life images 

I’m a big fan of rule of thirds photography, but this compositional technique is often deemed too simplistic or even boring. However, if you’re starting out on your photography journey, it’s a simple and reliable method of capturing pleasing compositions, allowing you to focus on other areas you might be struggling with, such as the exposure triangle or camera controls.

But as you start to learn more about compositional theory, you may find the rule of thirds to be lacking. And yet, what makes the rule of thirds so useful is that it can be applied to so many different situations. Unlike the rule of odds, leading lines, and a frame within a frame, the rule of thirds is an overarching compositional principle that can be applied to almost any image. Thankfully, there’s a more advanced alternative: the golden ratio.

How to use the golden ratio

1. Know the rule of thirds
2. Familiarize yourself with the Fibonacci spiral
3. Apply the spiral to images in post-production
4. Place the focal point at the end of the spiral
5. Use the curvature of the spiral as a guide for leading the viewer towards the focal point
6. Mentally apply the spiral when capturing images with your camera

What is the golden ratio?

The golden ratio, sometimes called the divine proportion or phi, is a mathematical equation that ends up close to 1.618. This number can also be achieved using the Fibonacci sequence, where the current number in the sequence is added to the previous number to make the next number: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc. As the sequence progresses, the Fibonacci sequence increasingly converges towards the golden ratio.

I’m no mathematician, so I’m not going to embarrass myself by explaining how that happens, but there’s a relationship. What we’re interested in is those numbers being used to form a curve known as the Fibonacci spiral. However, in the world of photography, I’ve seen Fibonacci spiral, golden ratio, phi, and the like, all being used interchangeably to refer to this curve. So, from now on, I’m just going to call it the golden ratio.

Things get really interesting when you realise that the golden ratio pops up all over the place throughout history. Not just in great works of art by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, but throughout the natural world. And while the concept of the golden ratio is pretty difficult to get your head around, applying it isn’t. But it does require practice.

The biggest difficulty is that, unlike the rule of thirds, it’s hard to find cameras that actually feature golden ratio overlays. This means you’ve got to overlay the spiral in your head. Thankfully, both Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Classic have a golden ratio overlay you can use when cropping, so you can tweak your composition accordingly. There’s also a simplified version of the golden ratio, which looks a lot like the rule of thirds grid, but with the two verticals set closer together in the center of the image.

As with the rule of thirds, you can place the focal point of the image on any of the converging points on the aforementioned grid, or roughly around the center of the spiral. The spiral itself can be flipped horizontally or vertically, and you can use the curvature as a guide for leading the eye towards the center of the spiral via objects or leading lines within the image.

Ultimately, the golden ratio isn’t overly different from the rule of thirds. However, due to its equally spaced grid, it’s less flexible than the golden ratio, and subsequent compositions can appear more rigid. I also find the Fibonacci spiral more useful in that the curvature can be used to lead towards the focal point of the image, whereas the rule of thirds simply features intersection points. It's also worth pointing out that you the golden ratio is scalable, so you can apply it to different aspect ratios. So, the next time you’re out and about, or if you’ve got some images to crop in post, why not try the golden ratio instead of the rule of thirds?

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Social media and the internet is full of faked photos. I would say it’s hard to spot what’s a real photo and what’s been given the AI treatment, but often it’s fairly obvious. However, when I posted this photo of our dog next to a tennis ball, I was met with confused responses. 

“How’d you make your dog so tiny, Peter?” 

“Is your dog one of those new miniature Bichon Frisé breeds!?”

No, and, er, no.

As our dog is standing beside the tennis ball on the grass, I haven’t played with perspective - eg when the ball (or toy car) is in the foreground and the dog (or subject) is in the background to make them appear the same size.

So I must’ve used some Photoshoppery? Or a little bit of AI generative fill stuff?

No, and again, no. 

So what’s the secret? 

Big balls. Big tennis balls, to be specific. Ever since my children were given giant tennis balls to play with, I knew there was a great photo op just waiting to happen. 

It’s simply a large tennis ball! To confirm, our Cavapoochon dog is a normal medium-size pooch, it’s the tennis ball in the photo which is big. It’s actually bigger than most soccer balls. 

It’s not a trick of the camera, it’s more a trick of the mind. We associate tennis balls as a certain size, so our brain thinks the thing next to it must be equally small. 

I shot low to the ground at around 50mm with a Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L lens, and at f/4 to keep the dog and ball on the same focus plane, and the background blurred. A bit of High-Speed Sync fill flash to brighten the shadows helped the exposure on this sunny day.

Anyone for tennis? Well, anyone for soccer? My balls are too big for tennis!

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You might think that still life photography requires a large space to operate in and a huge assortment of photography lighting kits, but if you’re a photography beginner or simply want to kill time on a rainy day, you can capture still life photography from the comfort of your own home using window light exclusively.

In fact, drab days can work very well, with soft diffused light flooding through windows, instead of the harsh, direct light you may encounter in the middle of a sunny day. Setting up your still life so it’s side-on to the window will allow you to replicate a classic-looking, single-light effect, illuminating your subject from one side, and forming shadows on the other to add both depth and dimension.

Simple still life tips for beginners:

1. Set up with the subject side-on to a window
2. Place your arrangement in front of a relatively plain backdrop
3. Think hard about your arrangement: the relationship of the objects, the narrative, the textures, and the colors
4. Frame your arrangement with your camera on a tripod
5. Use manual mode or aperture priority
6. Set an aperture of f/8 or f/11
7. Choose a low ISO
8. The subject is still so a slow shutter speed won't be a problem
9. Focus on the subject or just in front of it to maximise the depth of field
10. Use an exposure delay mode or remote shutter release to avoid camera shake

As far as subjects go, you can choose anything you have to hand, but classic still life subjects include pottery, flowers, and fruits. Many classic still-life paintings feature objects that are intended to connote death, referred to as a memento mori, so feel free to use objects to build a narrative. You’ll also want to think about your background. Typically, you’d opt for something that isn’t overly busy. That might be a dedicated photography background, a bare wall, or a piece of cloth.

Getting good at still life photography isn’t just about knowing how to use your camera; in fact, that’s really only a small part of it. The crucial part of any still life photo is the arrangement of the still life, so make sure you spend plenty of time thinking about your layout and what that says to the viewer. Consider elements such as the different textures within your frame, how the colors interact with each other, and the depth of the image.

When it comes to actually taking the photo, you’ll be working in low light, so a sturdy tripod is essential. An aperture of f/8 or f/11 should give you a suitably large depth of field to render your subjects sharp, but don’t be tempted to boost your ISO too high. Because the elements within your frame are, by their very nature, still, you can set a long exposure to gather the light that your camera needs.

When focusing, you may simply opt to focus on the focal point – the main subject – of your image. However, it’s worth taking a few test shots and playing with your point of focus if you want as much of your arrangement as sharp as possible. Sometimes, focusing slightly in front of your intended subject can help to render elements sharper in the foreground of the image, with the depth of field still large enough to render the subject in focus. Focus peaking can help to illustrate this.

If you’re finding that the natural lighting isn’t working for you, you could have a go at light painting. This requires you to set up a long exposure and brush the light from a torch over your arrangement. This is a more advanced technique that may require trial and error, and a little practice, as well as the blending of multiple images in post-production, but it’s a great workaround for those who don’t have dedicated photography lights.

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While it’s tempting to embrace those huge skies that you only seem to get in America – and while I would’ve happily used these images when I was a magazine editor, as the empty space in the sky would be perfect to put big headlines and text on top – when using these sorts of travel images online, this excess empty space can mean they lose their impact.

A bit of clever cropping is an easy way to lose these blank areas in the frame. So why don't you go for a panoramic-style crop? It’s a brilliant and quick fix for removing large areas of sky, or large empty bits of land or sea, like these shots by the beaches of California.

When I’m cropping these images, I don’t mean the classic 16:9 ratio favored for most panoramic shots; I’m talking about a more extreme 21:9 ratio for a proper widescreen movie experience.

The great thing with modern cameras is that the large file sizes captured by their high-resolution sensors mean that you can make some hefty crops and still be left with large, usable images.

These shots were taken with an old 30MP Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, which captures 6720 x 4480 images – more than enough pixels to crop. But, of course, when doing these 21:9 crops we’re keeping the full width, and therefore the full impact, of our high-res images.

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Canon’s latest AI autofocus technology needs to be seen to be believed! Everyone knows about the Eye Detection AF, which locks on your subject – whether it’s a soccer player, owl in flight, or racing driver in a car on the track. But one setting that doesn’t get enough attention and applause is Register People Priority.

This is a brilliant feature available in cameras like the new EOS R6 Mark III, EOS R3, EOS R1, and the EOS R5 Mark II, which I was using to take photos of my son playing soccer at the weekend.

It’s simple to set it up. To register the person you want to focus on, a soccer player in a match in my situation, just scroll to the AF menu and select Register People Priority.

Switch Register People Priority to ON, then you can take a quick headshot of your subject using the Photograph People And Register option.

Your Canon EOS camera will now save the face information to prioritize your subject when using autofocus. Alternatively you can use an existing image on a memory card and register that.

It goes without saying – but I’ll say it anyway – you need your Canon EOS camera’s AF modes already set up to shoot action sports. So I’ll list the settings here I used on my Canon EOS R5 Mark II, in case you don’t already know for soccer:

My menu settings for shooting soccer

AF pink menu 1:

AF operation - SERVO

AF area - Expand AF area: Around

Whole area tracking Servo AF - On

AF pink menu 2:

Subject to detect - People

Eye detection - Auto

Register People Priority - On

Action priority setting 1 - Enable

Action priority setting 2 - Sports Events – Soccer

Also use High-Speed Continuous Drive mode, and set the AF-ON button for back-button focusing to give you more control.

Now you’re good to go! During the match, aim your camera and ensure the player you want to track is in your frame. Whenever the camera highlights your registered subject, a little ‘headshot in a box’ icon appears in the viewfinder (or rear screen) along with a small white cross-hairs box – so you can be sure it’s your player. Press AF-ON to focus, and a small blue box confirms focus locked, and press the shutter button to fire off a burst of shots.

In the past, when shooting sports without Register People Priority, cameras would focus on the player closest to me, or the players with their face looking towards me and easiest to focus, but not always the player I wanted to focus on.

With Register People Priority set up, as long as the camera can see the player’s head (and ideally the eyes, nose and mouth are visible) it will highlight them in the viewfinder for you to focus and shoot. During the match, I found the R5 Mark II could find my player even when in profile or if their hair was in their eyes.

I’m a convert and will be using this super-clever mode every time for sports photos in the future.

If you’re looking for a suitable subject to photograph with that brand-new camera you've acquired during the Black Friday frenzy, why not consider enlisting your faithful furry companion to be your sit–sit–sitter?

You might think you need a studio to capture indoor pet portraits, but so long as you can set up a dedicated or makeshift photography backdrop next to a window, you’re halfway there.

Some pet photographers use flash to capture four-legged friends, but both the flash and recycling hiss can make some animals uncomfortable – so if you have a nervous pet, I’d recommend using constant lighting.

The upside of this is that LED light panels can be picked up for a very reasonable price and, if you’re not used to using off-camera flash, they’re easier to set up to, since what you see is what you get.

You don't need a fancy, super-fast lens either. A standard zoom or a nifty fifty will do, meaning you can get by with most kit lenses.

As the old saying goes: don’t work with children or animals. And indeed, the hardest thing about photographing pet portraits is the pets themselves. Patience and positive reinforcement are key. Make the process fun for the animal, and you’ll have more fun yourself, not to mention increasing the likelihood of capturing that winning shot.

For my portrait session I enlisted the help of Fenwick, the border collie. Once she realized her bed was in the middle of the studio and was plied with plenty of treats, she happily sat in front of the camera while I tweaked my lights and camera settings. Here’s how I got on…

How to capture a pet portrait at home

1. Set up a backdrop (and bed)

I set up my Lastolite collapsible backdrop next to a window on an overcast day, but a plain wall or bed sheet will work just as well. If your pet is particularly attached to their bed or a blanket, placing it in your makeshift studio is a great way to get them to sit in one place and stay there.

2. Set for success

I set everything up before my sitter arrived, as I didn’t want to waste their – potentially limited – attention span while I set up the backdrop and camera equipment. I used a similar-sized object as a stand-in so I could get my camera and lighting roughly set up. That way, I only needed to tweak things later.

3. Build a positive rapport

Positive reinforcement is the key to success when working with animals. Allow your sitter the time to sniff around and give them a fuss, so they know they’re in a safe place. I rewarded everything throughout the shoot with a tasty treat. If your pet becomes restless, this might be a sign that they need a break. A quick game of tug or a run around the garden before returning to the ‘studio’ can make a big difference.

4. Focus on the eyes

I used single-point AF and AF-C to focus on the nearest eye to the camera. If you’re photographing a cat or dog and you have a mirrorless camera, you may have an animal AF function available to you. At wide apertures you’ll have less room for error, so make sure you are constantly refocusing to better your chances of nailing critical focus.

5. Camera settings

Your settings will depend on the available light, but aim for a shutter speed of around 1/100 sec to compensate for movement. I shot at f/4.5 so as not to completely blur out the snout with a super-shallow DOF, while also letting in a good amount of light. If your camera can handle it, don’t be afraid to increase your ISO if you need to. Sharp shots take precedence.

Quick tips

Use treats, toys or commands to encourage your subject to look at you while you capture the shot. If you need your hands free or want to convince your pet to look off to the side so you can capture their profile, set up a self-timer or, ideally, use a remote shutter release to fire the shutter at the opportune moment.

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Portrait photographers tend to avoid barrel distortion by using standard or telephoto lenses. But when used intentionally, extreme barrel distortion can be a great way to capture creative portraits. And it doesn’t get much more extreme than a fisheye lens.

These ultra-wide optics are so-called because they replicate the ultra-wide vision possessed by fish. They’re often used to capture street scenes, architecture, skateboarding and occasionally portraits. The latter is particularly effective on pets, since the extreme barrel distortion emphasizes the subject’s features – much like a caricature.

Since a dog’s snout is one of its most poignant features, artists often choose to amplify this feature when designing cartoons – think Scooby-Doo, Snoopy and Dug from Pixar’s Up. By getting very close to your subject while they stare directly into the lens, the distortion will enlarge the canine’s snout and make for a humorous (and charming) caricature effect.

While a fisheye lens’s ultra-wide angle of view is its biggest draw, it also presents a challenge when shooting portraits – because it can be difficult to compose shots without distracting elements encroaching on the frame. Add to that the unpredictable nature of animals, and there’s plenty to consider before heading out with your camera…

How to photograph pets with a fisheye lens

1. Choose the widest lens you have

I used the Nikon AF-S Fisheye 8-15mm f/3.5-4.5E ED at its widest to maximize distortion. If you don’t have a dedicated fisheye, you can use the widest lens you have available. Remember to account for the crop factor if you’re shooting on an APS-C camera. For example, a 24mm lens will have a 35mm equivalent focal length of 36mm (or 38.4mm on Canon bodies). As such, it’s easier to get a super-wide fisheye effect on a full-frame camera.

2. Get really close to your subject

To emphasize the extreme barrel distortion, get close to your subject. Small subjects, like my puppy, may require you to get close to the lens’ 0.5ft minimum focus distance. On more than one occasion, the excitable pup licked the front element – so a lens cloth is essential!

3. Remove the lens hood

The 8-15mm f/3.5-4.5’s lens hood isn’t visible at 15mm, but when I was shooting at wider focal lengths it started to creep into the frame. At 8mm – as the picture above illustrates – it dramatically encroached on my shot. I therefore removed it altogether.

4. Find a clean, open space

Super-wide focal lengths cram in a huge portion of the surrounding area. To prevent unwanted details detracting from my subject, I shot in a wide-open space that was free from distractions – a field, park, or large garden are ideal locations. I further eliminated distractions by shooting down at my subject from a higher angle.

5. Make it fun for your pet

Animals can be difficult to work with; however, it’s important not to get frustrated with them. I spent a few minutes before the shoot playing with my pup. This meant she was less excitable, more relaxed and more pliable during the shoot, while also providing me an opportunity to introduce her to the camera gradually.

6. Focus on the eyes

As always, when shooting portraits, it’s best practice to focus on the eye that’s closest to the camera. I used single-point AF to pinpoint the correct eye and continuous-servo AF to help lock onto my bouncing subject. If you're using one of the best mirrorless cameras, there's a chance you can use an animal AF mode to make things even easier.

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The dictionary might define an arboretum as "a place where trees or shrubs are cultivated for their scientific or educational interest", but I’d say it’s a place you can go to capture a variety of interesting photos, from landscapes, abstracts, and patterns to macro. The best time to go is, of course, fall, because of the red and yellow colors adding to the greens of the all-year-round foliage. Now is pretty much your last chance for the year, as winter weather sweeps in and there are more leaves on the ground than on the trees, which is why I visited Westonbirt National Arboretum in the UK.

What lenses should I take, I hear you ask? Well, surprisingly, I wouldn’t go with a super wide-angle lens (like 18mm), as the widest you’re likely to need is a 24-28mm standard zoom, and often you’ll want to zoom in to frame specific features. The other consideration is that this is a wood/forest, so if you need more space for a shot, simply move backwards, and avoid the heavy distortion that you get with those super wide-angle shots.

The other lens to definitely pack is a 105mm or 150mm macro lens for flowers, mushrooms, berries, and leaf close-ups. In fact, if you really want to set yourself a challenge, just take that 105mm macro lens because you can still use it for your landscape shots as well as the macro ones.

1. The standard landscape shot

Here’s a standard landscape shot, using the red foliage to provide depth. I composed the image so that the trees progressively step back as you look into the photo, from the bush-like one in the foreground onwards. I used an aperture of f/8 to maximize the lens's sharpness and depth of field.

2. Flower portraits

Under the cover of the trees there will be wild flowers and mushrooms growing, especially as we get into the wet season. I brought a mat to kneel/lie on and a beanbag to rest my camera on to keep it steady (If permitted, you could use a travel tripod). This setup allowed me to get down low to photograph at my subject's level. For group shots, I like to put the first flower on a third vertical and focus on the stamen.

3. Let’s get abstract

If you’re visiting a managed wood/forest, somewhere there will be a pile of chopped up logs just asking to be photographed. Duly oblige them by filling the frame with the logs and shooting from parallel to the pile to make it about the pattern and textures. Here, I used a 35mm focal length at f/6.3.

4. Launch an ICM

A classic shot is looking straight up towards the tree canopy, but as the sky was grey and dull, I decided to hone my intentional camera movement (ICM) skills. This is where you use a slow shutter speed to intentionally introduce motion blur as you physically move the camera in the desired direction.

For this image, I paused initially to get a solid recording of the tree and then moved the camera downwards to create streaking highlights. I used a narrow f/22 aperture, blocking enough light so I could reach a 1/4th sec exposure.

5. Turn over a new leaf

There will likely be flowering trees and trees with fruit, as well as leaves turning a spectacular color, like the image above. I deployed my macro lens with a wide aperture to blur the background. If the sky is blue, you can compose your subject with that as the background; otherwise, try to find a shot where the green foliage is in the distance for a more pleasing backdrop.

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If you’re capturing fall, then the best tripod is essential. You might also use a polarizing filter to banish reflections from rain-soaked leaves. And finally, make sure you’ve got a waterproof bag for your gear if it starts raining.

The composition of a photograph is key – it can either make or break your image. And while it is possible to change the composition of your photographs with cropping in editing, this approach comes at the potential cost of image size and quality loss.

But there's a simple in-camera feature that supports you when composing, and it can transform your shots instantly: camera grid lines.

Activating this often overlooked feature helps you apply professional composition techniques in real time, so every frame feels balanced, intentional and visually engaging. So turning on your camera's grid overlay will help line up horizons, straighten verticals and compose like a pro.

With the in-camera composition guidelines, you can achieve perfect composition straight away – even handheld, on the go, without any compromise.

Many camera brands provide a rule of thirds grid as standard, as well as more advanced guides with additional lines that you can apply to any scene.

Every camera manufacturer's menu system is different, but you'll generally find the Grid Line features in the Display settings.

Having the ability to view these lines as an overlay is vital for photographic genres such as architecture or coastal photography, as non-straight lines and horizons can lower the image quality and the viewer’s experience.

With the help of these guides, you will encourage yourself to think more creatively by changing positions and perspectives. The in-camera guidelines are not only helpful in enhancing your compositions, but they also serve as a great way to train and build your photographic skills.

A useful tip is to always keep a particular grid option active to focus your mind on the composition.

Composition examples

Visual balance
The straight lines are crucial for creating a sense of harmony within the image composition.

The rule of thirds
By incorporating the rule of thirds, the subject is positioned off-center to create a more visually pleasing photo.

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You might be interested in our video explaining what is the rule of thirds, as well as our explainer on what is exposure in photography.

Even the best professional photographers can miss a shot sometimes. You can be in the right place, at the right time, and ready with your camera and lens to take that shot of your action subject – only to be a fraction too slow with the shutter button!

What you need is a clever camera setting that can help you get the shot quicker than your mind and shooting finger allows.

The often-overlooked and almost hidden Pre-Continuous Shooting mode is every action photographer’s dream. This feature is available on EOS cameras including the new Canon EOS R6 Mark III, along with the professional camera tag team of the EOS R1 and EOS R5 Mark II, and APS-C bodies EOS R7 and EOS R10.

When activated, the feature is already in progress in continuous shooting drive mode – even before you fully depress the shutter button to start taking shots.

Pro tip: To access this hidden feature, first you need to set the high-speed continuous shooting mode – then the Pre-Continuous Shooting setting is available. Now just press Enable to activate it, and set how many photos you want the camera to take as a maximum – 15 is the default, and that seemed more than enough for me.

Now, when you half-press the shutter button, Pre-Continuous Shooting does its magic! You can see it’s in action when looking through the viewfinder as you get a little ‘PRE’ timer icon in the top-left corner. Fully press the shutter button to take a burst of shots as usual.

I found I was sometimes a fraction of a second too late when shooting action subjects, such as our dog, Teddy, running around the park. Pre-Continuous Shooting makes up for any ‘human lag’ when we’re pressing the shutter button.

When you’re shooting at 20fps on the R5 Mark II and using Pre-Continuous Shooting, you’ll get lots and lots of shots! Which is what you want, as you will have more choice to pick the best shot with the subject’s eyes, arms and legs, or whatever in the most pleasing position.

But be warned: you’ll need a fast CFexpress card and have lots of hard drive or portable SSD space to store all the large hi-res RAW images, which are about 58MB each on the 45MP R5 Mark II.

This Pre-Continuous Shooting mode isn’t just great for photos of your pets or wildlife, it’s actually essential for action sports subjects when you’re at live events and aren’t allowed to take shots at certain crucial times to avoid putting people off.

This includes before a tennis player has served at Wimbledon, or at professional golf events where you shouldn’t ever take a burst of shots until the player has made impact with the ball to avoid distracting them mid-swing. With Pre-Continuous Shooting, you can get even better action shots than ever before.

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Check out the best lenses for the Canon EOS R5 and R5 Mark II, and take a look at the best lenses for bird photography and wildlife.

I’ve done my fair share of focus stacking in my time. Not only is it a laborious process, but you’re never quite sure you’ve got it right until you reach the editing stage, at which point, it’s too late to fix any mistakes. Cameras have featured automatic focus-stacking functions for years, but I’ve always done it the old-fashioned way, so I thought it was high time I gave my Nikon Z8’s Focus Shift Shooting a fair shake. Spoiler: I’m impressed.

In fact, I was so happy with the results, I can’t see myself returning to my manual focus-stacking ways. Well, not unless I’m capturing an extremely detailed macro stack, but for general close-ups and landscapes, I’m a Focus Shift convert. With that in mind, read on to find out how to use Focus Shift.

What is focus stacking?

Focus stacking is used to create a larger depth of field than is otherwise possible, whether to render the entire subject in focus or the entire image for front-to-back sharpness. It works by capturing multiple images with exactly the same framing while incrementally moving the point of focus from front to back. Those images are then blended together in post-production, typically in Adobe Photoshop or with specialist focus-stacking software, like Helicon Focus.

The traditional way to focus stack is to focus on the element closest to the camera that you want sharp, using manual focus, and taking the shot. Then, identifying where the focus starts to drop off and manually shifting the focus ring accordingly, repeating until you’ve covered the entirety of your subject.

Focus peaking has made this process easier, but if you don’t get this right, you can end up with out-of-focus patches when you blend your images together. As such, it’s worth capturing several stacks to help mitigate this problem. Ultimately, manually focus stacking is laborious, but plenty of cameras are able to automate the process.

How to use Nikon’s Focus Shift Shooting

Focus Shift Shooting is relatively easy to set up and completes the entire stacking process in a matter of seconds. All you have to do is blend the images together in post-production. Here’s how to activate Focus Shift Shooting…

1. Compose your shot, ensuring the camera is locked on a tripod to maintain consistent framing
2. Focus on the element you want sharp that’s closest to the camera/lens
3. Hit the Menu button and select the ‘Photo shooting menu’ (camera icon)
4. Scroll down to ‘Focus shift shooting’
5. Input your desired settings (explained below) and hit ‘Start’
6. Leave your camera to complete the focus stack

Perhaps the most complicated bit is understanding what the many options within the Focus Shift Shooting menu do. So here’s a breakdown.

No. of shots: This is the number of shots that will feature within the stack. I captured a stack of seven shots, but my Nikon Z8 is able to capture up to 300. Bear in mind that the more shots you have to stack, the more demanding the stacking process will be on your desktop computer or MacBook. Larger stacks are more necessary when focus stacking at extreme magnifications, due to working with extremely shallow depths of field.

Focus step width: This is how much the focus distance changes between increments, and is the trickiest setting to get right, because it’s a little abstract. Go too high and the camera will focus beyond the point of drop off, leaving you with blurry patches at the blending stage.

I like to start at five, right in the middle of the scale, and take a test stack. I then cycle through the stack in Playback and gauge whether I think there are any gaps. If in any doubt at all, I’ll lower the distance. Do be aware that if you lower the distance, you may need to increase the number of shots; otherwise, the camera might not cover the entirety of your subject before it finishes the stack.

Interval until next shot: This is simply the time taken before the next shot. Set it to zero and it will move onto the next shot immediately, completing the stack in the fastest time possible. The only reasons you’d have to increase the interval are if you need time for a flash to recharge or you’re shooting at such a high magnification you’re worried that vibrations from the closing shutter could cause camera shake (assuming your camera has a mechanical shutter).

First-frame exposure lock: This will lock the exposure of the first shot, so you can maintain a consistent exposure throughout your focus stack.

Focus position auto reset: A handy addition to some newer Nikon cameras, this returns focus to the point of focus at the beginning of the sequence.

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I'm not the only one who likes Focus Shift: I can focus-stack insects “much quicker” with the Nikon Z8, says pro macro photographer. Want more photography techniques? Make sure you understand the foundation of all photography, the exposure triangle. Plus, using a tripod might seem simple, but make sure you're not making these common tripod mistakes.

While I mostly use the excellent Canon RF 100-500mm F4.5-7.1L IS USM super-telephoto zoom lens for great shots of distant wildlife and sports photography, I also often use this lens on a Canon EOS R5 Mark II for photographing landscapes and city scenes.

Some beginners may be forgiven for thinking – why would you use a super-telephoto lens when you want to shoot landscapes? Surely you must use a wide-angle landscape lens for landscapes!

Rules are made to be broken. Long lenses are also great for landscapes. Because a super-telephoto lens allows you to zoom in and focus on more interesting scenes within a scene. More importantly, longer the focal length, the more you can compress the perspective. This means pulling elements within the scene closer together. Which equals fuller scenes, like this shot of this distant church spire amongst the Fall tree foliage.

This has made this image much more dense, full of colour, and more interesting. I shot this image at 270mm which has pulled the perspective together. If I’d shot the scene at something like 24mm or even 50mm, the church would appear a lot smaller in frame and there would be lots of unwanted gaps between all the nice colorful trees.

The RF 100-500mm’s comparatively narrow aperture range also becomes a benefit for landscape shots - f/4.5 at the short end, and stopping down to f/7.1 at the long end. I want to be shooting at around f/8 and narrower apertures for a better depth of field when using a long lens here.

For this photo, I shot at f/11, 1/160 sec and ISO160. The built-in Image Stabilizer helps to make sure I capture shake-free shots handheld at long focal lengths.

Whatever the weather! On a particular morning recently, the forecast for Clevedon said full-on sunshine from around midday until sunset. So I planned an afternoon visit to capture the iconic Victorian pier, which poet laureate, Sir John Betjeman, once said is: “the most beautiful pier in England.”

However, such is the changeable nature of weather, during the day it remained totally overcast, and the forecast kept changing… the promised sunshine getting shunted ever later.

Through the afternoon it remained totally cloudy, and by late afternoon my Met office app showed only one solitary hour of sunshine – just before sunset.

Undeterred I headed to Clevedon Pier with my optimistic hat on, as experience has taught me over the years, it’s always worth taking a chance on the weather to get the shot.

Here is how I got on…

⏱️ 17:15
The cloud cover was so thick all around when I arrived in Clevedon, I was beginning to think it was going to be a wasted trip. While my weather app still said sunshine at around 19:00 for an hour, my hopes weren’t high. But something told me to stick around…

⏱️ 18:22
Seemingly out of nowhere, blue skies appeared inland, and the clouds moved slowly over the pier and out to sea! I started to feel more positive as it began to brighten up.

⏱️ 18:36
The sun broke through and lit up the pier! I began to get excited. Now I just needed the cloud cover beyond the pier to shift. I waited patiently on the beach, with my Canon camera and 70-200mm on a tripod, composed and poised…

⏱️ 19:37
It was even better than I’d hoped. Now just the haziness remained on the horizon across the Bristol Channel, leaving the outline of Wales beyond. The skies in my scene were now completely clear, and the colors started to evolve, as I started taking photos of the scene at sunset.

⏱️ 20:12
Shortly before the sun was due to disappear below the horizon, and the skies surrounding the now-silhouetted pier had transformed to reveal beautiful pinks, oranges and yellows. I smiled smugly, zoomed in to around 150mm on my 70-200mm lens, and clicked away to capture this winning shot.

Camera settings: Canon EOS 5D IV with Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS III USM. 0.6sec at f/16, ISO 50.

Can 360-degree cameras be used in the dark to image the night sky? Astrophotographers have been using circular fisheye lenses to capture the Milky Way for decades, while astronomers regularly employ 180-degree (whole-sky) lenses to image fleeting “shooting stars” and, in the case of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF), produce an all-night timelapse of auroras (see this example). Whether consumer 360 cameras — essentially two 180-degree fisheyes mounted back-to-back — are capable of true astrophotography is another matter.

In 2025, two key models appeared with improved low-light potential: the Insta360 X5 and GoPro Max 2. Both claim 8K resolution and AI-assisted noise reduction. With the GoPro Max 2 unavailable at the time, I took the X5 to Churchill, Manitoba, to see how it performed under the Canadian Northern Lights.

Why use a 360 camera for astrophotography?

The immersive nature of 360 cameras is immediately appealing. By capturing the entire sky and landscape, they open new possibilities for creative storytelling — linking the cosmos above with the scene below. If astronomy is about what happens above the horizon, and astrotourism is about what happens beneath it, then 360 astrophotography bridges the two beautifully.

The best thing about 360 photography is that you can reframe your shot later — zoom in or out, switch from vertical to widescreen, or highlight any element that happened to be in view. You can go “tiny planet,” panoramic or all-sky — the choice is yours.

Limitations of 360 cameras

The most common misunderstanding about 360 cameras is their effective resolution. Even though 8K sounds impressive, that’s across the entire 360° sphere — effectively around 4K per hemisphere. The Insta360 X5’s stills measure 11,904 × 5,952 pixels (about 70.9 MP) in a 2:1 equirectangular format, but reframing inevitably reduces detail.

Sensitivity is another challenge. Consumer 360 cameras use small smartphone-class sensors. They perform well in daylight but struggle in darkness, producing grainy, low-contrast images even with long exposures.

The X5’s PureVideo mode (8K 30 fps) is designed to enhance low-light footage, but in my tests during a new moon, it wasn’t sensitive enough. That’s a shame because it’s something the newer full-frame mirrorless cameras can handle. Happily, the X5’s 1/1.28-inch sensor handled long-exposure stills far better.

Field test in Churchill

During my three nights in Churchill, the moonless night skies were clear, with the late-season Milky Way bright — and the aurora brighter. At 58 degrees north, Churchill is permanently under the auroral oval, so even if there’s no significant geomagnetic activity forecast, the aurora are often visible after dark. On the final night of the trip, Kp5 conditions ensued, causing the night skies to come alive with intense aurora for about two hours.

With the Insta360 X5’s battery fully charged – and good for about three hours – I took it out first to a lonely lake road, and then to the iconic “Miss Piggy” air crash site close to Churchill Airport … where polar bears are often spotted (there was an armed guard with a gun, and a minibus with open doors, nearby at all times!).

I set up the camera first on its invisible selfie stick, which extended to 9.8ft. I mounted it on a small tabletop tripod — and it immediately fell over in the wind during one of the first shots I took (the camera wasn’t damaged, but its casing was scuffed). I quickly re-mounted it on a tough full-size tripod.

I also took the opportunity, between auroras, to apply (several) Band-Aids over the very bright and incredibly annoying blue flashing lights on each side of the Insta360 X5 that accompany a countdown to a long exposure. If there is an option in the settings menu to switch those off, I didn’t have time to look for it.

360 settings at night

After testing, my preferred settings — under a new moon — for stills were: PureShot, ISO 1600, 10-second exposure, auto white balance, and no exposure compensation. Under darker or brighter conditions — for example, during quarter or gibbous moon phases, or with less intense aurora — you’d need to adjust accordingly.

A timelapse would have worked — essentially hundreds of stills like these stitched into a video sequence — though I didn’t have time to process one during the trip. Here’s an example on Reddit of an aurora timelapse from Greenland, whereby still images are stitched together in-camera to create a video.

Despite its limitations, the X5 produced colorful, bright stills of all-sky aurora. Images showed noticeable softness and noise, making them great for sharing but not for archival or print-quality work.

Verdict

Whether a 360 camera suits astrophotography depends on your goals. For scientific or high-resolution imaging, a full-frame camera with a fisheye lens still far outperforms any consumer 360 model. Observatory all-sky cameras — with large, low-noise sensors — also remain in a different league.

Where 360 cameras excel is in documenting experiences: aurora viewing, eclipses, or nights under the stars. They capture both the sky and the landscape in a single immersive frame, producing striking images even from modest displays.

So, is 4K per hemisphere enough? Not for deep-sky astrophotography — but it’s more than enough for the aurora. It’s not yet time to leave your DSLR or mirrorless camera at home, but next time you head north, consider adding a 360 camera — and don’t forget a tough tripod!

Jamie Carter travelled to Churchill with Lazy Bear Expeditions.

Check out our guide to the best 360 cameras

As a photographer who has photographed more than a few weddings in 90°F heat, I’ve edited my fair share of red skin. But Lightroom just added a new slider that’s going to make correcting red skin far faster: Color Variance.

There are a handful of new tools in the Lightroom October 2025 update that I’m particularly excited about as a portrait and wedding photographer, and Color Variance is one of them.

What is Color Variance in Lightroom?

Color Variance is a slider that creates more or less variety in a selected color tone. Using the Color Vairance slider, photo editors can make a selected color range more uniform, or take the slider in the opposite direction to add more color contrast. That makes the tool useful for smoothing out color variations in skin tones, such as redness from heat or rosacea. But, the slider can also be used in the opposite direction and create more color contrast in landscapes and other shots.

Where is Color Variance located?

Color Variance is located in the Point Color tool, which is available on Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. The new tool can be applied to the entire image, or to a mask, such as applying the change only to the skin tone.

Find the Point Color tool inside the Color Mixer tab in Develop. Then, click on the eye dropper icon, hover over the color that you want to adjust, and click on that color. Now, the sliders in the Point Color tool will adjust the color that you’ve selected.

That includes the new Variance slider. (Adobe calls it Color Variance, but the slider is located in the Color tools and named Variance.) Move the slider to the left for less variety in that color range, such as if you want to create more even skin tones in a portrait. Move the slider to the right if you want to increase the variety of colors in that selected range.

What does Color Variance in Lightroom do?

Decreasing Color Variance is a helpful tool for editing skin. Decreasing the color variance can help correct things like redness from heat. In this particular scenario, editors may want to use a Smart Mask over the skin; otherwise, the edit may also affect the colors in the subject's lips.

Take a look at this photo from Adobe Stock:

First, I masked out the subject’s skin so my adjustments wouldn’t affect the lips. Then, I selected the skin color in Point Color. Look at the before and after when I take that Variance slider all the way to the left:

Now, I like that the redness is gone, but the skin now looks a bit pale, so I adjusted the hue, luminance, and temp just a bit and ended up with this:

That process only took a few seconds, and I didn’t have to brush over specific patches of red skin.

Increasing Color Variance will help create more contrast in the colors without losing detail. If you have a photo of the fall colors, for example, and want to make the variety of different colors in the scene really pop, select one of those fall colors and take the slider to the right.

Take a look at the before and after here, where the only thing I did was move that Variance slider all the way to the right:

Like all Lightroom sliders, you probably don’t want to take the Variance slider all the way to the right or all the way to the left. Variance is a bit more subtle, but it makes a noticeable difference in editing skin or working to add contrast.

Color Variance can be used in conjunction with the other Point Color sliders. That includes the range slider. Range dictates how many colors similar to the one you selected are also impacted by the Point Color sliders, so if you want to adjust more or fewer colors with Color Variance, adjust the range.

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Dig into what else is new in Lightroom, or the new features inside Photoshop 2026.

One of the most popular ways to achieve a clean, modern look in product photography is through high-key lighting. Using a seamless white background creates a distraction-free image that's easy to edit later, but sometimes adding subtle details can better reflect a product's personality and attract attention.

High-key refers to the dominance of brighter tones in the shot, which produces a clean image. This allows good contrast while introducing an airy atmosphere, setting off products with a modern feel or with geometric shapes.

It offers clean surroundings for clean lines. This type of lighting can be achieved by mixing natural window light with a reflector on the opposite side of the object, creating a balanced exposure.

High-key shots don't need to be limited in color palette. While a dominance of white can appear contemporary, overlighting a chroma background can have intriguing effects which suggest a setting, without additional set items actually being introduced to the scene.

Most critically, when setting the lighting for your shot, consider the branding of the product. The tone in any shot is significantly affected by the amount of light present, and this has to make sense for the product.

Key characteristics

Color choice
We chose a yellow background color to introduce a summery, sunlight atmosphere.

High-key color
Exposing to-the-right has given the scene greater luminance, maintaining the high-key modern styling.

Minimalist composition
Wider framing increases negative space, pushing the clean, unrestricted tone.

Alternative look

Splash of color
To break up the otherwise empty periphery, the petals add contrast while staying on-brand.

Almost shadowless
Window light from the right and diffused flash from the left reduce most shadows to soft impressions.

Subtle high-key
The airy look is achieved through bright negative space, which contrasts with the dark box but is not entirely seamless.

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Browse the best cameras for product photography in 2025. Also, you might want to discover how to shine the spotlight on your product photography with this gorgeous low-budget DIY lighting hack.

If you’re a beginner photographer there’s perhaps no simpler compositional rule to master than filling the frame. This often-touted photography ‘hack’ has become a bit of an instructional buzzword akin to Weegee’s “f/8 and be there”. And indeed, filing the frame can be traced back to a legendary photographer, too, none other than famed photojournalist and Magnum co-founder, Robert Capa. To quote him in full: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, then you aren’t close enough.”

Capa is arguably the most famous war photographer of all time, it’s not surprising that getting close to the action was of extreme importance. However, his wisdom can be applied to many different genres of photography and while filling the frame should be considered just one compositional technique in your arsenal, it’s a great technique for beginner photographers to learn, because it’s a simple concept that can be achieved with almost any lens (providing you’re photographing the right subject).

One way to fill the frame is by cropping your images. This is fine, so long as your subject is sharp and you’ve got enough resolution to play with. However, this technique works best in the way Capa intended it, by physically getting yourself closer to the subject, either by changing your lens or moving your feet.

Filling the frame is a useful technique for a variety of reasons, perhaps the most useful being that it amplifies the impact of your subject on the viewer. This is because it positions the subject closer to the viewer and in doing so eliminates distractions, which brings me to my second point, something I like to think of as shielding.

Filling the frame can be used to 'shield' the viewer from uninteresting or overly busy backgrounds or elements within a scene. If you’re photographing a portrait of a flower, but the background is a tangled mess of weeds or the back of a shed, filling the frame will eliminate the noise.

Filling the frame is also a good way to make a boring subject more interesting. For example, macro photography very often involves filling the frame by magnifying the subject beyond the capabilities of the human eye. Photograph your living room carpet with a 50mm lens from head height, and it’ll look extremely boring. Photograph it with a 1:1 macro lens, and the minuscule threads will form an abstract tessellation that's infinitely more interesting.

So, if you’re ever faced with a subject that you want to amplify, that isn’t quite interesting enough, or sits in front of an overly busy background, try filling the frame. If it’s good enough for the late, great Robert Capa, it’s good enough for me and you.

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Want more compositional techniques? Learn all about the rule of thirds and leading lines. If you're looking to upgrade your camera, take a look at the best mirrorless cameras.

Many people will have grandparents or great-grandparents who served in WWII. With the recent 80th anniversary of the end of the World War Two, and Remembrance Sunday coming up, what better way to pay your respects than through the medium of photography?

For this project, you’ll need the military memorabilia associated with your relative. Or, if you’re a militaria collector, you can theme the image for a particular nationality or branch of the service.

For this shot, I’m using the medals, badges and studio portrait of a woman who served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, formed in 1938. The role of the ATS was to free up manpower for the front by giving military jobs at home being done by men to women instead. In total, some 210,308 women served with the ATS in WWII, including the late Queen Elizabeth II, with 335 losing their lives and many more being injured.

This is macro photography, so you’ll be getting close up to the objects – ideally using a macro lens. I you don’t have enough items to fill the display out, consider printing out a map of the area where your subject served. Maps make great background material but another option is blueprints of trucks, ships or tanks. There’s a free resource at: http://the-blueprints.com.

1. Arrange the items

The main item is the photo, so this should be placed centrally with everything arranged around it. Here, there is a cap at the top, which helps hold the various badges. Around this are various pieces of documentation arranged in a fan shape, including a letter of conferral from the Under Secretary of State for War for the two medals – the Defence Medal and the British War Medal. There’s also a card from the ATS, in which the subject served.

2. Light the scene

As this is a project dealing with the past, it suits being lit with warm tones, so a constant tungsten lamp was used to the side. This meant that the objects to the far side didn’t show up that well so I also used a flashgun for additional light. Firing it directly was too strong – though I could also have used flash exposure compensation. What I wanted to do was to soften the shadows and lift the highlights, including the WVS badge, so I aimed the flash at the ceiling and bounced the light back down from above.

3. Depth of field

My Sigma 105mm f/2.8-EX DG OS HSM macro lens has a fairly narrow field of view that makes it ideal for closely grouped items. If your objects are spread out over a wider area, then a shorter focal length lens with a wider field of view could be a better option.

The idea was to focus on the eyes in the portrait and use a shallow depth of field to make everything else above and below that line start to go out of focus, giving the photo a more nostalgic feel. An aperture of f/3.5 was used in Aperture Priority mode. Normally, a tripod would be necessary but the shutter speed was fast enough to do this handheld, enabling me to move around easily to try different angles.

4. Photo editing and achieving a specific look

The use of the tungsten lamp gave a fairly warm tone to the image, compared to simply shooting it with flash, which gives a cold result. However, this is a nostalgic themed shot so enhancing that look and feel was worth doing. You can use any photo editor to add grain or noise and a subtle vignette effect. I decided to put the Dehancer Film plug-in for Photoshop to the test. This used a specific film and paper stock to give the colours a reddish tone, add a vignette effect and give the photo more of a grainy feel. You could achieve the same kind of results in Affinity Photo.

If you're looking for a new macro lens then have a look at the TTArtisan 100mm f/2.8 lens that's available for all popular camera brands. If you don't have time to get your camera set up, how about using your phone to capture this image? Here's the best camera phones on the market. Then try editing your photos on one of the latest iMacs, perfect for photographers.

For our summer holiday in California I was keen to avoid carrying too much camera kit, so I could travel light, plus ensure I wouldn’t eat into precious family time by getting side-tracked with my usual bag full of different lenses. So I decided to take only one Canon EOS camera body and one Canon lens.

That’s a bit restrictive isn’t it? Well, I actually discovered it gave me more creative freedom, as I wasn’t always thinking should I change lenses? Instead I could concentrate on better compositions with the focal lengths I had at my disposal.

This would also enable me to manage the precarious balancing act of capturing great travel photography in a quick and efficient way, while keeping the family happy during our epic road trip from LA to San Francisco.

So, I took an old Canon EOS 5D Mark IV DSLR with a Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS II USM standard lens stalwart.

Deciding which lens to take on our vacation wasn’t as tricky as you might think. Some may want to take a superzoom that covers everything from 18mm to 400mm, but I didn’t need a super wide or super long lens for my travel photos. I just needed standard wide-angle to telephoto focal lengths, and I didn’t mind if my lens wasn’t small and compact. I also didn’t want to compromise on image quality. I wanted a fast-ish lens so I could set a wide aperture and get a shallow depth of field when I felt like it. The EF 24-105mm f/4 is the perfect compromise. Plus it’s not as heavy as the modern 24-105mm F2.8L hybrid lens, or some 24-70mm f/2.8 lenses.

24mm was wide-angle enough for my needs on a full-frame camera, but I could zoom up to telephoto 105mm for capturing ‘a scene within a scene’ or distant objects like boats on the sea, or zooming in on bustling boardwalk of a Californian beach town. Although I’ve found I often end up shooting around 40mm or 50mm for scenic shots for the better compositions, such as this shot of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The EF 24-105mm is a reassuring and tried-and-trusted piece of glass, so I knew my shots would be sharp across the frame, especially when shooting between the sweet spot of f/8 to f/11. Plus it’s got image stabilization, which is great when I was shooting handheld on the streets of LA, and wanted to shoot quick and fast.

It also complements the weight and size of a 5D Mark IV body perfectly, which is a camera I know back to front. I’m able to adjust camera settings on the fly without taking my eye away from the viewfinder.

This is another reason I took this camera with me – rather than a newer mirrorless model – as I wouldn’t waste time thinking about what new settings to use. I could focus on more important things, like exposure and composition, and simply enjoying my holiday.

By the way, here’s a top tip – don’t carry an obvious camera bag when travelling. I hadn’t brought a specific camera bag with me on our vacation on purpose. Instead I just used my son’s small Nike backpack to keep the camera with lens inside when we were out on our daily American adventures. It was great as it didn’t shout out that I’m a tourist, or even worse - I’m a tourist with a camera bag and some expensive Canon kit! So it meant I could covertly take my camera with me wherever I went, which meant I didn’t ever miss any photo ops.

You would be forgiven for thinking I took this shot of a flamingo in a photo studio with lights and a black background. However, for this shot of the flamingo in late winter sunshine at WWT Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, UK, I used a classic ‘low-key’ photography technique. 

It’s easier than you might think. First you need subjects to be a lighter colour and brightly lit by the sun, then position yourself so backgrounds behind the subjects are in deep shadow. With the correct exposure for the light levels on the bird, you can render the darker background to appear totally black in the shot.

It’s also easier to achieve this sort of low-key look with jet-black backgrounds when using a long lens so you can isolate subjects against the backdrop in dark shadow. Using a Canon EOS R5 full-frame mirrorless camera, I shot at around 400mm with a Canon RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1L IS USM super telephoto zoom lens.

In Manual exposure mode, I dialled in around one stop of underexposure, ending up with an exposure of 1/4000 sec at f/7.1 at ISO2000. The high ISO was to obtain a fast shutter speed to freeze the twitchy flamingos in motion for a super sharp result.

Check out the best lenses for bird photography

The first steam-powered ships took to the water in the latter years of the 18th century, using paddles for propulsion and often still being fitted with sails. It was Richard Wright’s Experiment, a converted French lugger, that made the first trip on the open seas though, chugging from Leeds to Yarmouth in 1813. 

However, the golden age of steamships was the Victorian era (approx 1820-1914), with one of the most famous being the SS Great Britain, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and launched in 1843. Fitted with screws for propulsion, cabins, kitchens, promenade deck and a sumptuous dining saloon, it was the first great luxury liner and sailed between Bristol and New York. She was also the first iron-hulled steamer to cross the Atlantic, in 1845, fielded a crew of 120 and could carry up to 360 passengers.

Capturing exteriors

A heritage ship like the SS Great Britain is more than likely permanently moored or in dry dock as it will never sail again. Even if the ship is still seaworthy, as a floating museum you are again, more likely to find it tied up, rather than actually sailing. Photographing a ship at sea is essentially an action shot, here it’s more a case of exploiting the angles and space as a static landscape. 

If you are at the dock with the ship, the tricky part is getting far enough away to include all of it in the shot, as buildings and dockyard equipment may be in the way. Clearly, a wide angle lens is required here, so head for the prow of the ship and frame it so you can get everything in. For ships with masts, the problem is even more acute because now you have a large vertical element to incorporate as well. Sometimes it’s simply not possible to get everything in, in which case a portrait-orientation shot, including the prow, figurehead and first mast, is your best bet. 

The one thing to be aware of is the position of the sun (if you get any that is) as you want it to be on the side of the ship that you are shooting, not on the far side as this will make it either too dark or offer a tricky exposure. Focus on the prow and use an f/8 or f/11 aperture for the best combination of sharpness and depth of field.

Whilst up top the main attractions are the patterns of wooden planks leading down the ship and the views from either end. Here use a wide angle lens and focus around 3m into the scene, unless you are excluding what is right in front of you, in which case focus a bit further into the scene. Then you can either opt for f/5.6, f/8 or f/11 for maximum sharpness. For ships with masts or tall steam funnels, switching to portrait orientation is usually a good idea.

If the ship is in dry dock there can be the opportunity to get below the waterline, in which case head for the rear to photograph the propeller and rudder. While at the dockside, especially for heritage harbours, there are often other elements of interest such as gears and pulleys, cranes, stacks of barrels and coal, or re-enactments of 19th century life. Capture these before you board the ship.

Life below decks

Capturing how the crew lived and the passengers travelled on a luxury steam-power liner ship like the SS Great Britain can be fascinating but technical challenges await. For a start, it’s going to be much darker, too dark to shoot with f/8 at ISO 100. If you don’t want to keep changing the ISO rating everytime you encounter a new scene it can be worthwhile setting it to Auto ISO and specifying a lower shutter speed limit. Now, with a wide angle lens and either in-camera image stabilisation or lens-based vibration reduction, you can hand-hold a camera at fairly low speeds. How low you can go is your call, but if you set the lower shutter speed to 1/50 sec, then that will offer a good balance between a stable enough shot and the Auto ISO going too high.

Things to look for include cabins for the passengers and control rooms and kitchens or storage areas for the crew. The steam-powered engine machinery may also be visible. For cramped areas the options for composition can be limited, but for locations such as promenade decks or dining saloons where there is more space, avoiding having vertical columns right at the front of the shot as they will probably distort. Use flooring patterns to lead the eye through the scene and consider using symmetrical compositions for architectural features. Which shooting mode to use is your choice but personally I’d go with aperture priority at f/5.6 or f/8 with Auto ISO.

Finally, as these are heritage vessels, it’s not uncommon to find re-enactors dressed up to represent people of the day. Do you have room in your kitbag for a little 50mm portrait lens? If so, now’s the time to swap it in, go wide with your aperture to blur the background, or narrow it down to include the setting.

Metering matters

Scenes below decks will invariably offer a combination of deep shadows, tungsten lamps and natural light from portholes. Zone or evaluative metering, which works well outdoors, is not a good option here, resulting in slower shutter speeds and overexposed highlights. Centre-weighted metering is a better choice, but check the results and if necessary, meter off the brighter elements, lock the exposure reading and recompose for the actual shot. However, if your camera has this, then the best metering option of all is highlight-weighted metering. This actively looks for the light sources and creates an exposure for those, giving you pleasing shadows in other areas. If the overall result is too dark, then ensure you’re shooting RAW and brighten the shadows or mid-tones in post production.

When visiting historic attractions you might not want to lug around your main kit so why not take a travel camera with you or upgrade your phone so it packs one of the best built-in cameras?