Fujifilm’s rise in popularity seems to have made sales on the brand’s most popular favorites a rarity. But a high-end Fujifilm mirrorless favorite with a kit lens has dropped by $200 in the US: The Fujifilm X-T5.

The $200 discount is only for the X-T5 paired with the 16-50mm f/2.8-4.8 R LM WR kit lens. The body-only version of the popular camera remains at list price.

But that discount puts the bundle at the lowest price it's been all year, according to Amazon price trackers. The $2,199 price has only been lower prior to the 2025 tariff price increases, when the lowest the kit sat was $2,099.

The Fujifilm X-T5 sits at the top of DCW’s best Fujifilm camera list for its blend of style and tech. The 40.2MP APS-C sensor is used in a handful of Fujifilm’s more high-end bodies, but the X-T5 pairs that sensor with classic SLR styling, retro dials, dual card slots, and weather-sealing.

That design is really the reason to opt for the X-T5 over another model, like the similar X-T50. The X-T50 is a more affordable version of the X-T5 that has the same sensor, in-body stabilization, and autofocus system. The pricier camera pairs that tech with a faster 15fps mechanical shutter and a larger buffer, but the biggest differences are in the camera’s design. The X-T5 has dual card slots, an ISO dial, weather-sealing, a higher-resolution EVF, a better screen, and a higher-capacity battery.

The deal pairs the X-T5 with what DCW testers called “a compact ‘kit' zoom that doesn’t compromise on image quality.” The 16-50mm f/2.8-4.8 is a rather compact zoom that, like the X-T5, is built with weather sealing. Sharpness and color are excellent, as this is a lens that’s built for Fujifilm’s higher-resolution 40MP sensors.

The X-T5 is one of Fujifilm’s more popular high-end models – though it’s not as impossible to find as options like the viral X100VI. Discounts don’t come around very often, making this a very tempting deal for photographers eyeing a higher-end Fujifilm kit.

The biggest hesitation for many will simply be the X-T5’s age. The X-T5 launched in 2022, and now that Fujifilm has updated nearly every model with its fifth-generation sensor and processor, fans are eagerly waiting to see what’s next.

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The new episode of Bokeh Face: The Digital Camera World podcast is now live on our YouTube channel and available to stream from Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all your favorite podcast services.

New episodes of Bokeh Face are released bi-weekly, every other Monday, so our next episode will be released on October 19.

DCW's How-To Editor, Mike Harris, joins me, James Artaius, DCW Editor-in-Chief, for our usual format where we discuss a burning issue in the world of imaging, dive into the kit bag to examine what we've been shooting with lately, and then troubleshoot a technical or creative camera issue.

You can watch the episode in full below:

In this episode, we Gear Up with Sigma’s eclectic range of cameras, including the Sigma BF, one of the coolest-looking cameras ever made!

In Focus is a reinvention of the filter, shifting it directly in front of the sensor. An inspired idea or one that’s fraught with potential problems?

And in Trouble Shooting, James and Mike discuss the best ways to extend your reach, including and beyond the best telephoto lenses, so that you can fill the frame with distant subjects.

We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the show, along with any questions or troubleshooting queries you might have, so please get in touch with us at bokehface@futurenet.com. We hope you enjoy the episode!

• Watch on YouTube
• Listen on Spotify
• Listen on Apple Podcasts

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Today in Afghanistan, under the rule of the Taliban, women and girls are systematically denied education, employment, free movement and basic human rights. It's a horrific situation, and as you'd expect, most photographic projects drawing attention to these facts lean towards the miserable and depressing.

But even bad news stories usually have a positive side, if you look hard enough. And this picture, which has just been named Peace Image of the Year 2026 at the Global Peace Photo Award, is so upbeat and unusual that it cuts through our expectations like a knife through butter.

Yes, we're used to seeing protestors raise things in defiance. Fists. V signs. Even that three-finger salute from The Hunger Games, which has taken off at real-life protests in Thailand. But… hairdryers? What's going on here exactly?

Forbidden craft

The answer is that this image, titled The Cut and shot by Italian photographer Silvia Alessi, captures women who've fled Afghanistan for a new life, and who are now training in a craft they were previously forbidden from practising.

When the Taliban returned to power in 2021, beauty salons were one of many things to be banned, removing one of the few professions in which women could still earn a living. Now, across the border in Pakistan, young refugees are relearning those skills in classrooms fitted out with mirrors, mannequins and styling tools.

As jury member Peter-Matthias Gaede puts it: "Every hairdryer is a weapon in the struggle for self-determination, identity and visibility, for participation and the right to choose a profession."

Full-circle moment

It's a full-circle moment for Alessi, who previously spent more than ten years working as a hairstylist herself. It was a trip to Asia in 2004 that turned her on to photojournalism, and she's since built a reputation for projects such as Skin in India, Beyond the Line in Iraqi Kurdistan, and Maze of Metamorphosis in Japan. She typically researches the social context in depth before working out how to tell the story visually.

As for her prize-winning photograph, it's a simple set-up, but every choice counts. Alessi shot from a low angle with her Nikon Z6 II using the widest setting on her 24-70mm f/2.8 lens, turning the raised arms into something heroic and monumental.

The plain concrete wall, meanwhile, provides a fuss-free backdrop, allowing the saffron, burgundy, rust, and black scarves to shine against the gray. Finally, the trailing cables add a lovely visual rhythm, as well as a reminder that these are working tools rather than props.

This shot was picked from 27,846 entries submitted from 144 countries, and the prize was presented at Vienna City Hall. Now in its 14th year, the Global Peace Photo Award recognizes and promotes photographers from all over the world whose pictures capture human efforts towards a peaceful world and the quest for beauty and goodness in our lives.

A National Geographic filmmaker has captured footage clearly showing great white shark depredation – the act of stealing a fish hook from a fishing line – beneath the waves.

While great white depredation has previously been observed from the surface, according to National Geographic, this is the first time a recording has been made of the behavior below water.

The footage was captured by Brian Skerry, a renowned whale and shark filmmaker, at Cape Cod, on the Atlantic Coast of Massachusetts, US.

According to National Geographic, Skerry, a native of Massachusetts, had been trying to capture the footage for several days earlier this year, when the moment finally struck. “It was so sudden, it wasn’t even a second. She just rocketed through and then it was over,” he told the publication.

In the split-second footage, which, according to Skerry, was captured in slow motion, we see a juvenile female great white shark snagging hooked striped bass at lightning speed. Skerry also explained that he used a custom-designed camera setup that ensured the fishing lure stayed in the camera's frame.

Above: watch the moment a juvenile female great white sharks rips the striped bass off the fishing line

According to Scientific American, great white populations have “surged” off the coast of Cape Cod in recent years, with the area now considered the first-ever white shark “hotspot” in the North Atlantic. The publication has explained that sharks are convening on the Cape because the gray seal population there is rebounding.

By the 1960s, New England seal populations had been largely culled by commercial fishermen. However, the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 gradually restored seal numbers in the region, with an estimated 30,000 individuals on Cape Cod by 2017.

According to Scientific American, seals are a favorite fat-rich prey for white sharks as the fish make their annual northern migration, typically arriving on Cape Cod between mid-May and late June as the coastal water warms up.

Skerry told National Geographic that he recorded the footage to help people understand that Cape Cod and the Gulf of Maine have a “healthy, recovering” population of large, predatory sharks.

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The Amazon Prime Big Deal Days sale may not officially begin until tomorrow, but this DJI deal makes it feel like the sale has already started!.

The DJI Osmo Pocket 3 Creator Combo has dropped to just $495 at Amazon, down from its usual $629 price, saving you $134 on one of my favorite compact video cameras. Better still, this is the lowest price I have seen for the Creator Combo, making it a very tempting early Prime deal for anyone looking to upgrade their video setup.

The Osmo Pocket 3 has become hugely popular for good reason. DJI has managed to squeeze a large 1-inch sensor and a three-axis mechanical gimbal into a camera small enough to slip into a jacket pocket, giving you beautifully smooth footage without having to carry a conventional camera and stabilizer.

It can shoot detailed 4K video, offers fast and reliable autofocus, and includes intelligent subject tracking that is particularly useful for vloggers and solo creators. Its rotating 2-inch touchscreen also makes switching between horizontal and vertical shooting incredibly easy, whether you are filming for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, or simply documenting your travels.

The Creator Combo makes this deal even more appealing, as you are getting a much more complete setup designed for content creation rather than just the camera itself. For travel, vlogging, and everyday filmmaking, there are few cameras that offer this combination of image quality, stabilization, and portability.

With Amazon already starting to roll out some seriously strong discounts ahead of Prime Big Deal Days, this is exactly the kind of early deal I would be watching closely. At $495, the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 Creator Combo is considerably easier to recommend than it was at full price.

Check out our guide to the best pocket gimbal cameras

With every generation of digital camera technology, we seem to be able to capture more and more visual information. The latest models lock on to eyes from long distance, drag usable detail out of deep shadows, and fire off more frames in a second than a film photographer would once shoot in an afternoon.

All of this is very welcome, and offers endless creative possibilities. Yet there's also a danger in doing things just because we can. It's easy to get into the habit of making our pictures as rich and detailed as possible. Yet it's worth remembering that the opposite approach can sometimes be more fruitful.

London-based photographer Nadav Kander has spent four decades demonstrating just this. As a new exhibition in Amsterdam demonstrates, some of his best pictures are mostly fog, flat water or empty sky.

Atmosphere over detail

Even if you haven't heard the name of Nadav Kander, you may well have seen his photography. Since he starting shooting aged 13, he's photographed Barack Obama, David Lynch and Rosamund Pike for titles including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and TIME, and has received a number of awards for his work.

The Obama portrait in the show is a good example of his style. When you're President of the United States, you're endlessly surrounded by the trappings of power. And yet here, there's no flag, no desk, no statesmanlike gaze into the middle distance. Just... a man.

There's a similar atmosphere to his 2007 portrait of David Lynch; all electric hair and pale blue eyes against nothing but blank white. Yet rather than lacking something, the absense of background feels like it's adding something.

Shadow and silence

For me, though, it's in Kander's landscapes that his style truly sings. In Yibin I (Bathers), from the Yangtze series, the top half of the frame is given over entirely to haze, with a cluster of tiny swimmers dwarfed by a vast boulder and the faintest wisp of a factory chimney smoking in the background.

In Diver, a lone swimmer stands on a board that seems to float over an endless sheet of still water. Treow V (Trust and Promise) , at the top of this page, is just an oak into fog. Then there's School Library, from his Chernobyl series, where collapsing piles of abandoned books do all the tragic storytelling you needed.

If there's a thread running through all of this, it's that Kander uses emptiness, shadow and silence not as a backdrop but as ingredients, giving the viewer room to bring something of their own to the picture.

And the lesson for photographers? Don't discard a shooting opportunity because there's a lack of interesting stuff going on. Because sometimes, the best pictures are hiding in mist, water and emptiness.

Nadav Kander: The edge of things is at Foam, Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam, Netherlands, until 31 January 31 2027. Open daily 10am to 6pm, and until 9pm on Thursdays and Fridays. An accompanying book is published by Thames & Hudson.

Not so long ago, the European common hamster was well named: it was so ubiquitous in German fields that farmers treated it as a pest. Today, though, its name feels very outdated: thanks to intensive agriculture, it's actually become one of the continent's most threatened mammals.

Christoph Kaula's photograph, Managed revival, runner-up in the Rewilding Europe Award, highlights the hard work now underway to bring it back.

The collapse of the European common hamster hasn't just been a tragedy for the species itself; more broadly, it's become a symbol of the collapse in biodiversity across farmland in general. There is, though, cause for hope,

Specialists from the Hamster Conservation Working Group at the Hessian Society for Ornithology and Nature Conservation are using targeted captive breeding, along with burrow mapping and genetic sampling, to trace the animals' movements.

That way, they can identify where habitats are connecting up and where more work is needed.

How it was shot

Managed revival shows a young European hamster pausing at the mouth of a wire trap, whiskers forward, eyes fixed on the camera. Behind it, out of focus, a researcher smiles. It's a small moment, but simultaneously a powerful one too.

Kaula shot with a Canon EOS R5 with an RF 35mm f/1.8 prime at ISO4000. Focusing through wire mesh in low light is the kind of thing that can send autofocus spinning, so the R5's animal eye detection is a real asset here.

The camera's 45MP sensor also handles ISO4000 comfortably, which matters when your subject is mostly active after dark.

In terms of composition, this is a picture of two halves. On the left, the researcher is soft and anonymous but smiling. On the right, the hamster is sharp and alert, framed by the tunnel of the trap, whose wire lines draw the eye straight to its face. A warm glow at the back of the trap balances nicely against the cool blue tones on the left.

The key decision here, to my mind, is to keep the human out of focus; you feel her presence, but she avoids overwhelming the animal subject. And that neatly mirrors the broader message.

"Bringing a species back is never the work of a single organization or individual," Kaula stresses. "It's a collective effort. And that also means raising awareness and communicating the importance of conservation to a much wider audience."

Think Britain in the 1930s and, if you've been watching a lot of History Channel documentaries, you'll probably picture things like hunger marches, unemployment lines and the gathering shadow of war in Europe.

All of which, of course, was very important. But as a new photo book highlights, there was a lot more to the decade than that.

Historian Steven Brindle and writer Maureen Hill have brought together hundreds of photographs, most of which have never been published, in a huge hardback titled Britain in the 1930s.

Many have been sourced from the archive of Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail, with others coming from Getty Images' Hulton and Keystone collections. They're arranged by county, from Cornwall to Orkney, across 616 glorious pages.

Brindle frames the book around English Journey of 1934 by the celebrated 20th-century novelist, playwright and broadcaster, JB Priestley.

The latter identified three Englands: the old country of cathedrals and villages, the industrial England built by the Victorians and a new, American-influenced world of arterial roads, cinemas and dance halls.

What's striking is how untouched the countryside was by the modern world of the 1930s. "It is remarkable how little impact the 20th century seems to have had; there is hardly a single building from after 1900 to be seen, and very few from after 1800," Brindle writes in the introduction.

In terms of photography, meanwhile, it's a real treasure trove. Many were taken by newspaper photographers whose names have been lost, yet time and again the compositions are superb. Here are some of my favorites.

Liverpool's 'dust-bins'

In 1930, Liverpool Police equipped its point-duty officers with these protection boxes, which shielded them from wind and mud. The idea came from a motorist's letter to the local paper, and the force promptly christened them "the dust-bins".

The constable's white sleeves made his signals visible to drivers, and the photograph frames him perfectly against the street behind.

Boxing Day at the Ritz

A cashier smiles from behind the pay desk at Manchester's Ritz Dancing Hall on Boxing Day 1938. The signs behind her advertise half price for children and a sixpence (6d) refreshment voucher with evening admission.

Dance halls were exactly the kind of place JB Priestley had in mind when he described his "new England".

A crossing for the schoolchildren

Schoolchildren who have to cross a dangerous road in Oxford are escorted by a man holding a Safety-First sign, an early forerunner of the lollipop man. According to the book, this was a new innovation for 1932.

The motion blur in the image is a clear reminder of the slow shutter speeds photographers had to work with at the time.

Sweet success at Bournville

Two women carry towers of finished boxes out of the Cadbury's chocolate factory at Bournville in Warwickshire, where the Quaker brothers George and William Cadbury had built a model village for their workers.

By the 1930s, this was the largest processor of cocoa in the British Empire, employing around 10,000 people.

Sheep come to Winsford

Flocks of Exmoor sheep arrive in the Somerset village of Winsford for the Exmoor Horn Sheep Breeders Society Show and Sale in 1937.

A man on horseback drives them past a row of parked cars, highlighting how this was still a world in which horses and motorcars shared the road.

The Queen Mary at Clydebank

Crowds gather on the riverbank to admire the new liner, Queen Mary, at Clydebank, where it had been built. The vessel set off on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in May 1936.

The giant crane on the left and the smoking tug give a vivid sense of the industrial muscle still at work on Clydeside.

Geese on the move

Geese are driven down the street in the village of Carlton, near Helmsley in Yorkshire, by a man with a stick and a boy in wellies.

This was the 20th century but, with the church tower behind them and not a car in sight, this could easily be the 19th.

The Harrow tuck shop

Boys in straw boaters crowd the Harrow School tuck shop at the beginning of term in 1933, with stacks of Toblerone chocolate on the counter.

While Etonians still wore top hats, Harrovians stuck to their boaters. One boy stares straight down the lens, mid-mouthful.

High above the hops

Men on stilts examine hop vines in Kent in 1937, checking whether they're ready for harvest. Each year, thousands of Londoners flocked to the Kent hop gardens for a working holiday. The second man is framed perfectly between the legs of the first, and the rows of vines draw the eye to the vanishing point.

Britain in the 1930s by Steven Brindle and Maureen Hill is published in hardback by Atlantic Publishing on November 05 2026, priced £50 (approximately $66 / AU$95).

Tilt-shift lenses are the darlings of architectural photography. The shift function can correct the perspective error that makes tall buildings look like they’re leaning inwards towards the top. But that’s only half the story. The additional tilt function also makes them popular with landscape photographers and special effects creatives, who enjoy being able to monkey around with depth of field, independent of focal length, focus distance and aperture setting. Indeed, you can typically get anything from a huge depth of field for keeping near and far areas simultaneously sharp in landscape and cityscape images, to an ultra-thin depth of field for the ‘toytown’ effect.

The forthcoming Laowa 24mm f/2 Zero-D Tilt-Shift has an ideal focal length for architectural and cityscape photography. Very much more so than the recent Laowa FFII TS 100mm f/2.8 Macro 1X, the main strength of which I think is extending the meagre depth of field that you typically get in ‘full macro’ photography. And it doesn’t stop there. Venus Optics is so renowned as a purveyor of esoteric lenses that I feel Laowa would be top of the list if Inspector Gadget took up photography. Other oddball lenses include the Laowa 8-15mm f/2.8 FF Zoom Fisheye, Laowa 24mm f/14 2x Macro Probe, Laowa Aksen 5-10x Ultra Macro APO and Laowa 200mm f/2 AF FF, to name but a few. Okay, the last of these isn’t quite so ‘out there’ but 200mm f/2 lenses aren’t exactly run-of-the-mill.

Back to the new 24mm. Headline attractions include a generous +/-10 degrees of tilt and +/-12mm of shift, along with a similarly generous 108.8-degree wide-angle perspective. In keeping with modern lens designs, the Laowa is relatively compact and lightweight for its type. Unlike most, however, it claims to be a ‘Zero-D’ lens, with minimal optical distortion rather than relying on automatic in-camera correction.

The relatively fast f/2 aperture is another string to its bow, coming to the fore for the likes of twilight cityscape photography and architectural interiors, when lighting is low. Indeed, the Laowa claims to be the fastest tilt-shift lens ever made.

The Laowa is full-frame compatible and more besides. As such, it’s available in Canon RF, Nikon Z and Sony E and L-mount options for full-frame mirrorless cameras, while also delivering its full range of tilt-shift adjustability for select medium format cameras, thanks to Fujifilm GFX and Hasselblad XCD mount options. However, the L-mount version is incompatible with Panasonic Lumix S52, S52X, S1M2, S1M2E and S1R2 camera bodies.

Typical of tilt-shift lenses, there’s no autofocus facility but fancy glass includes five Extra-low Dispersion elements, two glass aspherical elements and four Ultra-high Refraction elements.

The launch of the Laowa 24mm tilt-shift lens is scheduled for November 5 and the US dollar price is set at $1,249. Pricing in other world regions is yet to be announced.

When photographer Santiago Pérez Rincón was in Tolima, Colombia, for a wedding, he took the opportunity to visit the natural valley in the region of Cañón del Río Anaime.

Rincón then shot an image that will later be referred to as an eye-opening capture, showcasing an endangered Yellow-eared Parrot whose survival depends on the wax palm. Now the image has been recognized in the Conservation category at the Audubon Photography Awards.

"Some of the country’s last wax palm forests survive here, even as multinational corporations continue clearing these ecosystems to make way for monocultures of Hass avocado crops," Rincón explains to Audubon magazine. With a local guide, he was able to spot a Yellow-eared Parrot.

Rincón continues, "I hope this image of the bird and palm surrounded by crops conveys a message of vigilance: Thanks to the tireless efforts of environmental advocates, the species was saved from near extinction – but if avocado plantations keep encroaching, the parrot’s story of recovery could take a turn for the worse," he explains.

Winner: Conservation

Contest: Chile and Colombia
Species: Yellow-eared Parrot
Location: Cañón del Río Anaime, Tolima, Colombia
Gear: Sony A7 IV + Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS
Exposure: 1/800 sec, f/5.6; ISO 1600

Judge’s Take (Jaír F. Coll)
"This photograph captures the poignant resilience of the Yellow-eared Parrot. The scene contrasts the bird’s solitude with a background dominated by the geometry of monoculture crops, highlighting the fragmentation of the species’ habitat.

"With an impeccable composition, the work is not only aesthetically beautiful but also serves as an urgent invitation to reflect on the pressure that agribusiness exerts on our Andean landscape and its endemic species. "

The Audubon Photography Awards
This is a competition celebrating photographers who use their skills to highlight the beauty, challenges and threats facing birds across Chile, Colombia, Canada and the United States. You can explore all 2026 winning images here.

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Looking for competitions to enter? Here are 10 global photo contests now open for entries from September 2026 to February 2027.

What makes a pitbull dangerous? Is it their nature or their nurture? These are the sorts of questions that US-based pet photographer Katie Brockman has raised after recently becoming the International Dog Photographer of the Year 2026.

Crowned queen of the Studio category as well as the overall competition, Brockman’s portrait of her adorable pet bully, Caldwell, highlights what she says are the “injustices” he, and all bully breeds, face “simply for existing.”

“For this image, I wanted to convey society’s complicated relationship with pitbulls and bully breeds,” she told the competition organizers. “The collar and chain represent breed bans, restrictions and other ways pitbulls are punished.”

Brockman used real newspaper clippings to make Caldwell’s crown and collar, which featured headlines both praising and demonizing pitbulls.

The photographer said these represent how the breed is unjustly “caught in the middle” between critics and advocates through no fault of its own.

A longtime advocate of the breed, Brockman adopted Caldwell from a rescue center, finally giving him a forever home after three years.

The award-winning photographer believes it’s “still a long road” until pitbulls are treated equally to other breeds, but she’s confident it will eventually happen.

The Dog Photography Awards celebrated canine frames across a range of themes and settings.

In the Action category, Slovenian photographer Nika Kuplenk Golobič placed first for her high-octane shot of a client pooch named Ori springing toward the camera through the snow.

Golobič explained that she got “incredibly lucky” as the location and the light created a “magical atmosphere.”

And over in the Dogs & People category, Sarah Ebner, from Switzerland, came out on top for her self-portrait taken with her dog, Koda.

Ebner explained that the photo was captured in a special place where she used to take both Koda and her other dog, Faye, who died last year. “Even though she wasn’t physically there with us anymore, in my heart, she was there with us.”

The 2026 edition of the photography competition saw roughly 1,900 entries from 50 countries. As the overall winner, Katie Brockman claimed €700 (approximately $800 / £600), an engraved trophy and a spotlight placement in the competition’s annual book and winners’ gallery.

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I was reading a new study on the growth of analog tech when I read a phrase that I had to stop and puzzle over: Young people are “replacing endless scrolling with ‘granny hobbies’ like crocheting and photography.”

Wait, apparently photography is a granny hobby? The study I was reading isn’t even the only one that lists photography among so-called “granny hobbies.”

I have, of course, heard the phrase granny hobby before. As a Millennial, I actually have a few of them – like bird watching, baking and gardening.

Millennials have gone through so many global crises that we’re trading the longstanding midlife crisis for hobbies that feel more old-fashioned, from knitting to baking sourdough – and it’s a trend that I’m completely on board with.

But, is photography actually a “granny hobby”? The answer depends a bit on how you define the phrase.

Photography is a hobby for all ages. I’ve given my 6-year-old a camera. I’ve inherited the compact camera that my grandmother took on her trips.

Taking photographs is something a vast majority of the population does, even for those who don’t actually consider themselves photographers. The average American takes about six photos a day on their phone.

But I don’t think the term “granny hobby” is really about age at all, nor do I think that other hobbies like knitting or quilting are reserved only for a certain generation. The granny hobby trend is actually all about activities that have a slow pace meant to reduce stress and spark creativity.

The concept of a granny hobby gets its name because many of these slow-paced activities are associated with hobbies with a longstanding history. But the art of a hobby that forces you to slow down is finding growth across multiple generations.

We live in a fast-paced tech world full of swiping through seconds-long videos and screens built into everything from fast-food drive-thrus to smart home refrigerators. The rise of granny hobbies pushes back against that fast pace and supports hobbies that are intentional and slow-paced.

While I believe that photography is a hobby for every generation, I agree that photography – or at least some forms of photography – can be a slow-paced, intentional hobby for boosting mental health.

Not all photography is slow-paced. Taking a snapshot with my phone doesn’t feel like the slowed-down, in-the-moment mental health break that the term granny hobby is meant to encompass.

Taking a wildlife hike with my mirrorless camera does, however, feel like a slow mental health break (although, I suppose, wildlife photography is really just a combination of two granny hobbies: bird watching and photography).

Shooting with my film camera or a screen-free camera comes with an even slower pace and intentional thinking.

Is photography a granny hobby? Photography could be a slow-paced hobby for multiple generations, but for it to be a real mental health break that the term granny hobby embodies, I don’t think smartphone photography counts. But let me know what you think!

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The Ocean Photographer of the Year competition added a new category this year: Ocean Unseen: Hidden Worlds. Its focus, as the name suggests, was our oceans' smallest and least-seen inhabitants: the microscopic and the overlooked. And its first winner, Mitsuna Kawai, has set the bar high.

Captured during a dive off the coast of Osezaki, Japan, this March, it's a dramatic scene alright. A ribbonfish rises vertically through the dark waters, as gossamer filaments trail and loop from its fins.

A swarm of salps – small, jelly-like animals that feed on tiny particles in the water – drift around it, transforming what might have been a dull black background into a maelstrom of color. It looks less like a typical underwater shot and more like something from fantasy or sci-fi.

All the more surprising, then, that the kit behind it is relatively modest. This picture was taken on a Canon EOS R10, a 24MP APS-C mirrorless body aimed at beginners and enthusiasts.

The lens is the RF-S 18-150mm f/3.5-6.3 IS STM, the travel zoom Canon often bundles with said model, set to its widest 18mm (29mm in full-frame terms). Exposure was 1/160 sec at f/9 and ISO200, in manual, at 19:45pm local time on a late March evening.

That lens choice makes a lot of sense. When you're hanging in open water at night, there's no real way of knowing what's about to drift by: it could be something the size of a fingernail-sized or a behemoth with meter-long tentacles. You can't change lenses inside a housing, though, so a zoom that covers wide-angle through to short telephoto is just the ticket.

The focus distance of this image was just 28cm – and that's smart, too. Shooting wide and close minimizes the amount of water between your lens and your subject, leading to stronger color, greater contrast and less backscatter (lit-up particles) in the frame.

Yes, you want some of the latter to make the scene feel immersive, but you don't want to go overboard, so to speak.

Few people on Earth will ever see a scene like this in real life, which is exactly why this category is such a great innovation. Not to mention being a reminder that specialist kit matters less than knowing where to be and how close to get.

Presented by Oceanographic and Blancpain, the Ocean Photographer of the Year drew more than 15,000 entries this year, with Julien Anton's seahorse portrait taking the overall title. You can view all this year's winners in the gallery.

You’re probably aware of that old film-era wheeze of rubbing Vaseline petroleum jelly over your UV filter to create a hazy, diffuse effect in your photos. Why not take that basic idea further and experiment with putting other custom diffuser elements in front of your lens? Only without getting everything sticky this time.

The two ideas I’ve used here are bubble wrap and stockings. One creates an interesting out-of-focus vignette effect; the other adds a layer of diffusion and tints it according to the color of the hosiery.

All you need is a rubber band to hold your diffusing element over the lens so that you aren’t trying to hold it still while taking the photo. Whether you use a wide-angle or telephoto lens changes how it registers, but be aware that there’s an element of hit-and-miss in this. How the light falls onto the lens affects the final result as well.

01 Attach the wrap

There are two ways of doing this. The first method is to put the bubble wrap completely over the lens, which gives a very diffuse effect. Also, when facing into sunlight, it shows up much more in the image. The second idea is to attach the wrap, but then poke a hole through the middle of it, so that the middle area of the frame will be clean and sharp.

02 Set up the camera

The only parameter here to really be concerned with is the aperture, which was set as wide as possible for the main photo on the previous spread. It doesn’t have as much effect as the focal length, but it’s still better to go wide. That means that the out-of-focus area behind where the bubble wrap covers is even softer. The key element is to experiment until you find an effect you like.

03 Wide-angle effect

For this image, the aperture was set to f/8, so you can see how much more of the scene is in focus. The key point is that with a 24mm wide-angle lens, the bubble wrap is now more apparent and the effect appears to be like looking through a pane of broken glass. Use this effect for more deliberate framing of the photo so that the viewer is looking into the image.

04 Blur it with telephoto

With the focal length now at the telephoto end – 85mm – the bubble wrap is much more opaque and indistinct, and the gap in the middle forces attention onto whatever is in focus in the main area. So with just a change of focal length, you have two different ways of framing the subject. This outcome is most similar to that old Vaseline trick.

Try a soft-focus portrait capture

These projects can also be used for taking soft-focus portraits. With a little trial and error, you can achieve great results without the expense of having to buy all manner of soft-focus filter attachments for your camera.

A second and rather different set of effects can be created by using hosiery over the lens. No, your gran’s thick woollen tights won’t do – you will need to use a fairly low denier so that you are able to see through and record the image. Changing the color and the thickness of the hosiery will have different effects, as you can see below...

Attaching to the lens

One option is to pull the hosiery tightly over the lens, which makes it easier to see through and reduces the effect. Hold it in place with an elastic band as before, making sure you can still use the zoom. The other option is to use a little slack, which creates waves and patterns in the image. Also, if you’re using any kind of colored hosiery, you might want to set the white balance manually, otherwise Auto White Balance may attempt to counter it.

Which tights? Three different results from different colored hosiery

01 Using a tan color

For this shot inside a chapel, a tan color was used, which has given the image a diffuse and warm glow. It perfectly suits the light coming through the window and the building’s gloomy interior.

02 Bring the gloom

For this image, facing into the bright light, a nearly black fabric was used. This has created more of a pinhole effect with the coloring and opacity. It has also significantly reduced the contrast.

03 What about white?

White-colored hosiery was used on this exterior shot of flowers, which has made the image softer and more diffuse in what was very bright, harsh light. Try to match the colors of your tights to those of the main subject in the frame.

SEND US YOUR PHOTOS!

If you have been inspired by any of these projects and have had a go yourself, we’d love to see your results. Email us your high-res shots: digitalcamera@futurenet.com

The Pentax 6x7 (later simplified to the Pentax 67) was one of the great medium format cameras, combining the handling of a 35mm SLR with the image quality of 120 roll film.

For many photographers, it offered the ideal balance between portability, simplicity, reliability and exceptional image quality. Even today, almost 60 years after the system's introduction, it remains one of the most sought-after film cameras.

Development of the camera began in the mid-1960s as Asahi Optical (now Pentax, a brand owned by RIcoh) wanted to build a medium format SLR that would feel familiar to photographers accustomed to 35mm SLRs.

Rather than copying the square 6x6 format used by Hasselblad, Bronica and others, Pentax chose the 6x7cm format, producing negatives approximately 56x70mm – about 4.5 times the area of a 35mm frame and, more importantly, a 4:5 image ratio, a perfect match for the standard 8x10-inch print.

It was first shown as a prototype at the Photokina trade show in Cologne, Germany, in 1966, but was called the Pentax 220 – as Pentax wanted to emphasize that it could use the new 220 film introduced by Kodak the year before.

Unlike most medium format cameras, the Pentax 6x7 was intentionally designed to resemble an oversized 35mm SLR. It featured a right-hand shutter release, a film-wind lever, a focal-plane shutter and interchangeable lenses.

Someone familiar with a Pentax Spotmatic, Nikon F or Canon F-1 (or virtually any modern 35mm SLR) could begin using the Pentax almost immediately. It is a big, heavy camera, but one that balances well in the hand.

It made 10 exposures on a roll of 120 film or 20 exposures on 220 film (21 on the later 67II). The Pentax used a cloth focal-plane shutter, with speeds to 1/1000 sec and flash sync at 1/30 sec. This meant simpler (lower cost) lenses with larger maximum apertures.

The first production Asahi Pentax 6x7 appeared in 1969, while the final version, the Pentax 67II, remained in production until 2009, giving the system an exceptional 40-year life.

The four versions were a fairly straightforward evolution. The 6x7MLU followed in 1976 and was identical except for the addition of a mirror lock-up, to eliminate the mirror-slap (desirable as it greatly reduced mirror-induced vibration during long exposures and close-up work).

In 1989 the electronics were updated, it was given a cosmetic overhaul and its name was shortened to the Pentax 67. The last version, introduced in 1998, provided better ergonomics, added an LCD display and improved the metering in the form of an autoexposure prism. The 67II was made until 2009 – well into the digital era!

One of the Pentax 67's greatest strengths was its remarkable lens lineup. More than 40 lenses were eventually produced, covering focal lengths from the 35mm fisheye to a 1,000mm mirror lens.

But it was its standard 105mm f/2.4 lens that made the Pentax 67 famous – and its history is almost as fascinating as the camera itself.

From the beginning, the company wanted a standard lens that would equal or exceed the quality of Zeiss Planar lenses on Hasselblad cameras, be fast enough for available-light photography, provide excellent edge-to-edge sharpness on the large 6x7 cm negative yet remain reasonably compact and affordable.

Those requirements were difficult to reconcile.

Simultaneously with the development of the Pentax 6x7, Asahi began investigating multi-layer coatings and negotiated the rights to the technology from a California company, Optical Coating Laboratory, Inc.

Asahi's achievement was inventing an industrial process that could apply those coatings consistently and economically to photographic lenses.

Applying up to seven ultra-thin layers uniformly to every air-to-glass surface of a complex photographic lens was extremely difficult in the late 1960s. But it enabled Asahi to upgrade all its lenses with its now-famous Super-Multi-Coat (SMC) standard in 1971.

On any camera, the focal length of a "normal" lens should be roughly the diagonal of the negative in order to give a perspective equivalent to the human eye (not counting peripheral vision).

For a 35mm camera, the diagonal is 43.3 mm. Thus, manufacturers have used anything from a 40 to 58mm lens as standard; with the longer focal lengths used on early SLRs where the length was needed to enable the rear element to clear the mirror without resorting to more complex retrofocus designs.

The diagonal of the Pentax 67 negative measures roughly 89.5mm, so a 90mm lens should do it. But Asahi selected 105mm because it provided a slightly narrower field of view than a 90mm (about equal to a 52mm lens on a 35mm camera) for a more flattering perspective for portraits.

This was enough working distance for general photography and room for a relatively large f/2.4 aperture without making the lens gigantic.

The optical formula comprised six elements in five groups. Rather than chasing extreme sharpness at every aperture, the designers struck a careful balance between high center resolution, excellent correction of spherical aberration, smooth transition from sharp to out-of-focus areas (bokeh), and low distortion.

This balance is a major reason for the lens' enduring reputation. But curiously, the lens did not achieve instant legendary status in the 1970s.

It was respected as an excellent standard lens, but its near-mythical reputation grew in the digital era when high-resolution film scans revealed just how much detail the lens could resolve. As a result, prices for clean examples have risen dramatically since the 2010s.

In the digital era, the Pentax 67 has enjoyed a resurgence among portrait, landscape and fine-art photographers, with its large negatives scanning exceptionally well and producing images with a distinctive depth and tonal richness that many photographers prize.

Read more of David Young's ongoing series on classic cameras, as well as his book A Brief History of Photography.

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Most street photography takes place at street level. But what happens if you stop pointing your lens forward, and look up instead? A new exhibition reveals what happened when Masao Gozu did just that.

The Japanese photographer spent three decades around New York's neighborhoods, pointing his lens up at apartment buildings and capturing whoever happened to be leaning out. Now his work is getting its first US museum exhibition.

Masao Gozu: Windows and Bars opens at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, on November 05 and runs until March 15 2027.

Organized by associate curator Jody Graf, it brings together more than 40 works of photography, sculpture and archival material, dating from 1972 to the present day. So how, exactly, did this mammoth body of work come about?

An immigant in New York

Born in Hakuba, Japan, in 1946, Gozu moved to New York in the 1970s after winning a scholarship to the Brooklyn Museum Art School.

He had no formal training in photography. But as a newcomer in a city that was alien to him, he was drawn to immigrant neighbourhoods, from Chinatown and Little Italy to Bay Ridge and Crown Heights.

Typically, his subjects are gazing at something outside the frame. We never find out what it is but, in a way, that's what makes them compelling. Each apartment window becomes a stage, offering what the museum calls "the interior theater of everyday life".

One thing that grabbed my attention was the geometry. Shooting upwards from the street should produce converging verticals, with windows tapering towards the top. Yet typically, the window sits perfectly square to the picture plane.

It turns out that Gozu corrected the perspective in the darkroom by manipulating the enlarger: the analog equivalent of a perspective-correction slider. The result is a flat, formal composition in which brickwork and window frames become a rigid grid.

In one picture, a father, three children and a dog crowd into an open sash window, all staring at the same unseen event. In another, a figure in a woolly hat peeps out from behind a window decorated with an American flag.

It all acts as a clear metaphor for what Gozu himself was experiencing: a sense of estrangement in a foreign land.

View of the bar

These window photos, though, are only one half the story. The second half of the exhibition's title refers to Harry's Bar, at 98 Bowery.

Between 1976 and 1981, Gozu shot its storefront obsessively, taking a picture each time a customer looked out of the left side of the window. The framing barely changes: the same window panes, the same neon Schlitz and Schmidt's signs, the same fluorescent tube. Only the drinkers come and go.

Twelve of these images are in the show. Together, they work almost like a time-lapse. In one, a white-bearded man stands forlornly behind the glass, framed by glowing signs. In another, one of these signs has gone dark and a hunched figure leans on the bar, expression obscured.

Gozu kept making the window photographs until 2004. In 2025, he began reshooting the places he'd photographed decades earlier, and the exhibition pairs them together.

The sense of time passing is profound. In these photos, the city is a backdrop that barely moves while its people come and go. And to anyone who knows New York, that feels less like an observation and more like a definition.

Masao Gozu: Windows and Bars is at MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, from 5 November 2026 to 15 March 2027. Admission is free.

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While regular practice is the ultimate way to become a good photographer, critiquing other people’s images is also an important aspect of your development.

The more types of photography you observe, the more critical your eye becomes – an important skill needed for producing your own images.

And now, with the Exposure One Awards having opened its People’s Vote Award as part of the 2026 Photographer of the Year, what better way to not only see a vast array of new monochrome imagery, but to hone your eye further.

Each year, the black-and-white contest – which also accepts sepia and single-color-tone images – puts all entries nominated by judges for the Photographer of the Year Award forward for a People’s Vote Award, too.

At this year’s event, images across some 20 categories have been nominated, with themes including wildlife, architecture, abstraction, nudity, portraiture, photojournalism and landscapes.

To cast your vote, simply head to the People’s Vote webpage, spend some time critiquing the nominated shots – there are many, by the way – and select your winner.

So far, almost 30,000 votes have been cast and, according to the rules, you're allowed to vote once per day until the deadline, which is 05:00 BST on October 12 (be sure to convert this to your local time).

If you're keen on taking part, then my tip is to vote once per category, so you’re exposed to the breadth of this year’s nominated images.

Personally, I’ve been impressed by Brazilian photographer Ronaldo Andrade’s shot titled Travessia, or "Crossing". The scene depicts Pesca da Tainha, a traditional artisanal mullet fishing ritual that takes place annually between May 01 and July 10 in Florianópolis, Brazil.

I’m also a fan of Parisian Pierre-Yves Cruaud’s image of a pair of old hands on top of one another. A simple yet intriguing frame, it’s a great example of how seemingly everyday moments, like resting one’s hand on a table, can make great pictures.

The event organizers haven’t yet said when the People’s Vote winners will be announced, but keep an eye on the event webpage for updates. We’ll also be covering further updates about the 2026 Exposure One Photographer of the Year Award here on Digital Camera World, so stay tuned.

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Capturing an Olibird in flight "inside its sanctuary of shadows was a test of patience and technique," explains wildlife photographer Faber Mosquera Álvarez.

Now the image that cost him nerves and pain has been announced as the category winner in Birds in Landscapes, Colombia, at the prestigious Audubon Photography Awards.

"I knew the lighting conditions in the cavern would be critical, so I went ahead of the group I was with, crossing a rushing river to find the perfect angle without disturbing the area," he says to Audubon magazine.

Álvarez increased the light sensitivity of his APS-C DSLR and selected a fast shutter speed of 1/250 sec to freeze the birds' movement.

He adds, "As my companions caught up with me, the cave came alive in an explosion of fluttering wings. I had a nasty fall on the river rocks on my return trip, but my knee pain vanished when I saw this image," explains Álvarez.

Winner: Birds in Landscapes, Colombia

Contest: Chile and Colombia
Species: Oilbird
Location: Cañón de los Guácharos, Quindío, Colombia
Gear: Nikon D500 + Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 DG OS HSM | C
Exposure: 1/1250 sec, f/5; ISO 8000

Judge’s Take (Sebastian Herzog)
"Taking sharp, captivating photos of birds in flight requires a lot of experience and skill, but capturing a primarily nocturnal bird inside a cave without using a flash is on another level!

"This photo stands out for its technically complex execution, which freezes the Oilbird in mid-flight and allows us to discern all the details of its plumage, despite lighting conditions far from ideal. It offers us a rare glimpse into the dark home of this enigmatic species."

The Audubon Photography Awards
This is a competition celebrating photographers who use their skills to highlight the beauty, challenges and threats facing birds across Chile, Colombia, Canada and the United States. You can explore all 2026 winning images here.

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There aren't a lot of devices I refuse to leave home without. There's my phone and camera, obviously, and a PocketTalk translator if I'm working somewhere that English isn't the first language. But there's one more device that I always slip into my camera bag or pocket, no matter where I am: the Lexar Professional Go Portable SSD.

I'm shooting more and more video these days, both as a dad with a six-month-old and as someone who covers press events and shoot a lot of social media content. I still shoot all my photos on a mirrorless camera, but for video my phone is infinitely quicker and more convenient – and when I take my iPhone, I can record in ludicrously good ProRes RAW if I want to.

But the one area where a camera would beat my phone is storage. Yes, shooting 4K 60p in ProRes RAW looks great, but it gobbles up the space on my phone faster than Pac-Man on a power pill binge. Lasy year I actually had to buy a duplicate phone, because I'd run out of space even after playing my usual hokey-kokey with apps and files.

This is where the Go has become an invaluable part of my workflow, both personally and professionally. This teeny tiny portable SSD is about half the length of a stick of gum, but it gives me two terabytes of lightning-fast storage that I can record directly to – even when I'm churning through PreRes footage flubbing my lines and repeating take after take.

It's hard to be precise, because I'm usually juggling a lot of files when I'm using this in the field, but I've comfortably shot about a couple of hours of ProRes on this thing before I figured I'd better transfer everything to my computer – which I could never dream of doing with just my phone!

With read and write speeds of 1,050MB/s and 1,000MB/s, I don't have to worry about frame drops or any kind of impact on my footage at all – it's like capturing natively to my phone, which gives me peace of mind while I'm focused on filming.

I'd assume you can do exactly the same thing if you've got a fancier phone that shoots 8K, but mine doesn't so I didn't get to test that – and you'd also have to be mindful about overheating, which wasn't a problem for me, but obviously you're going to generate more heat the more resolution you're pumping through.

I recently discovered just how tough it is, too, as an errant cup of coffee in a café gave it a bath I hadn't intended. While I was less than thrilled to have wasted almost ten bucks on my undrunk mocha, the Go survived completely unscathed thanks to its IP65 rating for dust and water (and apparently coffee) resistance.

This clever little cookie is more than just small and caffeine-proof, however; it comes with a brilliant hub that enables me to expand to a full shooting setup when I need to. It has four USB-C ports, including a 30W PD charging port, meaning I can slap in a light and microphone receiver without having extra cables trailing all over the place.

I try to avoid doing that whenever possible, otherwise I may as well use my camera to film video, but when needs must this really does change the game – for starters, I'll never have to use the huge horrible rig I used to be stuck with ever again.

And once I'm done shooting, I can connect it straight to my laptop and transfer all my files for editing – or to my wife's phone if we're overseas and I want to use her 5G coverage which is somehow better than mine even though we're on the same network.

The Lexar Professional Go Portable SSD has been a real revelation. I've been testing it ever since CP+ in Japan earlier this year, where it was such a life saver when working in cramped press rooms and on the show floor. If you're someone who creates content on your phone – or who just wants a tiny SSD that's the same size as the eraser in your kid's pencil case – this one comes highly recommended.

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An elusive Andean Mountain Cat (Leopardus jacobita) has been sighted by conservationists in Argentina for only the third time in as many consecutive years.

The footage was captured by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Argentina, which commented on the “clear role” that trail cameras have played in helping to conserve what is, according to the organization, the most endangered cat species across the Andes.

Andean cats grow to roughly the same size as a large house cat. Their thick ash-gray fur is marked with brownish-orange spots and stripes, providing excellent camouflage against rocky terrain.

ABOVE: The elusive Andean Mountain Cat captured on a Bushnell trail camera

However, threatened by hunting, habitat loss and a reduction in its prey, the Andean cat is the only one in the Americas listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List. WCS Argentina estimates that there are around 2,100 mature individuals across South America.

The latest sighting was recorded in January 2026 in the La Payunia Protected Natural Area of Mendoza Province, which formed part of a broader WCS investigation into the species in northern Argentina over the past two decades.

“Every discovery is great news; it confirms that the Andean cat is still present in the area and that conservation efforts are yielding concrete results,” commented Dr María José Bolgeri, regenerative management manager at WCS Argentina.

While WCS had first observed the Andean cat with camera traps three years ago, in Neuquén Province, it had yet to snap frames of the feline in Mendoza.

That was until a local farmer described an encounter with one with “remarkable precision”. According to Dr Bolgeri, the farmer helped confirm the presence of the cat in the region, therefore helping conservationists decide on where to set up camera traps.

None of the sightings over the past three years, however, establish whether the local Andean cat population is increasing or decreasing.

Instead, they underline the importance of continued camera trap monitoring to improve understanding of the species' distribution and the challenges involved in studying elusive species.

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Photography duo and viral creators Jada and David are accustomed to building their own worlds – after all, they once built 100 different photography sets in 100 days. But the duo’s latest challenge blends a warped, imaginary world with the American landscape.

Using a set that fits entirely into the back of a small truck, the couple is traveling over 7,000 miles across a dozen US states to capture a series of warped, whimsical photographs that blend an imaginary world – with America as the backdrop.

Jada and David Parrish – better known simply as Jada and David (@jadanaddavid) – are an award-winning husband-and-wife team known for their photos featuring custom sets, bold designs and dramatic colors.

The couple is in the process of moving across the country from Virginia to California – but when all their plans for moving began to fall apart, the photographers decided to turn what should be a four-day trip into a thirty-plus-day, cross-country creative trek.

The trip mixes the couple’s usual iconic sets and style with something entirely different: using America as the backdrop.

I chatted with the couple around 3,000 miles into their journey while in South Dakota about the creative project – and the challenge of building and shooting with a moving set.

A project created from unraveled plans

The duo explained that the idea for taking their studio sets outdoors has been lingering since completing a 100-set challenge, but the opportunity never felt right.

While planning a cross-country move, though, their initial plans began falling apart. When they realized they would need to drive, in order to take their dog from their old home to the new, the idea came off the back burner.

When the couple pitched the idea and ended up with sponsorship support from Adorama for camera gear and OWC for hard drives, that was the confirmation the couple needed that the idea was an adventure worth sharing.

“I was overwhelmed with the concept of moving – I made a bigger concept for myself. I don’t feel like I’m moving… I think I distracted myself,” said David.

Embarking on a creative cross-country trek at the same time as moving has added to the challenge of determining what to pack, all while a custom-made plywood set fills up the entire back of the couple’s Toyota Tacoma.

An entire set that fits in a 5.5-foot truck bed

After the couple’s moving plans fell apart and shifted to a month-long photography drive, the entire project needed to be planned in less than two months. That started with building a custom set that fits into the back of a truck.

Jada and David wanted to build a set that could be photographed in more than one way.

The set’s layers look almost like a wormhole when shot from inside the truck out the back window – often with the dog in David’s lap as he shoots. Shooting from the top of the truck, meanwhile, it looks more like a colorful staircase.

To be able to shoot through the set, the tailgate had to come off the truck – but also needed to make the move to California, so David took the tailgate off first, stashed it in the truck bed, and built the plywood set around it.

Building took around eight full days. While wood is the duo’s usual choice for sets, the concept added to the challenge, requiring a set that was also aerodynamic and a route that met the set’s eight-foot clearance.

In order to keep the lighting setup similar across the different locations, the team fixed a wall-mounted light rack to the top of the trop cab, positioning a Flashpoint Xplor 300 Pro and Xplor 600 provided by Adorama on the top of the truck.

A softbox is built into the sides of the set using corrugated plastic sheets in order to create soft light inside the wormhole-like set.

A warped world combining the imagined with the real world

The series takes what the couple is known for – bold, unique sets – but changes the background to different iconic American landscapes.

“The initial concept is that this character is bouncing between locations, coming out of this forced perspective portal into these landscapes; she’s not sure where she is, she’s looking for something,” Jada explained.

“The initial idea is to keep the framing exactly the same and build on that repetition to tell the story, but as we’ve been going to these different locations, the framing has been changing up a bit.”

Mixing an imaginary world with the real world has introduced new challenges to solve. Backing up the truck to line the set up with the background landscape has proven to be more challenging than expected, often taking several attempts.

To exaggerate the whimsical, warped look that the geometric, wormhole set is going for, the go-to lens on the shoot is the Canon RF 10-20mm f/4 IS L STM, often shot at 10mm, mounted on the Canon EOS R5.

A 24-105mm zoom and the GoPro Mission 1 Pro also made the camera bag in the limited space for the trip to shoot behind-the-scenes video.

The shoot locations also had to be planned around scenic, iconic American landscapes – that didn’t have fences or guardrails in the way.

The route was planned with a mix of input from social media fans and using Google Gemini to help find locations with an unobstructed view in places the couple is seeing for the first time.

While AI played a role in planning, the photography is done entirely in-camera. “I think with everything, two things can exist. AI can be scary and bad, but also helpful, so we need to find the middle ground, like making the map,” David said.

“The visuals that I create, it’s all in-camera; that’s what we create, that’s our art. If someone uses AI with their art, it’s like the difference between watercolor and oil paint. I don’t want to judge anyone using AI, but for me and my art, it’s about trying to create the effect in camera.”

Intentionally creating problems to solve

The set must be in each shot, Jada and David said, even when shooting without it would be the easier option. While intentionally making something more challenging may seem unusual, putting specific limitations on a project often sparks creative problem-solving, the couple says.

“I enjoy putting parameters on myself because then it creates problems that I have to solve, which gives me new tools to use in the future on projects,” David said. “Having strict parameters really helps me to do that… you use tools in different ways than you would ever expect to.”

“The lines that you put yourself in force you to be more creative within those parameters,” Jada added. “We end up having more ideas than we would have had without those parameters.”

Prior to building their own sets for creative studio work, Jada and David worked as wedding photographers – an era of their career that involved making existing locations work, rather than creating their own worlds.

“There’s something magical about having 100% control over the environment that you are creating,” David said. “Start small with a chair that you like from the thrift store on a paper background and grow from there. Create these worlds that only exist in your imagination.”

“There are a lot of different ways to build sets,” Jada said. “David uses plywood; it’s a medium that he’s always been familiar with, and it works for us. But it doesn’t have to be plywood; you can use fabrics… even cardboard and plastic. You don’t have to have a woodworking background.”

While much of Jada and David’s work is client-centered builds, the trek across America serves as a reminder of the importance of personal creative projects.

“Doing creative projects just because you are curious about something is a really important practice for photographers,” Jada said. “It gives you a reason to try something new, push boundaries, and challenge yourself in different ways, and then take that personal project and bring it back into your profession.

“When you do a personal project, you never really know why you are doing it; you are just curious. But in following that curiosity, you end up discovering a really interesting skill set that adds to the whole.”

I spoke with Jada and David a bit before the halfway point in their 30+ day journey. Follow the creative All About the Journey project through the couple’s website and social media as it unfolds.

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When you think of images representing climate change, a number of clichés come to mind. A wind or solar farm; a lone polar bear on an ice floe. You know the kind of thing.

But while these are all real things that really exist, let's be honest. They've become so familiar to us, they've lost whatever impact they once had.

OPEN ECO is going in a different direction. Held outdoors at the Seafront Gallery in the English seaside resort of Brighton, the exhibition brings together 20 artists, selected through an international open call.

Each is showing a single photograph in response to a single question: how can photography make a difference to the climate crisis? There's no single answer, and that makes sense because the climate affects, well, everything.

A range of responses

So for example, Mark Phillips's The Rhone Glacier retreats exposes protection efforts at a Swiss glacier that are driven by tourism. Meanwhile for The Catch of the Day, Dr Gil Mualem-Doron worked with young Sri Lankans to turn plastic washed up on the beach into wearable sculptures.

Some photographers document nature reclaiming the spaces humans have left behind. In Monument, for instance, Halfdan Hallseth captures plants and trees reclaiming the cooling tower of Chernobyl's Reactor 5, while Kerstin Rudnick's As times go bye shows vegetation overrunning abandoned cars in Sweden.

Others focus on damage already done. Ann Petruckevitch's Kilometres to where? shows bushfire destruction along an Australian highway, and Rebecca Goddard's Fly records the impact of fly-tipped waste in England.

Across all 20 images, there's a tremendous variety of techniques and subjects, and limiting contributions to one picture per photographer has really paid off.

"The single-image format asks us to consider what a photograph can do within a wider conversation," says Photo Fringe producer Ricardo Reverón Blanco. "An image can act as evidence, testimony, warning or invitation. It can make visible what is overlooked, connect a local experience to a global condition, or encourage us to look again at the environments we inhabit every day."

Photo Fringe, a registered charity that supports early-career photographers and lens-based artists, runs until 31 October across Brighton & Hove, Newhaven and Portsmouth, with dozens of exhibitions in galleries, cafés, empty shops and other unexpected spaces. OPEN ECO is at the Seafront Gallery, 54 Kings Road, Brighton BN1 2HJ, from 5 October to 1 November, as part of Photo Fringe 2026.

The 2026-27 soccer season is now in full swing, so for anyone looking to start shooting the beautiful game – or sharpening their skills – it's time to get inspired.

Chantelle Cook is studying photography at Edinburgh College in Scotland UK.

She only picked up a digital camera for the first time as recently as 2023, but has quickly built up her range of photographic skills.

With a particular interest in commercial photography, Chantelle is also keen to broaden her repertoire, so put her hat in the ring to shadow a pro soccer photographer for a day – to be the reader in a Digital Camera magazine Apprentice feature.

Her mentor was Raymond Davies, the club photographer of Motherwell FC, a team which plays in the Scottish Premiership, and Chantelle would get the chance to show her chops in a local clash with Falkirk football club.

Chantelle and Raymond are both Canon shooters, but while Raymond uses the pro-grade EOS R5 Mark II, Chantelle favors the EOS R50 – an entry level body with a 24.2 megapixel APS-C sensor.

So how did Chantelle fare on the day under Raymond's expert guidance? Let's find out – and get some of Raymond's insights for shooting soccer like a pro…

"I'm hoping to figure out how to approach different styles of shots. In particular, I'm keen to learn how to capture dramatic images of football," she says.

"I roughly know how it's done – I understand the basics – but I've never actually tried it before. So I'll enjoy learning more about the exact shutter speeds to choose and put them into practice!"

It's great that Chantelle understands the importance of knowing the game and that the required techniques will differ from one sport to another.

As her main photographic interests are in commercial imagery – fashion and portraiture, in particular – sport is quite a departure from her comfort zone. So why has she chosen to branch out?

"I am drawn to the excitement of sports photography; you never know exactly what's going to happen next.

"You're right in front of the action pitchside. It's the exact opposite of studio-based photography, where everything is planned," she says.

How Chantelle got her super shots – technique assessment

Set the subject

Modern cameras have myriad subject-detection AF modes, so make sure yours is set up for the correct subject.

For football images, this will probably be people or athletes, depending on the specific camera make and model that you are using.

Adjust AF sensitivity

Set Servo or Continuous AF mode so you don’t have to refocus for each shot.

Then, turn down the sensitivity of your camera to objects passing between the lens and subject, which is common during a match and can cause misfocusing.

Use lens function buttons

Use AF Stop buttons to pause autofocus during play. This is useful if there’s a risk of focus racking to the background or the subject is going to remain at the current focus distance, increasing your hit rate.

Read more from Digital Camera magazine

This content appeared in issue 308 of Digital Camera magazine.

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Like many fans of cutting-edge tech, smart glasses with a camera and AI assistance have held appeal for me for some time.

If you can forgive a little tech nostalgia, I still remember using my Google Glass in the early 2010s. Everyone I knew was fascinated by them. Soon, though, I realized for myself that they weren't actually very useful and, worse still, the wider world was a lot more hostile than the optimistic nerds at Google might have expected.

Now things are very different. Cameras in glasses frames are still the subject of debate, but – thanks to Meta's non-display variants – have to some extent been normalized.

The problem is more that, especially for someone interested in the content they're creating, the process – heavily dependent on checking your phone display – all seems very disjointed. It's not as "smart" as the name implies.

Step forward the Meta Ray-Ban Display – like the Google Glass there is visual feedback, but this time it's in color. Plus there are a lot more means to interact. Is this the solution?

When Meta / Ray-Ban finally offered me the opportunity to try out the glasses, I jumped at it so I could find out.

Even though I've tested a lot of eye-worn displays – from RayNeo's head-worn monitors, through drone FPV goggles with menus, to Apple Vision Pro – the Meta offering still surprised me in a number of ways.

First things first, I'm pretty confident that it is something I'd be fairly happy wearing in public. They are light, and the frames look okay given the tech inside.

My wife was actually pretty complimentary about how they looked (before I showed her the price tag). Sure, it's a bit Buddy Holly – and I'd have felt comfortable on the cover of a Weezer album – but it's not all about the glasses.

The downside is the wrist band – or "neural band" – which is worn on the wrist of your dominant hand and communicates with the glasses.

It detects the movements that form your interactions with the user interface. These are rotating the hand left and right (for example, to handle volume), and gestures of tapping your thumb against different fingers.

It took me no more than a minute to grasp this – but a few more to start to remember which of my first three fingers I should be tapping with my thumb in some situations.

Really it's no more complicated than a computer mouse with a few buttons – but even once you're used to the interface, the band itself is one more thing to keep track of… and take on and off and charge.

What that buys you, though, is not having to look at your phone all the time, which surely is the whole promise of smart glasses.

It also means the glasses are capable of a lot more genuinely cool tricks, like putting subtitles in your view – using AI translation – when someone is speaking in a foreign language, or displaying translations of things you can see.

From the perspective of a photographer, too, it enables you to see your images or video. There is a 12MP camera, set for vertical images – only the new Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 3) have the option of landscape shooting, but they don't have a display.

I don't know about you, but I find a visual interface easier to follow than asking an AI and wondering if it correctly understood me, so a display is incredibly reassuring compared to similar tech.

It is 600 x 600 pixels, which makes it capable of displaying a phone-like interface three icons wide.

That is where things get a little weird, though. The interface isn't exactly the one you're used to from your phone – Android or iOS – but Meta's own.

Interactions with the device are through Meta's AI. Meta is a big player, and it wants to be part of – or dominate – the new face of computing, and that is interaction through AI.

In fact, I strongly suspect this is why the company has invested so much in releasing this range of products and kept them at relatively accessible prices.

Meta's modus operandi is to use the information (not the photos and videos) from user interactions to develop its AI system.

That can include pictures, if you ask the glasses "Meta, what am I looking at?" – but not your personal gallery. It's a significant distinction, but it does technically mean that someone working at Meta HQ may end up seeing more or less what you saw, which might feel a bit strange for some folk.

The cameras on smart glasses have always created privacy concerns, but leaving that aside it is impressively useful.

What I did find myself asking, from a demo that included the camera and some Meta smart functions (including translations of what I could see), was whether these are significantly more useful than either the glasses without the display or the Google Glass of over ten years ago?

To fully answer that, I'd need to spend longer with them. But one of the key demonstrations projected directions onto the display to help me find a nearby subway station.

The thing is, I generally don't need a map – but I know others do, so I can see the use in this. But I suspect I'd feel more comfortable with Google or even Apple Maps.

The camera gets a zoom function, powered by twisting your hand, which I'm sure is great for socials but must involve some compromise in quality. The live preview in the display means you are at least recording what you want, though.

My test was a controlled demo, so I wasn't able to link the device to my own phone and get the full experience, which means I stuck mostly to the photo and translation tools.

Translation seemed futuristic to me. I could see the ability to look at menus and have them converted into an image in my language as much more discreet than having it read out to me, but live subtitles was amazing.

Just quickly reviewing my images without reaching for the phone was a massive step up, too.

Then again, there were limits to this unconnected demo. I tried to play the music of Ariane X (easily found by Siri) by voice, but Meta couldn't – and there was no prospect of linking to my own accounts unless I bought the glasses. I could, of course, use them as headphones, but that doesn't feel as "smart".

So, are they all that they promised from my hands-on?

Well, they're cheaper than Google Glass. In fact, if you're interested in cool tech, they're also cheaper even if you buy a premium phone like an iPhone 18 Pro Max than the iPhone Duo. So while the $799 / £749 might seem a high starting point, there are other ways to look at it.

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Take a look at the best camera glasses from other manufacturers.

Established in 2008, the Fritz Pölking Prize celebrates extraordinary nature photography stories and portfolios. And this year's winning series certainly fits that bill.

Tales of the Forest Keepers, by Dutch biologist and photojournalist Michiel van Noppen, takes us into the rainforests of Costa Rica and tells the story of the extraordinary relationship between the Baird’s tapir – the largest native land mammal in Central America – and the rare Jícaro Danto tree.

Above, you can see my favorite image from the project. Two Baird's tapirs, the older Mamita and a youngster called Julian, forage around the base of a tree in a Costa Rican rainforest. Clusters of cucumber-like fruit hang from the trunk. Mamita, wearing a GPS collar, stretches up to feed.

It's not a particularly showy or dramatic image. There's no front-cover 'wow-factor' here. Yet this is the picture that explains everything about the story.

The tree is a Jícaro Danto (Parmentiera valerii), found only in the Guanacaste Mountain Range; around 600 are thought to survive in the wild. Its fibrous fruit has just one disperser: the endangered Baird's tapir, which eats it, wanders for kilometres and deposits the seeds in a ready-made pile of fertilizer.

Mamita is guiding Julian around the Jícaro Danto trees of Tapir Valley Nature Reserve, a buffer zone of over 100 hectares next to Tenorio Volcano National Park. You're watching one generation teach the next how to keep a symbiosis alive.

It's also good to know that this photo didn't depend on having the latest or most expensive kit. The camera is a Nikon D3100, the 14MP APS-C DSLR that Nikon launched as an entry-level model in 2010.

The lens is a Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM, set to 18mm, or 27mm in full-frame terms. Exposure was 1/200 sec at f/8 and ISO800, in manual.

To my mind, the most important decision here was going wide with the shot. Had the framing been tighter, at best he'd have got a good close-up.

This picture, however, gives you the whole shebang: the fruit at the top of the trunk, the mother feeding in the middle, the son bottom-left, the trunk acting as a central spine for the eye to follow and dense forest framing everything beautifully.

In the words of juror Hanneke Van Camp: "That's exactly what conservation photography is about: making the complex connections between species visible, bringing together scientific and local knowledge and showing ways for people and nature to live well alongside each other."

Van Noppen will be honored as part of the official award ceremony of the European Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026 competition, held at the International Nature Photography Festival on October 23.

You might also like...

Check out the best cameras for wildlife photography as well as the the best lenses for bird photography and wildlife.

Ordinarily when you take a picture at night, you want to reduce the darkness and illuminate the scene as much as possible. Yet to my mind, that needn't always be the priority. Sometimes, drama trumps detail. And above you can see a very good example.

This one of the images from Michiel van Noppen's Fritz Pölking Prize-winning series, Tales of the Forest Keepers, about a conservation project in the Costa Rican rainforest.

In pitch darkness at 17 minutes past midnight, a Baird's tapir is being treated for infestation of screwworms – a species of parasitic blowfly whose larvae feed on the living flesh of warm-blooded animals.

The tapir's head is crossed with scars and there's a large, open wound. To treat it, a gloved, tattooed arm reaches in from the left, while a headtorch blazes straight into the lens. It's not a pretty sight, but this isn't grossness for grossness's sake. There's a serious point to be made.

Tapirs are especially vulnerable to screwworm. Pushed out of the shrinking rainforest, they're now often seen crossing yards and cattle pastures, typically carrying bite wounds.

It's a frustrating situation, because screwworms were actually eradicated from Costa Rica for more than 40 years, yet illegal livestock trafficking across Central America has recently heralded their return.

How it was shot

This dramatic scene was shot on a Canon EOS R6 with an RF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM at 37mm. The settings were 1/25 sec at f/5.6 and ISO 8000, in manual, with flash. The recorded focus distance was 1.31m.

The combination of high ISO, slow shutter speed and flash is a smart one. The flash does the heavy lifting on the subject and freezes it, while the longer exposure and high ISO enable the headtorch and its glow to register as well.

Without that, you'd probably get a flash-lit tapir floating in uniform black, with none of the sense of a team working by torchlight. Here, though, the darkness does not obscure the drama, but helps bring it to life by framing it.

The visible action runs on a diagonal: headtorch top left, arm across the center, wound and treatment on the right. The red liquid adds a splash of color, pulling the eye back to the middle of the frame.

Nobody's face is visible, but that's a feature, not a bug. This picture isn't about the human, it's about the act of care and the nature of the threat.

Van Noppen will be honored as part of the official award ceremony of the European Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026 competition, held at the International Nature Photography Festival on 23 October.

You might also like…

Take a look at the best cameras for wildlife photography and the best lenses for bird photography and wildlife.

The octopus is known as an intensely curious creature – and when one spotted a snorkeler’s 360-degree camera, it decided to try it out. The octopus not only swam away with the camera, but took some uniquely tentacled shots in the process.

The humorous underwater photography mishap was shared on social media by Konstantinos Mousis and later picked up by Insta360, as the eight-legged thief stole an Insta360 X5.

The video starts with a shot that was clearly taken from the octopus's underbelly, with eight legs framing the snorkeler. The octopus then swims away, still holding the camera, and gets some occasionally quite good shots that frame the snorkeler amid a ring of tentacles.

The snorkeler initially tries to follow the camera, then waits and holds back while the octopus explores the camera.

The video is far from the only time that a curious octopus has stolen a camera. The creatures have been known to grab an unsuspecting diver’s camera, often creating humorous footage and some occasional selfies in the process.

But the fact that the stolen camera was a 360 camera helped create footage that wasn’t fully obstructed by tentacles. The design of a 360 camera played a big role in what the octopus was able to capture.

As DCW’s 360 camera expert Adam Juniper says when writing about the X5, “The magic of this is that you don’t need to point the camera when you’re capturing any action.” Capturing footage from every direction means the whole lens wasn’t obstructed by the underbelly, allowing the video to be cropped to a view framed by those curious tentacles.

Marine biologists are often quick to point out that an octopus with a stolen camera doesn’t actually think it's taking a selfie, but is rather exhibiting its curiosity. Octopuses tend to be curious creatures and are known for exploring unidentified objects with their tentacles.

The “stolen” camera is a relative favorite among 360 cameras, though the newer Insta360 X6 has taken its place at the top of DCW's best 360 cameras list. The Insta360 X5 boasts impressive 8K footage and low-light capabilities, along with a durable build – or should I say "octopus-proof" build?

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Take a look at the best waterproof cameras, or the best 360 cameras.

The compact camera sits among the photography industry’s biggest trends – but a new report suggests that there’s actually a non-pro, compact category that may be outselling the viral point-and-shoot: the gimbal camera.

A new report from market research firm IDC hints that brands have sold nearly 2.8 million gimbal cameras in the second quarter of 2026 alone, a massive 87 percent increase over the same time last year.

Looking at data from the Camera and Imaging Products Association – which only tallies numbers from participating Japanese brands – the number of compact cameras sold in all of 2025 numbered 2.3 million.

That means that, globally, gimbal cameras sold more in three months than compact cameras from Japanese camera brands for all of last year.

Comparing the numbers that only come from Japanese brands and a global report is a bit like comparing apples to oranges. CIPA data includes the biggest camera makers from Japan, but in the compact camera category in particular, that’s going to exclude point-and-shoots like those from Kodak. Some Kodak-branded cameras have been particularly popular, like the viral Kodak Charmera, so excluding brands outside Japan may skew the numbers more than just a little bit.

Regardless, the numbers are staggering and suggest explosive growth for the gimbal camera category. The gimbal camera was first popularized by the DJI Pocket series, but the viral success of cameras like the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 – now on its fourth generation with the Pocket 4 and 4P – has led to an uptick in competition, such as the Insta360 Luna Ultra and the upcoming Hohem Eyepic.

The report predicts that gimbal cameras, together with action cameras and 360 cameras, could reach 41 million cameras sold annually by 2030 – and the gimbal camera is currently the largest of those three categories.

According to the report, gimbal cameras outnumbered the more standard action camera category in the second quarter as well, selling 2.8 million compared to 2.55 million action cameras. “Panoramic cameras” – better known as 360 cameras – grew four percent but numbered far fewer at 530,000 in that three-month period.

I immediately understood the draw of the gimbal category after first trying one out. Gimbal cameras are built for stabilized video without the complexity of pro rigs, but beyond that, they can track moving subjects and simplify cinematic camera moves. Video tends to be the medium with the most engagement on social media in recent years, likely adding even more to the appeal of a capable but uncomplicated video camera.

Another relatively new camera format is also rising in popularity, according to the report. IDC says that “thumb cameras,” tiny action cameras that detach from a larger base, have grown 300 percent compared to the same time frame last year. The category includes tiny wearable cameras like the Insta360 Go 3S and the DJI Osmo Nano.

The report also offers an unusual look at what brands are dominating those three camera categories. DJI remains the dominant player, responsible for 73 percent of the cameras in those categories shipped in the second quarter. While DJI has led the segment for some time, IDC says that’s a record high and an 11 percent jump from the same time last year.

While DJI is responsible for nearly three out of every four cameras in those categories, Insta360 follows with around one in five. Perhaps even more interesting is that other brands, including GoPro, account for only around ten percent.

That data highlights GoPro’s recent financial struggles as the action camera maker finalizes plans to merge with another company to pay off its debts. IDC suggests that GoPro’s second-quarter camera sales declined 49 percent compared to the same time last year.

But several recent changes will make it interesting to see where future reports put the camera known for creating the action camera category in the first place. First, GoPro has now launched a new larger sensor series, the GoPro Mission 1. The camera is arguably less unusual than the introduction of DJI’s Pocket series, but brings a long-awaited larger sensor as well as a more niche mirrorless camera.

The other factor that will be interesting to watch play out is shipments to the US. DJI’s newly announced products – including the Pocket 4 and Osmo 360 II – can’t get the necessary FCC approval to be officially sold in the US. The IDC data suggests that 65 percent of GoPro’s sales are already focused on the Americas.

The report predicts that the “handheld smart camera” category that includes everything from gimbal cameras and action cameras to thumb cameras and 360 cameras will grow to 41 million by 2030, a one million camera increase over IDC’s prediction from earlier this year.

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Browse the best gimbal cameras or the best action cameras.

Amazon Big Deal Days officially returns tomorrow, October 6, but you do not need to wait for the sale to begin to start saving. A number of early deals are already live on Amazon UK, and some of them are simply too good to miss, with discounts already appearing across cameras, lenses, action cameras, home security tech and essential photography accessories.

If previous Amazon UK shopping events are anything to go by, photographers, filmmakers and content creators could be in for some seriously tempting savings once the main event gets underway on October 6-7. From the best mirrorless cameras and lenses to action cameras, drones, memory cards, tripods, camera bags, lighting and photo-editing accessories, there should be plenty worth keeping an eye on across the two-day sale.

Some of the biggest savings are likely to appear on slightly older camera bodies, popular third-party lenses and everyday photography essentials, while brands such as Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, DJI, GoPro and Insta360 could all feature heavily. Amazon sales are also particularly good for picking up the less glamorous essentials photographers still need, including SD cards, SSDs, batteries, card readers and storage, where even relatively small discounts can quickly add up.

This deals hub is already being updated with the best early offers I can find and will continue to be refreshed throughout Amazon Big Deal Days on October 6 and 7 as new deals appear, prices change, and the strongest UK photography bargains emerge. I’ll be sorting through the noise to highlight the offers that are genuinely worth your attention, so bookmark this page and keep checking back for the latest camera, lens and photography deals from Amazon UK.

Quick links

Today's top Amazon deal - Up to 50% off!

Best Action camera deals - Top brands at great prices!

Best lens deals - Save BIG on a lot of lenses

Best camcorder deals - Great savings on awesome brands

Video camera gear deals - Up to 15% savings

Best film camera deals - Great nostalgia savings

Best lighting deals - Big savings across a huge range

Other sales events:

DJI Autumn Sale - up to 28% off

Wex brands sale - up to 30% off

30-day free trial

Best amazon prime camera deals

Best Amazon Prime action camera deals

Best Amazon Prime drone deals

Best Amazon Prime lens deals

Best amazon prime security camera deals

Best amazon prime photography deals

Amazon Big Deal Days officially kicks off tomorrow, October 6, but you do not need to wait for the main sale to begin. Early deals have already started appearing across Amazon, and there are some seriously tempting discounts live right now for photographers, filmmakers, and content creators.

Today's top Amazon deal - up to 50% off!
Best film photography deals - Prices from just $8
Sign up for Amazon's 30-day FREE trial!

With the full two-day event running October 6-7, we are expecting savings across everything from the best mirrorless cameras and lenses to the best action cameras, drones, memory cards, tripods, camera bags, lighting, and photo-editing accessories. If previous Amazon sales are anything to go by, there should be plenty worth watching as more offers go live.

Some of the biggest discounts are likely to appear on slightly older camera bodies, popular third-party lenses, and everyday photography essentials, while brands including Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, DJI, GoPro, and Insta360 could all feature heavily throughout the event.

Amazon sales are also a great opportunity to stock up on the less glamorous essentials photographers always need, including SD cards, SSDs, batteries, card readers, and storage, where even smaller discounts can quickly add up.

This deals hub is already being updated with the strongest early offers I can find, and I’ll continue refreshing it throughout Amazon Big Deal Days on October 6 and 7 as new deals appear and prices change. I’ll be cutting through the noise to highlight the offers that are genuinely worth your attention, so bookmark this page and keep checking back for the latest camera, lens, and photography deals.

Quick links

Today's top Amazon deal - up to 50% off!
Best action camera deals - HUGE savings across many brands
Best lens deals - Save BIG on a lot of lenses
Best film photography deals - Prices from just $8
Best video camera gear deals - up to 15% savings
Best lighting deals - big savings across a huge range
Best Camera & Photo Accessories - Awesome savings

30-day free trial

Best Amazon Prime camera deals

Best amazon prime action camera deals

Best amazon prime drone deals

Best Amazon Prime lens deals

Best Amazon Prime securtiy deals

Best Amazon Prime photography deals

The Fujifilm X-Half brings the brand’s popular film simulations into a digital compact camera built with the intentional limitations of film – but the compact camera just got a new film-like option, thanks to a firmware update.

Part of the X-Half’s more film-like charm – beyond the screen-free film mode and advance lever – comes from the camera’s built-in filters. Firmware 2.0 brings one more option to those retro looks: Soft Glow.

The soft glow option is built to imitate the look of a diffusion filter – or the softer highlights of old film lenses. Fujifilm says this mode softens highlights to enhance the glow.

The Fujifilm X-Half already had a similar mode called halation, but halation and glow are two similar yet distinct image qualities. Halation is a subtle glow that adds a bit of warm tones. On film, this effect was simply a result of the light hitting the film and scattering.

A soft glow traditionally differs from halation because it doesn’t add warm tones and is the result of using softer lenses. A glow effect typically spreads out light sources.

I’m a big fan of using diffusion filters to get a glow, so I love that the X Half now has an option like this built in, without adding filters. The Soft Glow is part of the X Half’s filter effects, which are a separate mode and not used at the same time as the camera’s film simulations.

Along with the addition of Soft Glow, the firmware adds 12 and 24-frame options to the camera’s film mode. The X Half’s film mode locks several settings and disables previews, essentially locking the screen and creating a “screen-free” compact camera. Now photographers can choose to shoot as little as 12 images per roll, allowing for swapping settings between rolls earlier than with a roll of 36.

The firmware update also includes a handful of performance enhancements, including improving the start-up time, enhancing autofocus timing, and reducing the delay between shots.

It’s great to see Fujifilm continue to expand on the X Half’s different built-in filters – and the soft glow looks like a welcome addition. But, as with most firmware, it’s often best to wait a few days (or even weeks) to avoid any potential early bugs.

The new firmware 2.0 for the X Half is available to download directly from Fujifilm.

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Take a look at the best retro cameras, or the top screen-free cameras.

Most screen-free cameras aren’t beach-ready without extra housing. But one binocular brand is branching out into compact cameras – and the first launch is a screen-free camera that’s actually splash-proof. The Nocs Portal AFN7 Adventure Camera is a screen-free compact camera that takes on an unusual shape – but an even more unusual support for “zoom” using binoculars.

Screen-free cameras tend to opt for a traditional optical viewfinder to be truly screen-free. The Portal uses an electronic viewfinder instead – but that’s very much by design. The front of the camera has a mount that allows the camera to be used with Nocs’ monoculars and binoculars.

Using a traditional cut-out optical viewfinder wouldn’t have supported a preview of the shot when using binoculars for added reach, so Nocs went with an electronic viewfinder instead. But, like other screen-free cameras, the Portal purposely leaves out the option to view photos on the camera in a design built for screen fatigue.

Supporting the use of a monocular or binocular on the front adds more reach for a category that typically doesn’t offer any form of zoom at all. But, that’s not the only unusual feature on the new camera. The Portal is IP56 weather-sealed to resist splashes, rain, and dirt in a design that’s built for living screen-free outdoors – though it’s not meant to be submerged.

Many screen-free cameras shoot only stills (or only video, like the Camp Snap CS-8), but the Portal shoots both 16MP stills and 4K 30p videos on its 1/3.06-inch sensor. Outside of the binocular support, the camera uses a 22.5mm equivalent lens and has built-in digital zoom.

Like most screen-free cameras, the Portal is going for a retro feel to the images, supporting six built-in presets. That list includes two Kodak-inspired looks: Kodachrome and Kodak Gold.

As a camera built for the outdoors, the Portal doesn’t use the typical rectangular box of a screen-free camera. The Portal is designed both for use while wearing gloves and for keeping a hiking pack light. The Portal AFN7 uses a cutout that gives the hand room to wrap around the grip while keeping a lightweight, 140g / 4.9 oz design.

The camera uses a rechargeable Li-ion battery rated to about 500 shots or 30 minutes of video. Photos and videos are stored on a MicroSD card, with a 4GB card included in the box.

Nocs Provisions, a company that builds binoculars and monoculars made for the outdoors, hints that the AFN7 may just be the first camera in a new series. “Portal AFN7 is the first camera in the new Portal series — a dedicated new product platform for Nocs. We're not detailing what's next yet, but Portal was designed as a series from the start,” the company wrote.

The new Portal AFN7, announced on October 01, is already shipping directly from the manufacturer, as well as from REI. The camera retails for $179 – which is about £135 / AU$257 / CA$254. International shipping is available.

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For more adventuring and less screen time, take a look at the best screen-free cameras or the best waterproof cameras.

LK Samyang, known as Rokinon in the US, has finally announced the release date of the long-awaited 28-135mm f/2.8 Sony FE full-frame standard zoom, which the company says will come to market in February 2027.

The Korean budget lens manufacturer made the announcement on its Instagram on September 30, with a second post finally giving us the technical specs we’ve also been dying for – following the zoom's earlier appearance at CP+ in February.

Honestly, I’m impressed, and I think we’ve got a real contender that could shake up the “do-it-all” focal-length segment of the lens market for the first time in a while.

Swipe to see the Samyang AF 28-135mm f/4 FE specs

The obvious eye-catcher is the versatile 28-135mm focal length combined with the fast f/2.8 aperture.

This is a seriously versatile setup — in fact, it’s the first-ever lens to combine this specific zoom range and maximum aperture — and, on paper, I’m inclined to believe Samyang when it says the forthcoming kit will work for “every moment.”

Although, the maximum wide angle of 28mm does cut you off at a slightly awkward point. My go-to lens is the Sony FE 24-105mm f/4 G Master, and I can tell you that those extra 4mm do make a difference.

These often save me having to change to my dedicated wide-angle and I can’t see the Samyang being quite as helpful at the wide-angle end, despite the claims.

The other big deal here is the voice coil motor (VCM), which is another first for Samyang, as none of its previous AF lenses have featured this kind of motor.

VCMs can handle large-aperture glass smoothly and pretty quietly, too. It’s good to see Samyang seemingly paying serious attention to AF performance in a lens that, in theory, could be used to shoot subjects like wildlife.

The weather-sealed zoom will weigh 854g and is constructed with 20 elements in 16 groups.

Going by the announcement, I have to say this lens looks promising, to say the least. Funnily enough, I recently scratched my Sony 24-105mm f/4 and am now getting mad lens flare.

If the build quality is there and Samyang prices the lens in line with how it normally does, maybe the forthcoming 28-135mm f/2.8 could be its replacement. Though, we’ll see if this is all too good to be true in a few months time.

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Think of the word "rewilding" and you'll probably imagine remote valleys and wide open spaces, far off in the countryside. But rewilding can be just as impactful in urban environments, and the winning image in this year's Rewilding Europe Award is a great example.

Captured by Jan Wieczorek in 2025, the night-time shot features three beavers lurking in the shallows, two of them nose-to-nose.

They're surrounded by gnawed stumps and stripped branches, the unmistakable signs of beaver engineering. And roads and railway lines cross their territory, and new housing going up nearby, support from local residents and the city authorities means the animals are thriving.

Wieczorek, who has been observing these beavers for around 15 years, explains why that matters.

"The story behind the photograph shows that nature doesn't always exist somewhere far away," he says. "It can thrive right next to our homes, beneath our bridges, and in the centres of our cities. By framing the housing development alongside the wetland created by the beavers, I wanted to show that it is possible for humans and wildlife to share space."

How it was shot

His kit list is short: a Sony A7R III, a 16-35mm f/4 lens, a tripod and an infrared sensor. The framing is wide, low and close, allowing the lens to pay proper attention to the animals in the foreground, without losing that city background.

The A7R III is gaining in years now, having launched in 2017, but its 42.4MP sensor delivers plenty of detail, and the setting of ISO 1600 is well within its comfort zone.

Monochrome is a smart choice, too. A night scene like this typically might mix orange streetlights, cool skylight and the hues of whatever lit the foreground. Opting for black and white instead nullifies such potential clashing colors, and turns the mist into a soft, glowing backdrop.

Why it won

Rewilding Europe Award, now in its fifth year, is a special category within the GDT's European Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. It's run in partnership with Rewilding Europe, a non-profit organization dedicated to making Europe a wilder place.

"The winning and commended images capture the essence of how humans and wildlife can live side by side," says judge Viktoria Pezzei. "Photography like this translates the complex relationships between humans and wildlife, ultimately helping us understand them better."

Wieczorek will be honored at the European Wildlife Photographer of the Year ceremony on October 23, 2026.

It turns out, like humans, animals too only want their best angles snapped, with several of the finalist images at this year’s Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards striking some seriously sexy poses.

The global photography competition has revealed its shortlist for the 2026 edition, which saw more than 10,000 entries, the highest number in its history, from 112 countries.

Among them is a praying mantis strutting the sexiest look you never knew an animal could do, captured by Peruvian photographer Diego Perez.

Perez told the competition organizers that he had first tried photographing the entire insect, but the images “felt too familiar,” subsequently lowering his position to get the promiscuous

Then there’s a caiman, photopraphed by Italian Paolo Torre, who appears to be rocking an Elvis-esque hairstyle while giving the camera the most seductive side-eye only the King of Rock ’n’ Roll knew how to.

According to Torre, the animal had emerged from the water in an area with a lot of floating vegetation, some of which had remained on its head.

Finally, US photographer Scott Suraino snapped an Alaskan brown bear showing off its fantastic physique during what appeared to be a morning calisthenics routine. Suraino said that it seemed like the “beach babe” was getting her summer body ready.

Perez, Torre, and Suraino will now compete, along with all of the other finalists, to be crowned the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Photographer of the Year and win a safari trip to Kenya’s Maasai Mara. Other prizes include a Nikon Z6 III, Z50II, and ZR, plus rucksacks from ThinkTANK.

The overall winner, category winner, and highly commended images will be announced on Tuesday, December 8, at an awards night in London. This will be followed by a one-week exhibition in December for all the 2026 finalists at the OXO Gallery in London.

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Tenba has launched a new line-up of camera shoulder bags: DNA v2. Sporting a design reminiscent of vintage shoulder bags from the film photography era, DNA v2 bags are intended to pair perfectly with cameras like Fujifilm X-series bodies, the Nikon Zf and Z fc, as well as Leica M cameras.

But although DNA v2 bags may look retro, they're very much constructed from 2026 materials. Each bag is made from a brushed polyester twill with a durable water-repellent finish on the face and a double PU coating on the reverse, while every exterior opening is protected by water-repellent zips. These are styled to look like metal, in-keeping with the retro look, but are actually polymer, so won't scratch your gear. Additional weather protection is provided by an included silver/black reversible rain cover, with the silver side intended to reflect sunlight on hot days.

The DNA v2 shoulder bag is available in four size options: the smallest DNA v2 Shoulder Bag 10 fits a mirrorless, rangefinder or compact DSLR camera with 3–4 lenses, plus a tablet up to 11 inches. Step up to the Shoulder Bag 14 and there's space for a mirrorless or DSLR camera with 3–5 lenses (up to an unattached 70-200mm f/2.8), plus a 14-inch laptop. The Shoulder Bag 16 has a similar capacity for camera gear, but can hold a 16-inch laptop, while the largest DNA v2 Shoulder Bag 16 Pro has been designed to store a pro-size mirrorless or DSLR camera with a grip, 4–6 lenses up to an attached 70-200mm f/2.8, plus a 16-inch laptop. All four variants come in either black or blue colorways.

Whichever size you choose, you get 3-Stage dual-zip top access that allows immediate, unobstructed access to your gear (the top flap folds back and attaches to the interior sidewall, so it is completely out of the way). The laptop/tablet pocket is accessed separately to the camera compartment, making it easy to remove a laptop when passing through airport security.

Additional pockets on the front provide space for batteries, cables, memory cards and other accessories, while an elastic side pocket secures a water bottle. An extra zipped side pocket offers quick storage for a lens or other larger items. There's even a hidden Bluetooth tracker pocket compatible with AirTag and Tile. Everything is suspended on shoulder strap pad made from memory foam, which Tenba says should give body-contouring all-day comfort.

Tenba DNA v2 bags are available now, and are priced very keenly. Expect to pay from an $169.95/£140 for the smallest DNA v2 Shoulder Bag 10, up to $219.95/£180 for the range-topping DNA v2 Shoulder Bag 16 Pro.

Researchers conducting camera-based surveys off the coast of one of Samoa’s smallest populated islands found something unexpected when they looked at the footage: An endangered leopard shark.

A group conducting surveys with National Geographic Pristine Seas was dropping baited underwater camera systems, also known as BRUVs, off the coast of Samoa’s Apolima Island. That's when they managed to capture footage of the rare leopard shark, or Stegostoma tigrinum, which is sometimes also called a zebra shark:

While the endangered species has been caught on camera before, this was the first time that the shark has been recorded in Samoan waters. Previous reports suggested that the species could occasionally be found there, but the researchers say the footage is the first verifiable evidence that the shark is also found near the Samoan islands.

But beyond adding evidence of the shark’s range, the footage helps illustrate the importance of deploying cameras in wildlife research. BRUVs are unmanned baited cameras that are typically left alone in the ocean for about an hour in an attempt to document wildlife that may be more skittish around human presence.

Impressively, the zebra shark was actually captured on the team’s first camera deployment in the region earlier this summer.

“A single camera deployment can reveal something entirely unexpected and add an important piece to our understanding of a species distribution,” said National Geographic Pristine Sea scientist Jett Walker.

The leopard shark is a slow-moving shark that’s typically found along sandy bottoms, as the shark prefers a diet of gastropods and bivalve mollusks, such as snails, clams, and mussels. But the footage also adds to growing evidence that the sharks can be found in coral reefs.

The successful capture on the group’s first baited camera drop in the region also gives the researchers a “promising start” to their work in the region.

National Geographic’s Pristine Seas mixes filmmaking and underwater photography with scientific research. The group’s work has already helped to support the establishment of 31 protected marine reserves.

The footage isn't just aiding in conservation – it adds to a growing pile of evidence of how camera traps can aid wildlife research and conservation.

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Optical illusions aren’t just for internet entertainment – new research suggests that the patterns in butterfly wings serve as an optical illusion to help the winged creatures avoid predators.

The study was made possible using slow-motion cameras capable of capturing videos of butterflies taking off at more than 1,000 frames per second. The researchers from England’s University of Essex and the University of Exeter recorded the takeoff of five different butterfly species against a green screen background at 1,057 fps per second.

Then, the researchers fed the footage through a bird-vision computer model and compared the movement suggested by the slow-motion footage to how the butterfly had actually moved.

“The first slow-motion video of a butterfly I put through our bird-vision computer model was glowing with downward motion even though the butterfly was moving up,” said researcher Dr. Jolyon Troscianko. “First I checked this wasn’t a coding error, that I’d swapped up and down somehow, but then it dawned on me that this would be a perfect way to confuse attacking predators.”

Troscianko explained that the patterns in the butterfly’s wings create an illusion that works a lot like the “barber pole illusion” – even though the classic red-and-white barber pole is only turning sideways, the stripes appear to be moving upward. On a butterfly’s wings, this illusion can cause a bird to miss the butterfly entirely or hit a less delicate part of the insect.

The team looked at five different species – two of which had different patterns between males and females, creating seven different patterns to study. The researchers then looked at patterns for about 400 different European butterflies and found similar patterns that could create an optical illusion once in motion.

The researchers also asked a computer model to “evolve” 50,000 wing patterns, and found computer-generated patterns that were very similar to actual butterfly species.

The research could help answer a longstanding question about butterflies. Many butterflies have muted colors and camouflage patterns on the underside of their wings, helping them to blend in when the butterfly lands. But many species have bright colors on the top side of their wings that seem the opposite of that camouflage.

The new research suggests those bright colors and patterns skip camouflage for an optical illusion designed to make predators miss. The researchers are hopeful the work could open up future work into how patterns across the wider animal kingdom, from zebras to birds, could be a trait built to confuse predators.

The research was published on September 30 in the journal Nature and has already been peer-reviewed.

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Camera brands have been warning of increasing costs all year – and now a major camera maker has raised camera prices in Japan due to “a surge in material costs.” On October 01, Fujifilm Japan issued a notice that the prices of some cameras, lenses, and instant cameras/printers have increased.

The price increases range from six to 23 percent and cover a handful of cameras, one lens, and a few Instax products, but not Fujifilm’s entire lineup. That list includes popular X-series models, including the viral X100VI compact camera as well as the X-T50 and X-E5 mirrorless cameras. The medium format GFX100 II, GFX100S II, and GFX100RF have also been affected.

Just one lens is affected so far – the XF 500mm f/5.6 R LM OIS WR – but the kit price with a bundled lens for the X-T50 and X-E5 also increased in Japan.

Hybrid Instax sees the steepest increase, with changes ranging from six to 23 percent. Affected products include the Instax Mini LiPlay, LiPlay+, Mini Evo, Mini Evo Cinema, and Wide Evo. The smartphone photo printers Mini Link 3 and SQ Link are also impacted.

Fujifilm has been warning investors of rising costs since 2025, but in 2026 those warnings shifted from general inflation to the rising cost of memory components due to an AI-driven memory shortage earlier this year. The rising cost of silver is also a factor, particularly for Fujifilm Instax film, which uses silver halide technology.

The increase in costs in Japan for Fujifilm raises two key questions for photographers. First, will other regions follow suit? And second, will other camera brands also increase prices?

The increased prices in Japan have already gone into effect. In the US, the affected products appear to remain unchanged, keeping the same list price as after Fujifilm’s second tariff-fueled price hike last year.

In the UK, a few Fujifilm products now sit at a higher price point – though it’s unclear if those changes came on October 1 or as part of the September increases in Europe. The Fujifilm body-only X-E5, for example, is now £1,399, which is £100 above the launch price. The popular X100VI compact camera, once £1,599, now sits at £1,749.

While it’s unclear if other brands will raise camera prices, Fujifilm isn’t alone in warning investors of rising manufacturing costs. Canon, Sony, Nikon, Leica and GoPro have also warned of rising manufacturing costs amid the memory crisis and AI boom.

Adjusting list prices also isn’t the only possible response to the increased costs. Canon has told investors that it pre-bought most of the memory stock that it needs for 2026, for example. Photographers could also potentially see the impact not in increased list prices, but in reduced frequency of camera sales and deals.

Newly launched cameras could also already be taking the increased manufacturing costs into account, as a number of 2026 launches sit at a higher price than their predecessors – but increased features and inflation could also be playing a role in those price changes.

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DRONES

Chris Gurton is a photographer from Suffolk who received an honourable mention in the Special Night Photography category of the International Photography Awards last year for his ‘Harvesting at Night’ image. He also came second in this year’s Lumearth photo awards, in the Agriculture and Rural category.

“Although photography has become a huge part of my life, I don’t currently do it full-time,” Chris told our colleagues on Digital Camera World magazine.

“Every opportunity to photograph farming has been built around my day job, which makes the support I’ve received from farmers and the recognition my work has gained even more rewarding. My ambition is to make agricultural photography my full-time career one day, continuing to tell the stories of the people and landscapes behind our food production.”

What got you into shooting farming or agricultural photography as a subject?
I’d always been fascinated by aerial images, particularly the work of French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand. His book The Earth From the Air had a huge influence on me, showing how a change in perspective could transform familiar landscapes into something extraordinary. That style of photography felt out of reach because it relied on hiring helicopters or light aircraft. Consumer camera drones completely changed that, giving photographers like me the

Have you developed good relationships with farmers to capture them at work? Building good relationships with farmers has been one of the most rewarding parts of my photography journey. Trust is incredibly important because I’m often photographing people while they’re concentrating on complex tasks with large machinery. They need to know that I’ll work safely, stay out of the way and never interfere with what they’re doing. I think those relationships also help me to create stronger images. Spending time on farms has also given me a much deeper appreciation of the skill, dedication and long hours that are involved in producing our food, and I hope that understanding comes through in the images I make.

What camera equipment do you use?
My main camera is a Nikon D7500 DSLR with a selection of lenses, including a wide-angle and 35mm prime to a 500mm telephoto lens, depending on what I’m photographing. For my aerial work, I use a DJI Air 2S camera drone, which has been an incredible tool for capturing the patterns, textures, and scale of the agricultural landscape. Neither is the latest or most expensive piece of equipment on the market, but I’ve never believed that creating a great photograph is simply about owning the newest camera. It’s far more important to understand light, composition, timing, and the story you’re trying to tell.

Living in rural Suffolk, I’m surrounded by farmland, so it felt natural to start exploring the agricultural landscape from above. I became fascinated by the skill, precision and sheer hard work involved in producing our food, and that’s what I try to capture in my photography today.

What made you interested in covering this subject?
What really drew me to agricultural photography was the opportunity to tell stories that many people never get to see. Most people only see the finished product on the supermarket shelves; I wanted to capture what takes place right at the start of the food production process.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate to receive fantastic support from the farming community. The farms that I’ve worked with have trusted me to document their work in an authentic way, and those relationships have grown over time. As well as creating images for my own portfolio, I’ve also produced photographs for farmers to use across their social media, websites and promotional material.

Chris Gurton's top five tips

1: Ensure safety always comes first
Harvest is one of the busiest periods of the farming year, with multiple machines working together. Never assume you can simply walk into a field with a camera – always ask the farmer or landowner for permission first. If you want to get closer, you have to respect that they’re running a business. Always stay aware of your surroundings, keep well clear of working machinery and never distract operators.

2: Learn how harvest works
Understanding what’s happening in the field makes a huge difference. If you know when a combine is likely to unload, where tractors will position themselves, or how the crop will be worked, then you can anticipate these moments.

3: Make the most of the light
Some of my favorite harvest photographs have been taken during golden hour or even after sunset. Dust hanging in the air and low-angle light can completely transform a scene, so don’t pack away your camera when the sun starts to disappear.

4: Tell a story, don’t just show a machine
A combine harvester is an impressive machine, but the strongest photographs include the wider story. Look for leading lines in the crop, dramatic skies, birds following the machinery or people working together. These details add context and help viewers connect with the image.

5: Be patient and enjoy the process
Harvest rarely goes exactly to plan. Weather changes, machinery breaks down and the light doesn’t always cooperate. The best photographs often come after hours of waiting, so be patient and keep looking for new angles. If the conditions aren’t right, don’t be afraid to call it quits and return on another day.

Website: www.chrisgurtonphotography.com
Instagram: @chrisgurtonphotography

Read more…

This interview appears in the October 2026 issue of Digital Camera World, the world's favorite photography magazine. Every issue is packed with the latest technique tutorials, photo tips, inspiring images, news, reviews, and expert buying advice.

The magazine also comes with a downloadable selection of bonus gifts including video lessons, tips cards, and much more. It aims to help photographers of all skill levels to improve their images.

A lot of the best camera phones deliver 50MP camera technology, but with many of them offering flagship specs they also attract flagship prices. With the release of the Poco X8 and Poco C95 Pro, Xiaomi's value phone brand, Poco is aiming to buck the trend.

The Poco X8 retails at a price of £329 but, in an attempt to attract customers, the handset can be snapped up for just £269. If that seems like aggressive sales tactics, then it's nothing compared to the Poco C95 Pro – which is discounted down from £249 to just £159.

Both handsets feature 50MP main cameras, but it's the Poco X8 that offers the best overall camera specs. In fact, Poco has upgraded the imaging system with the aim of elevating "portrait quality across all scenarios to help users capture the moments with true authenticity."

Its 50MP main camera, equipped with optical image stabilization and electronic image stablization, is backed up by a 16MP front camera, both of which promise "greater detail in diverse lighting conditions."

Aside from the hardware, one of the most innovative features available on the X8 is Dual Video, which enables users to capture both front and rear views at the same time. This feature is aimed directly at content creators who want to create more dynamic and engaging content without requiring further investment in additional cameras.

Another feature available on the X8 is the AI editing tools, including AI Glare Removal, AI Erase Pro, AI Image Expansion, AI Image Enhancement, and AI Beautify.

The C95 Pro also features a 50MP main camera, but at the front Poco has opted for a lower-resolution 8MP camera for selfies and video calls. There's also no Dual Video video recording like there is on the X8.

Beyond the cameras

Both phones offer industry-leading battery specs, with the X8 featuring a huge 8,340mAh battery and the C95 Pro still having an impressive 7,500mAh battery. The result of these batteries is more than two days of battery life on a single charge.

Where the C95 Pro shines in comparison, the X8 is in its immersive display, which, at 6.9 inches, is slightly larger than the 6.83 found on the more expensive X8. Both displays offer sufficient nits of brightness to be used in bright sunlight.

Availability

The Poco X8 and Poco C95 Pro are now available in the UK. The X8 can be purchased at Mi in three different colors: White, Black, and Orange with one variant: 8GB + 256GB.

The C95 Pro is available in three colors exclusively on Amazon: Blue, Green and Black and comes in two variants: 6GB + 128GB and 8GB.

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Film cameras came with the anticipation of finally opening a pack of photos, unseen since the moment unfolded. Now, a new all-digital camera wants to recapture some of that magic by skipping the screen and instead mailing out physical prints every month. Await is a film-inspired compact camera that aims to bring the anticipation of shooting film to the digital world.

At its core, Await is a compact camera with an 8MP 1/3.2-inch sensor, a 26mm equivalent lens, and a built-in filter inspired by film. But the most unusual part of the Await camera is what happens after the photo is taken.

Using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi or a USB-C cord, photos from the Await are transferred to a mobile app, one “roll” of 24 shots at a time. Like with film, those rolls cannot be viewed until a full roll is finished and developed in the app (though there’s a desktop computer shortcut).

But Await wants to make sure those photos exist as more than files – and every month, sends out a full pack of 6x4 inch prints from the camera. Await allows photographers to choose to either automatically print every roll shot on the camera, or to manually select what photos to print.

The physical prints aren’t the only way Await wants to bring a film-like experience to digital compact cameras. The number of shots is limited to a roll of 24 images. The camera’s internal memory can hold up to three rolls at a time.

The Await, a new sister brand from the Swiss company Rolling Stone, aims to join the growing list of screen-free compact cameras built for digital fatigue. Instead, the Await camera trades out the screen for an OLED that shows essentials like the battery life and the number of shots remaining in the “roll.”

But screen-tree isn’t the only trend that the Await hits. The semi-transparent body is inspired by retro 1990s tech, while a magnetic, swappable faceplate allows for changing up the look of the camera.

The upcoming camera also hits on the compact camera trend – the brand says the camera is only around 44 percent larger than a credit card, measuring 98mm x 68mm x 55mm / 3.86 x 2.68 x .59 inches.

While the physical prints are what make the Await stand out from other screen-free compact cameras, the prints – and their costs – are optional. Users can choose to automatically print each roll, which will cost around $8.99 a roll in the US, manually choose which photos to print at $9.99, or just enjoy the digital photos without recurring costs. (International print pricing has not yet been announced.

Await was first unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show at the start of 2026. Now, the camera is launching on Kickstarter, where the campaign has already more than doubled its original goal.

Pledges with a camera start at €89 – about $101 / £76 / AU$145 / CA$143. The Await camera’s expected MSRP is €129, or about $146 / £110 / AU$210 / CA$208. If production proceeds as expected, the company expects to begin shipping the camera in December 2026.

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I have very fond memories of the Canon EOS 750D, known in the US as the Canon Rebel EOS T6i and in Japan as the Canon EOS Kiss X8i.

You'd be forgiven for not instantly recognizing the Canon EOS 750D (or its namesakes) among the company's long and increasingly convoluted alphabet soup of model names, but trust me – this stood out as one of the best beginner cameras on the market for a number of reasons, many of which still make it worth picking up today.

For starters, with its 24.2MP APS-C sensor, the Canon EOS 750D boasted the highest resolution of any entry-level model in the company's lineup. While 24MP might be the baseline for APS-C resolution today, back when this camera launched in 2015, 18MP was the norm for a starter system.

At that time I was still doing a lot of workshops and photographic education, and one of the most common questions I'd get would be, "What camera should I start with?"

Obviously pixels aren't everything – and indeed, the Canon EOS 750D offers more than just pixels. But given the choice between a starter camera with 18MP and another with 24MP, it was pretty easy to recommend the 750D as the place to begin a photographic journey.

Resolution aside, the camera also boasted plenty of features that made it even more appealing. Canon's Hybrid CMOS AF III imbued it with phase detect autofocus, something that even some expensive cameras at the time were shy to offer. It may be hard to remember in 2026, but back in the day the leap in reliability from contrast-detect AF was a pretty big deal.

A key one for me was that the Canon EOS 750D offered WiFi connectivity, enabling it to work with Canon Camera Connect. People are quick to dump on camera company's smartphone apps, and indeed some of them are pretty dire, but I've always found Canon's to be one of the best (behind Olympus / OM System's app).

But perhaps the biggest deal with the 750D was the fact that it boasted a fully articulating rear screen, with touch controls. There's a misnomer that these kinds of "flippy screens" are only good for video, but I use them just as much for photography.

I'm certainly not shy of going prone to get a shot, but trust me – it's way easier to get a low-angle (or even a high-angle) portrait-orientation shot using an articulating screen rather than going belly-down on the ground and getting mucky!

But the Canon EOS 750D certainly catered to video as well, offering FullHD 25p capture, and it even had a microphone jack. Again, there are plenty of expensive midrange and high-end cameras that don't give you a mic jack even today – so the fact that you had all this tech on a beginner camera in 2025 really was quite special.

Today, the landscape is very different. But for an entry-level Canon camera with a flippy screen, you're looking at the Canon EOS R50 – which will cost you around $629 / £729. While it's an objectively better camera in every respect, compare that to the cost of a Canon EOS 750D / Rebel T6i – which is available from $341 at KEH or £239 at MPB.

The Canon EOS 750D was ahead of its time – so much so that, even a decade later, it's still a very respectable place to start your journey.

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With mirrorless rigs now the go-to technology, many wildlife photographers these days wouldn’t sniff at a DSLR camera, especially bird photographers, who often want the fastest and sharpest kit available.

But US-based photographer Erich Podbielski has just proven that DSLR setups still have the firepower to compete with any new, shiny mirrorless, using one to recently gain an honorable mention at the 2026 Audubon Photography Awards.

With a Canon EOS 90D, a seven-year-old 32MP APS-C DSLR, extremely modest by today’s standards, and a Tamron SP 150-600mm f/5-6.3 Di VC USD lens, Podbielski snapped the frame of a flock of brown pelicans at Oregon’s Cannon Beach.

Erich Podbielski's gear and settings

• Canon EOS 90D
• Tamron SP 150-600mm F/5-6.3 Di VC USD
• 1/2500sec | f/5 | ISO 320
• Species: Brown Pelican 
• Location: Cannon Beach, Oregon, United States 

Talking to the competition organizers, Podbielski explained that he was visiting the beach, famed for its iconic pyramid-esque Haystack Rock, a year after honeymooning there with his wife, when “squadron after squadron” of brown pelicans flew low across the water.

“Mesmerized,” Brown continued roughly a mile farther along the shore, discovering the birds frolicking against the picturesque backdrop of Haystack Rock. “I positioned myself so I could capture one flock and got eye-level with the pelicans,” he explained.

“I was physically shaking after the experience: an iconic coastal species at an iconic coastal landmark, reminding us that people and birds can share the shore,” he added.

As an honorable mention in the “Birds Without Borders” category, the judges’ commented that Podbielski’s image “beautifully” showcased the movements of migratory species over long distances and connected habitats.

The judges added that the "soft fog, muted colors, and iconic landscape" created an atmospheric scene, while the lone flying bird and the bustling flock below added dynamism.

The Audubon Photography Awards celebrate outstanding bird photography and videography while highlighting the diversity, beauty, and conservation challenges facing birds.

Organized by the National Audubon Society, the event features multiple categories, with separate competitions for photographers in the US and Canada and in Chile and Colombia.

Jacqueline Burke was the Grand Winner in this year’s edition of the competition with her image of a roseate spoonbill at an alligator farm zoological park in Florida, US.

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Xtra has used its official social feed to share a release with an apology for the delay in the promised Muse 2 and Muse 2 Pro, cameras which were trailed on August 13 but have yet to appear on sale.

The US-based camera and drone company seems to be trying to fill the gap in the market that is being left as the American government clamps down on free trade in general and Chinese company DJI specifically, which has meant the recent DJI Osmo Pocket 4 and Pocket 4P have been released everywhere except America.

The Muse 2 Pro pocket gimbal camera seems to offer very similar specifications to the Pocket 4P (as, some have observed, the original Muse did the Pocket 3). Indeed Xtra has taken the opportunity not just to make its apology, but to point out that the original Muse is still available and an appealing prospect at its current price.

If you're planning on waiting, it's worth remembering that while Xtra's last re-iteration of the launch was in August, it actually showed the Muse 2 Pro in July at a launch event, which is a long time to not release a product.

Even before that, DJI is being clamped down on by the US government, so any connection between the companies (and the technological similarities are undeniable). At first what was just a ban on drones now seems to cover all new DJI products in 2026, while the FCC – which imposed that ban – expanded its investigation to include Xtra. This was based on a claim that the XTRA devices were exact hardware copies.

Xtra has also issued refunds to pre-orders made after that announcement, around the same time the FCC proposed a $25,000 penalty to Xtra, partly because it didn't respond to the Commission's investigations.

Many saw the Muse series as the way round the DJI ban, but clearly that was a temporary phenomenon at best.

That said, those looking for the best action cameras and the best pocket gimbal cameras may now be more interested by the Insta360 Luna Ultra as a credible alternative to the chimaera of a Muse 2 Pro – it is already on sale (and I was thoroughly impressed in my review).

Most of us have a ton of photos that we never look at. They may be stored digitally, tucked away on an ageing hard drive. Or they may simply exist as negatives, gathering dust in a shoebox. Either way, you haven't looked at them for years, and you don't really want to. Because, to be honest, you remember them not being very good.

We all have that very human response to stuff we did a while ago. Personally, as a writer, I shudder to think of the nonsense I was churning out 10, 20, 30 years ago. But every now and again, something I penned back then gets resurfaced online. And blow me down, it often turns out to have been pretty good.

That seems pretty much what happened to Dave Jordano. In early 1972, aged 24, he was a photography student at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. He spent around a year roaming the city and its environs with a 35mm film camera, but printed very little of what he shot. He kept the negatives, sure, but ultimately put them to the back of his mind for several decades.

When he uncovered them in 2013, though, he was surprised to find a substantial, impressive body of work. A selection of these shots has since won All About Photo's Solo Exhibition competition. Titled The Year I Arrived, it's exhibiting online on the All About Photo website throughout October.

A city a'changing

Looking back at these pictures now is a heady experience. Back in 1972, Detroit was still Motor City. Five years on from the 1967 riots, big societal changes were afoot. Yet Jordano's shots don't focus on any of that, at least not directly. Instead, his lens gets close to people going about their ordinary day.

At a lunch counter, two members of a motorcycle club sit with their backs to the camera, their customised vests dominating the view, while a waitress in the foreground shoots the camera a look that tells you exactly what she's thinking.

In Greektown, a group of young women sit outside an electrical store, with a hand-painted sign advertising soft drinks for 25 cents, all lost in thought. At an anti-war rally, a young Jane Fonda speaks into a mike while fellow activist Tom Hayden chats in the crowd and fairground ride seats dangle overhead.

Then there are the suburbs. In Sterling Heights in 1973, a small child clutching a purse stands on a sidewalk flanked by freshly laid lawns and spindly new trees. It's an image of a child, but it also points to where a lot of inner Detroit residents were heading at the time.

The lead image is the one I love most. Coffee Break, shot in the Michigan town of Bad Axe in 1972, shows two young women in a diner booth. One has a look of total boredom, fist pressed to her mouth. The other has a 35mm camera clamped to her face. And it tells you a lot about what makes these pictures work.

Jordano wasn't sneaking shots from a distance. His subjects knew he was there. Many of them look right down the lens. And that level of directness gives these images an atmosphere that much street photography lacks.

What we can learn

So what happened next? Well, you might say life got in the way. Jordano graduated in 1974, set up a commercial studio in Chicago in 1977 and spent years shooting advertising for clients including Starbucks, Kellogg's and Nintendo.

Later he built a second career as a fine art photographer, publishing books including Detroit: Unbroken Down and winning the $50,000 AIMIA-AGO Photography Prize in Canada.

By the time he looked at the negatives again, aged 65, he'd had a wide range of life experiences. Consequently, he judged them from an entirely different perspective than he'd had at 24.

The lesson is simple, yet profound. Your early work may not be as bad as you remember. In fact, it might be incredible. So dig out that box, that hard drive. If it's awful, at least you'll realise how far you've come. And if it turns out to be better than you expected, well, the sky's the limit.

Brightin Star's latest MF 50mm F2.0 Tri-Sight lens seems fairly normal with its fixed 50mm focal length, but it stands out from the crowd by boasting user-selectable 'rendering modes' which alter the character of out-of-focus highlight points. Choose from Smooth bokeh (soft highlights), Prime (sharper, more defined highlights), or Foams (dreamy, bubble-like light flares)

The system works using a dedicated control ring positioned between the focus and aperture rings. This moves a floating group of lens elements back or forth within the barrel to vary the focus distance, altering the convergence characteristics of light rays passing through the lens. This then results in the change in bokeh style, depending upon where the light converges relative to the focal plane.

This feature alone would make the MF 50mm F2.0 Tri-Sight pretty special, but Brightin Star also includes four circular plate inserts with novelty aperture cut-outs. These turn what would otherwise be round out of focus highlights into a choice of butterfly, star, triangle, or four-leaf clover shapes. The effect is certainly eye catching, though not entirely unique, as Lomography implemented a similar feature in its Petzval and Daguerreotype Achromat lenses. Brightin Star's method of fitting the inserts is more unusual though, as rather than slotting them down into the barrel, you instead unscrew a locking ring at the lens mount, fit the plate, then re-attach the ring. There is also a slot in the barrel, but this is designed to take conventional drop-in 37.5mm filters.

The barrel itself is made entirely of metal and features a neat retractable hood. Weight ranges between 429g and 454g, and length between 70mm and 74mm, depending on mount option. The aperture diaphragm is comprised of a generous 11 blades and is de-clicked for smooth aperture transitions when shooting video. Videographers may also appreciate the included detachable focus lever that helps with fine focus adjustments - useful, as the MF 50mm F2.0 Tri-Sight does not have autofocus.

Inside is a 7-element optical stack arranged in 6 groups. Up front is a custom-made protective lens made from precision-ground, ultra-thin glass measuring just 0.7mm thick. This is necessary as the floating group of elements which adjust the bokeh appearance actually extend forward of the main barrel when in Foams mode, making the front element more vulnerable to damage. Consequently, Brightin Star recommends the lens is stored with the bokeh control set to Prime mode, where the barrel is retracted.

The Brightin Star MF 50mm F2.0 Tri-Sight lens is available now for full-frame and APS-C Sony E, Canon RF, Nikon Z, and L-mount cameras, priced at $349.99/£263.99

Laowa has just announced "the world's first full-frame AF 35mm lens with true 1:1 magnification", promising the unique life-size rendering of a macro lens with the environmental context of a wide-angle lens.

Unlike traditional macro optics, built around longer focal lengths that carve a subject out of the scene, the new Laowa Acris 35mm f/2.8 1x Macro Apo brings a 1:1 reproduction ratio to a much wider perspective – and combines it with a fast f/2.8 aperture and advanced autofocus.

Well, the autofocus part comes with a bit of an asterisk: the lens will be available with AF on Sony E, Nikon Z and Canon EF mounts, while on Canon RF and L-Mount it is manual focus only.

The AF versions offer what Laowa is calling a Dual-Mode Hybrid Focusing system designed to work across all distances.

The Standard Autofocus mode (from infinity to 0.5m) "delivers fast, responsive, and accurate subject acquisition for everyday shooting, street photography, and environmental portraits."

Then there is Macro Focus Assistance (from 0.5m to 1:1), which "takes over in the close-up range to provide tactile micro-step manual precision. This setup integrates seamlessly into focus-bracketing workflows, making handheld or tripod-based focus stacking simple, efficient, and exceptionally accurate for high-depth-of-field macro shots."

As the name suggests, the Laowa Acris 35mm f/2.8 1x Macro Apo boasts Laowa's apochromatic optical design, which the manufacturer says "virtually eliminates both longitudinal and lateral chromatic aberrations (CA) in both in-focus and out-of-focus areas."

The optical design features a total of 13 elements in 10 groups, with 9 aperture blades in the AF version and 13 in the manual. The minimum focus distance is 180mm, with a minimum working distance of 48.6mm.

Weight and dimensions vary across the various mounts. The Sony version is a good representation of the mirrorless versions at 79mm x 114mm and 560g, with a 72mm filter thread, while the Canon DSLR version measures 79mm x 87.4mm and weighs 530g, with a 67mm filter thread.

All versions of the lens are weather-sealed, which makes this a very capable option for shooting outdoor subjects or working in damp and dusty environments.

The Laowa Acris 35mm f/2.8 1x Macro Apo is on sale now, priced $449 (£339 / AU$645).

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Take a look at the best macro lenses and the best cameras for macro photography.

Photographer Carl Bovis was shocked to be told by former New York attorney Regina Alberty that she was blocking him on social media for the heinous crime of posting an unflattering photo of a bird.

She implied he had deliberately made the image look bad because he disliked the woodpigeon, saying: "Usually photographers try to take pictures that favor the subject. Do you even like the subject of your pics?" before telling him not to answer, as she would be blocking him.

I got in touch with Carl, who is based in Somerset in the UK – not so far from where Digital Camera World started life – and asked him how it felt to be on the receiving end of this.

He said "I'm usually quite sensitive to criticism but I found that hilarious!" which, if I'm honest, I was expecting – as he'd shared the image on socials "knowing my followers would be similarly amused" he said, "but I didn't quite expect the reaction it got."

As he also notes, "I definitely gained more than I lost. Regina didn't even follow me, but was so offended by my harmless woodpigeon in the rain that she had to block me, and made sure I knew why!"

Others are asking for more 'offensive pigeons' – could this be a new genre in photography? – and Carl has even sold prints on the back of this exchange (see Carl Bovis print sales).

There have also been a lot of funny replies defending Carl on social platforms. He picked out: "I didn't even get *that* testy after I saw my own passport photo." while I enjoyed: "Yeah, the pigeon can't use that on Tinder! What a worthless photoshoot."

Oddly, the pigeon incident might only be "one of" the strangest discussions he has had about his photography.

"One woman once insisted that all my birds in flight photos were dead, and 'posed' in mid-air by string.... that was strange, but I don't think she blocked me!"

I asked Carl about his history in photography (beyond unusual exchanges). He told me "I've always loved birds, and I started taking photos of them back in 2006 when I bought my first DSLR camera, a Nikon D50, so I could have a record of what I'd seen."

He started sharing them on the now-defunct Fotothing, and was surprised by the positive response: "I got very popular there, but the site started to go downhill when other bigger rivals started appearing, such as Flickr and Facebook."

He still uses social: "I started posting on both, then eventually joined Twitter in 2015. That's now where I share most of my work because that's where most of my followers are."

His camera is now a Nikon Z9, and "I like to walk about hand-holding it with Nikon Z 180-600mm lens to get my photos."

He let me into one more secret about the 'singing woodpigeon' as the title suggests: "When I'm at home I take photos of the birds in my garden from my bathroom window as it offers the best view. That's where I took the 'singing woodpigeon in the rain' photo. The pigeon was actually having a bit of a preen in the rain, This is a good time to get unusual angles and poses as the birds shake their feathers and stretch to reach different areas of their plumage. This Woodpigeon wasn't actually singing (or cooing), it had just shaken itself, and I used a very fast shutter speed to freeze this split second in time."

Check our guides to the best camera for wildlife photography and best lenses for bird photography.

I've tried three different pairs of smart glasses in the same day and one was noteable simply because it didn't say "Ray-Ban" or "Meta" on it. That was the new Vive Eagle, with built-in camera and ring-fenced access to multiple AI chatbots.

The concept of the Vive Eagle glasses isn't a million miles from the established Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses with camera – the third generation of which was launched just days ago – but there are some key differences as well as similarities.

Like the Ray-Ban Meta, the 'smart glasses' are designed to pair with your phone and offer AI assistance via a chat bot you talk to (there is no 'screen' or display), and they have a built-in camera which lets you take 3MP video or capture photos – and lets the AI "see" its environment.

The 12MP camera can power AI features like visual translation, too (live translation is an option, but you'll need your phone out to share the conversation).

There are speakers above each ear in the arms of the glasses; these have 'virtual bass' to reduce noise leakage.

Where things differ significantly from Meta's product is that the AI does not belong to HTC/Vive, and so – I was told – the company has been keen put privacy first. Meta, on the other hand, uses its own AI, and interactions with it are used by Meta as part of the development of its LLM.

To be clear, this isn't the same as Meta keeping your photos and videos, which are protected by the company's policy.

Because Vive isn't working on a LLM, there is what can be seen as a significant advantage – it can use both Gemini and ChatGPT for its functionality. That offers choice.

"Wait! What about the fact that those services use personal data as part of their development?" you might ask. Well, for now at least, the Vive Eagle doesn't allow you to connect to your personal chatbot account – so it can only get the plain answer. Fine for queries like "What is the weather going to be like?" or "Read this to me in English" but there will be some who may actually prefer

This is a feature that'll be looked at, I was told. In the meantime, you have your phone's assistant accessed effectively as if through headphones – be that Google Assistant or Siri.

The Vive glasses boast a button on either side. There is a status LED that faces the user (just in the bottom right of your field of view) and another facing out (with tamper sensors).

In terms of style, they might not be called 'Ray-Ban' but there are a number of colorways, including the black pair with sunglass-style lenses I am testing, as well as red and brown alternatives and clear glass. There are more rounded frames, called Pantos, and more square ones (as pictured). Lenses are Zeiss, a name that'll please readers here!

The lightest pair is 48.5g and they do feel light to wear, but a nice touch is that a small additional battery can be magnetically attached without adding a lot of weight if you need a boost. This may detract from the style, of course, depending on your hair!

Check our guide to the best camera glasses.