When photography was first invented, critics argued that photographs lacked the soul of traditional artwork like paintings – but around two decades after the first daguerreotype, a jewelry-maker in Boston would bring “soul” to photography in an entirely different way: spirit photography.

William H. Mumler (1832-1884) wasn’t originally a photographer but rather a jeweler who worked in engraving silver. Mumler was experimenting with a self-portrait in another photographer’s studio, Helen F. Stuart, when a dim, spirit-like figure appeared in the final print. Mumler reportedly said that figure looked like his cousin, who had died 12 years earlier.

Mumler continued to experiment with photography, and soon word of the “spirits” appearing in Mumler’s photographs spread. At the time, America was in the midst of a Civil War, and many families were mourning the loss of a loved one.

At the time, post-mortem photography was common. A camera wasn’t yet something that many families owned, and with high infant and child mortality rates, post-mortem photography at the time was often the only photograph of the deceased that the family owned.

It’s amid that historical backdrop that Mumler’s spirit photography flourished. At one time, he charged $10 for a dozen photos – which would be more than $200 (£150 / AU$284 / CA$280) in today’s currency. A visit from a “spirit” was never guaranteed and, in some cases, required returning to the studio for additional photographs.

Mumler’s photographs weren’t without doubters, and when business began to slow in Boston, he moved to New York City. But around a year after that move, Mumler took a photograph that would alter the course of his photography career – some accounts say this person was an undercover reporter; others say Mumler photographed an undercover New York Marshall.

Mumler was subsequently arrested on charges of fraud. The trial drew a lot of attention, including P.T. Barnum, who served as a witness in the trial. Mumler was eventually acquitted due to a lack of evidence.

Mumler continued to take spirit photographs even after being publicly disproven, but his work became far less popular after the trial, and he stopped taking spirit photographs in 1879.

Mumler, who many describe as the first spirit photographer, likely used a few different techniques. A double exposure exposes the light-sensitive surface twice – which, in Mumler’s case, was a glass print negative. Exposing the same photo twice creates a semi-transparent image that overlaps the other. The long exposures required for photography at the time also likely contributed, with motion blur adding to the eerie look of the photographs.

While Mumler worked well before the invention of computer-based photo manipulation, darkroom techniques were likely also part of Mumler’s photographs. Reusing a glass plate that was only partially cleaned from the first image, hand-scraping away parts of a glass negative, and exposing two glass negatives together for a print are also techniques that likely factored into the eerie quality of Mumler’s work.

Today, dozens of his photos still exist, often housed in museums. His most famous portrait is arguably the photograph he took of Mary Todd Lincoln with the “ghost” of Abraham Lincoln.

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Forget the spooky tales you’ve been told about British castles, because there’s nothing scary about these stunning photographic subjects. From the south of England to northern Scotland, the UK is home to some jaw-droppingly beautiful historic fortresses, and a new survey has just revealed the most-photographed.

Carried out by photo curation platform Popsa, the survey has shed light on the top 10 most-photographed castles in the UK.

To determine the list, Popsa analyzed millions of photos uploaded by users to the platform over 2024 and 2025. Each castle that appeared was given an index score of 0–100, with the top scorer receiving 100 and the rest scaled relative to it.

At number one, unsurprisingly, was the Tower of London (100). Far from the most picturesque castle on the list, but arguably the most significant, the former royal palace was founded by William the Conqueror in 1066. It went on to become an infamous state prison and now houses the dazzling Crown Jewels.

A flurry of famous and definitely picturesque castles came in second, third, and fourth. Edinburgh Castle in Scotland scored 55, while Windsor Castle (England) – an alternative royal residence to Buckingham Palace – scored 38.

Warwick Castle (England), considered by historians to be a masterpiece of medieval military engineering and defensive design, scored 24.

Three lesser-known, yet still beautiful, castles took positions five, six, and seven. Stirling Castle (Scotland), which, according to historians, was the most besieged castle during the Scottish Wars of Independence from the English, scored 18. Cardiff Castle, in the heart of the Welsh capital, scored 16, while Tintagel Castle (England) scored 13.

Saving the best for toward the end, arguably the most photogenic castles on the list scored a mere 11 and 10, respectively. St Michael’s Mount (England) came in eighth – the castle famous for its stone causeway, which is only accessible at low tide. And Eilean Donan Castle (Scotland) came in ninth, the picturesque site set against the stunning backdrop of the Scottish Highlands.

Last, but certainly not least, was Urquhart Castle, the tenth-placed castle also scoring 10. The castle is perched in a prominent spot overlooking the famous Loch Ness, where Nessie, the legendary loch-dwelling monster, is said to live.

On second thought, a run-in with Nessie would probably be spooky. Aside from that, I’ve been to a few of these castles and can tell you firsthand just how stunning these locations are for snapping a few frames.

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Wildlife photography is my self-care – and looking at wildlife photos comes in at a close second. This week, I’ve been inspired by wildlife photographers around the world, from perfectly timed fishing birds to a newly rescued elephant.

These are some of the top wildlife photos that I’ve spotted this week.

A great egret mid-catch

Getting great wildlife movement requires patience and sometimes a bit of luck. This photo by Ronen Tivony is a perfectly timed shot of a great egret tossing a fish in its mouth – even the water droplets are frozen.

The shot was captured with the Sony A9 II, a high-end flagship mirrorless, and a 400mm lens. A 1/1600 second shutter speed freezes the action.

A bird-filled tree with a rainbow

This shot from Delray Beach, Florida, by Bruce Bennett mixes a variety of dark-colored birds with a spectacular rainbow background. Among the branches are three Anhinga birds and a Boat-tailed Grackle.

Bennett took the shot with the Canon EOS R5 Mark II and the RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1 L IS USM lens.

A camouflaged owl tucked in a tree trunk

This long-eared owl perfectly blends with its background as it sits tucked into the trunk of a fallen tree. The photograph comes from Bursa, Turkiye, by Alper Tuydes. I love how the texture of the tree blends so seamlessly with the owl’s feathers.

A songbird amid colorful leaves and mushrooms

The colorful background and mushrooms in this photo by Paul Sawyer create a dramatic frame for the great tit (Parus Major) sitting near the water line. The photograph was taken this October in Suffolk, England.

A rescued elephant at a new sanctuary

The elephant in this photo has a name – Julie, a 45-year-old elephant, is the last wild animal to be part of any circus in Portugal. Now, she lives in the Pangea sanctuary in Vila Viçosa, Portugal. The sanctuary is the first large-scale elephant sanctuary in Europe and covers 400 hectares.

Photographer Patricia De Melo Moreria captured the photo.

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AAP Magazine announced the winners of its #61: Street photography competition. The winning shots were captured in 18 countries across five continents.

Sandrine Hermand-Grisel, Editor-in-Chief of All About Photo. explains that deciding the winners was difficult: "What I particularly appreciated in this edition was the diversity of perspectives and the photographers’ ability to find meaning in unexpected situations.

"Some images were powerful in their simplicity, others surprised me through their composition, humor, or emotional depth. Together, they demonstrate how much can be discovered by simply paying attention to the world around us."

AAP Magazine #61 – Street Winners

First Prize Winner

A man warms himself on a steam grate in Northwest DC on Wednesday January 28, 2026 in Washington, DC. The area was still recovering following winter storm Fern.

McClain explains, "The photo was taken as part of daily news coverage following a winter storm. I was simply walking by when I noticed this scene. This was part of a series I did throughout 2026 called America: Red, White and Blue that centered on the 250th anniversary of the United States."

Competition highlights

Marchamalo says, "One day I decided to escape boring real life and dedicate myself to chasing light. I immediately became addicted to it, and that changed everything. This addiction has allowed me to decipher a much more exciting and irrational reality."

Torrei explains, "In a suburb of Rabat, I came across a playing field where the blue ground, the wall and the sky formed a continuous expanse. I noticed how the children moved through this vast space, their small figures like notes on a musical score. Their gestures, the distances between them and the moments of stillness created a constantly changing rhythm. Rabat, Morocco 2024."

Sunye says, "I moved to Istanbul, where my street photography turned to colour, inspired by the stylised warmth of Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain and the liveliness of that city and its people. When I moved back to Paris however, I instinctively returned to black and white mostly."

Grether explains, "Life is full of unexpected moments, often hidden in the most ordinary situations. Through my street photography, I am drawn to unusual gestures, subtle humor, and surprising connections between people and their surroundings."

Marmer says, "I took this photo during a ferry ride from Vancouver to Nanaimo. It was a typical, grey Pacific Northwest winter day. A young couple tied a bright red hammock on the deck and climbed inside for the entire ride. The only thing that remained visible was a pair of hands holding a smartphone"

Visit the AAP Magazine website to discover more images and the stories behind the frames.

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Nikon has been making cameras and lenses for over a century, and its gear has found a place in the bags of beginners, enthusiasts and professional photographers alike.

Now, B&H Photo is offering savings of up to 37% on some of the brand's most popular kit, from capable DSLRs and versatile Z-series mirrorless cameras to a range of wide-angle, standard and telephoto lenses.

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Browse the best Nikon cameras, the best Nikon wide-angle zoom lenses, and the best Nikon telephoto lenses.

Wildlife photography has exploded since Instagram took off, and you see so many amazing animal frames these days that sometimes they all blur into one. However, this Grand Prix-winning image at the 74th Nikkor Photo Contest truly stands out.

The frame depicts a northern gannet in action in the moment of capturing its fish prey. Entitled “The Struggle for Survival Beneath the Surface,” it was taken by Mayumi Takeuchi, who reportedly clicked the shutter while treading water and using a large housing fitted with a strobe. She told the competition judges that it was “truly miraculous” to have captured that moment.

Takeuchi’s image was selected from over 23,000 entries to this year’s edition of the photography competition, which first ran in 1953 and promotes photographers from Japan across print and, since last year, the web too. As the overall winner, she took home a Nikon Z8 camera body and ¥500,000 (approximately $3,100 / £2,300).

Mayumi Takeuchi's gear and settings

• Camera: Nikon D5
• Lens: 8.0-15.0 mm f/3.5-4.5
• Focal Length: 15.00 mm (in 35mm: 15 mm)
• Exposure: 1/250 sec | f/22 | ISO 400

There was a particularly interesting winning image (Gold Award) in the “Web Freedom” category, too. Toru Shinohara’s “Inside the Soda Water” captured a surfer riding a barreling wave, although the interplay of light and the translucent wave created the illusion of the surfer being inside the wave rather than on its surface.

Over on the print side of the competition, the Gold Award went to Sanae Ono’s “Secret Base,” which depicted four cousins who gathered at their family home over Golden Week (a major Japanese holiday period). The photographer told Nikon that the cousins had turned the living room into a “secret base” for conjuring up plans – memories I’m sure we all have.

In fact, I think all of these winning images have something unique to them. Be it lighting, a quirky composition, or a scene rarely captured, they are standouts for sure. To see all the commended images at this year’s Nikkor Photo Contest, head to the official competition webpage.

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It’s April 2024, and multi-award-winning wildlife photographer David Lloyd is leading a photography safari in Kaziranga National Park, Assam, India, when his group encounters a herd of Asian elephants.

The herd instinctively gathers together to form a protective barrier around the two vulnerable calves, while Lloyd’s instinct is to raise his camera and capture the innate behavior of these imposing yet beautiful animals.

“I have seen it before. It is natural for an elephant family to herd the young ones into the middle of themselves in order to shelter them,” he says.

The image, entitled Herd Huddle, goes on to receive a Highly Commended distinction in the “Behaviour: Mammals” category of Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026, Lloyd’s seventh distinction at the contest.

David Lloyd's gear and settings

• Camera: Fujifilm X-H2S
• Lens: Fujifilm XF 150-600mm f/5.6-8 R LM OIS WR
• Focal length: 420mm
• Exposure: 1/500 sec | f/7.1 | exposure compensation −0.67 EV | ISO 320

For Lloyd, wildlife photography should preserve the reality of any encounter, with images balancing authenticity and artistry. “Nature needs no embellishment,” he says. “I think we can compare this to photojournalism, where accuracy is paramount.”

According to the photographer, the encounter with the herd of Asian elephants lasted just a “few minutes,” giving him a mere moment to decide on his composition.

“I was very much aware that, given the presence of the calves, this encounter would not last very long at all before they melted into the forest."

By making the entire herd, rather than an individual calf, the subject, Lloyd was able to capture the relationship between the adults and their young. “I opted for a frame that is over the two calves, and I’m pleased I did.”

While Lloyd prefers natural-looking images, his approach doesn’t mean that every image should remain completely untouched in post-production. The photographer explains that, for Herd Huddle, he did something he “rarely does–" reducing the saturation to achieve the sepia-like aesthetic.

“The elephants exhibited various tones in real life, and by doing this I was able to create a satisfying duotone look."

Not encroaching on an animal, however, is always at the heart of Lloyd’s approach. According to the photographer, when an animal is disturbed for a shot, it not only puts the subject at risk, but the authenticity of the scene disappears.

“No animal should be detrimentally affected by anyone trying for a particular photo, and also the behavior would then cease to be natural,” explains Lloyd. For Lloyd, Herd Huddle succeeds because it documents the elephants’ innate, protective response rather than forcing a moment for the camera.

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For anyone who loves great photography, the news that LIFE magazine is coming back to to print should bring a smile. On November 23, 90 years after its first issue, the title will be back on newsstands, with a 250-page, large-format issue called Where Are We Now?

But here's the kicker: a copy will cost you a not inconsiderable $45. So during a cost of living crisis, in an era when we can access billions of images for free, it's worth asking: is it likely to succeed?

To answer that question, it’s worth reminding ourselves why LIFE mattered so much to begin with.

The golden era

When Henry Luce launched LIFE in 1936, the idea of a mass-market weekly that told stories mainly through pictures was totally new. Its first cover, Margaret Bourke-White’s photo of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, made it clear that photographs weren’t no longer just added decoration to the main story. They were the story.

LIFE sent photographers on assignments, gave them the budget to shoot properly, and the space in the magazine to tell stories properly. It brought World War Two, civil rights marches and the space race into ordinary people's living rooms. And readers loved it.

At its peak in the 1960s, LIFE sold more than eight million a week. It made household names of Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gordon Parks, W. Eugene Smith, and many others.

But then, television arrived, and sales went into decline. LIFE stopped publishing weekly in 1972, returned as a monthly in 1978, but then stopped regular printing again in 2000, other than the occasional special issue.

A new way of LIFE

So what happens now? The new LIFE, published by Bedford Media will be published quarterly in an oversized 11 x 16in format, similar to the original. It won’t carry conventional print ads, and will instead rely on subscriptions, a “founding membership” scheme, and brand partnerships.

There are also plans to extend the brand to documentaries, video, events, collectibles and special edition prints. As someone who worked in print magazines for 30 years, my gut tells me this is where the real profits will lie.

All of this sounds great, both for readers and photographers alike. But let’s be honest about the numbers. At $45 an issue, the new LIFE will be in the same price bracket as a high-end photobook or a collector’s item.

Why it's important

This is not something people will pick up on a whim at a newstand. Its readers are likely to be people who already care deeply about photography; and of course, there's nothing wrong with that. But anyone who thinks it'll attract the same mass market audience it did half a century ago is kidding themselves.

Something the new LIFE may achieve, though, is the admirable goal of helping the art of photojournalism to survive.

Editorial budgets have shrunk dramatically in the 21st century. Consequently, there's a lot less photojournalism in the world, leaving a vacuum to be filled with an avalanche of YouTube speculators and fake news.

If a modern, well-funded version of LIFE is able to send photographers out to spend time with – as the editors’ letter puts it – “scientists and artists, entrepreneurs and athletes, children and octogenarians, coal miners and drone makers”, that’s got to be good news for both photography and the world in general. I wish it every success.

When I think of Sony cameras and professional sports, I naturally think of photographers lining the pitchside with enormous telephoto lenses. However, Sony invited me to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London to see its NFL technology in action, and its involvement goes far beyond photographers on the sidelines.

Sony became an official technology partner of the NFL in 2024, expanding an existing relationship in which its cameras, broadcast equipment, and Hawk-Eye technology have become increasingly important to how the sport is played, officiated, and watched.

And the scale is quite remarkable. During the 2025 NFL season, Sony cameras captured more than 1,100 hours of broadcast television across over 300 games, while Associated Press photographers shot more than 130,000 images using Sony Alpha equipment. At Super Bowl LX alone, more than 175 Sony cameras were deployed on and around the field.

Cameras that can influence the game

Perhaps the most recognisable part of Sony's NFL partnership is Hawk-Eye, a name that will already be familiar to anyone who follows tennis or soccer, where cameras have become essential to officiating (love it or hate it).

In the NFL, Hawk-Eye has a similar broad role in instant replay. Across the NFL, 12 dedicated boundary-line cameras at each stadium provide additional angles to help officials scrutinize key decision moments in the game. And during the 2025 season, these cameras supported 322 replay reviews and 141 replay assists.

One of these key areas is using Hawk-Eye's camera systems to determine whether a team has gained the required 10 yards for a first down.

Traditionally, close first-down decisions involved officials bringing out a set of measuring chains, a process that could take more than a minute and interrupt the flow of the game. Sony's virtual measurement system instead uses six cameras to determine the distance between the spotted football and the first-down line.

During the 2025 season, the system was called upon for 21 virtual measurements, and Sony says these were completed in nearly half the average time required for traditional chain measurements.

Officials are still responsible for deciding exactly where the ball should be placed after a play. Hawk-Eye measures the distance from that position, rather than independently determining where the ball should have ended up, so there is still room for human judgment and error.

Supporting photographers with kit

Of course, Sony hasn't forgotten about the army of photographers capturing every moment, and one thing I learned during my visit was just how much support goes into keeping them shooting throughout a game.

Sony told me it typically supports around 75 to 100 photographers on game days, offering everything from loan equipment to sensor cleaning and repairs (even on cameras not carrying Sony branding).

There's also an interesting mix of cameras being used to capture the action. Sony says freelance photographers have been particularly drawn to the high-resolution Sony A7R VI; now its speed has caught up with the massive resolution, while agencies tend to favor the even faster Sony A1 and A9 series.

Lens choices are interesting too, with Sony's new, significantly smaller and lighter 400mm f/4.5 and 600mm f/6.3 G Master lenses apparently already proving popular with photographers who don't fancy lugging enormous telephotos around the sidelines all day.

Sony audio on the sidelines

Sony's partnership also goes beyond photography – the headsets worn by NFL coaches.

Sony developed a completely new headset specifically for the league, drawing upon the design of the WH-1000X consumer range of noise-canceling headphones, but adapting it to an environment where it needs to withstand humid heat to freezing temperatures, as well as some abuse from frustrated coaching staff.

Sony tested its headsets using crowd noise exceeding 100 decibels, with specially designed microphones that isolate the coach's voice from the surrounding noise. I tested this out (without the baying crowd, unfortunately), but the audio beaming between the sidelines and a box far up in the stadium rafters was crystal clear.

More than 2,300 of its headsets were deployed across all 32 NFL teams during the 2025 season, recording over 1,100 hours of game-day communication, which Sony says was done so without a single hardware failure.

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Skygazers have long been finding shapes among the stars, but the latest photos released from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes showcase a nebula so striking that its nickname seems clear: The Cat’s Head Nebula.

NASA recently released new photographs of the Carina Nebula, a star-forming area of space located about 7,500 light-years from Earth. The new collection of photographs comes from both the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, which means the images showcase a variety of different colors that offer researchers insight into star formation.

The Carina Nebula gets the Cat’s Head Nebula nickname from its shape, which looks like a seated cat, complete with a glowing red “eye” – which is likely a young star that’s still shrouded in dust.

The Carina Nebula isn’t just delightful because of its cat-like shape – as an area where stars are forming, studying this particular patch of the sky is giving researchers additional insight into star formation.

Carina Nebula won’t always look like a cat – and because the light from the nebula has taken 7,500 years to reach Earth, it could already look quite different. NASA says that the Cat’s Head look is a temporary scene and that stars will disperse as the nebula evolves.

Using different cameras to photograph the region of star formation creates not just wildly different photographs but also offers layers of insight for researchers. The rainbow-colored photograph captured by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the visible light coming from the nebula.

The multi-colored background isn’t just dazzling to look at but offers clues as to what’s happening as the young stars form. “Hubble’s filters record scattered starlight along with light emitted from oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur,” NASA explains. “Differences in gas excitation, absorption by dust, and illumination all contribute to the changing colors.”

Photos from the James Webb Space Telescope capture the Cat’s Head Nebula using near-infrared, which can better see through some of that dust to reveal more of the structure and what’s inside and behind that cat-like dust cloud.

The James Webb Space Telescope also has a mid-infrared camera, which reveals more of the cat-shaped dust structure. NASA says the bright yellow to the right of the “cat” in the mid-infrared image is likely an infant star.

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Most photographers spend their lives protecting film from light. Lotus L. Kang does the opposite.

In her installation, shown above, long sheets of photographic film hang unfixed from steel beams. As light and humidity reach them, they slowly change color, and develop “bruises, blood and bile-like hues”.

It’s one of four projects shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2027, which rewards artists for an exhibition or book in Europe that's made a significant contribution to photography. In their different ways, they all show how far the discipline has come from simply pointing a camera and pressing a button.

Beyond the veil

Iranian-born Hoda Afshar is shortlisted for her exhibition Performing the Invisible, which draws on the archive of the French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault.

In the early 20th century, the latter took thousands of photographs of veiled women in Morocco to explore his psychoanalytic ideas around covering and fantasy. Now, in the 21st century, Afshar uses mirrors, video and sound to reverse the focus. Instead of the veiled women in the original pictures, the subject becomes the act of looking itself.

Loss and destruction

Toronto-born Lotus L. Kang’s installation, The face of desire is loss, explores how bodies change over time, what we remember and what gets lost along the way. Alongside her lengths of unfixed photographic film, there are sculptures of tatami mats, cast objects of crying birds, a film of tidal mudflats and 49 bottles of spirits. (Why 49? In Buddhism, it's the number of days a soul spends between death and rebirth. So now you know.)

Ukrainian artist Sasha Kurmaz is shortlisted for her book, Red Horse. An 800-page visual diary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it combines documentary photographs with notes, drawings, newspaper cuttings and found objects that capture his experiences and those of the people around him. On one page, a handwritten note records the 15m width of a bomb crater beside a residential building.

Finally, Italian artist Salvatore Vitale is shortlisted for SABOTAGE. Made in collaboration with South African freelancers, it looks at the hidden human labor behind the digital economy, from surveillance to algorithmic control.

Bringing together film, photography and sculptural installations, its images include a man smashing a laptop on a rocky hillside.

“From century-old photographic archives to radical contemporary experiments, the 2027 shortlist proves how urgently photography speaks to our times,” says Anne-Marie Beckmann, director of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation.

The winner, who'll be announced in April, will get £30,000 ($40k), and each of the other three will get £5,000 ($6,665).

Work by all four artists will be shown at The Photographers’ Gallery in London from March 10 - June 6 2027, and then at the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation in Eschborn, near Frankfurt, from June 19 to September 26.

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You need to see this year’s shortlist from the Royal Meteorological Society’s (RMetS) Weather Photographer of the Year to truly understand how spectacular, phenomenal, and downright jaw-dropping the elements can be!

And when admiring them, why not cast your vote for your favorite of the 30 finalists? The public vote is now open until November 5, 2026 (23:59 GMT), with the winner announced on November 17.

Looking at the shortlist, which the competition organizers said was selected from over 5,500 entries from nations worldwide, a few jump out. I particularly like Lisa Kuhn’s frame of Mount Shasta, a prominent, glacier-clad stratovolcano rising to 14,179 feet (4,322 meters) in the Cascade Range, Northern California.

Kuhn told the Meteorological Society that she’d already been out to shoot the volcano that day but returned for a better view. “I was surprised to see the lovely outcome of the photo with the smooth layers on the front of the cloud,” she shared.

While it’s hard to choose individual images from the shortlist, another that catches my eye is “Fire” by Erfan Samanfar. The Iranian photographer’s striking frame depicts a farmer trying to protect their land as fire ravages all around. It takes a moment to notice the farmer, shrouded in thick, blue-gray smoke in the bottom corner of the frame.

The wider shortlist features scenes of fascinating cloud formations, heart-stopping lightning strikes, and crashing glaciers. Be sure to spend some time appreciating these fantastic images and casting your vote.

Professor Liz Bentley, Chief Executive of the RMetS, said: “Our judging panel had an incredibly tough task in shortlisting the images and deciding on the winning images, and we are now delighted to hand over to the public to vote for their favorite.”

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Spanish astrophotographer Mikel Iraeta managed to capture not one, but two beautiful arcs of our galaxy above the world-famous Milford Sound fiord in New Zealand – although it rains an average of 300 days a year here.

Iraeta's Double arch in Milford Sound was announced as the Open Nature/Landscape category winner at the 2026 Epson International Pano Awards, the leading global competition dedicated to panoramic photography.

The final image was assembled from 107 photographs (!) and required very specific conditions: no rain, clouds, or moonlight. Iraeta told the awards how he managed to capture a scene that he describes as "a unique photo, one that I have not seen anywhere else and that I think would be very difficult for anyone else to replicate. "

Category Winner: Open Nature/Landscape

Iraeta explains, "This is what I consider an almost impossible photo because you need some very specific conditions to pull it out.

"In fact, the day before I visited, the access road was closed due to snow avalanche danger. I ventured there without any expectations, with the sole intention of enjoying the place, aware of the improbability of the task.

"It is very difficult to have an entire clear night with no rain, no clouds, no moon, and for all of this to coincide at the end of September when it is possible to capture the double arc of the Milky Way. But I thought what if..."

The photographer continues, "I still remember feeling excited under the stars, aware of what I was witnessing."

Iraeta's shot required a bit of luck, a chain of coincidences and technical skill, both behind the camera and in the editing process.

He says, "The sky is composed of two separate tracked panoramas, each comprising eight panels, with each panel in turn consisting of a stack of four 45-second exposures.

"The first panorama is taken after sunset to capture the spiral arm containing the galactic core. The second contains both Magellanic Clouds, Gum, and the Orion Nebula, captured between 2 and 4am.

"It is important to time the shots so that both panoramas are at approximately at the same height above the horizon.

"Finally, the ground needs to be captured for which the moving tides need to be considered. For this foreground I used a 14-panel 360º panorama, where each panel is created from a bracketing of three photographs, plus an additional photograph to include myself. The final image is therefore the result of combining 107 different photographs."

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In 1983, a line of Aboriginal men in traditional body paint and grass skirts walk across a patch of wasteland in Lower Manhattan, carrying spears. Behind them, one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center soared into the sky. It’s very much a Harvey Wang picture.

For decades, Wang has been photographing people from every walk of American life. Musicians. Punks. Shopkeepers. Complete strangers. Now his work is the subject of a new exhibition, Wang’s World: Photographs and Films of Harvey Wang, at the Bronx Documentary Center.

The show brings together Wang’s photographs with his films, offering “an expansive view of an artist whose career has been rooted in observation”.

Origin story

Wang first picked up a camera as a teenager in Queens, where he was born and bred. After graduating in 1977, he worked as a photographer for the Village Voice under picture editor Fred W. McDarrah. Since then, his work has spanned documentary photography, portraiture, journalism, commercial work and film.

His portraits stand out for their warmth and directness. In one, from 1979, three blues legends (Lightnin’ Hopkins, Clifton Chenier and Honeyboy Edwards) sit side by side on a floral sofa in front of even busier wallpaper: a real visual riot.

In another, shown at the top of this page, rock icon Dee Dee Ramone and his wife Vera pose on a train platforms, all leather, denim and wild hair, yet still evoking the countenance of the bored commuter.

Alongside his portraits, Wang has spent a career documenting the Big Apple's changing streets, especially the East Village in the 1970s and 1980s. This was a time of huge social and cultural change. The city was gritty and often broke, but it was also bursting with creative energy.

In the words of the organisers, his work captures “a world populated by New Yorkers, Americans, artists, workers, families, strangers, neighborhoods, and fleeting moments”.

These are pictures that above all capture everyday moments, although never in a way that's boring. In one, from 1984, a group of marathon runners make an unscheduled stop against a chain-link fence under an overpass; nature, evidently, had called.

Another photograph depicts a scene that's more visceral and shocking – a young boy taking a baseball bat to a wrecked car, sending glass flying – although for many residents at the time, that may have seemed mundane too.

Wang is also an award-winning filmmaker whose work ranges from documentary to experimental. By showing both types of work side by side, the exhibition explores the links between “the single frame and the passage of time, between portrait and story”.

Wang’s World: Photographs and Films of Harvey Wang runs from November 13 to January 2027 at the BDC Annex, 364 E 151st St, Bronx, New York. It’s open Thursday and Friday from 3pm to 7pm, and Saturday from 1pm to 5pm. Admission is free but you need to reserve a spot. There’s an opening reception on Friday, November 13, from 6pm to 9pm.

I love Italy, which I've visited a few times for both work and pleasure, and the places I've been have been pretty much what you'd expect from the tourist brochures. Gondolas. Vespas. Golden light on terracotta. Well-dressed and immaculately styled people. All present and correct.

I admit, though, I've made little effort to visit the other side of the tracks. But that doesn't mean I'm not interested. And so a new show by Miron Zownir, the German-Ukrainian photographer dubbed "the poet of radical photography", definitely piqued my interest.

Titled simply Italy, the exhibition takes place at Galerie Bene Taschen in Cologne, Germany. Shot across cities across the north and south of Italy, as well as rural Apulia in the south-east, these images offer a window onto Italy's many and complex social realities.

If you know Zownir's work, you'll already have a good idea what that entails. If not, here's a quick primer.

AIDS, arrests and a trip to Hell

Born in Karlsruhe in southwestern Germany in 1953, Zownir took up photography in the late 1970s, at the height of the punk era. In 1980 he moved to the US, where he spent 15 years living in New York, LA and Pittsburgh, and his moody, expressionistic black-and-white pictures captured gay parties shortly before the AIDS crisis. Along the way he was arrested, censored and threatened more than once.

In 1995 he spent three months in Moscow photographing the homeless, the dying and the dead, an experience he described as "Dante's inferno". Since then his work has hung alongside Goya, Picasso and Cindy Sherman, appeared in Fotomuseum Winterthur's Darkside exhibitions and, in 2023, placed in direct dialogue with Otto Dix at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg.

So how can we summarise his Italian photos? I'd say that above all, he's seeking to capture the gap between the image the country is selling and the life its people are actually living.

In Milan, a giant Dolce & Gabbana ad of a man in a wide-brimmed hat looms over an almost empty bar, with a lone drinker hunched at the counter. In Venice, a carnival reveller strides past the door of a Parisian jewellery boutique, while another frame shows a canal bridge and its lamps dissolving into fog.

In Florence, Zownir shoots the famous statues of the Piazza della Signoria from below, turning Hercules into a muscular black silhouette against the clouds, David reduced to a bystander. In Taranto, he finds a crumbling palazzo with huge eyes staring out from its empty window frames across a deserted square.

It's not all grim and negative, though. For instance, a shot of a young woman in Milan, all face piercings and leg tattoos, reflects the fascination with people outside the mainstream he's had since his punk days.

Indeed, Zownir himself would bristle at the idea that he's only interested in gloom. "What you might consider dark or grotesque might well be free, uncompromising, strange, tragic, unique, interesting or whatever," he once told Slow Travel Berlin. On this evidence, Italy has plenty of all of the above.

Italy runs at Galerie Bene Taschen, Lindenstrasse 19, Cologne, Germany, from Saturday, November 28, 2pm-6pm until Saturday, February 6.

A dive tour leader and marine wildlife filmmaker has shared the heartbreaking moment he photographed a mutilated tiger shark while diving in the Maldives.

Footage captured during those moments has since gone viral on Instagram, reminding us of the importance visual media, especially immersive video, can play in raising awareness of conservation issues.

Xabi Romero, an Argentinian-Spanish photographer, was diving at Fuvahmulah, a single-island atoll and UNESCO Biosphere Reserve located in the southern Maldives.

As he and a fellow diver, who was also operating a camera, meandered above the coral-covered seafloor close to the surface, a seemingly odd-looking shark glided past.

After a few moments, Romero realized that this was no uncommon species, but a tiger shark whose fins had been cut off, the videographer said in an Instagram post.

“This is the saddest encounter of my life,” Romero captioned his Instagram video depicting the meeting. “That was kind of bottom for me,” he wrote in the video description.

Watch: Xabi Romero's heartbreaking encounter with Fin, the tiger shark whose fins were cut off by fishermen

According to Romero, the shark, known somewhat ironically yet sadly as Fin, is a juvenile female tiger shark previously seen by other divers. Romero explained that Fin was caught by fishermen and all but the top part of her caudal fin had been cut off before she was thrown back into the ocean “to let her die.”

This practice is known as shark finning, and fishermen do it to sell the sharks’ fins for high profits while saving limited storage space on their boats. Shark fins are a highly prized ingredient for shark fin soup, a delicacy and status symbol across several Asian countries, including China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Conservation groups widely condemn shark finning as a cruel, wasteful, and destructive practice that is driving many shark species toward extinction.

The Maldives has strict shark fishing regulations, including a total ban on catching tiger sharks and finning any shark species. And while the authorities aim to enforce these rules by, for example, having registered commercial vessels carry GPS tracking devices, some fishing crews are able to skirt the law.

Romero went on to explain that he returned to the site where he spotted Fin, hoping to get a second glimpse of the brutalized shark. “I became obsessed with photographing Fin. Seeing her for the first time made me so sad, and I felt like that was a feeling worth sharing,” he said.

According to the photographer, he went on to make a print of the shark and sold copies of it, donating part of the proceeds to shark conservation. Romero didn't, however, clarify how much he donated or which conservation initiatives benefited.

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In the 20th century, the Rolleiflex was one of the most respected names in camera circles. First made in Germany in 1929, it’s a twin-lens reflex (TLR) camera, which means it has two lenses stacked one above the other. The top one shows you the scene on a viewing screen, the bottom lens takes the shot.

Favored by photojournalists, fashion photographers and street photographers, those stacked lenses made it one of the most recognisable cameras ever made. And now that distinctive look has been shrunk down into a stylish watch design.

Made to mark 100 years of Rollei, the Camera Dual Rolleiflex is the creation of Hong Kong company ARTRA. It’s officially licensed by RCP Technik, the German company that owns the Rollei trademark.

That makes it stands apart from ARTRA’s Camera One watch, launched about a year ago, which was inspired by cameras in general. Don't rush to find your credit card, though: no release date has yet been announced, keeping this firmly in "coming soon" territory.

Lovely little details

The Rolleiflex influence on the watch, which measures 47 x 30mm and is 11mm thick, isn't just seen in the shape. The two sapphire crystals have anti-reflective coatings inspired by the camera’s lens optics (violet-tinted on top, amber-yellow below). The case has fine vertical grooves inspired by the camera's body, along with an aluminium brand badge.

Two small knobs on the case work as a day indicator and a leap-year indicator. A crank-style winding lever on the side echoes the film advance crank on the camera. And even the steel strap buckle is engraved with a vintage Rollei logo.

According to ARTRA’s launch materials, the watch runs on a Seiko NH05 automatic movement with a power reserve of 40-plus hours. A custom module drives the two dials. Note that some early reports said it uses a Miyota movement instead. Featuring a quick-release Italian leather strap, it's water-resistant to 30m and comes in six colors, white, green, black, red, gold and navy; only 100 of each will be made.

The standard edition costs HK$13,800, which is around $1,780 / £1,350 at the time of writing. There’s also an exclusive edition for retailer The Lavish Attic, limited to 30 pieces, which boasts a mirror dial and heat-blued hands and costs HK$15,800 (around $2,030 / £1,550). That might sound like a lot, but it's still quite a bit cheaper than the Leica watches we saw released last year.

For full details, visit www.watchik.com.

When you think of Hasselblad, you probably picture beautifully crafted medium-format cameras, legendary portrait photographers, or perhaps even the cameras that accompanied astronauts into space. What you probably don't imagine is taking one underwater.

However, Instagram photographer @wetnegz is doing exactly that, using an incredibly rare underwater housing originally designed for the iconic Hasselblad 500C/M more than 50 years ago, and judging by the photographer's latest Instagram reel (see below), this remarkable piece of engineering appears to be working just as intended, continuing to protect a mechanical film camera beneath the waves and allowing its owner to capture beautiful analog photographs underwater, just as it would have done when it first left the factory.

The housing itself dates back to the 1970s and was manufactured by underwater equipment specialist Hugyfot, which produced dedicated housings for Hasselblad's legendary 500-series cameras. Constructed from heavy-duty metal, with a distinctive blue finish and yellow handles, this extraordinary piece of photographic equipment was designed to withstand the challenges of underwater photography while keeping the camera completely protected from the surrounding water.

External controls allow the photographer to adjust shutter speed, aperture, and focus, while dedicated mechanisms operate the shutter and advance the film. There's even an integrated viewfinder for composing photographs beneath the surface. It's a fascinating example of precision engineering from a time when underwater photography required considerably more preparation, patience and mechanical ingenuity than it does today.

What makes this particular example so interesting is not simply its age, but the fact that Wetnegz is still actively using it for its original purpose. Rather than leaving this incredibly rare piece of Hasselblad history sitting on a collector's shelf, the photographer has been taking it into the ocean and producing genuine medium-format film photographs. In a recent trip to Tonga, the photographer paired the vintage housing with a special 25th-anniversary Hasselblad 500C/M, one of just 1,500 reportedly produced, and shot on Kodak Ektacolor Pro 800 film, later converting the photographs to black and white. There are no batteries, no autofocus, and no built-in light meter to rely on, with exposure judged by eye and just 12 frames available on a standard roll of 120 film. Considering the housing's age, the fact that it continues to function underwater is a remarkable testament to the craftsmanship behind its original design. These housings are exceptionally difficult to find today, especially in complete, working condition, making this surviving example all the more extraordinary.

Interestingly, Hasselblad's relationship with underwater photography didn't end with the arrival of digital cameras. In 2020, the Swedish manufacturer partnered with AquaTech to introduce the REFLEX underwater housing for its X1D II 50C, bringing 50-megapixel medium-format photography underwater. Unlike its much heavier mechanical predecessor, the modern housing weighed just 1.6kg (3.5 pounds), protected against depths up to 10 meters (33 feet), and supported Hasselblad's XCD lens range through interchangeable lens ports.

Originally priced at $1,695, the housing demonstrated that there was still an appetite for taking medium-format cameras underwater, even if the technology had changed dramatically since the 1970s. More recently, Nauticam introduced its NA-X2DII housing for the Hasselblad X2D II 100C, an $8,000 professional underwater solution capable of taking the company's 100-megapixel medium-format camera to depths of up to 100 meters (328 feet).

But while today's underwater housings offer remarkable technology and access to some of the finest digital cameras ever made, there's something rather wonderful about watching Wetnegz continue to use a piece of equipment that has already survived more than half a century.

This isn't simply a collector's item or a forgotten relic of photographic history; it's a fully functioning tool that is still producing images in precisely the environment it was designed for. And in an industry where cameras and accessories can feel outdated after only a few years, seeing a 1970s Hasselblad underwater housing still doing its job is a refreshing reminder that great engineering really can stand the test of time.

More than 50 years later, this incredible piece of photographic history is still capturing moments beneath the waves, one carefully considered frame of film at a time.

It's the sort of unremarkable building you could have walked past hundreds of times without giving it a second thought. A long, low concrete block behind a wire fence on the edge of a field, topped by a structure that could be a water tank. Not the most exciting of places to shoot, you might think.

Yet for decades, this unremarkable building in Nottingham held an enticing secret: it was where the East Midlands of England would have been governed from in the event of a nuclear disaster.

Now, finally, the general public is getting a look inside; well, virtually at least. An exhibition at Nottingham Trent University brings together photographs by Martine Hamilton Knight with an immersive digital recreation by Dan Billings, documenting the Grade II-listed bunker before it gets redeveloped into a space for community use, conferences, workspace and heritage.

It's certain the local community will benefit hugely from this project. But there's also a keen sense that once the builders move in, this important part of history will be gone forever. "We were conscious that we were documenting a place that was about to change forever," says Hamilton Knight.

Chaotic energy

The bunker was built in 1952-1953 as part of Britain's civil defence network. It was later expanded to become one of 11 Regional Seats of Government in the UK. Designed to house hundreds of people, it would have acted as the command centre for the whole East Midlands in the event of nuclear war.

After it was decommissioned, though, its interior quickly fell into ruin. "It looked as though it had undergone its own form of internal conflict," Hamilton Knight recalls. "It had a disjointed, chaotic atmosphere, with little lighting in places, which some people may have found psychologically unsettling."

Her photos capture that atmosphere beautifully. In one, the concrete walls are streaked with grime and studded with outdated switch boxes and pipework. A bucket and a broom seem discarded, as if someone had just stepped out for a moment, decades ago, and never come back.

In another scene, a heavy, riveted steel door sits against a bare concrete wall beneath a lone lamp, with soft, even light picking out every rivet. It's the kind of image that rewards close examination, and a reminder that architectural photography can be as much about mood as record.

Small details each tell a story of their own. A pile of unused bars of soap, stamped with a crown, tumbles out of crumbling boxes labelled "SOAP TOILET". A stockpile of everyday comforts, laid in for a catastrophe that never arrived.

Program of events

Martine Hamilton Knight's photographs will be shown across multiple screens in NTU's Design & Digital Arts building. Alongside them, a digital recreation lets you explore the bunker for yourself through a VR headset experience. Plus, each evening, images will be projected onto the building's windows, turning its façade into a public gallery.

A series of free talks will reveal details about the site's history, how the photography and digital documentation were done, and the plans for the future development of the site. Hamilton Knight's sessions, Nottingham War Rooms on Camera and Camera as Witness, take place on November 4 and 11.

The War Rooms: A Past Unseen, A Future Revealed is at Nottingham Trent University's Design & Digital Arts Building, 40 Shakespeare Street, Nottingham NG1 4FQ, UK from November 4-13. Entry is free, but booking is required. Under-18s must be accompanied by a parent or legal guardian.

Close your eyes and conjure up a mental image a 1930s film star. You'll end up picturing the work of George Hurrell… whether you know his name or not.

Hurrell rose to fame as the in-house portraitist at MGM before setting up his own studio. And his pictures did more than anyone’s to define the look of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Now the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC is putting 20 of his vintage prints on show in Star Power: Photographs from Hollywood’s Golden Age by George Hurrell (A Sequel).

The first Star Power installation ran from March 2024 until January this year. Now this second selection, running until January 2027, reads like a who’s who of the era. Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, William Powell, Barbara Stanwyck… the list goes on.

Who was Hurrell?

Born in 1904, Hurrell originally trained as a painter. The first time he used a camera was to record his canvases. After moving to California in 1925, though, he found that his photographs sold better than his paintings, so he started building a career as a portraitist.

His big break came when he shot the Mexican actor Ramon Novarro in 1929. Novarro showed the results to the Canadian-American actress Norma Shearer, who was looking to shed her wholesome image and land the lead in The Divorcee. To aid her cause, Hurrell shot her in poses far more provocative than her fans had previously seen. Her husband, MGM production chief Irving Thalberg, then hired Hurrell to run the studio’s portrait department.

But Hurrell wasn't just in the right place at the right time: he was doing things differently. Before him, publicity stills were bland and interchangeable. Hurrell innovated by using hard, directional light to carve out cheekbones and throw everything else into shadow.

His portraits of Dietrich are a masterclass in the approach. In the picture shown at the top of this page, she leans against a fluted column in a pleated gown, the light raking across the folds of the fabric and the grooves of the pillar so that woman and architecture seem to merge together.

In another, she sits cigarette in hand, her trademark stare lit from above so a sharp shadow falls beneath her nose. That overhead light – high and in front of the face – flattered features, emphasised eyes and created a sculptural look that soon because synonymous with Hollywood glamour.

It wasn’t all smouldering looks, though. Some of the most best pictures in the show are the playful ones. In my favorite, Jean Harlow lies on a polar bear skin rug in a pale satin gown, grinning at the camera. It’s absurd, glamorous and slightly unhinged.

His style eventually fell out of fashion. By the 1950s, Hollywood wanted something different, and TV changed how studios promoted their stars. Hurrell moved into advertising, then had spent the 1970s and 80s shooting album covers for artists including Queen, Fleetwood Mac and Paul McCartney.

Today, though, his 1930s portraits define an era. Long before Instagram filters and beauty apps, he understood that a star’s image couldn't be just captured; it needed to be constructed, and that light was key to doing so.

Curated by senior curator of photographs Ann Shumard, Star Power: Photographs from Hollywood’s Golden Age by George Hurrell (A Sequel) is on show on the first floor of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, until 10 January 2027.

A now 18-year-old photographer has turned a misty morning and a lake full of swans into an award-winning wildlife image – using a Nikon DSLR that's been around for a decade. Szymon Bartold's Swan lake captures the birds gliding through glowing orange hues at sunrise, their silhouettes reflected in the water's surface to create an almost mystical scene. As mute swans rose majestically from the mist, bathed in golden light, he pressed the shutter.

Previously, Bartold'simage won Silver at the Bird Photographer of the Year competition. Now it won the top prize at one of Europe's major wildlife photography contests, the GDT European Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, in the 14- 17-year Youth Category.

Founded in 2001, the GDT European Wildlife Photographer of the Year has grown into a global benchmark for contemporary nature photography, celebrating work that is innovative and strong in storytelling. The German Society for Nature Photography (GDT) selects the best images and awards the overall winner, the Fritz Pölking Prize, and the Rewilding Europe Award.

Winner: Youth Category | 14-17 years

Image info
Title: Swan lake

Tech details
Camera: Nikon D5
Lens: 150-600mm f/5-6.3
Exposure: 1/6400sec, f/6.3, ISO 1000

Story behind the still
Szymon explains, "Out walking, I came across a lake with a large number of waterbirds, and decided to return before dawn the next morning.

"Well hidden, I watched as mute swans (Cygnus olor) rose majestically out of the mist in a scene bathed in gold light.

"One perfect moment, one frame – and a feeling of pure joy I'll never forget."

Discover all winning images on the GDT European Wildlife Photographer of the Year website.

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NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency) have announced the latest James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) picture of the month, with this new frame depicting what the agencies have described as a “turbulent” stellar nursery.

Every month, NASA and the ESA choose their favorite image captured by the Webb telescope over the past four weeks, publishing it on the ESA Webb telescope site.

According to the ESA, October’s image shows a star-forming region of space named LHA 120-N 159, or simply N159, located 161,000 light-years away from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy orbiting the Milky Way.

N159 is what’s called an H II region: an area of space filled with ionized hydrogen gas. According to the ESA, in these regions, giant molecular clouds of cold hydrogen gas collapse under gravity, forming new stars, many of which are extremely massive and hot.

The ESA explained that the stellar nursery is shrouded by the thick orange clouds spread across the center of the image, with the orange color signifying light emitted by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a carbon-based molecule.

According to the agency, the pale blue clouds swirling within are made of H II gas, which has been ionized by “intense” ultraviolet light emitted from massive stars. And the dark red filaments across the center of the image are formed of cooler molecular hydrogen. The ESA said that these filaments are the densest part of the nebula and shield young stars from harsh radiation and stellar winds.

To capture the 230-light-year-wide image, astonomers used Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam).

The primary imaging instrument aboard Webb, NIRCam is capable of capturing light ranging from 0.6 micrometers (visible red light) to 5 micrometers (near-infrared). Because infrared light passes through dense cosmic dust clouds that block normal visible light, NIRCam enabled the astronomers to see deep into N159.

The astronomers have since published a paper on the recent observation, highlighting how the conditions of N159, thought to be akin to those of the early universe, have helped to further our understanding of star formation during that time.

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A young photographer from Germany has captured the fleeting magic of a winter sunset in an award-winning image that transforms the last rays of sunshine into a golden spectacle.

Marla Schwarze's image, Winter Gold, shows the reeds along Dortmund's Lake Phoenix glowing in the evening light and sparking water. The image earned Marla top honors in the Youth Category (ages 14 and under) of the GDT European Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, selected by the German Society for Nature Photography.

Captured with a Nikon Z6 and a 70-300mm lens, Marla captured the sun just before it disappeared. As she explains, the challenge was to capture the atmosphere of the winter evening and the flickering play of light as the sun illuminated the swaying reeds.

Winner: Youth Category | Ages 14 and under

Image info
Title: Winter gold
Location: Lake Phoenix, Dortmund, Germany

Tech details
Camera: Nikon Z6
Lens: 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6
Exposure: 1/500sec, f/5.6, ISO400

Story behind the still
Marla explains, "I wanted to hold onto that one second, that fleeting instant.

"The image shows the low evening sun, the swaying reeds flooded with light, set against the sparkling water, with the rays refracting inside the lens.

"I made a particular effort to capture exactly this special winter atmosphere and the flickering play of light in that one moment."

Discover all winning images on the GDT European Wildlife Photographer of the Year website.

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Growing up in a small farming town in northern Belgium, Eva Verbeeck learned about the USA the same way most Europeans do, via films, magazines and music videos. In her mind, then, the typical American girl conformed to a number of well-worn stereotypers. A cheerleader. A science nerd. A goth. All, in their own way, glamorous, distant (both figuratively and literally) and slightly unreal.

Years later, while living in the States herself, she set out to meet the real thing, and take some photographs. This turned out to be many, many photographs.

The project began in 2018 with a group of cheerleaders in Savannah, Georgia. Verbeeck wanted to avoid casting girls to fit a preconceived idea, so she found her subjects through open calls, schools, youth groups and community events.

She invited each of them to bring along something that mattered to her. What they brought varied enormously: a tiara, an electric guitar, a competition rifle, a horse and a CPR training dummy. Though she notes in the book that “none ever choose a piece of technology,” which itself speaks volumes.

The importance of format

Verbeeck shot mostly on 4x5 and 8x10 large format cameras, which slows everything down. That was no accident. “The slowness of the process created space for conversation, vulnerability, and trust,” she explains.

The choice of large-format also meant her pictures looked nothing like the selfies these girls were used to. “The large=format camera slows the process down and results in something so foreign that it does not correspond to the image they have created and curated of themselves online,” she writes.

Verbeeck notes that grandmother has only five photos of her as a child. Back then, a photographer would come to town, families would book a slot, and everyone would dress up for the occasion. Today, Verbeeck notes, “It is no longer special or valuable to have a photograph of yourself.” Paradoxically, this helps her portraits feel more real, because the girls care less about the picture and more about the conversation around it.

The project went well beyond the shoots. Through interviews, recorded conversations and letters, the girls talked about friendship, family, their bodies, ambitions and fears. In Ithaca, New York, one 15-year-old waited until everyone else had gone home to show Verbeeck an essay she’d written about sexism.

Now 54 of the best images have been brought together in a new photobook from GOST. Shot on film between 2018 and 2024, it features girls aged between six and 18 from 28 states.

“The idea of the ‘American girl’ existed in my imagination long before I ever came to the United States, built from fragments of images, fantasies, and stories that felt impossibly far away from where I grew up,” she says. Most of us who don't live in the States probably have similar fantasies: this book is a welcome antidote.

America’s Girls, On the Edge of a Dream by Eva Verbeeck is published by GOST. A 104-page clothbound hardback measuring 290 x 350mm, with 54 color images, it costs $60 / £45. The work is on show at CC De Factorij in Belgium until October 31.

Verbeeck is also giving a talk at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) on November 18, and she’s a headline artist at Belgrade Photo Month in May 2027.

Think "spider" and most people don't think "adorable"; quite the opposite in fact. But the image from German photographer John-Oliver Dum might make you reconsider that prejudice.

With two huge, black eyes and a face fringed with fluffy white scales, this cute critter looks like something Pixar or Disney would draw for their next kids' film. No wonder the picture has taken second place in this year's Nikon Small World 2026 Photomicrography Competition.

So what exactly are we looking at? Meet Salticus scenicus: a jumping spider common across Europe that typically measures 5mm to 9mm long: that's smaller than the nail on your little finger.

In Dum's prize-winning photograph, it's been magnified 20 times, which turns grains of pollen – which are too small to see with the naked eye – into what look a little like jewels. Perhaps I'm being fanciful, but to me the grains clustered on top look like a crown, while another sits perfectly between the two main eyes, like a pendant. Overall, it's a surprisingly regal effect.

How it was shot

At this level of magnification, depth of field is highly limited, so only a sliver of your subject will be sharp. To solve this puzzle, Dum used focus stacking, a technique he specialises in.

This means that what looks like a single image is actually built from dozens (or sometimes more than 100) individual frames, shot at slightly different focus distances, then merged so everything is pin-sharp.

Based in Bendorf, Germany, Dum typically works at magnifications from 1x to 100x. His kit includes a Sony Alpha 1, an MJKZZ macro rail for making precise, tiny focus steps, and microscope optics from Mitutoyo, Nikon, Olympus and Carl Zeiss Jena. His work has been shown at venues including the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum and ARTIS-Micropia in Amsterdam.

For me, it's the level of detail in this picture that's the most impressive. Despite the spider being smaller than a fingernail, you can see the individual scales on its face, the fine hairs on its legs and the texture of every pollen grain clearly.

Photography often shows us the world we're used to seeing from a different perspective. This photograph, though, shows us an entirely different world, that we can't see with the naked eye at all, which in my book makes it special indeed.

Nikon Small World showcases the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope via photography and video, and is open to anyone with an interest in microscopy.

This year’s overall winner was Ole Bielfeldt’s never-before-seen view of an inkjet printer at work. You can view all the winning images on the Nikon Small World website.

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The young woman doesn't smile. She looks straight down the lens, freckles scattered across her face, hair falling in loose waves. There's no glamour, no performance. But still, that steady gaze makes an impact.

This is one of more than 100 photographs that the New York-based photographer Sherrie Nickol took in the late 1970s, when she was a student in Cincinnati, Ohio. Shot on film in natural light, they've remained largely unseen for almost half a century. Now they're gathered together in a new book from Hirmer, Chrysalis.

There are many portraits here of young women. Friends and peers, captured in bedrooms, hallways, on staircases and in pools of window light. They sit together with pictures of the American South where Nickol grew up, from Osceola in Arkansas to the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans.

What strikes you most is how unguarded the subjects are. The women weren't posing for a fashion shoot or a press photographer. They were simply reading, thinking, looking out of windows, or looking directly into the camera.

In one shot, a woman sits on a bench by a window, a cigarette at her lips and a pair of binoculars held up in one hand. She glances sideways, half amused, half daring the viewer to work out what's going on.

In another picture, a young woman lies sits on a sofa, staring over the top of a newspaper with wide eyes. A headline reads "What's In A Name? Fame". It feels eminently suitable for a collection of photos of women whose identities have not yet firmly settled.

Nickol shot all of this on film, using only natural light, and she makes the most of it. In one portrait, a woman sits in front of an old ribbed radiator. The stripes of her shirt echo the columns of the radiator behind her, while soft light from one side models her face. It's a simple but effective composition that leans into geometry to great effect.

The title, Chrysalis, says it all. In the words of the publisher, it speaks to "a protected space of becoming, of identity not yet fixed, of transition held gently in suspension". These are pictures of young women on the cusp of something, made by a young woman who was herself still finding her way too.

A parallel strand, meanwhile, takes us on a journey around the 1970s south. In one of the New Orleans pictures, two women ride a streetcar, sitting on wooden benches beneath its tall windows.

A younger woman in a knitted hat gazes out at the trees, while an older woman in a beret and tweed coat holds a tissue to her mouth and looks the other way. They’re inches apart but entirely in their own worlds.

These Southern scenes broaden the book’s scope to family, community and place, from Arkansas farm roads to small-town street scenes in Mississippi.

Chrysalis by Sherrie Nickol is published by Hirmer and will be available in the US from January 2027, following its November release in the UK and EU. It's a 156-page hardback with 112 duotone illustrations, bound in linen with two large tip-ins.

Not a fan of the square or vertical images we've got used to in the smartphone age? Prefer the idea of wide, sweeping panoramas... the wider the better? Me too. And that's why there's a special place in my heart for Kodak’s Colorama: a huge, backlit panorama installed on the east balcony of New York City’s Grand Central Terminal from 1950 to 1990.

At 60 feet wide and 18 feet tall, this photographic display showed an idealised slice of American life to passing commuters. Now 287 of them have been brought together in a two-volume publication from Gestalten, titled KODAK COLORAMA Archive.

The formula was simple: take everyday scenes, cast them in a glow of perfection, and reproduce them at enormous scale. A family packs the car for a summer at the beach. Kids hurtle down a snow-covered hill on a sled. Water skiers race towards the lens in a spray of foam. Newlyweds emerge from an ivy-covered church, beaming.

As the publisher explains, Kodak and its advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, these idealised visions of safe, suburban, consumer-centred life had a very clear purpose. At a time when post-war employment markets and growing mobility were pulling families apart, these images were selling something more profound than just photographic film. They were selling the notion of memory-making and social belonging.

Thumb through the book, and a pattern emerges. In picture after picture, somebody is taking a photograph. A man crouches in autumn leaves to snap his girlfriend. A young couple kneel in a riot of tulips and hyacinths, peering at a compact. At the wedding, a guest photographs a bridesmaid.

The message is unambiguous: the best moments are the ones you capture on Kodak. Or as the youth of the 2020s might say: "Pics or it didn't happen".

The Coloramas weren't just about ideas of domestic bliss, though: they also tracked real events in a changing world. The collection includes work by Ansel Adams and some of NASA’s first images from the surface of the Moon. Colorama No. 319, photographed by Norman C. Kerr and displayed in 1969, was the first to feature a black couple.

By the 1980s, you get pictures like True Promise – Class of 2001, featuring a line of grinning children dressed as future artists, athletes, musicians and graduates.

Making a sharp, vividly coloured photograph that could be viewed at 18 metres wide in the 1950s was, of course, no small task. First, Kodak used specialised, oversized Deardorff large-format cameras to shoot the scenes. Next, the giant transparencies were processed in vertical strips inside a repurposed swimming pool, then joined using custom clear welds developed specifically for the task. The finished images were lit from behind by about a mile of cold-cathode tubes.

Sounds expensive? You betcha. Kodak paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in rent for the space alone, and up to $30,000 per image before production costs were even counted. Which was an awful lot of money in those days.

Today we worry about algorithms, addiction and social media fakery. The Coloramas might be seen as an ancestor of this dynamic: a glowing, larger-than-life version of a reality that never quite existed, glowing with saturated colour. And that may make revisiting them in 2026 a strange and unsettling experience. But that doesn’t stop them, at the same time, being a real joy to look at.

KODAK COLORAMA Archive is published by Gestalten as a two-volume hardback set in a slipcase, priced $150 / £125. It’s available now in the UK and Europe, and in the US from November 17.

Ever glanced into a stream and seen nothing but murky blur? Don't be fooled. There's a whole world of life, color and action going on below the surface. And here's a great example of a photographer knowing exactly where to look.

The main part of the picture, at first glance, could be mistaken for a piece of antique lace, laid over black velvet. Look closely, though, and you’ll see it's actually a skeleton of a rotting leaf; its soft tissue decayed just enough to leave behind a fine network of veins.

Moving through it, we can glimpse some of the smallest inhabitants in this underwater world. On the right, two tiny, shrimp-like crustaceans, their bodies pale grey and amber respectively, seem to cling together. On the left, a mayfly larva appears in what Hungarian photographer István Hogya describes as a small “window” in the left.

Titled At the bottom of the stream, it's been awarded runner-up in the Pure Nature: Water category of the OurNature Environmental Photo & Video Award.

A miniature world

"These tiny creatures play an important role in the stream’s ecosystem," explains Hogya. "They feed on organic debris while also providing food for larger animals, including fish and birds. A miniature world, barely visible to the naked eye, yet essential to life in the stream."

Even the leaf plays an important role in this ecosystem. It's precisely because such creatures have been breaking it down over time, leaving only the toughest veins behind, that we can see through it so clearly.

Hogya shot the image on a Canon EOS R6 Mark II with a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, at 1/125sec, f/8 and ISO 1000, in manual mode with spot metering. Interestingly, Hogya was taken just 37cm away from the subjects. At that distance, even at f/8, only a few millimetres of the scene in front of him could be sharp. Consequently, he made sure both the creatures and the leaf were lying flat at roughly the same depth, keeping everything in focus.

Overall, this prize-winning image works on two levels: as an attractive pattern of light and line, and as a glimpse into an ecosystem most of us would never otherwise pay thought to.

The Our Nature Environmental Photo Award is an annual competition that showcases the most inspirational nature and environmental photography from around the world. See more winnng work in the Winners' Gallery.

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Dave Newman is an amateur wildlife and pet photographer based in Lincolnshire in the UK.

He submitted this fantastic photo to Digital Camera World magazine, responding to shoutouts for its regular 'Rate My Photo' page.

The image gets a full analysis, highlighting the aspects that excel, and ones that could be improved upon.

Before deconstructing Dave's photo, let's go behind the scenes of the shot…

"In this image, I captured a kingfisher emerging from the water with a freshly caught fish, freezing a split second of precision and power," Dave recalls.

"I positioned myself near a known hunting perch. I tracked the bird from the dive, into the water and then back out, and used a fast shutter speed to freeze motion.

"The goal was to reveal the bird’s hunting skill, timing and the dramatic beauty of its everyday survival instincts. This is my best kingfisher capture to date."

Captured on a Sony A9 with a Sony FE 400mm GM f/2.8 OSS. Settings: 1/8,000 sec at f/2.8, ISO 800, -0.3 exposure compensation.

See more of Dave's shots on his Instagram: @daves_spherical_photography

Expert analysis of 'Kingfisher' by Dave Newman

Overall impact

It’s a tremendous shot that has bags of impact. Having the kingfisher coming straight back out of the water like a missile, and with a fish in its beak, makes this perfectly timed capture.

Getting this shot was all down to Dave’s fieldcraft in knowing where the bird was likely to perch and dive from, and where it would emerge, then using his technical skill to capture the action at the perfect moment.

Eye contact

The slight tilt of the head trades symmetry for a more engaging photo. Being able to see the bird’s eye gives the image more of a connection; a symmetrical bird may not have made as good a shot.

Frozen water and spray

The fast shutter speed of 1/8,000 sec means every droplet of water is frozen, giving the splash an interesting shape. The trade-off for that shutter speed is that the ISO had to be increased to 800, but the resulting noise was dealt with in software.

Beautiful background

The wide-open aperture of f/2.8 means the background is a series of pastel coloured bands, with lovely muted colours, allowing full focus on the bird.

Depth of field

The advantage of f/2.8 is the background and keeping the ISO to 800 with that fast shutter speed. The disadvantage is that there is little depth of field.

The focus point seems to be the head and neck area, which is sharp, but some feathers are out of focus, as are the feet and tail.

Would a narrower aperture have achieved more depth of field? Possibly, but it would have impacted either the shutter speed or the ISO.

Vertical composition

Dave has already cropped this image to get closer to the bird, but another option may have been to crop it into a vertical orientation to emphasise the upwards movement.

He could have tried to capture it vertically, but that would run the risk of not getting it in the frame when it was moving quickly, so shooting in landscape orientation was probably the better choice.

Read more from Digital Camera magazine

This content appeared in issue 308 (June 2026) of Digital Camera magazine.

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For photographers, “good weather” may not mean warm and sunny. In the case of some stunning wildlife photography coming out of the London area this week, “good weather” meant early morning fog.

The photograph comes from the lens of Getty photographer Brook Mitchell, who spent a morning at sunrise photographing red stags and fallow bucks at Richmond Park in London, England. October is the rut, or mating season for the deer, which tends to make the deer more active.

Foggy conditions can create limited visibility, making wildlife photography with a long lens particularly challenging. Fog can also cause condensation to build up on the camera lens. But while fog comes with its challenges, it can also create streaks of light if that ground fog isn’t mixed with clouds overhead.

The early morning sun combined with foggy conditions to create some dramatic, glowing light. Crepuscular rays are what happens when sunlight hits the fog’s water droplets suspended in the air and scatters. To get sun rays like this, photographers need to adjust their position so that they are shooting towards the sun.

The sun rays will also show up best with a darker background, like with the trees in Mitchell’s photographs. Because those sun rays are strong, photographing them often means using a narrower aperture or faster shutter speed to avoid overexposure.

Crepuscular rays can also be created from mist, dust, and smoke particles in the air – fog isn't the only condition that will create those sun beams.

Michell’s photos – shot with the Canon EOS R5 Mark II and RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1 L IS USM – were featured on Getty’s top news photos of the week, seasonal shots highlighting the deer’s rutting season.

Many types of wildlife, including the red stag, are most active at dawn and dusk – perfect for golden hour wildlife photography.

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While we may only see the finished building, architectural photographer Timothy Soar sees the designers behind them, their personalities and their aspirations for the future of the profession.

In his current exhibition, Reinventing Practice, on display at the Building Centre in London throughout this month, Soar brings together portraits of 40 of these architects at the forefront of Britain's building industry, delving into the people and practices working to change the built environment.

"In making the series I hadn't really turned away from photographing architecture. I was trying to extend its photographic language to include the people responsible for making it," said Soar.

According to the photographer, Reinventing Practice has roots in a project that began in 2004. That year, Soar bought his first digital camera, a Canon 1Ds, and paired it with a Canon tilt-shift lens.

Having previously worked with large-format 4×5-inch transparency film, but facing “enormous difficulty” making photographs that included people, the photographer explained how he now had a “powerful and fast way” to capture interiors with people in them.

Armed with his new DSLR, in partnership with Architects' Journal (AJ) editor Isabel Allen, Soar set out to photograph architects within their own workspaces, hoping to shed light on this profession.

Subsequently, the project developed into AJ's 2005 edition of 40 Under 40, a now-defunct celebration of emerging architects in the UK. “The series went on to become the most popular feature in the magazine and provoked some splendid, occasionally heated, conversations in the letters pages,” said Soar.

The photographer's architectural portraiture took its next major step in 2020: a series called Architects In Practice in collaboration with Architecture Today. According to Soar, in 2024, this "evolved" into Reinventing Practice, the more recent series commissioned by Architecture Today which features at Regenerative Design.

Instead of imposing standard corporate portraits, Soar explained how he works with his subjects to create images that reveal their personalities, working environments and professional values. “I begin by looking for a composition that makes sense of all this, then work out how the person might naturally inhabit it,” he said.

Like Rupert and Socrates, from MCM Architecture, whom Soar photographed perched on enormous bags of compost, chatting like old friends catching up. “I'm looking for something that feels entirely characteristic of the person, rather than an image of how an architect is supposed to look,” the photographer added.

Timothy Soar's gear and settings

Soar shot the series for Reinventing Practice using a Fujifilm GFX 100 and a Canon TS-E 50mm f/2.8L tilt-shift lens. According to Soar, using one camera and lens across the portraits gave the series a consistent visual language. His settings were typically ISO 100 and f/11, and sometimes, he used shutter speeds of 1/4 sec or 1/2 sec.

While Soar's subjects challenge the traditional corporate image of a professional in their field, according to the photographer, they're also bringing new ways of working to the industry. “They [the architects] are at the leading edge of responding to a world undergoing rapid change as a consequence of global warming.”

According to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), climate change is the “biggest threat” to the built environment sector, and the industry will have to adapt practices to account for increasing heat, flooding and the pressures of migration, a reality Soar says his exhibition reflects.

“I think what I've learnt is how optimistic, engaged and positive these architects are, how much they have to contribute to the debate, and the extraordinary range and imagination of the solutions they're developing,” he said. “I've found their optimism rather moving.”

Soar hopes that exhibition visitors will see beyond the beautiful buildings that so often epitomize architecture to the optimism, drive and values held by what he calls “an extraordinary group of people” changing the way the industry works.

Timothy Soar: Reinventing Practice is now on display until October 30 as part of Regenerative Design 2026, a month-long program at the Building Centre, London, exploring how architecture and design are responding to environmental and social change.

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Let’s face it, we photographers are incredibly self-critical and can easily get caught up comparing our images with those of way more experienced creatives. However, this year, a major photography awards contest wants to help nip imposter syndrome in the bud for first-time entrants.

Announced by the World Food Photography Awards sponsored by Tenderstem® Bimi® (WFPA), the 2027 edition of the contest will allow first-time entrants to enter their own category. According to WFPA, the “Newcomer Prize” has been created to make entering photography competitions “less daunting” and calm the nerves of beginner competitors.

Caroline Kenyon, founder of the WFPA, said: “Since the Awards began in 2011, it’s been really important to us to support and encourage photographers, whether professional or amateur, young or old.” Kenyon went on to explain that entrants have often told WFPA that being shortlisted “gave them the confidence to turn professional.”

Alongside the “Newcomer Award”, the 2027 WFPA will also feature a suite of prizes aimed at boosting winners’ creative skills and professional experience.

This includes a four-week residency at the Hugo Burge Foundation in Scotland, plus a £1,400 stipend (approximately $1,800 / AU$2,600), for the winner of the “Award for Innovation”. And for the winner of the “Food Portraiture” category, it also includes a one-to-one virtual portfolio review with James Davies, art direction and image lead at Waitrose.

David Loftus, chair of WFPA judges, said: “I’m delighted to see the Awards taking this positive step forward. I really hope photographers feel that these opportunities are valuable, meaningful, and genuinely supportive of them and their work.”

The 2027 WFPA welcomes professional and amateur photographers to submit images across a broad range of categories and styles featuring food, including travel, street, documentary, still life, and portraiture. For further information and to enter, visit the contest’s official website. Entries close February 7, 2027.

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It’s ironic when you think about it. Cities have never been more crowded with people. Yet for those who live in them, it's common to feel lonely and isolated.

London photographer Mark Fearnley has spent years exploring that tension through his lens. And now his work is presented a new book published by teNeues, titled The Art of Solitude.

The pictures here all follow a similar approach. A single, anonymous figure is framed against a huge architectural space: a sweep of concrete, a soaring atrium, a gleaming staircase. The people are tiny. The buildings are huge. The impact is profound.

The way I've described it here might sound depressing. But as you can see from the photographs on this page, the effect is actually pretty positive and uplifiting.

In the words of the press materials, this work “celebrates human resilience—transforming everyday spaces into poetic narratives that invite us to step out of shared isolation and rediscover connection and hope".

Sense of scale

Like so many photographers, Fearnley started out as painter, with his working including large-scale murals. Then around 10 years ago, he swapped his brush for a camera, and quickly saw the parallels between the two art forms in terms of composition, focus and use of light.

That painterly background is evident throughout in the book. These photographs are carefully constructed compositions, in which every line, curve and shadow has been placed with intent.

Take the picture at the top of this page, of a cyclist gliding beneath what looks like a forest of angled concrete ribs. This imposing structure is mirrored in the water below, so that the rider seems to be passing through the centre of a giant eye. It’s a masterclass in symmetry, and in timing.

The same dynamic applies equally well indoors. In the photograph below, a man in a suit stands in a white gallery, gazing up at a vast lattice of metal rods hanging above him like a storm cloud. The latter fills around two-thirds of the frame, so you feel its weight pressing down.

Scale is at the heart of Fearnley work. In one picture, the curves of a futuristic building rise like a frozen wave beneath a dramatic sky. The tiny hooded worker at its base, hose in hand, is easy to miss; but without him, this would be a striking architectural shot. With him, it becomes a meditation on the relationship between people and place.

Elsewhere, there’s real joy. In one shot, pigeons burst into flight in front of a gridded wall, while a lone figure walks towards it. The birds break up the rigid geometry and bring what might have felt like an austere scene to wonderful life.

With a foreword by filmmaker and photographer Sean Tucker, the timing of this book feels spot on. Urban loneliness has become a concern in cities around the world, and architecture is often part of the problem. These pictures don’t lecture us about any of that. Instead, they make us feel it.

The Art of Solitude: Street Photography by Mark Fearnley is published by teNeues, priced $90 / £60. It’s a 208-page hardback, out now internationally and published in the US on November 24.

The train station at night is a mysterious and, occasionally, weird place. The light can be more interesting than during the day, with more colors at play, there are people and there are trains. Don’t forget the architecture and leading lines as well.

Rather than walk around with a tripod and attract unwanted attention, I suggest you go guerilla, whipping your camera out when something catches your eye.

Be prepared to shoot fast and move on, which, in turn, means knowing where all the functions are on your camera. You’ll need to have one finger on the ISO, another on the aperture dial and be aware of the variable lighting.

Workflow process

In low light conditions there’s a case to be made for using Auto ISO. Not by me I hasten to add, there are only a few cases where I use it and this isn’t one of them.

The process I used for the main shot and ones on this page is as follows. Set the shooting mode to Aperture Priority. Dial in f/5.6 to start with.

Take a meter reading. How slow is the shutter speed at ISO 100 and do I have anything to rest the camera on that would help.

For the main shot, the answer was yes (a railing), which meant I only had to increase the ISO to 800 and open the aperture to f/4 to get a shutter speed of ⅛ sec.

Without support, that would be tricky, but resting, it was doable to avoid camera shake.

The front of the train was about 3.5m away, and that’s what I focussed on.

The choice of lens focal length has more effect on depth of field than aperture and at 16mm (the field of view is equivalent to 24mm) it meant that there was much more DoF available than if using a telephoto lens.

At the aperture of f/4 it meant that the depth of field came forwards 1.82m from the focus point, and went back from there to infinity. That covered the important part of the scene in focus. The point here is that the shorter the focal length of the lens, the wider aperture you can use in these low light conditions.

Metering options

The lighting in places like train stations at night is always going to be challenging so what works in terms of metering in one scene might not be the best idea in the next. Here are two examples.

Pattern metering
In these shots the light is mainly coming from the subway and the massive light in the middle. Centre-weighted metering was very overexposed, while Highlight metering was very underexposed, because of that big light.

The balanced option was to use Pattern/Evaluative metering but with -1.67 EV exposure compensation. Both images were shot using Pattern metering, the shot on the left has the exposure compensation, the one on the right didn’t.

Highlight metering
In these shots there’s a string of bright lights that runs through the scene, but they are quite small so while the overall exposure using Pattern metering is okay, notice how the LED lights and the areas around the lights and the reflection on the ground are over exposed in the photo on the right.

The solution here was Highlight metering and bringing the exposure back up in the rest of the image.

Before you go...

To shoot images like this you need a lightweight camera like the Nikon Z fc, a wide angle lens, and a high speed memory card.

Glance at this image without context, and you might imagine a forest of trees on an alien planet. In fact, you’re looking at the neurons inside a mouse’s brain.

This stunning image, by Kaelin Wulf and Rachel Flannery of the Allen Institute in Seattle, took third place in the Nikon Small World 2026 Photomicrography Competition. And the way they captured it is utterly remarkable.

Neurons, aka nerve cells, are the fundamental working units of the brain and nervous system. They use chemical and electrical signals to receive, process and transmit information around our minds and bodies.

Neurons in an expanded mouse brain

As you can imagine, neurons are very tiny indeed, and the branches connecting them are tinier still. So small they’re hard to separate even with a conventional light microscope.

To photograph them, then, the team at the Allen Institute – a non-profit that carries out large-scale research into the brain, cells and the immune system – couldn't just rely on magnification alone.

Instead, they used a technique called expansion microscopy. Quite simply, this means physically enlarging the tissue by embedding a sample of the brain in a special gel that makes it swell like a balloon.

Wulf and Flannery also used two other techniques.

The first was fluorescence, which makes the labelled neurons glow, so they stand out vividly against the dark. The second was light sheet imaging, which involves scanning the sample with a thin plane of light, and building up a sharp, 3D picture slice by slice.

By combining all these techniques, the image could then be photographed using a modest 5X objective lens. The resulting image? Both scientifically useful and stunningly beautiful.

Nikon Small World showcases the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope via photography and video, and is open to anyone with an interest in microscopy.

This year’s overall winner was Ole Bielfeldt’s never-before-seen view of an inkjet printer at work. You can view all the winning images on the Nikon Small World website.

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The extraordinary image titled Hidden Worlds has earned multi-award-winning photographer Imre Potyó the coveted title of European Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026, selected by the German Society for Nature Photography.

For 13 years, Potyó has captured hibernating bats in Hungary's Börzsöny Mountains, taking his camera to protected and mine tunnels that have restricted access. "This image speaks to a larger truth about the natural world: much of life exists beyond our immediate awareness, in places we seldom visit and among organisms we rarely notice," says Tom Gilks on behalf of the jury.

Potyó is not only a nature photographer but a scientist and environmental expert. He has won many prestigious international awards, including Hungary's Nature Photographer of the Year, the Grand Prix of Hungarian Nature Photography, the UK's Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and HIPA, the international photography competition from Dubai.

'Hidden Worlds' – GDT European Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Tech info
Gear: Nikon D7200 + Tamron AF 60mm f/2 Di II Macro
Exposure: 41secs, f/25, ISO 320

The story behind the still
Potyó explains: "A key characteristic of the lesser horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus hipposideros) is that, during hibernating it occasionally wakes and leaves its roost to hunt flying insects.

"In doing so, the bat leaves behind droppings that gradually accumulate into a continuous dark layer.

"In the beam of a torch, a whitish coating can be seen on the guano - a small pin mould thriving in this unusual habitat.

"Using a macro lens, I captured the mould in the foreground with the hibernating bats visible in the background.

"The photograph, a long exposure incorporating a focus shift, was taken during a controlled bat count and without disturbing the animals."

Discover all winning images on the GDT European Wildlife Photographer of the Year website.

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Pulitzer-award-winning photojournalist Jerry Gay’s passion for photography and firefighters started so early that, as far back as elementary school, he would jump on his bike with a Kodak Pony 4 to chase fire engines. Gay, a longtime photojournalist who won a 1975 Pulitzer for a black-and-white film photograph of exhausted firefighters, died on October 14 at the age of 79.

The photographer's passion for photographing firefighters likely stems from his grandfather, who was a firefighter. The passion that had him biking after fire trucks in elementary school turned into a career as a photojournalist who kept a police and fire call scanner under his bed and in his car.

Gay was working for the Seattle Times when he arrived on the scene of a house fire in 1974. But, when he arrived, he was too late to capture photos of the flames, as the fire had already largely been put out. Instead, Gay turned his lens to four firefighters resting against a muddy bank, exhaustion from the call written in their expressions.

“I took six or eight frames, all at once,” Gay said. “They all had a deep, reflective look. I could tell they were rethinking what they’d just been through.”

The photograph, which he titled A Lull in the Battle, was taken on a Nikon F and went on to earn a Pulitzer Prize in Spot News Photography in 1975.

The photographer was known for both his work with black-and-white film and connecting with people. As fellow Seattle-area photographer Dan Lamont said, “You wouldn’t expect to see a lot of landscapes from Jerry Gay. It was all about people.”

Two years after winning the Pulitzer, Gay photographed convicted serial killer Ted Bundy at the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. He was one of the few photographers allowed to photograph him after his arrest.

“There wasn’t any judgment,” Gay later said in an interview in 2018. “I was just photographing a person named Ted. I was getting to know him, so he would feel comfortable with the camera. I wanted to know him for who he was, and not for what had happened.”

In addition to taking many historic photographs, Gay also served as the president of the National Press Photographers Association.

In a tribute from Robinson newspapers, where he worked later in his career, his colleagues wrote that “Jerry taught us that a camera isn’t a tool for taking something from a subject – it is a bridge for sharing understanding, dignity, and warmth.”

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Once you reach your 50s like me, you find yourself saying the kind of stuff you hated your parents saying when you were a kid. For instance, whenever I see youngsters taking endless selfies for their Instagram, I inwardly tut and think, "How vacuous! How superficial!"

If I'm honest, this is mainly jealousy that I'm no longer young and pretty enough to want to share pictures of my own face. And really, it's not true that sharing pictures online is a waste of time. Sometimes, it can be a positive good for society.

Humans of New York is a great example. And now here's another. One man’s holiday selfie has literally helped science identify a new plant species.

Here's what happened. Back in 2021, plant enthusiast Jeremiah Harris was exploring the flooded forests around Inírida in the Guainía region of Colombia. With the help of local guides, his group found huge floating lily pads that were well over a metre across.

Harris, who runs a carnivorous plant nursery in Colorado Springs and holds the Guinness World Record for the largest Venus flytrap, assumed he was simply looking at Victoria amazonica, the best-known of the giant waterlilies. So he took some photographs, including a few selfies, and shared them on his Instagram.

The image was then spotted by Carlos Magdalena, a waterlily expert at London's famous Kew Gardens – and he immediately sensed something unusual about it. The issue was that no Victoria waterlily had ever been recorded in the Orinoco river basin, where the photo was taken.

Magdalena got in touch with Harris, sparking years of work that began with studying satellite imagery. Eventually, a team including scientists from Bogotá’s botanic garden and members of Indigenous communities set out to search the flooded jungle, but without success.

With just 10 hours to go before their flight home, though, their driver pointed them in the right direction, and they sailed overnight in darkness to reach a small lake where they found the waterlilies Harris had photographed.

The power of a picture

The plant has now been officially identified as a new species, Victoria colombiana in the journal Phytotaxa, with Harris listed as a co-author. The leaves are so big that the plants can be spotted on satellite images from space. It's not all good news, though: the plant is likely to be critically endangered as it's estimated only 30 to 50 exist in the wild, so work is under way to protect it.

For photographers, it’s a great reminder of the power of a picture, even one taken casually. Harris’s selfie wasn’t carefully composed. But it was clear, well located and shared publicly, and that was enough to lead to a major botanical achievement. As one of Harris’s followers commented under his post: “Everyone, more plant selfies!”

As Yamilex and Naiomy, two escaramuzas, posed for a portrait, a third, Katie, entered the background, the entire scene illuminated by an ethereal orange glow.

“I noticed Katie off to the side lunging her horse and thought it could make a beautiful composition to have all three in the frame, with the horse in motion,” said Constance Jaeggi O’Connor, who clicked the shutter.

Recently, O’Connor’s image was selected by the photography platform VSCO to feature in The Fifty. An ongoing project, The Fifty celebrates 50 photographers, one from each US state, by displaying an image from each photographer on a billboard in their home state.

Chosen from over 13,000 entries, O'Connor's frame will soon appear on a billboard in Colorado, where she resides.

O'Connor's gear and settings

Constance Jaeggi O’Connor has used a Contax 645 120mm film camera along with an 80mm and 35mm prime lenses for her project Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home. While she opts for film rated ISO 400 by the manufacturer, she typically set her in-camera ISO setting to 200 for richer, more colorful images.

The photographer captured the scene near Nampa, Idaho, while photographing the Reinas del Valle (Queens of the Valley) escaramuza, an all-female Mexican equestrian tradition in which riders perform intricate, high-speed maneuvers on horseback while riding sidesaddle.

As the sun hung low, creating a soft, warm light, and the stamping hooves kicked up dust that filled the smoky air, she framed the shot.

Shooting on a Contax 645, a medium-format autofocus SLR film camera, O’Connor rated her Fujifilm Pro 400H at ISO 200 in-camera and opted for a slower shutter speed to capture what she described as the “ideal” conditions.

“This was probably the best day of photographing of the entire project – which I worked on over the course of two years – and it was in part because of the light,” she explained.

The project had developed from an exhibition commission, Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home, which was previously on display at the National Cowgirl Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. “I was certainly interested at first because of the beauty of these women’s attire, and the spectacle of their performances,” said O’Connor.

But interviews with riders revealed a more complex story about identity, belonging and gender inequality within charrería – Mexico’s overarching national horseback tradition and sport.

Rooted in the image of the charro, a male horseback rancher, the tradition became a cornerstone of Mexican identity, with traits like bravery, dominance over animals and fearless bravado treated as badges of machismo.

However, O’Connor’s travels across the US, interviewing and photographing escaramuzas, revealed the all-female branch of charrería “pushing back” against machismo. “I realized what a complex and layered story this was, one that I really felt the need to help to tell,” she said.

The photographer hopes that, by being featured in The Fifty, her image will help tell the story of escaramuza and how these women are redefining the Mexican charrería tradition, albeit north of the border in the US.

“Working on this project opened up a whole new world to me, and helped me understand a culture and a tradition that I hope more people are able to discover thanks to this work,” she said.

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Here’s Seb Oakley, our analogue expert’s pick of the best film cameras.

A never-before-seen microscopic view of an inkjet printer printing words on paper has won the prestigious Nikon Small World 2026 Photomicrography Competition.

Young German photographer Ole Bielfeldt captured the image using a microscope objective in an unconventional way. Getting the shot right took some experimentation, as the printer's quick movements and tiny ink droplets were challenging to photograph sharply.

His award-winning image began with a simple question: how does a printer place ink onto paper with such precision? "I think it was super interesting because I didn’t know how it really worked," Bielfeldt said. "It’s like it was magic, and I didn’t understand it, but now I do."

How he captured the award-winning image

Capturing the ink droplets in motion was difficult. Bielfeldt's first attempts ran into two problems: the printhead moved too quickly to keep a small area in focus, while the droplets themselves were travelling too fast to be frozen by the camera's shutter speed.

"I thought I would need some expensive equipment. But it turned out I already had everything I needed," he said.

Bielfeldt modified the printer's setup so that the paper moved beneath a stationary printhead, making it easier to keep the area he wanted to photograph in focus.

He used a self-built imaging rig fitted with a microscope objective, and worked in a dark room, using a flash to freeze the ink droplets mid-air.

Why the image stood out

"Ole Bielfeldt’s winning image embodies what makes Nikon Small World so powerful: the intersection of microscope imaging, ingenuity, and artistry," said Eric Flem, senior manager, communications and CRM at Nikon Instruments.

"By using a microscope objective in a different way, he transformed a familiar object into something altogether new and previously unseen.

"It is a reminder that the microscope is not only a scientific tool but also a creative one, capable of expanding how we see and imagine the world around us."

The full list of winners can be found on the official competition website.

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Browse the best Nikon cameras and the best Nikon Z lenses. If you're shooting close-ups, here's our guide to the best camera for macro photography and the best macro lenses.

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

For as many legendary photographs have been taken in New York City, wildlife photography is not typically the reason that photographers are drawn to the city. But late in the evening, huddles of photographers have been gathering near Central Park in Manhattan’s Upper West Side for an unusual reason: A nesting family of barn owls.

While New York has had its fair share of famous, unusual birds like the escaped Eurasian eagle-owl Flaco, spotting barn owls in New York City is an unusual sight. According to experts at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the family of owls is likely the first recorded instance of the barn owl species nesting in Manhattan in modern history.

Bird-watchers have now spotted at least one adult owl and five fledglings, who appear to be living around a water tower. Before a resident spotted the owls and reported the sightings, residents in the area had noticed unusual screeching, including one resident who recalled first hearing the noise around mid-September.

New York City is just on the edge of the American Barn Owl’s usual range, which makes the nesting family a particularly unusual sight. According to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, eastern screech owls, barred owls, and northern saw-whet owls are more commonly spotted in Central Park.

Now, the barn owl family has become something of a New York City celebrity, with groups waiting in the area at dusk hoping to catch a glimpse of the owls in the unusual urban backdrop.

With the barn owl family’s celebrity status, however, come risks that the crowds disturb the owl family. Wildlife organizations, such as the International Owl Center, recommend keeping a distance and using long telephoto lenses to avoid disturbing the animals.

Photographers and bird watchers should move slowly and quietly around owls – never attempt to chase an owl.

Flash photography should never be used to photograph owls, as the light ruins the owls’ night vision.

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Read more tips on how to photograph barn owls. Or, take a look at the best lenses for bird photography.

Arriving at Mautohe Cathedral Cove, on New Zealand’s North Island, at sunrise, astrophotographer Evan McKay was “stunned by the beauty of the light.” Noticing the composition with Te Hoho Rock as the centerpiece, framed by the natural curvature of the beach, he planned his return for a night shoot, as explained on his website.

“I knew the Moon would be rising early in the night, leaving no time to photograph the scene under true starlight. Still, I hoped the landscape might look just as magical as it had at sunrise,” said McKay.

But nature had other ideas, with unanticipated solar activity producing beyond-magical conditions. “The Milky Way and the rising Moon were the elements I'd planned for, but the beautiful, radiant green airglow was an unexpected paid actor in the scene,” the photographer said.

Evan McKay's gear and settings

• Multilayer, 24-panel mosaic
• Exposure: Full-color sky: f/2, ISO 1600, 15 sec. Duoband: f/2, ISO 1600, 120 sec
• Equipment: Nikon Z6a, Sigma 40mm, Optolong L-Para filter
• Location: Cathedral Cove, New Zealand

The photographer explained that the vibrant airglow seemed to channel toward the rising Moon, “tying the whole scene together.” And the judges at this year’s Astrophotography Prize (AstroPrize) agreed, naming McKay the AstroPrize Photographer of the Year 2026.

The judges praised McKay’s image for its “exceptional detail and depth,” along with its strong sense of atmosphere and place, with McKay taking home 3,000(approximately£2,200/AU4,200) in winnings.

While McKay took the overall contest prize as well as the “Astro Landscape” category, winners were announced across three more categories. Polish photographer Marzena Rogozińska won the “Deep Space” category for her shot of intricate streams of interstellar dust within the Chameleon Dark Clouds of the constellation Chamaeleon.

Meanwhile, Jason Perry (US) placed first in the “Aurora” category with his frame of the Aurora Borealis dancing above the mountains of Å in Norway’s Lofoten Islands.

Last but certainly not least, Chinese astrophotographer Alpha Zang was named the winner of the “Remote Imaging” category for his scene of Galileo’s Finger (LBN 420), a finger-shaped cloud of cosmic dust located in the constellation Lacerta (the Lizard), at the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy.

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Here’s our photography expert Jamie Carter’s pick of the best cameras for astrophotography.

LCE Photographer of the Year 2027 is open for entries, and it’s free to enter, so you’ve no excuse not to throw your lens hood into the ring. The competition, run by popular UK-based camera retailer London Camera Exchange, runs from October 12, 2026 to January 20, 2027 and is open to anyone aged 18 or over, with prizes limited to residents of the UK.

What I’ve always liked about this competition is that it’s designed to be as accessible as possible. Not only is it free to enter, but it’s also not bogged down by endless restrictions. Images can be taken anywhere in the world, on almost any camera device (including smartphones and drones), and as you’d expect, AI-generated imagery is strictly prohibited.

Entrants are invited to submit one image per category, of which there are 14, ensuring that all major genres are catered for. This will once again include Emerging Talent and ‘People’s Choice’ categories, with the former dedicated to photography students studying in the UK, and the latter open to the voting public to crown their winner.

LCE POTY 2027: Categories...

• Action
• After Dark
• Birds
• Creative
• Emerging Talent
• Events
• Landscape
• Macro
• People’s Choice
• Pets
• Portrait
• Street
• Travel
• Wildlife

Prizes and judging panel

A total prize kitty worth £10,000 ($13,400)is up for grabs. Each category winner will receive £500 ($670) in LCE vouchers as well as a trophy, while the Emerging Talent winner’s place of study will also receive a further £500. The overall LCE Photographer of the Year will receive an additional £2,500 in LCE vouchers.

Entries can be submitted online or, thanks to a particularly charming quirk of the competition, in-person at any of LCE’s 26 stores. Finalists will be invited to the LCE Photographer of the Year awards ceremony at next year’s Photography & Video Show, taking place at ExCeL London from March 13 to 16, 2027. Their work will also be displayed in an exhibition at the show’s entrance.

The judging panel consists of four industry experts: SheClicks founder Angela Nicholson, award-winning pro and YouTuber Jimmy Cheng, acclaimed street photographer Peter Dench, and Digital Camera World’s very own content director and Bokeh Face: The Digital Camera World Podcast regular, Chris George.

According to the managing director of LCE, Lee Harasyn: “London Camera Exchange is celebrating its 70th anniversary in 2026, so we are aiming for this year’s competition to be our biggest and best yet.”

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Want more competitions to enter? All award-winning photographers started somewhere – enter these 10 photography contests to get your work noticed this October. And to find out more about last year's incredible LCE winner: This amateur photographer beat 14,500+ entries to win top prize with this playful portrait of a Vietnamese fisherman. Plus, check out the latest camera news.

Whether you're a seasoned photographer, a beginner just getting started or someone who loves capturing beautiful moments, submitting your images to photo competitions is one of the best ways to gain exposure and recognition.

Entering contests isn't just about winning – though prizes and publicity are great bonuses! – it's also a chance to dive into your archives, rediscover your best images and refine your personal style. Many photographers say that competitions were the stepping stone that helped them build a name, grow their audience or land their first big feature.

And with so many open calls across all genres, there's something for everyone. So, here's a list of photography competitions with open calls that are accepting submissions from October 2026 until January 2027. It's a small selection to spark inspiration, but there are countless others out there.

Insta360 Global Awards

Deadline: October 30

Fee: Free

Open to: Photographers and videographers of all levels

Requirement: Entries must be shot on Insta360 or Antigravity products

Format: Videos: 30sec-3min MP4/MOV, single image only under 20MB

Categories: Street, Travel, Life, Portrait, Sports, Night

Prizes: $150,000+ prize pool with over 100 winners to be announced

Environmental Photography Award

Deadline: November 01

Open to: Photographers of all levels

Fee: Free

Focus: Environmental photography that raises awareness of environmental protection and explores the relationship between humans and nature

Categories: Polar Regions, Forests, Ocean, Changemakers, Human vs Nature

Prizes: €8,000 in total grants; winners and shortlisted photographers will feature in the award's exhibition and book

IAPB World Sight Day Photo Competition

Deadline: November 18

Open to: Photographers of all levels

Fee: Free

Focus: Eye health and the role vision plays in everyday life, as part of IAPB's #LoveYourEyes campaign

Categories: Love Your Eyes, Love Your Child's Eyes, Love Your Eyes at Work, Love Health for All, Making the World See the Value of Vision (new for 2026)

Prize: $1,000 cash prize each for the professional stream winner and the amateur stream winner

World Sports Photography Awards

Deadline: November 23

Fee: Free

Open to: Photographers of all levels

Eligibility: Up to 10 images taken between December 2025 - November 2026

24 categories: American Football, Athletics, Baseball, Basketball, Combat Sports, Cricket, Cycling, Equestrian, Football, Golf, Gymnastics, Ice Hockey, Motor Sports, Nautical, Other, Racquet Sports, Rugby, Skate, Special, Swimming & Diving, Tennis, Urban & Extreme, Venues, Views & Crowds, Winter Sports

Prizes: Prizes are provided by sponsors of the World Sports Photography Awards, details TBA

Sony World Photography Awards

Deadline: November 27 (Student), January 5 (Youth + Single Images), January 12 (Series)

Fee: Free

Open to: Photographers of all levels

Competitions: Series (previously Professional competition), Single Image (previously Open competition), Student, Youth

Categories: up to 10 different categories depending on competition

Prizes: Cash prizes up to $25,000, top-tier Sony equipment, and global exhibition opportunities

Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Deadline: December 03

Fee: adult entrants may submit up to 25 images (£35 fee), ages 18–26: free entry (25 images), ages 17 and under: free entry (10 images)

Categories: 13 single-image categories; new category: Positive Action, three multiple-image categories and three Young WPY age groups

Prizes: Cash awards of up to £15,000 for the adult Grand Title winner and £2,00 for the Young WPY winner, plus trophies, certificates, publications in the WPY Portfolio book, invitations or trips to the London awards ceremony and opportunities for professional recognition

Concrete in Life

Deadline: December 04

Fee: Free to enter

Open: Photographers of all levels

Categories: Urban and Infrastructure, Concrete in Daily Life, Concrete Beauty and Design

Prizes: Overall winner will receive a top prize of $10,000, with other prizes of $5,000 and $2,500

The Tideway Prize

Deadline: December 31

Open to: UK photographers of all levels, with three age categories: Open, Youth (16-24), and School Student (ages 11-15)

Fee: Free

Theme: "Standing by the Thames" – photographs capturing the River Thames, including its people, wildlife, recreation, work, industry, architecture, infrastructure, and everyday life

Prizes: Open winner: £2,000 in photography vouchers; Youth winner: £1,000 in photography vouchers and a half-day photography masterclass with Matthew Joseph, and more

Oppo Photography Awards

Deadline: December 31

Open to: Photographers and videographers of all levels, shooting with Oppo, OnePlus or RealMe devices

Fee: Free

Theme: "Super Every Moment"

Categories: Me, Journey, Video, Zoom, Live, Snap

Prizes: $76,500 prize pool across 38 awards

LCE Photographer of the Year

Deadline: January 20

Open to: Photographers of all levels

Fee: Free to enter

Categories: 13 categories, from wildlife, to action and travel. The LCE POTY also features dedicated category for photography students to showcase their developing style.

Prizes: £10,000 prize fund

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For even more inspiration, browse the best photography awards and contests.

The long-running British Journal of Photography has announced that it is to stop printing its magazine after 172 years. Founded back in 1854, the BJP, as it is known by its readers, will now only be available in digital form.

"British Journal of Photography has changed many times, in its design, its frequency and the way it reaches readers, while its focus on photographers and their work has stayed consistent," says BJP's CEO and Creative Director Mike Moore in an email to its readers earlier this week.

"We're writing to share the latest of those changes: from this week and for the time being, BJP will be published in digital form only. The cost of printing a magazine and sending it around the world has risen beyond what we can sustain right now. Rather than put the magazine at risk, we've paused our print edition".d

For someone like me, who used to read The British of Journal of Photography every week like many who worked in the photo industry or who were professional photographers, the news is a sad blow. But it is one that follows a trend of physical magazines becoming unprofitable that has been going on for some time.

At Future Publishing, where I work, we have sadly had to close some of our photography titles in recent years. Some of the best-known titles in the history of photographic publishing have been lost forever, such as Popular Photography, which stopped printing after 70 years in 2017, and Practical Photography, which closed in 2020 after a 61-year run.

The BJP ceased being published as a weekly in 2010, switching to a monthly that abandoned its focus on trade news. This format will continue to be available 12 times a year in digital form. The BJP's current owners, 1854 Media, will also continue with its paid-for photo competitions such as the annual Portrait of Britain awards.

The Center of the Cosmos is an ultra-wide panorama of one of the world's most photographed places: Times Square in New York. Photographer Xuecheng Liu captured the iconic intersection from an unusual aerial perspective, with illuminated streets and buildings radiating outwards in a galaxy-like pattern.

His image won the Open Built Environment / Architecture category at the world's largest competition dedicated to panoramic photography – Epson International Pano Awards.

Lui is known for his unique attempt to make the familiar look unfamiliar. His work received international recognition, for example, at the Sony World Photography Awards. He was also awarded the Weibo Landscape Photographer of the Year title. Now Lui adds another prestigious honor to his growing list of awards.

The award-winning image 'Center of the Cosmos'

Liu explain, "Times Square is one of the most photographed places in the world, so my challenge was to find a perspective that could make such a familiar place feel unfamiliar again.

"From above, the dense architecture, streets, and illuminated billboards seem to radiate around the square.

"I stitched together 25 frames to create an ultra-wide aerial panorama, revealing the scale and density of the skyscrapers surrounding Times Square.

"I wanted the panorama to immerse the viewer in the vast expanse of the city, with countless points of light resembling stars surrounding the centre of a galaxy."

The Epson International Pano Awards

Founded in 2019, the Epson International Pano Awards remain the world's largest competition devoted exclusively to panoramic photography.

The 2026 edition drew thousands of entries across Nature/Landscape, Built Environment, VR/360° and Aerial categories, celebrating both professional and amateur photographers. Explore the 2026 winning gallery by visiting the Pano Awards website.

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

A Reddit user has shared how they “tricked” their camera into essentially becoming a star tracker, too, with the resulting image of the Milky Way turning out surprisingly well.

Reddit user Prestigious-Ad-5238 was shooting with an OM System OM-5 Micro Four Thirds (MFT) camera using the Handheld High-Res Shot (HHHR) mode. HHHR is a built-in OM-5 function that enables a user to shoot eight RAW or JPEG files, with the camera stitching them together automatically to create a single 50MP file.

As a handheld mode, the camera expects camera-body shake and, therefore, looks for contrast points in the frame – such as stars – to align all eight images across the sequence.

However, as Prestigious-Ad-5238 was photographing the Milky Way using a 30-second shutter speed, they mounted the camera on a tripod, meaning there was no camera shake, creating a perfectly aligned image of the galaxy. “It basically tricks the camera into tracking the stars for you!” said the astrophotographer.

Prestigious-Ad-5238's gear and settings

• OM System OM-5
• TTartisan 7.5mm
• f/2 | 30 sec | (8x30s HHR) | ISO 2000

While the OM-5 also features a Tripod High Res Shot (THR) mode, this wouldn't have created the same result. THR also captures eight frames and automatically stitches them together, albeit into an even higher-resolution 80MP final image.

But as the functionality expects the camera to be mounted on a tripod, it does not account for any camera shake and, therefore, does not anchor all images along a contrast point within the frame.

Watch: astrophotographer explain how Handheld Hi-Res mode works on the OM-5

This is problematic for astrophotographers wanting clean images without star trails, because the rotation of the Earth would turn stars into streaks of light when using THR mode and a slow shutter speed.

“The whole process takes about five minutes of camera work, so actually handholding it is impossible,” said Prestigious-Ad-5238. “The trick is that you must use the Handheld Hi-Res mode while mounted on the tripod,” they reiterated.

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Here's our astrophotography expert, James Carter's, take on the best cameras for astrophotography.

The World's largest competition dedicated to panoramic photography – Epson International Pano Awards – has announced its winners, with Spanish photographer Daniel Viñé Garcia taking home the Open Photographer of the Year title.

His winning image, The Sleeping Giant, captures a spectacular sunset over Chile's Parinacota Volcano, neighbouring Pomerape and the surrounding high-altitude lakes, all bathed in atmospheric purple and orange hues,

But capturing this extraordinary scene was no easy feat. Garcia spent three days and three nights at high altitude, waiting for the right conditions to photograph the landscape. His patience paid off when he caught one of the final bursts of sunlight illuminating the volcanic peaks.

Open Photographer of the Year

The Sleeping Giant is a 360-degree aerial panorama assembled from 33 individual exposures. Garcia carefully refined the framing to focus the final composition on what mattered most: the volcanoes, the light and the landscape's shapes.

He explains, "Parinacota Volcano was one of the main photographic goals of my trip to Chile.

"Rising to more than 6,300 metres, its distinctive snow-covered cone has an almost perfect symmetry that immediately reminded me of volcanoes such as Mount Fuji.

"Beside it stands Pomerape, another giant reaching more than 6,200 metres, together forming one of the most impressive landscapes I encountered during the journey.

"After allowing time for proper acclimatisation, I spent three days and three nights at around 4,500 metres above sea level, giving myself the best possible chance of photographing the area under ideal conditions."

The Epson International Pano Awards

Founded in 2019, the Epson International Pano Awards remain the world's largest competition devoted exclusively to panoramic photography.

The 2026 edition drew thousands of entries across Nature/Landscape, Built Environment, VR/360° and Aerial categories, celebrating both professional and amateur photographers. Explore the 2026 winning gallery by visiting the Pano Awards website.

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Browse the best 360 cameras and the best fisheye lenses.

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

The photo above shows a scene from a movie which was made an entire century ago. And while it's just a single frame, you can see exactly why it's still entrancing audiences today.

A wild-haired and heavily bearded man is signing a document with a quill. Beside him, a hooded figure has the countenance of a rogue landlord waiting for you to initial the small print. And in a sense, he is: this is the moment a scholar signs away his soul to the devil.

The image comes from Faust, a 1926 silent movie directed by German director FW Murnau. To mark its centenary this year, MUBI Editions has just published The Faust Bible: The Making of FW Murnau’s Masterpiece, a book built around an archive of photographs that was once assumed to be lost forever.

These pictures offer a rare glimpse into how filmmakers created nightmares long before most of us were born, with nothing in the way of digital tech, but a whole lot of ladders, smoke, fur, papier-mâché and ingenuity taking its place.

Lost and found

This is a book that's literally 100 years in the making. Once the original film had wrapped, crew members Robert Herlth, Carl Hoffmann and Walter Röhrig assembled a visual diary of around 400 photos and illustrations that documented its creation. They presented it to Murnau as a souvenir before he left Germany for Hollywood.

The album then vanished for decades and was thought to have been destroyed in the Second World War. It eventually resurfaced and was purchased by la Cinémathèque française in Paris in 2017. After a painstakingly restoration, it's now being published for general consumption for the first time.

These images are eerie and endearing in equal measure. In one, a skeletal rider with flowing white hair sits atop an equally grotesque steed, flanked by a grim-faced man in armour. It would look terrifying, were it not for the presence of stepladders and technicians in work coats assembling the scene.

In another, two men balance on a plank laid between a ladder and a trestle, above the peak of a model mountain, as fake clouds float around them. The artifice is obvious, but you can see how effective and visceral it would have looked in the final film.

Another captures actor Emil Jannings as Mephisto, caught mid-lunge in satin robes, rapier in hand, his make-up drawn into a widow’s peak. Beside him, F.W. Murnau directs the action in a white coat and hat. Theatrical menace on one side, workaday practicality on the other.

One of the most fascinating images shows the filming itself. The director sits beside a hulking wooden camera on a tripod, megaphone in hand, while a colleague bends to peer through the viewfinder. It’s light years away from today’s mirrorless rigs, yet at a basic level, the job of framing a shot and shouting instructions hasn’t changed much at all.

The Faust Bible: The Making of FW Murnau’s Masterpiece is published by MUBI Editions, priced $100 / £75, and available from mubieditions.com and bookshops worldwide. Faust (1926) is now streaming on MUBI, with live-scored screenings at the Filmmuseum München on October 25 and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles on November 1.

In wildlife photography, we often see photos depicting the photographer’s or a hunting animal’s perspective. But this unique image of a hungry polar bear, captured from a seal’s perspective, is nothing short of a nightmarish scene.

The frame was created by Norwegian photographer Audun Rikardsen, who rigged a Canon EOS 6D DSLR directly beneath a seal’s breathing hole on Arctic drift ice, with a motion sensor also set up to fire the shutter.

A few hours later, a hungry polar bear stuck its head in, searching for its next meal, capturing what can only be described as the last thing a seal would ever want to see.

Rikardsen's gear and settings

• Canon EOS 6D
• Canon EF 14mm f/2.8L II USM
• f/9

Rikardsen’s image, aptly titled A Seal’s Nightmare, was recently crowned Image of the Year at the Our Nature Photo & Video Award 2026.

The photographer told the contest organizers that having already waited eight hours for the bear to arrive and trigger the motion sensor, the animal then bedded down next to the hole for a nine-hour kip. This left Rikardsen no choice but to wait for the polar bear to awaken from its slumber to retrieve his camera.

At the 2026 Our Nature Awards, winners were announced across a range of wildlife photography categories.

In the “Stories or Portfolio” category, Belgian photojournalist Alain Schroeder took first place. His series documented daily life at a clinic operated by the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP), Indonesia, where workers help rehabilitate and prepare rescued, injured, and formerly captive orangutans for return to the wild.

The photographer explained that expansion of palm oil and rubber plantations, logging, road construction, mining and hunting are forcing increasing numbers of orangutans out of their natural environment.

And in the “Our Nature – Air” category, Czech photographer Jan Pokluda placed first with a frame depicting a great spotted woodpecker feeding its chick in what he told the contest organizers was an “unusually low” nesting cavity in the trunk of an old oak tree.

All of the winners from this year’s Our Nature Photo & Video Award 2026 can be seen on the contest’s official website. Speaking about his winning image, Audun Rikardsen said: “When I finally saw the image, I knew I had captured the polar bear photograph I had dreamed of for years.”

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Here’s our pick of the best cameras for wildlife photography. And we’ve also compiled our list of the best underwater housings for cameras and phones.