Wildlife photographer Rodrigo González Pairoa faced challenges when capturing birds in Albatross Islet, Magallanes and Chilean Antarctica, Chile. Now his image of a Black-browed Albatross, shot with a full-frame DSLR that was released 14 years ago, was honored as the winner of the Birds Without Borders category in the 2026 Audubon Photography Awards.

Pairoa recalls the situation, "It was almost ​​​​impossible to keep the camera steady. In the remote Almirantazgo Sound, the biting cold, ever-changing light, and unpredictable wind forced me to readjust my stance and refocus after every blast of photo."

The albatross was calm and Pairoa was able to approach it slowly.

He explains, "In an almost comical moment, it tilted its head, as if observing me with the same curiosity with which I was photographing it. I filled the frame with its face, revealing the dark outline around its eye and the sculptural texture of its plumage.

"In that brief moment, the wind ceased.

"The resulting image captures a fleeting moment of silent, intimate connection with an iconic species of the Southern Seas. I hope that whoever views it feels that same sense of ​​​​closeness."

Birds Without Borders Winner

Contest: Chile and Colombia
Species: Black-browed Albatross
Location: Albatross Islet, Magallanes and Chilean Antarctica, Chile
Gear: Nikon D600 + Nikon AF-S 300mm f/4D IF-ED
Exposure: 1/1600 sec, f/11, ISO 400

Bird Lore
The Black-browed Albatross is one of the smaller and most widespread albatross species. It breeds on islands in the sub-Antarctic and southern oceans, and ranges at sea as far south as the Antarctic continent and north to offshore waters of Brazil and Australia.

While the birds might seem free to wander the seas of the world, studies show that individuals from different nesting colonies tend to migrate to different regions of the ocean outside the breeding season. Those from South Georgia Island, for example, mostly move to waters off southern Africa, while those from the Falklands favor the seas east of South America.

Judge’s Take (Claudio Contreras Koob)
"This image caught the judges’ attention because it offers an almost abstract view of the albatross.

"The skillful use of a modest background, which does not distract the viewer, allows the eye to instead follow the lines and tones that lead us to the albatross’s piercing gaze, the focal point of the composition."

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

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

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 competitions 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 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 September 2026 until February 2027. It's a small selection to spark inspiration, but there are countless others out there...

The 2026 Arnold Newman Prize

Deadline: September 23

Open to: Photographers of all levels aged 18 years and older

Fee: $65

Focus: New Directions in Photographic Portraiture

Prizes: $20,000 Grand prize, three finalists receive a $500 stipend each, all artists recognized in the Top Ten will be included in the online exhibitions hosted by Maine Media, Top Ten will be featured in a professionally produced publication celebrating the work of the Prize recipient, three Finalists, and six additional photographers recognized in the Top Ten.

AAP Magazine #61: Street

Deadline: September 29

Open to: Photographers of all levels

Fee: Early bird: $30 for 3 images, Regular: $35

Focus: Street photography

Prizes: $1,000 in cash awards, publication in AAP Magazine #61, extensive press coverage, and international exposure

Botanical Photographer of the Year

Deadline: September 30

Open to: Photographers of all levels

Fee: Free

Focus: Britain and Ireland's wild plants

Categories: Intrepid: Plants in wild, hard-to-reach, or dramatic landscapes, Inquisitive: Close-up shots highlighting the fascinating and minute features that are often used in ID, Inclusive: People interacting with plants, urban botany, or community recording, Open: For entries that fall outside the above.

Special: Young Botanical Photographer of the Year for an entry into any category, aged 18 or under

Prizes: To be announced

Fine Art Photography Awards

Deadline: Early deadline: October 11, Final deadline: February 14

Fee: Amateur: Early deadline: 19$ single image, $24 series; Professional: $24 single image, $29 series, category fee: $10

Open to: Photographers of all levels

Amateur & Professional categories: Abstract, Architecture, Conceptual, Experimental, Fashion, Fine Art, Landscape, Nature, Night Photography, Nudes, Open Theme, Panoramic, People, Photojournalism, Photomanipulation, Portrait, Seascape, Street Photography, Travel, Wildlife / Animals

Prizes: Amateur: Grand Prize $2,000, Professional: Grand Prize $3,000

Travel Photographer of the Year

Deadline: October 12

Open to: Photographers of all levels

Fee: From £14, entry is FREE for young photographers aged 18 and under

Portfolio categories: Adventures & Journeys, Cultures, Traditions & Celebrations, Landscapes – Nature & Urban, Wildlife, Sealife, Birdlife

One Shot categories: In Nature, People of the World, Street, Travel in Black & White,

Special Awards: Travel Photographer of the Year, Young Travel Photographer of the Year, Travel Image of the Year, Rising Talent Award, People’s Choice Award

Prizes: Cash prizes from £1,000 to £200, industry portfolio reviews, media exposure, and more

Wellcome Photography Prize

Deadline: October 21

Open to: Photographers of all levels

Fee: Free

Focus: Issues on health, science, and the human experience

Categories: Striking solo photography, A storytelling series, The marvels of scientific and medical imaging

Prize: £10,000 for each Category Winner, 22 entries from across the three categories will be awarded £1,000 each, extensive international media coverage

Insta 360 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

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

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

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If you shoot portraits for a living, August Sander is a name you should know. His decades-long People of the 20th Century, for one, is a landmark in the discipline's history.

An attempt to catalogue a cross-section of society by trade and social type, it set the template that Diane Arbus, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and ultimately portraiture in general would build from.

If, for instance, you've ever shot a series of subjects against the same plain background, in the same pose, to emphasise the differences between them, you're standing on Sander's shoulders.

Precisely because he is so legendary as a portraitist, though, the breadth of his work as a whole is often overlooked. And so seeing images like those on this page – a hard working, weathered farming couple, an outlandish artistic trio, a hand gripping a walking stick – is a breath of fresh air.

They form part of a new exhibition marking the 150th anniversary of his birth. August Sander: On His 150th Birthday draws mainly on the foundation's own holdings, which have housed the world's biggest Sander archive since 1992.

Alongside his famous portraits, visitors also get to experience early images from his Linz period and commissioned photographs from the Westerwald region that few people have ever seen.

It is, in short, a chance to see just how many different registers Sander could work in. Formal document, social observation, personal affection; all united by an eye for structure that made even a farming couple leaning on hoes look epic.

Substance over style

What quick becomes clear is that Sander's genius was never really about a fixed style, so much as a fixed method applied to constantly shifting subjects.

A group of musicians, gathered together with their instruments and dogs, has none of the stiffness you'd expect from studio work of the period; a mother and child portrait evokes real tenderness within the formal pose. Elsewhere, artists pose in an almost confrontational manner that could pass for a still from a much later decade.

Sander wasn't just cataloguing "German types" but also paying close attention to everyone in front of him. This extended to small details, as seen in two of the featured series, Studien, der Mensch (Studies, the Human Being) and Mensch und Maschine (Man and Machine), where the hand recurs as a central motif.

Cologne, where Sander lived and worked for more than 30 years, gets attention too: a newly exhibited group of images, made between 1930 and 1942/43, documents his own family home and studio. A companion publication from Schirmer/Mosel pairs this body of work with six radio talks Sander wrote and delivered for West German Radio in 1931; all six play in the exhibition space.

The show also touches on Sander's single trip abroad, several weeks in Sardinia in 1927 with the writer Ludwig Mathar, while a monitor presentation pairs his Rhine and Siebengebirge landscapes with recent images by photographer Gerhard Fleischer, who's spent years since 2014 tracking down Sander's work.

August Sander: On His 150th Birthday runs at Die Photographische Sammlung/Stiftung Kultur der Sparkasse KölnBonn, Cologne, until 24 January. Admission is €7.50 (concessions €4.50), with free entry on the first Thursday of every month.

The total solar eclipse on August 02 2027 will bring 6 minutes and 22 seconds of totality – the longest until 2114 – to Luxor, the temple-strewn capital of ancient Egypt. But while media attention will focus on Luxor and the Nile, photographers actually have thousands of miles of eclipse track to choose from – including many well-known holiday locations.

On August 02, the moon’s shadow will cross southern Spain and Gibraltar before sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East.

With favorable clear-sky prospects across much of the route, maximum duration needn’t be the priority. Solar altitude, landscape, heat, accessibility and mobility could all matter more than another few seconds of totality.

For photographers, there’s only one way to plan an eclipse trip – start with the photograph you want to come home with.

How to plan for the 2027 total solar eclipse

If you want to photograph the totally-eclipsed sun, there is one non-negotiable rule: you must be inside the path of totality. A 99% partial solar eclipse is not remotely the same thing – and will not give you the full experience or the photographic opportunities.

However, you don’t necessarily need to be precisely on the centerline. Moving toward the edge of the path can cost surprisingly little duration while putting you somewhere with better landscape, clearer weather prospects, or easier road access.

Before booking anything, decide what photograph you want. Use eclipse maps (such as Xavier Jubier’s Interactive Google Map) alongside apps such as The Photographer’s Ephemeris (which has a highly detailed Solar Eclipse Simulator), PhotoPills or PlanItPro to investigate the altitude and azimuth of the sun from potential locations.

Then work backward from your intended foreground. If you want a castle, mountain, mosque or ancient temple beneath the eclipsed sun, where do you actually need to stand? It could be hundreds of meters or even several kilometers away.

Solar altitude matters, especially in 2027. Around the Strait of Gibraltar, the eclipsed sun will be roughly 38° above the southeast horizon. By Luxor, it will be around 82° high – almost overhead.

That’s awkward if you imagined the eclipsed sun hanging above an Egyptian temple. It’s also awkward for telephoto images of the corona, because it means cameras will need to point almost vertically upward in temperatures exceeding 104°F / 40°C.

Make sure your tripod head can support a long lens at a steep angle, shade equipment before totality, keep spare batteries cool, and watch for overheating warnings, particularly when shooting video.

Above all, scout your composition, not just your location. If possible, arrive a few days early and visit prospective sites at approximately the same time of day as totality.

Where to photograph the 2027 total solar eclipse: Spain

For European photographers, southern Spain is the easy option. Totality is shorter than in North Africa, but the sun is lower and in the southeast, making it easier to combine with beaches, mountains, villages and the ocean. Infrastructure, road access and the ability to drive in with your own equipment are other major advantages.

Málaga (1 min 54 secs).
Totality is relatively short, but excellent transport links, plentiful accommodation and a long Mediterranean waterfront make this one of the easiest places from which to photograph the eclipse.

Cádiz (2 mins 56 secs).
One of Europe’s oldest cities sits on a narrow peninsula almost surrounded by the Atlantic, with its historic skyline, waterfront and beaches offering plenty of potential foregrounds.

Tarifa (4 mins 40 secs).
Close to the centerline and overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar towards Morocco, Tarifa combines a long totality with beaches, mountains and seascapes.

Where to photograph the 2027 total solar eclipse: Morocco

Morocco combines almost five minutes of totality with a relatively low sun, making its coastlines, medinas and Rif Mountains particularly attractive for environmental eclipse photography.

Tangier (4 mins 50 secs).
A historic port overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar, with the medina, coastline and views towards Spain.

Tétouan (4 mins 51 secs).
Its UNESCO-listed medina, whitewashed architecture and proximity to the Rif Mountains offer plenty of possibilities for combining totality with a distinctive Moroccan foreground.

Chefchaouen (3 mins 39 secs).
You sacrifice more than a minute compared with Tangier, but the famous blue-painted city and dramatic Rif Mountains could make that an attractive trade for photographers.

Where to photograph the 2027 total solar eclipse: Algeria

Algeria could suit photographers looking for landscapes and locations far removed from the major eclipse-tour circuits. Oran is the obvious starting point because it is a major coastal city with ferry links to Spain, while locations farther inland are closer to the centerline.

Oran (5 mins 9 secs).
Algeria’s second-largest city sits on the Mediterranean coast and offers a relatively practical base, with coastal scenery, Santa Cruz fort above, and more than five minutes of totality.

Mostaganem (5 mins 7 secs).
Farther east along the Mediterranean coast, this less-visited city combines a long totality with beaches, cliffs and coastal landscapes.

M’Sila (5 mins 22 secs).
Head inland for a longer eclipse, increasingly arid scenery and excellent prospects for clear skies — an interesting option for photographers prioritizing the eclipse over tourism infrastructure.

Where to photograph the 2027 total solar eclipse: Tunisia

Tunisia offers a choice between Star Wars desert landscapes near the southern edge of the path and much longer totality around Sfax on the Mediterranean coast.

Tozeur (1 min 43 secs).
Totality is relatively brief, but the surrounding desert contains some of Tunisia’s most famous Star Wars locations, including the nearby Mos Espa sets.

Sidi Bouhlel (3 mins 9 secs).
Better known to movie fans as “Star Wars Canyon,” its rugged desert landscape could provide one of the most distinctive eclipse foregrounds anywhere along the path.

Sfax (5 mins 41 secs).
Tunisia’s second-largest city combines almost six minutes of totality with a Mediterranean location, good infrastructure and excellent prospects for clear skies.

Where to photograph the 2027 total solar eclipse: Egypt

For sheer spectacle — as well as bragging rights — Egypt will be impossible to beat. The path crosses the Nile Valley near Luxor, where totality lasts about 6 mins 22 secs beneath some of the most reliable clear skies on the eclipse track. Dust, extreme heat and a throng of humanity may be bigger concerns than clouds.

Six minutes of totality is an extraordinary luxury. There will still be the usual scramble around the diamond rings and Baily’s beads, but plenty of time between them to photograph the corona, stop shooting and simply look up.

However, Luxor may not be the best place in Egypt for photographers. It will be exceptionally busy — accommodation is already in incredibly high demand and access to sites such as Karnak and the Valley of the Kings will likely be restricted. Don’t plan your photography around setting up a tripod inside a famous archaeological site.

Many visitors will watch from Nile cruise boats, but a moving, vibrating platform isn’t ideal for long-lens photography. Nearby boats could also mean engines, music, announcements and artificial lights during totality.

The path covers a long stretch of the Nile Valley, so consider looking beyond Luxor. Esna and Edfu have major temples and lie inside the path, while Kom Ombo is closer to its southern edge. All could be quieter alternatives, although transport and access will require careful planning.

Another catch awaits anyone dreaming of the eclipsed sun hanging above an Egyptian temple. Around Luxor, the sun will be about 82 degrees high, almost overhead. A conventional telephoto composition of temple-plus-eclipse is therefore unlikely — you may need to move a considerable distance from the monument or use an extremely wide lens to include both.

Alternatively, Egypt could be perfect for a 360-degree camera. Put one on a tripod, start recording before totality and leave it alone. It can capture the approaching shadow, changing landscape, sunset-like horizon and reactions around you, and you can reframe the footage afterward. Best of all, there’s nothing to operate during totality.

Luxor (6 mins 22 secs).
The headline destination, with maximum-duration totality, exceptionally favorable clear-sky prospects and some of the world’s most famous ancient monuments — but expect huge crowds.

Siwa Oasis (5 mins 31 secs).
Deep in Egypt’s Western Desert near the Libyan border, Siwa offers palm groves, salt lakes, dunes and desert landscapes beneath more than five minutes of totality — a compelling alternative to the crowds of the Nile Valley.

Edfu (about 5 mins 40 secs).
South of Luxor and home to the remarkably well-preserved Temple of Horus, Edfu combines a long totality with an extraordinary ancient Egyptian setting.

Plan to experience the eclipse

A total solar eclipse is one of photography’s most alluring subjects because the most memorable image may not be the technically perfect close-up of the corona. It could be a wide-angle frame showing the landscape plunged into twilight, a photograph of someone’s reaction, a 360-degree recording of the moon’s shadow arriving, or a creative composition yet to be dreamed up.

Whatever destination you choose, arrive with a plan – and preferably a simple one. Know exactly where the sun will be, scout your location, endlessly rehearse your equipment, and automate as much as you can. Always have a Plan B in case of cloud.

Plan the photographs now, then book your flights and accommodation as soon as possible. But the priority always has to be the same – when the moon’s shadow arrives on August 2, 2027, you should spend as little time as possible operating cameras and as much as possible looking up. However, with such a long totality to play with this time, savvy eclipse photographers could be in for the eclipse of a lifetime.

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Alina Marazzi's The Girl with the Leica opened at the Venice Film Festial this month, and most of the coverage so far has focused on what it gets right and wrong as a biopic.

The mannered performances, the jazz-age dance numbers, the tangle of lovers and émigré friends circling Emilia Schüle's Gerda Taro; all good things for a film reviewer to explore.

But as a writer for Digital Camera World, I'm more interested in a detail buried in the plot that might matter more to anyone who's ever taken a photograph and had it uncredited.

Here it is in a nutshell. Gerda Taro, a refugee from Nazi Germany, and André Friedmann, a Hungarian Jewish émigré, photographed the Spanish Civil War together in the 1930s. They decided that their work would sell better under an invented American name: Robert Capa.

Friedmann eventually kept the name for himself and became one of the most famous photojournalists of the century. Taro died in 1937, aged 26, run over by a tank during the retreat from Brunete.

For 70 years after that, a meaningful chunk of what Taro had shot stayed filed under Friedmann's name, in his archive, only adding to his legend.

Why Robert Capa?

At the film reflects, the pair selected "Robert Capa" with care. In the drama, we see Taro and Friedmann explaining to their friends that Jewish names hurt their sales, while more "marketable" ones improved their fees and assignments. So they constructed one. Confident, glamorous and entirely fictional.

It worked. Picture editors bought it, readers bought it and eventually history bought it, too, crediting one invented man for two real photographers' work, long after only one of them was left alive.

For anyone who's ever argued over a shared credit line, or had a picture desk shorten "additional photography by" down to nothing, it's a historic version of a familiar problem.

A byline is supposed to be a matter of fact. Here it was more like a marketing decision, made under pressure by two people trying to survive as Jews in Europe. And yet long after the war was over, no one felt bothered enough to correct the record.

Then in 2007 in Mexico City, three boxes of negatives, misplaced for decades, finally surfaced.

Once those negatives had been physically examined, frame by frame, historians were able to work out which "Robert Capa" images were shot on Taro's camera and which on Friedmann's. This was serious forensic archival work, seven decades after the fact.

Marazzi's film dramatizes the moment this attribution issue was created: Europe in the mid-1930s, when a joint invention felt more like a survival tactic than an erasure.

I haven't yet seen the movie myself yet, but Lee Marshall's review for Screen Daily argues that the film's impressionistic style keeps Taro 'beyond our reach', even as it tries to restore her.

Perhaps that's fitting for the woman who shot some of photography's most famous work, but whose name spent 70 years failing to get the recognition it deserved.

The Girl with the Leica doesn't yet have a theatrical release date. It will next be featured as part of Filmfest Hamburg on September 29 in Germany. Find out more at the film's official website.

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When young photographer Juan David Camacho Márquez headed into the woods in El Queremal, Valle del Cauca, Colombia, to photograph birds, he hoped he might capture a species he had spent years trying to photograph. Little did he know, he was about to get his dream shot.

Juan's striking image of a Canada Warbler perched above a delicate spiderweb has now been named the Youth winner in the 2026 Audubon Photography Awards.

"I was walking through the woods with a group of birding friends one cloudy morning when I came across a Plain-backed Antpitta – a lifer for me and one of the first records of the species for the area," he explains. "With that sighting, my day was already a success, but then I saw​​​​ this Canada Warbler."

Juan adds, "I took a photo, but it was only when I looked at it later that I noticed the perfect dew-covered spiderweb hanging beneath the branch. The bird seems to be looking at the web, creating a natural harmony.

"For three years, I had tried many times to get a decent photo of this species, but I hadn’t yet succeeded. What you see before you is a dream fulfilled."

Youth Winner

Contest: Chile and Colombia
Species: Canada Warbler
Location: El Queremal, Valle del Cauca, Colombia
Gear: Sony A6700 + Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS
Exposure: 1/320 sec, f/6.3, ISO 6400

Bird Lore
Found in its namesake nation for less than half the year, the Canada Warbler is a long-distance migrant. It spends the nonbreeding season mostly in South America at middle elevations in the Andes, where it largely sticks to dense understory of rain forest and cloud forest.

It will sometimes join with flocks of other migrant or resident birds – especially those that follow swarms of army ants. The Canada Warbler then seizes the chance to grab smaller insects that the ants scare up.

Judge’s Take (Sebastian Herzog)
"Capturing this intriguing composition of an adult male Canada Warbler – a migratory species that rarely stays still – requires shooting at just the right moment, with a very sharp focus and the ideal depth of field.

"Here, the bird seems to pause for a second in its constant search for food to gaze at a spiderweb. The raindrops caught on the web shine and show off the web's unique geometry. "

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

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Glance at this image momentarily and you get an instant sense of how this bird on the left is feeling. Fierce. Defiant. Ready to take on all comers.

That open beak, that unblinking stare. It has "apex predator readying for battle" written all over it. Well, that's what I thought anyway. Turns out I was totally wrong.

According to the Italian photographer who took it, Philipp Egger, "the open-beaked chick appears fierce, almost defiant, but the call is about hunger." No one is squaring up for a fight. Just asking for dinner.

The photograph, titled Born of Silence, won the Winged Life category at the California Academy of Sciences' 13th annual BigPicture: Natural World Photography Competition.

It shows two Eurasian eagle owl chicks at a nesting site near Prad am Stilfserjoch in Italy's South Tyrol; so close together their outlines briefly merge into one shape.

The importance of patience

Egger has photographed this same site across many consecutive generations of owls, which is how he got close enough to notice the contrast between the two siblings in the first place. And that contrast is certainly profound.

As Egger puts it: "The sibling seems withdrawn, eyes half closed, already embodying the calm intensity that defines the species. At this age, the birds are still covered in soft down, yet their features already carry the structure and presence of adult predators."

Observing the nesting site for so long has enabled Egger to study the owls’ behavior and rhythms. In this case, neither the chicks nor the adult birds were aware of his presence. And that's key: the birds weren't performing for the camera because, as far as they were concerned, there was no camera to perform for.

As a result, we end up with a picture of two clearly distinct personalities, rather than two startled animals reacting to an intruder.

Technical details

Egger shot this on a Nikon Z9 with a 400mm f/2.8 lens, but rather than opening that lens up wide – as most wildlife photographers would, to isolate a subject and blur the background – he stopped it down to f/22.

This was smart, enabling him to hold both owl faces sharp, given how close together they were and how easily a shot like this could fall apart if one chick's eyes drifted out of focus.

Even at f/22, the recorded depth of field at this focus distance was just 5cm, which shows how unforgiving long glass is even stopped almost all the way down. That both faces stay crisp within a window that narrow says much about Egger's positioning and timing.

That, in turn, speaks to Egger's patience. "I spend weeks, months, sometimes years in one place, waiting for that single moment when everything aligns," he says.

This depth is reflected in his photographs, which have been exhibited across the globe, as well as his work as a cinematographer for documentaries such as Universum, Austria's renowned nature and documentary TV series.

BigPicture: Natural World Photography Competition is run by the California Academy of Sciences. The winning and finalist images are currently on display at Cal Academy in San Francisco.

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Born and raised in New Jersey, Henry Wessel (1942-2018) was a photographer who first came to prominence in 1972 with a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art.

Over the course of his career he published a number of books, received two Guggenheim Fellowships and his work is included in the permanent collections of major American, European and Asian museums.

Now, a new exhibition has opened at New York's Grolier Club featuring highlights of his work across four decades. But to me, the most interesting of these centers around a method of taking photographs that few will ever have thought of – and fewer still will probably wish to try.

It came about because, in the early Eighties, Wessel was commuting from his home in the East Bay to a teaching job in San Francisco. One day, he noticed the morning and evening light on that drive was worth stopping for. Except… he never actually stopped.

Instead he prepared his camera for one-handed use, kept it ready in the car, and started photographing other drivers through his own windshield while still behind the wheel.

I'm no driving expert, but that doesn't strike me as a particularly safe thing to do when you're at the helm of a one-ton killing machine.

That aside, the black-and-white photographs he took formed the basis of two landmark portfolios, Incidents (2012) and Traffic (2017). Between them they cover roughly 30 years of pictures that sat unfinished, or simply unshown, long after they were taken.

Other highlights

Wessel's earliest work on view predates any of this, although the subject matter is not dissimilar. Untitled (1968), a deserted road split by a telephone pole, was chosen by MoMA curator John Szarkowski as the final image in his influential 1973 book, Looking at Photographs, and Wessel was the youngest photographer included in it.

San Francisco (1973), showing a man in a suit photographed from behind on a beach, is another early highlight from the period that Wessel joined the faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he went on to teach for four decades.

The Nineties brought two further shifts. Real Estate, his first sustained project in color, returned him to houses shot from a car window, a subject that had interested him since his very first roll of film, though this time the car stayed parked rather than moving.

Night Walk followed in 1995, after Wessel started noticing how streetlights reconfigured his own neighborhood while walking his dog after dark. He described the effect as "stage-like," full of "implied drama" created entirely by where the light happened to fall.

The exhibition also places Wessel alongside the photographers who shaped him – Walker Evans, Weegee and Helen Levitt among them – along with contemporaries including Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, and includes the Steidl-published books that later carried his sequences into print with almost no accompanying text.

Which feels quite fitting, for a photographer who once said, "I simply take pictures." What he meant by that was, he didn't purposely go out to shoot.

"If there’s light out and my eyes are open, it’s usually reason enough to be able to work," he explained. "It’s the facility that the camera provides that makes photography to me a very vital medium, a very challenging medium and in a sense, a very indulgent medium. The preparation to work is almost nonexistent.”

Henry Wessel: Photographs and Books runs until November 14 at The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York, NY 10022. Admission is free. The gallery is open Monday to Saturday, 10:00-17:00. A panel discussion on the exhibition takes place on October 28 at 18:30.

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When people think of the world's most influential photography companies, the conversation often turns to Japan, Germany or the United States.

But Scandinavia has quietly built a remarkable legacy in imaging – from camera systems and lighting technology to professional software and color science.

For Capture One CEO, Rafael Orta, this connection is not accidental. He believes the region's influence comes from decades of expertise in precision, quality and the ability to reproduce images with exceptional accuracy.

"It's truly fascinating to see how some of the names that stand for quality in terms of the image and colors, but also the stability and the reliability and quality in engineering, have come from the Scandinavian region," says Orta.

The Scandinavian color connection

Capture One's roots are closely tied to Denmark, a country with a long history of expertise in visual reproduction.

Orta explains that the foundations can be traced back to the region’s printing industries, where accuracy and consistency in color were essential.

"You can trace this all the way back to many decades ago, the emergence of incredibly high-quality print industries, especially in Denmark," he says.

That knowledge of representing colors accurately did not disappear as photography moved from analog to digital. Instead, it evolved into new approaches to scanning, processing and managing digital images.

"Then that eventually evolved into how to scan and how to represent colors digitally," Orta explains.

This transition helped create an environment where companies focused on imaging technology could develop highly specialized expertise.

From print to digital photography

Capture One is part of a wider Scandinavian imaging tradition that includes companies such as Hasselblad and Profoto, which have become recognized globally for professional photography tools.

For Orta, the common thread is not just technology but a shared approach to quality.

"There are these incredibly specialized companies in photography and in imaging more broadly across Scandinavian countries," he says.

Those companies have built reputations around reliability, engineering and a deep understanding of how photographers use their tools.

Capture One's own focus has been on giving photographers control over their images, particularly in demanding professional environments where color consistency matters.

Whether it is commercial photography, fashion, advertising or increasingly photojournalism, Orta says the company’s role is to support the creative process.

"We're at the service of photographers," he says. "We're at the service of the craft."

A small region with global influence

Denmark-based Capture One has become one of the photography industry's most influential software companies. Headquartered in Frederiksberg (part of Copenhagen), the company has a team of around 122 employees, with additional offices in Greece, England and the United States.

"It's never lost on us that we're this very, very specialized, very focused company from Denmark," says Orta.

"But it's never lost on us that the impact that we have on global photography – especially the more commercially and culturally influential photography – vastly outsize the fact that we're this specialized company based in Denmark."

From advertising campaigns and fashion editorials to photojournalism and commercial productions, Capture One's software plays a role in images seen around the world.

"We're incredibly proud of the scale of the impact that we have on the industry, and in general on society and culture and commerce," Orta says.

As photography continues to evolve through new technologies, artificial intelligence and changing creative workflows, Capture One's Scandinavian roots remain grounded in the principles that have shaped the company from the beginning: precision, color accuracy and reliability.

For Orta, those values – "quality, color and reliability" – remain as relevant today as they were decades ago, and continue to guide how Capture One develops tools for professional photographers.

Explore Capture One's current plans and pricing, including a one-time purchase.

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Now 87, William Eggleston is known as the "Godfather of Color Photography" for helping establish it as a legitimate, high-art medium. But that was by no means an easy task, as a new exhibition in London, England, reminds us.

William Eggleston: All That Goes Unnoticed, which runs at The Photographers' Gallery from October to February, is a career-spanning look at the American photographer's 60 years behind the camera. And it pulls together many of the pictures you may already recognize.

The rusted child's tricycle; the single bulb hanging from a blood-red ceiling; a supermarket worker leaning over a train of trolleys – all are shot with the same democratic attention that Eggleston gave to everything he pointed his lens at.

He printed many of these images using dye-transfer – a laborious process borrowed from advertising, where it was typically used to make products look glossy and desirable. He called himself "at war with the obvious".

Dye-transfer prints were, it must be noted, costly and painstaking, the kind of process a studio would reserve for a whisky advert or a car brochure; anything that needed to look irresistible.

Eggleston pointed that same expensive precision at the stuff of everyday life. At the time, this was utterly revolutionary – and not everyone was ready for it.

When these pictures were first shown, at MoMA in 1976, the critical response was brutal. New York Times critic Hilton Kramer wrote about that show: "Perfect? Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly."

He went on to describe Eggleston's family and friends as "dismal figures inhabiting a commonplace world of little visual interest." Another Times writer, Gene Thornton, reportedly voted it the most hated show of the year.

They weren't, it must be said, out of step with the general opinion of the time. Color photography itself was still widely seen as a commercial medium unfit for a museum wall; only monochrome was acceptable if you wished to create art.

Eggleston's subject matter, too – tricycles, oven interiors, a dog drinking from a puddle – were seen as entirely the wrong things to photograph.

Fifty years on, in retrospect, that backlash seems odd to us. But then again, half a century's worth of photographers have since made a habit of applying serious color to unserious subjects.

Eggleston got there first. He got the bad reviews so that others could follow in his wake and get praiseworthy ones.

Wandering into a London gallery in 2026 – ticket in hand, catalog essay – it's strange to forget that any of this was ever contested. The photographs haven't changed since 1976. It's the eye looking at them that needed time to catch up.

There's a particular kind of photography that's often a tough sell to the arty crowd. Deadpan shots of a humdrum world, boasting nothing obviously "clever" about them beyond good light and a clean composition. It's the kind of work that might look so simple that anyone could take it.

On closer inspection, though, you realize how much discipline it takes to resist the wide angle, the dramatic crop, the filter. And that in photography, as with so many other disciplines from painting to music, making things look easy is actually a devilishly difficult skill to master.

Tom Hicks, who works under the name Black Country Type, offers a textbook example of this approach. And 12 of his images are now on show in the café space at Black Country Living Museum in Dudley, eight miles northwest of Birmingham, England.

These pictures are drawn from his second book, Black Country Type II, published by The Modernist. And while the images are exceptional, it's the foreword that's likely to grab most attention.

Written by Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin's frontman and one of the Black Country's highest-profile cultural exports, it describes Hicks as capturing "the surreal madness and magnificence of our old mothership with a keen eye and quiet wit."

The unlikely pair met when Hicks was asked to curate a photographic exhibition to accompany one of Plant's shows at The Halls in Wolverhampton. The singer, who's sold over 300 million records across his career, has been a fan of Hicks' work ever since.

Swerving the clichés

Personally, what I like most about these images is that they avoid indulging in either nostalgia or misery-tourism.

A shot of the "Central Snooker Club" in Lye, its awning intact but the shutters smashed, sits alongside the joyful lettering on "PIES" painted across corrugated steel in Tipton, and an arresting image of the word "MENTAL" spelled out on a blue-clad unit in Netherton, cloud drifting past like a punchline.

There's real formal control, too, in these pictures. Flat, even light. Subjects placed dead center or hard against a blue sky. Color used with precision.

It's a style that owes something to the New Topographics photographers and to Ed Ruscha's deadpan documentation of LA signage, just translated into the very different environs of Dudley, Netherton, Lye and Tipton.

The lesson for the rest of us? The most photogenic subject in your area probably isn't the landmark that everyone shoots. And consistency of eye, applied patiently to unglamorous subjects, is what turns a collection of snapshots into a body of work worth a museum wall, a book deal and praise from a bona fide rock legend.

The display runs in the visitor center café of the Black Country Living Museum, with Black Country Type II available from the gift shop and online, alongside prints of Hicks' work.

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Every morning, a young Chinese-American photographer fresh out of Yale would set an alarm for well before sunrise, drive from New England into Manhattan, then haul a wooden box camera and a tripod out onto pavements that were, by design, as empty as he could find them. That was Baldwin Lee's routine through the winters of 1975 to 1979.

Lee was using a 4x5 view camera, his first time working in large format. We're talking a dark cloth over the head, a single sheet of film loaded per exposure, a machine that rewards patience and punishes movement.

Point one at a busy road at rush hour and you'll get a blur of legs and cab roofs. Point one at an empty street before dawn, though, and you'll get something akin to what Lee got: doorways, fire escapes, silvered diners and the Empire State Building sitting still on the horizon, all rendered with the kind of clarity that only a large negative can hold.

Lee went out early, mostly in winter, when the sidewalks were closest to bare. "My trips to New York City from New England were an exploration of buildings as organic forms," he once said. "Rather than approaching the work as architectural photography, I saw it as a way of capturing a landscape.

“It was my first time using a large-format camera," he added. "Early in the morning, with no one around, I felt an overwhelming intimacy – as if I were walking through my own private garden."

Those pictures are now being shown for the first time since he made them, in a new exhibition opening at Howard Greenberg Gallery on September 18, titled Baldwin Lee: New York (1975–1979).

For any interested in street photography, I think they offer a useful perspective. Because in a way, they're running directly counter to most of the instincts people bring to the genre.

Typically, modern street photography chases crowds, gesture, movement, activity, action. All in search of that one, defining moment when a stranger's expression lines up perfectly with their surroundings and the light hitting them.

Lee's New York pictures do the opposite, finding stillness and peace in places that, an hour after the picture was taken, will doubtless be teeming with life.

A tennis court fenced off from a Manhattan skyline. A dog tied up outside a shuttered ticket booth. A couple sheltering by a row of grain silos. These aren't candid fragments of a bustling scene. They're carefully planned compositions that had time to be built, because nothing in frame was going to move before the shutter clicked.

At the same time, as the press materials put it: "Lee approached Manhattan not as a collection of architectural subjects, but as a place shaped by human presence. Human figures rarely appear, yet their presence remains legible in the worn surfaces of streets and buildings, storefronts, and parked cars."

So why did they lie there, unobserved, for so many decades? In a nutshell, Lee left New York for Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1982 and spent the rest of that decade making the nearly 10,000 photographs of black communities in the American South that eventually made his name – culminating in a 2022 monograph, Baldwin Lee.

And so although it was shot first, his New York work has become known last.

All this time, Lee has been sitting on a secret masterpiece he knew the world wasn't ready for. He was a young photographer working out how to use a new camera. It took the rest of his career for that early experiment to transform into a finished statement.

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The World Sports Photography Awards 2027 (WSPA) is open for entries. Described as “the world’s foremost showcase of sports photography,” the free-to-enter competition attracts thousands of entries from photographers all over the world.

Last year, over 4,200 entries covering 60 different sports were entered by photographers from 123 countries.

For the second year running, the competition is sponsored by none other than Canon. “Canon has been the perfect partner (...) there’s no name more synonymous with sports photography,” said co-founder of the WSPA, Simon Burton.

“It's been another remarkable year for sport around the globe, and we can’t wait to see the images photographers submit.”

WSPA entry requirements

Submissions to the WSPA are free. Entrants can submit up to 10 images across 24 sports categories, but they must have been captured between December 2025 and November 2026. Images entered in last year’s competition are not eligible for reentry. The closing date for entries is November 23 2026.

I’ve judged many photography competitions over the years and one of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is entries that breach competition guidelines (look no further than the recent controversy surrounding the Capture the Dark contest).

It’s therefore imperative that you take a detailed look at the WSPA’s rules page before submitting your entries.

Last year, the competition debuted the ‘Canon Emerging Talent’ award in a bid to celebrate the next generation of sports photographers. It’s back for 2027 and open to those under the age of 25.

“By recognizing emerging talent and giving young photographers a platform to showcase their creativity and passion, we hope to help them take the next step in their careers and tell the powerful stories at the heart of sport,” said Richard Shepherd, product marketing senior manager at Canon Europe.

Want to see some of 2026's winners? I’m an avid sports photographer, and these are my five favorite match-winning shots from last year's World Sports Photography Awards.

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When Gail Bisson retired as a doctor, bird photography was at the top of her list. Since then, she has traveled the world photographing birds, building an impressive collection of international awards. Now Bisson has added another prestigious honor to that list. Her striking shot of a female Common Merganser flying over the water with a flatfish in her beak has won the Female Bird Prize in the 2026 Audubon Photography Awards.

The photograph was captured at East Bay Sandbar, Nova Scotia, Canada, on a bitterly cold winter day. Bisson almost missed the shot entirely. She explains, "The ducks were not very active, and after 30 minutes I decided to go warm up in the car. Normally I leave my camera on the ice during breaks, but this time I took it with me.

"Thank goodness I did, because just as I reached the car, I spotted a female Common Merganser with a flatfish take to the air to protect her catch from other mergansers. I was thrilled to snap this frame, but I worried it wouldn’t be tack sharp. It was!"

Female Bird Prize Winner

Contest: United States and Canada
Species: Common Merganser
Location: East Bay Sandbar, Nova Scotia, Canada
Gear: Canon EOS R5 Mark II + Canon EF 600mm f/4L IS III USM
Accessories: Canon Mount Adapter EF-EOS R
Exposure: 1/2500sec, f/6.3, ISO 640

Bird Lore
Mergansers, or Goosanders as they are known in Europe, are among the few ducks that regularly eat fish, diving and swimming gracefully underwater to capture them in their long, slim bills.

Ordinarily, the bird will eat its prey promptly after catching it, pausing only long enough to maneuver the fish into position for swallowing it headfirst. But if other members of the flock try to steal the catch, the bird may have to maneuver to keep hold of its meal.

Judge’s Take (Jess Gorzo)
"This felt like a portrait fit for a field guide illustration, while at the same time an extraordinary action shot brought to life by bright lighting and reflective ice and snow.

"The judges appreciated both the luck and skill involved in capturing this perfectly framed moment in flight, fish in beak. In addition to its excellent composition and subject, this joyful image captures a day in the life of a female Common Merganser."

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

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

The world's leading digital photography magazine, Digital Camera launched in 2002 and has been helping photographers of all skill levels to improve their images ever since.

Every issue is packed with technique tips, tutorials, inspiring images and expert buying advice, plus the latest news and equipment reviews, as well as a selection of bonus gifts (see below).

Autumn is almost upon us, and we're here to help you make the most of it. October's cover feature has 12 pages of pro advice for capturing the wondrous colors of the season in a variety of creative ways.

Experienced outdoor photographer Peter Fenech will help you master top landscape shooting techniques for the new season. Turn to page 62 to get started.

Don't forget that you can subscribe to Digital Camera magazine and get the magazine delivered to your door every month. Choose between a print or digital subscription, or a bundle of the two.

All print subscribers to Digital Camera magazine can now access digital back issues dating from 2009 (when using iOS) or 2012 (when using the Pocketmags Magazine Newsstand app or the Pocketmags website).

Starting on page 41, our Photo Skills projects section will help you become a better photographer.

This month, you can discover how award-winning photographer Chris Gurton takes his evocative pictures of harvest time (pictured, above).

Plus, we show you how to put together a colorful floral still-life using lights and smoke, and you can learn how to blur clouds in landscape photos with a 10-stop neutral density filter.

Other projects this month include learning how to capture harvest mice, and shooting country house landscape gardens.

Plus, photographer Imogen Tinkler discusses her photo zine documenting the coastal town of Margate in the UK (pictured, above).

Other highlights in October's Digital Camera

October's Digital Camera Apprentice reader challenge sees pro car photographer James Mann give Rufus Rogers a masterclass in automotive photography.

Rufus got to shoot a range of different cars at the Haynes Motor Museum in south-west England – including a Ford Mustang GT Coupe (pictured, above). Turn to page 8 to see how the day unfolded.

Of all the photo skills worth learning, how to use light tops the list, says imaging expert Will Cheung.

Over 10 pages in October's Camera Clinic, he shows you how to make the most of light… and even more importantly, how to use it right. Enrol on the course from page 82.

Commencing on page 74, Hotshots showcases the category winners from the 19th iPhone Photography Awards.

With thousands of submissions from all over the world, see how the top-rated entries continue to showcase the possibilities of iPhone photography. The 20th IPPAwards is open for entries now.

The Caithness coastline in north-east Scotland is often described as one of the best in the world for nature.

Whether you've been there or not, you'll agree when you've seen the photographs in Ken Crossan's book Life At The Edge.

Discover more about the book, and the stories behind the shots, in our interview from page 120.

Our Digital Darkroom editing tutorials for October explore a range of creative techniques for Photoshop, Lightroom, and Affinity.

Essentials (pictured, above) shows how to turn photographs into artworks that look like watercolor paintings, while Fundamentals covers using the Vignette tool in Lightroom to focus on key parts of an image.

Also in this month's Digital Darkroom, the Get the Look tutorial (pictured, above) reveals how to unleash the creative power of the Adobe Camera Raw filter in Photoshop.

October's Kit Zone section of camera and lens reviews kicks off with a group test – six of the best travel cameras.

Featuring a cross-section of brands from across the market, we've assessed half a dozen small shooters that excel at both stills and video. See which camera wins, from page 106.

Also reviewed is the Tamron 35-100mm F2.8 Di III VXD, a new zoom with a versatile focal range and a relatively fast aperture for Sony E-mount and L-Mount bodies.

Plus, we test the Meike 85mm F1.4 Mix II, an affordable portrait prime that's available for three leading lens mounts including Nikon Z.

The latest issue of Digital Camera comes with an unrivaled selection of digital gifts 

October's bonus gifts include nine photo tips cards, 32 minutes of video tutorials and 14 software extras for Photoshop and Lightroom.

Here's the full list of the bonus gifts bundled with issue 312 of Digital Camera:

• Nine new photo tips cards covering wildlife, landscapes, action – and more!
• 32 minutes of video tutorials for Lightroom, Photoshop and Affinity
• 14 bonus software extras (Actions, presets, and LUTs)
• The Ultimate Guide to Photography Post Production e-book
• 250-plus-page Camera Buyer’s Guide e-book full of buying advice

Subscribe now

Every issue of Digital Camera magazine is packed with tips, techniques, pro advice, reviews, news and inspiration.

Don’t forget that you can subscribe to Digital Camera magazine and get the magazine delivered to your door every month. Choose between a print or digital subscription, or a bundle of the two.

All subscribers to Digital Camera magazine can now access digital back issues dating from 2009 (when using iOS) or 2012 (when using the Pocketmags Magazine Newsstand app or the Pocketmags website).

You can buy limited back issues of Digital Camera magazine in print at our Magazines Direct secure store.

Alternatively, there is a range of different digital options available, including:

• Apple app (for iPad or iPhone)
• Zinio app (multi-platform app for desktop or smartphone)
• PocketMags (multi-platform app for desktop or smartphone)
• Readly (digital magazine subscription service)

Some of the most historic photographs of 9/11 are so powerful, they are written in America’s collective memory. One of those photographs came from photographer and New Yorker Gulnara Samoilova. But for as memorable as her photographs are – winning a World Press Photo Award and Pulitzer nomination – Samoilova, in shock, covered in dust and bleeding, says she reacted on pure photographer’s instinct.

At the time, Samoilova was a photo editor working for the Associated Press and living just four blocks away from the World Trade Center. Woken by sirens well before her later shift started, she grabbed several rolls of film, her Canon T90, and walked out the door.

Samoliva, who is now a street photographer and the founder of Women Street Photographers, started taking photographs in disbelief as rescue workers began carrying out the injured. That’s where she was, standing across the street, when the first tower collapsed.

“As I was standing across the street from the World Trade Center, I heard the trembling noise and I lifted my viewfinder. I saw the tower was about to collapse. I took one photo. Then someone shouted ‘run!’ and we all started running,” Samoilova said, telling her story to Projections NYC as part of a multi-day effort to record the history of more than 35 photographers who witnessed 9/11.

“I look back and see this cloud,” she said. “I fell by a parked car so I quickly sat by this parked car, and this cloud of debris and dust just enveloped us. I felt like I was in a tunnel. The impact was so powerful, and then it was dark and it was complete silence to me.”

“Someone was next to me, we were there for a while. I began choking because there was no air,” she said. “I couldn’t open my eyes, I was choking and coughing. He asked, ‘are you okay,’ and I said, ' No, no, I’m not okay, I’m pregnant…I thought I was buried alive. We went from blue skies to complete darkness.”

When the dust cleared enough to see the lights from the emergency vehicles, the photographer, bleeding from a scraped elbow during her fall, looked around and saw the silhouette of survivors emerging from the cloud of dust.

“My photographer’s brain turned on, which I couldn’t admit for the longest time until a few years ago, but I thought, what a beautiful composition,” she said of that moment. “I took one shot, and I blacked out.”

“I didn’t pass out,” she explained, but, in shock, she acted by instinct and blocked much of what happened next. “I changed film from color to black and white, changed lenses. I just started shooting, but I don’t remember it. All my award-winning pictures were next to each other, and I don’t remember taking them.”

“The camera is a shield, like it’s looking in from the outside,” Samoilova said. “That’s how the camera helps me in any situation over my 45+ years.”

In the face of tragedy, photojournalists are tasked with the job of recording history at a time when taking photographs may be viewed by some as insensitive. Samoilova recalled a moment with a police officer before the towers fell. “One of the police officers was yelling at me like, ‘How can you photograph this?’ and I told him, ‘This is for history.’ And I kept shooting.”

Samoilova took 100 frames on film that day on her Canon T90. The following day, eleven of those photographs had been published all over the world, and immediately, the people in the photographs and the family members began reaching out to her.

“They wanted to see my negatives. They wanted to find loved ones. They wanted to find the people that saved them. I would meet with them, and they would share their stories…we became friends,” she said.

“It made me realize how important it was for them and for me, for my mental health too. The importance of having those pictures helped them heal faster, to realize that they have pictures of the people who saved them.”

One of the survivors in the Samoilova’s photographs was trapped in an elevator with her friend. Firefighters were able to help the two friends to safety, but when the first responders went back in, that was the moment that the tower collapsed. One of the women later came to the AP office to look through the negatives in order to identify the first responders who had saved her life.

Samoilova’s story is one of many. In the days leading up to the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Projections NYC interviewed more than 35 photographers about their experience behind the lens during and after the tragic day in American history.

Another round of interviews is scheduled for September 11 at 7 PM ET via Zoom. The interview series will also be uploaded to Projections NYC’s YouTube in the coming weeks.

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For more 9/11 stories, read about the young photojournalist who photographed 9/11 just two months after starting his job with Getty Images.

Mario Tama had only been working as a photojournalist for Getty Images for about two months – not yet long enough to consider himself a true New Yorker – when he got the call from his editor. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Unable to call a taxi, he ran towards the devastation, camera in hand – and 25 years later, Tama’s photographs of 9/11 remain a devastatingly poignant part of American history.

“I was a new New Yorker,” Tama said in an interview, part of a large-scale effort by Projections NYC to document the 9/11 story of more than 35 photographers. “I was so new that I had never taken a photo of the Twin Towers. I had seen them, and they were like my North Star. You could figure out where you were by those towers. I always thought I would wait and get them in better light.”

Unable to get a taxi, Tama made his way towards the Twin Towers on foot that morning. At one point, he was stopped from getting any closer by an NYPD barricade that, he believes, saved his life.

Tama instead went around towards the south side of the South Tower, near Cathedral Trinity Church. Photographing the plumes of smoke coming from the South Tower, he ran into fellow Getty photojournalist Spencer Platt, who told him, “This is the story of our lives.”

“I was in a panic trying to get as many images as I could,” said Tama, who was using one of the earliest professional digital cameras, the Canon EOS D30, a 3.1MP DSLR. “Being a new New Yorker, I wish I had that gravitas perspective, but [Platt] shook me and he grounded me in a way that I wasn’t before.”

Tama was making his way towards the South Tower when he heard a sound that, to this day, he finds hard to describe. “I looked up, and the top of the South Tower started to tilt and collapse. The sound echoed down the canyon, and it was completely horrifying.

“I went from being a photojournalist to just another New Yorker running for their lives…at some point during my sprint, I remember looking back, and there was this tornado cloud of dust coming towards us. In hindsight, if I had stopped and taken a photograph, it would have been a powerful image, but I kept sprinting towards a parking garage. The dust storm cloud went over everything after that.”

It was after the dust settled that Tama took a photo of two civilians huddled near a wall, one praying in English, one praying in Spanish.

“The only thing that I knew was to put that camera up to my eye and keep photographing,” Tama said. “I think it was a shield in a way and also a way to process what happened…the camera was my tool, and I just started walking around photographing, looking for survivors. It was an incredibly horrifying feeling to realize that those of us out here had survived and so many others inside had lost their lives. The only thing that I knew to do was to take photos.”

The moment that Tama began to feel like a true New Yorker wasn’t experiencing the day of 9/11, but in the days that followed. On September 13, he was in a shell-shocked apartment building with the windows blown out, climbing the stairs in order to try to get high enough to see Ground Zero.

He made it to the ninth or tenth floor, where he captured a photo of lines of emergency responders and volunteers amid the rubble.

“Looking down on that scene, it was the first time that I felt hope,” he said. “To see all these incredible, brave workers of all stripes – police, fire, construction workers, hospital workers, civilians all there, trying to dig out and this hope over fear feeling swept over me. I just put the cameras down and wept. At that moment, I think I became a New Yorker and fell in love with the city.”

“I’m honored to have this photograph and this recollection….In my mind, [this incredible humanity] won, they won. New Yorkers just showed incredible humanity and heart and it’s something I will hold with me forever.”

Projections NYC is spending six days interviewing 36 photographers who photographed 9/11 and the aftermath to record their stories for history between September 6-11. The series continues with live Zoom broadcasts at 7 PM ET on September 10 and 11.

The interviews will also be uploaded to Projections NYC’s YouTube page approximately 1-2 weeks after the live broadcast.

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For more stories behind the images of 9/11, read about how Joe McNally photographed life-sized Polaroids of the first responders, or read about Thomas Hoepker's controversial 9/11 image.

Everyone’s favorite free, industry-standard video editing software has just received a major update with a raft of new features, including an AI assistant. That’s right, just days after Adobe’s big Premiere news, Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve has released DaVinci Resolve 21.1.

AI assistant integration

The headline feature is AI assistant integration, allowing users to access assistants from leading models such as Claude and ChatGPT Codex to give editors a helping hand. According to Blackmagic, assistants will be able to analyze projects, organize media, adjust settings and batch render, but the real plus point is that users can communicate using normal conversational prompts, which should make complicated processes much easier.

Similarly to other examples of AI Assistant integration, the technology is designed to handle more laborious tasks, such as building highlight reels from long-form content, rendering deliverables and removing unwanted clips.

Other big changes

One of the biggest new additions to DaVinci Resolve in a long time was the recent introduction of photo editing. DaVinci Resolve 21.1 bolsters the program’s stills prowess by supporting more camera formats, including the Sony A7R VI, Leica SL, and both the Fujifilm GFX and X series of cameras.

In addition, image settings on the Photo page can now be adjusted in the inspector using color panels. This includes the DaVinci Resolve Micro Color Panel. Blackmagic says that this gives “customers hands-on control for faster, more precise adjustments.” ResolveFX also boasts enhanced sky replacement capabilities for stills on the Color page.

In a bid to prevent editors from losing their place when working on multi-camera workflows, the Edit page has introduced a new timeline viewer multi-cam mode button. This allows the current clip to be displayed in the source viewer, providing “seamless angle switching,” and after editors have previewed media pool clips, the source viewer automatically returns to multi-cam mode when switching back to the timeline. It’s also now possible to split at timecode gaps, which is said to make syncing multi-camera footage faster.

Blackmagic has also rolled out an update for Blackmagic Cloud with enhancements including new Presentations features and faster bulk downloads when using Cloud Storage. DaVinci Resolve 21.1 is available right now and can be downloaded for free.

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A powerful and incredibly detailed black-and-white image of an adult seahorse releasing newly born juveniles into the wide world has won the top prize of this year's Ocean Photographer of the Year competition. The seahorse's posture, combined with the image's monochrome treatment, gives the photograph a deep emotional impact, leaving the jury with the question: "What kind of ocean are we leaving for those who come after us?"

Multi-award-winning photographer & filmmaker Julien Anton captured the scene after countless hours of searching on a rebreather dive in the shallow seaweed-filled waters of Moorea, French Polynesia. He explains that while it is not known whether these seahorses are related, their arrangement evokes a touching farewell – almost as though the tiny seahorses have gathered around their father after he sent them out into the world.

"When Julien Anton's image first appeared on screen, the judging panel fell silent. It is an image that demands reflection, pause for thought, and it certainly got that from us," explains Will Harrison, Ocean Photographer of the Year founder and director.

Overall Winner: Ocean Photographer of the Year 2026

Tech details
Gear: Lumix GH7 & SeaFrogs Housing
Lighting: BigblueLights 2x 36000Lumens & x1 12000Lumens
Exposure: 1/320secs, f/5.6, ISO 400

Anton says, "We spent countless hours searching in difficult conditions, with no guarantee of finding a single seahorse. That is what made the moment so extraordinary – when the juveniles turned back towards the adult, it felt like something far beyond what I had dared to hope for.

"I am not a professional photographer; for me, photography is simply how I share what I see and feel. My hope is that this image can serve as a bridge between science, conservation and a world that deserves to know what is at stake."

What makes this image award-winning

Beyond its technical excellence, Anton's photograph captures the seahorses with remarkable sharpness and detail while revealing a deeper emotional story.

The image invites viewers to pause, reflect, and consider the fragile relationship between marine life and our changing world – delivering a powerful message about the need to protect our natural world.

Founder and director Harrison says, "The image is full of quiet energy, even if some of that comes from us humans imprinting our own emotions on the photograph: the bow of the father’s head, the juveniles turning back towards him, the generational gap and the unknown futures of the newborns.

"What kind of ocean are we leaving for those who come after us? It is ocean photography at its most powerful: intimate, urgent and impossible to ignore."

Ocean Photographer of the Year is presented by Oceanographic and Blancpain. You can see all the 2026 winners on the Oceanographic Magazine website.

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What's the most work you've ever put in to getting the shot you desire? For Arctic photographer Audun Rikardsen, it took three years of planning, one motion sensor and a hole drilled through ice to get within touching distance of this dramatic, award-winning wildlife image.

A Seal's Last Sight has won the Grand Prize at the California Academy of Sciences' 13th annual BigPicture: Natural World Photography Competition. It was chosen from more than 7,400 entries submitted by photographers in 64 countries. And that's no great surprise.

This dramatic shot shows a polar bear peering through a seal's breathing hole in the drift ice north of Svalbard; a remote Norwegian archipelago that sits roughly midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.

The effect is pretty startling: we're seeing exactly what a seal would see in its final seconds of life. It's a rare vantage point on one of nature's most majestic beasts, and one built on a lifetime of Arctic experience.

How he shot it

Polar bears hunt seals by waiting motionless at their breathing holes. So Rikardsen needed to find a hole that was actually being watched, then getting a camera into position without disturbing anything.

He'd wanted such a picture for years. After repeated failed attempts, he finally located a breathing hole with fresh bear tracks nearby.

He drilled through the ice, rigged his camera directly beneath the hole, attached a motion sensor, then began to wait. Eight hours later, at 4am, a bear arrived. It pushed its head through the thin layer of ice covering the hole, blew its nose, and stared straight into the lens.

Instead of moving on, though, it simply lay down and went to sleep, right above the submerged rig. Rikardsen had to wait another nine hours – adding up to 17 in total – before the bear finally wandered off and he could retrieve his camera rig.

Technical approach

If you're leaving a camera alone under Arctic ice for 17 hours, you want to keep things simple. Rikardsen employed a Canon EOS 6D, a full-frame DSLR that's over a decade old now, paired with Canon's EF 14mm f/2.8L II USM, a wide prime well suited to close-up, distortion-controlled encounters like this one.

He set it to f/9 with pattern metering and manual white balance, since there was nobody there to adjust anything once the bear turned up.

None of these technical details would have made a difference, of course, without his years of scouting and perseverance in some of the Earth's most challenging weather and terrain. Not to mention the willingness to sit through an animal's nine-hour Arctic nap.

So next time you're getting a bit tired and cold on a shoot, and wondering whether to call it a day, maybe ask yourself: what would Rikardsen do?

BigPicture: Natural World Photography Competition is run by the California Academy of Sciences. The winning and finalist images go on display at Cal Academy in San Francisco from September 10.

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The aftermath of 9/11 brought an estimated 400,000 first responders – the largest number of mobilized rescue workers in American history. But one New York-based artist photographed 9/11’s heroes, families, and survivors with a camera so large, the photographs feel almost like meeting them in person.

Joe McNally’s life-sized Polaroid series, The Faces of Ground Zero, went on to capture 272 faces of 9/11 with the world’s largest Polaroid, a camera about the size of a single-car garage that created massive life-sized 9x7-foot prints. Taken in the days following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the series went on to become a permanent part of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

Nearly 25 years later, the photographer is speaking on how The Faces of Ground Zero unfolded in a special event on September 10 at 5 PM ET. Presented by Adorama, McNally will speak live in person at 42 West 18th Street, New York, NY, while the event will also be live-streamed on YouTube.

Many photographers and photojournalists have told the story of 9/11, but McNally, a portrait and assignment photographer, wanted to photograph the people of 9/11 in a way that was both distinctive and respectful.

At the time, the world’s largest Polaroid camera, built by Dr. Edwin Land, happened to be in a studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “It was the size of a one-car garage, with two technicians inside of it working the machinery of this unique picture instrument,” McNally said of the unusual camera.

But, McNally, after first using the camera in 2000, knew what the mix of modern and vintage camera tech could do – freeze a moment, life-sized.

“For the viewer, standing in front of one of these life-sized Polaroids is akin to meeting the person in the picture,” McNally once wrote. “It’s an emotional encounter. They gaze back at you. And, given the fact that these portraits were all shot within a month of 9/11, those faces spoke a powerful, emotional truth. You cannot look away from the hurt, the stress, the exhaustion, the bravery, and the pride.”

But Faces of Ground Zero didn’t just record life-sized portraits. The series not only went on to become a permanent part of the 9/11 Museum, but the subsequent book ended up raising nearly two million dollars for the post-9/11 relief fund.

Each frame taken by the giant Polaroid camera, at the time, cost $300.

“The subject must stand very still for their portrait, while the camera is prepped and focused," McNally said. "The studio lights need to be doused. The cap is pulled off the massive lens that serves as the portal to the interior chamber. With a single pop of a powerful flash system, the subject is recorded, life-size.”

McNally, as a New York-based photographer, had photographed the World Trade Center many times in his career before 9/11, including climbing to the top of the Twin Towers in 1977 to photograph maintenance workers.

The Adorama event will feature not only a special appearance by McNally but will also display a selection of some of the Polaroids from the series. The Faces of Ground Zero: 25 Years Later event is free to attend, with reservations now open. The event will also be livestreamed on Adorama’s YouTube channel.

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"I was on a boat passing under cliffs where Northern Gannets nest and spotted this dead bird hanging from fishing line as others went about their lives around it," says award-winning photographer Joshua Galicki.

The striking image, comprised mainly of black and white tones, captures a haunting contrast and the bird's harsh reality.

"I've never seen anything like it. I wanted to show this contrast between life and death.

"This species already faces many challenges, including climate change and disease; only the year before my visit, avian flu had decimated the colony. I took this image as a reminder of one more obstacle we put in the way of this charismatic species," he explains.

The photograph was taken at the Isle of Noss in the Shetland Islands, where Northern Gannets gather to nest on dramatic sea cliffs.

Galicki's image has now been named Conservation category winner in the 2026 Audubon Photography Awards, a competition that celebrates photographers whose work showcases birds and the challenges they face. You can explore all 2026 winning images here.

Conservation Winner

Contest: United States and Canada
Species: Northern Gannet
Location: Isle of Noss, Shetland Islands, United Kingdom
Camera: Canon EOS R3 + Canon RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1 L IS USM
Exposure: 1/2500 sec, f/5, ISO 4000

Bird Lore
Huge, long-winged Northern Gannets hunt their prey with spectacular plunge-dives, arrowing into the sea to grab fish below the surface. They sometimes run afoul of commercial fishing operations, become entangled in fishing nets, and drown.

Ironically, while gathering material to build their nests on island cliffs, they may pick up fragments of discarded fishing gear from the water or shorelines, working these bits in with grass, seaweed, and other items. Either adult or young gannets may become caught in the unbreakable synthetic fibers.

Judge’s Take (Sabine Meyer)
"This scene encapsulates the hopes and stresses of conservation.

"The nesting gannets telegraph the promise of the next generation, whereas the gruesome scene of the entangled bird shows the cost of human impact. The monochromatic color palette heightens the scene’s drama, akin to a painterly tableau where life and death coexist."

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The first-ever photograph is returning back to where it was taken in France for the first time in 200 years. Shot by Nicéphore Niépce in either 1826 or 1827 – no one knows the precise date - the image entitled View from the Window at Le Gras will go on show in Chalon-sur-Saône, in the Burgundy region, as part of France's 200th anniversary of photography celebrations.

The image of a courtyard was shot from a room in Niépce's home in the village Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, just outside Chalon-sur-Saône. It was recorded onto a sheet of pewter plate, which was coated with bitumen of Judea – a naturally occurring light-sensitive resin. He used a camera obscura to create the 8-hour exposure.

Niépce travelled to the UK shortly after the image was taken, to look his older brother in Kew – and to promote his photographic process, which he called heliography (the Greek for sun drawing). He had hoped to demonstrate his image-making process to the Royal Society and King George IV. But the presentation to the Royal Society never happened as Niépce refused to disclose the exact technical details of his chemical process, which went against the society's rules for investigating new discoveries. He returned to France later that year, leaving some of his plates with a botanical illustrator and friend Francis Bauer.

His first-ever image is now part of the Gernsheim Collection, which was purchased by the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin in 1963. "The Gernsheim collection is one of the seminal collections in the United States of the history of photography and contains an unparalleled range of more than 35,000 images," explains Michael Pritchard.

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas and the Musée Nicéphore Niépce have jointly announced thatView from the Window at Le Gras will be shown in both museums in 2027.

The heliograph will be included in an exhibition Radical Forms: Photographic Experimentation from the Harry Ransom Center's Collections which opens on February 27 2027. It will then head to France to be displayed in the exhibition Helios 1826-1827 at the Niépce Museum in Chalon-sur-Saône, close to Niépce's home and where the plate was made, from April 26 to June 20 2027.

When professional nature photographer Liron Gertsman heard about white-tailed tropicbirds nesting in the caldera walls of an active volcano, he packed his full-frame mirrorless camera, telephoto lens, and traveled to Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, Hawai'i, United States. On the trip, he captured the now award-winning image of the tropicbird rising above volcanic gases and glowing red lava.

Gertsman explains, "I spent 10 days scouting and waiting at the Halema'uma'u Crater before the Kīlauea volcano erupted. White gases on the left of the photo are primarily water vapor and carbon dioxide; the blue gas on the top right is sulfur dioxide; the brown dust is volcanic ash; and red lava glows on the right. The birds nest in the crater's cracks, safe from predators, and use the thermals generated from the volcano’s heat to gain lift as they fly out to gather food. "

This spectacular shot has been honored as the winner in the Birds in Landscape category at the 2026 Audubon Photography Awards – a competition celebrating photographers who use their skills to highlight the beauty, challenges and threats facing birds across Chile, Colombia, Canada and the United States. You can explore all 2026 winning images here.

Birds in Landscapes Winner

Contest: United States and Canada
Species: White-tailed Tropicbird
Location: Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, Hawai‘i, United States
Gear: Canon EOS R5 + Canon RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1 L IS USM
Exposure: 1/2500 sec, f/16, ISO 2500

Bird Lore
Tropicbirds are beautiful, long-tailed seabirds that range throughout the world’s oceans, mainly in the tropics. Seldom seen from mainland shores, they raise young on oceanic islands.

The White-tailed Tropicbird, the smallest and most widespread of three species, usually tucks its nest into a cavity among rocks.

On many islands, these sites are most readily found among layers of volcanic rock – including, at times, around still-active volcanoes, leading to remarkable scenes.

Judge’s Take (Sadie Hine)
"This was easily the most dramatic landscape we saw this year. I can clearly visualize this tropicbird weaving through this unforgiving environment.

"This sense of movement – paired with a wide perspective and the powerful role of volcanic activity in shaping unique ecosystems – makes this image memorable.  "

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No one's ever written a rulebook for street photography, but sometimes it feels like it exists anyway. Candid and spontaneous, not staged. No light but natural light. No crew, just one lone lens.

So it's quite a surprise when Street Photography Africa, a new publication from curators Nadine Barth and Azu Nwagbogu, published by Thames & Hudson, feels like it doesn't so much break those rules as entirely ignore them.

It only takes a quick flick through the book, which is released on 15 October, and you'll see precisely what I mean.

On one page there's a queue for a bus in Lagos, shot flat and documentary, everyone facing away from the camera. But then few pages on, there's a bride in full lace and tulle striding through a market; everything styled and lit like a fashion plate. Both are called "street photography".

To me, that makes this book doubly interesting. It's not just a strong representation of images from a continent that's been chronically under-represented to date. It's also a challenge to the idea that there should be strict boundaries between reportage and fashion. Here, they live side-by-side, and the effect isn't jarring; in fact, it feels liberating.

This cross-genre nature of the book stems naturally from the multidisciplinary practitioners it features.

Artist and filmmaker Salaheddine El Bouaaichi photographers young people on the street and designs record covers for the rap scene. Delali Ayivi is commissioned for Vogue and Dazed. Siaka Soppo Traoré stages breakdance crews inside working markets.

Nowhere is it clearly stated which pieces in the book are documentary work and fashion work. Each are taken with the same eye, through the same lens, on the same sidewalk, in the same afternoon light.

A goat market becomes a runway. A stack of used jeans becomes a backdrop. The street doesn't care what you call the picture; it simply supplies the texture.

For anyone trained on the Cartier-Bresson school of street photography, that might seem unthinkable. Again, while there's never been a strict rulebook for these things, the idea of setting up a shot will feel to many like cheating.

What this book shows, though, is that a posed portrait shot on a real street, among real market stalls and real passers-by, can carry just as much documentary weight as a candid one. The setup is obvious, but so is the spontaneity of the background; the two work to energise each other, rather than cancel each other out.

Some of the strongest images are the ones that make you stop and guess. Editorial or documentary? Commission or chance? For anyone still drawing a hard line between the two in their own work, Street Photography Africa will make you wonder: should you?

• Street Photography Africa by Nadine Barth & Azu Nwagbogu is published by Thames & Hudson from October 15, priced £45 / $60.

Say what you will about the camera phone, but it’s forever changed the way people look at photography. Years of simply pointing, tapping a screen and letting computational photography do all the legwork has imbued a good portion of the population with the belief that photography is easy.

Modern photographers are caught between a rock and a hard place. If one rando isn’t asking you why you don’t just use a phone, another is telling you how much harder it was in the film days… I’ll happily bow down to a pro film photographer, because taking a good photo on an SLR film camera is objectively harder. But photography isn't just about operating a camera...

Accessibility vs difficulty

First off, I think there’s a tendency to confuse accessibility with difficulty. We moan about rising prices, but we still live during a period where quality tech is comparatively cheap. And unlike film, digital photographers don’t have to weigh up film and development costs. You don’t need to pay for tuition or resources, either. It’s all out there on YouTube and the web.

Photography now requires significantly less running costs and you can learn as much information as you’re willing to take and practice as much as you like. I’m therefore certain that there are more pro-level photographers than ever before. And all of this has resulted in higher expectations.

Great expectations

I’m not going to sit here and say that modern photographers take better images than the photographers of yore, because I don’t believe that for one moment. But what I do believe is that technical expectations have risen. Go back and look at wedding photos that were shot on film. They simply will not be as consistently exposed, sharp and well-composed as a modern wedding portfolio. I’m not saying they’re better or worse, but digital wedding photographers are expected to operate at a higher standard.

Granted, this is largely due to advancements in tech. Modern exposure and autofocus algorithms have made it harder for photographers to under- or overexpose and miss focus. But this has raised the bar to an, at times, impossible level. The demand for technically perfect photographs has never been higher. You only need to take a cursory glance at competition winners or Instagram to know that the bar is at an all-time high. Arguably too high at times.

But some expectations have gone beyond what’s possible. Instagram has raised the bar so high that I’ve heard some photographers talk about unrealistic expectations from clients. Suffice to say, wedding photographs taken in a registry office on a wet and windy day in Hull are never going to look like your favorite influencer’s Barbados beachside wedding photos...

The rise of AI

The emergence of generative AI is already having a huge impact on photographers. Similar to my last point, it’s also breeding unrealistic expectations as clients struggle to gauge the boundary between realistic photography and impossible AI fabrication.

GenAI is also taking chunks out of an already depleted creative industry. Professionals are finding themselves caught between staying true to their craft or embracing the new AI normal. Fighting tooth and nail to keep clients by working harder, working for less, and going above and beyond.

But there’s a less-talked-about problem that’s happening on the flip side. AI has caused a cynicism surrounding photography, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the popularisation of photo editing software. Photographers don’t just have to compete with AI; they have to defend their work from AI accusations. By that I mean people questioning the validity of their work. If a photographer captures a particularly amazing photo, it will often be met with comments questioning its authenticity.

Increased output (and video)

It’s not just visual expectations that have risen. Photographers are now expected to deliver more. Instagram photographers need to post regularly to appease the algorithm and professionals are often expected to deliver hundreds of images to clients. Modern wedding photographers are offering packages with well over 500 images. That simply wasn’t the case in the film days. And that’s hundreds of images that have to be edited, prepared and sometimes printed for delivery.

And then there’s video. In many cases, it’s no longer good enough to be ‘just a photographer’. Plenty of professionals have turned to video to bolster their client base, diversify their work, and appease influencer-led expectations. That means more investment in time and kit, and that’s before you consider self-promotion.

An advert in the local newspaper won’t cut it anymore. Photographers have to promote themselves online. That means managing social media platforms, and building and maintaining a website. Social media in particular is a huge time sink. As if photographers don’t have enough to do, many are filming behind-the-scenes videos as they work.

A hypercritical world

I’m going to sound like a right snob when I say this, but people who are not photographers often have no idea what a good photograph is. It makes sense if you think about it. Learning the craft is essential in understanding what is and isn’t good. Don’t get me wrong, anyone can look at an incredible photograph taken by a landscape photographer and say it’s good. It’s the other end of the spectrum that tends to be the problem. This is why, as you progress as a photographer, images you once thought were amazing start to pale in comparison to your later work.

You could argue this has always been the case. But in the film days, photography was seen as much more of a skill. The oversaturation of cameras and photography has diluted that considerably. As such, people’s appreciation of photography is at an all-time low. We live in a hypercritical world anyway, so photographers are subjected to much more abuse and non-constructive criticism than ever before, too.

Ever-changing trends

The online world moves fast, and photography is no different. Editing styles are constantly going in and out of fashion, but the biggest aesthetic photography and video ‘trend’ to emerge over the past few years has been the rise and rise of vertical video.

This has changed the game completely. Instagram has famously pivoted to vertical media, meaning photographers and videographers are caught between a rock and a hard place. Commit fully to the limiting properties of vertical imagery or frantically try to capture both. I recently covered this in more detail by reporting on a video made by a sports videographer who explained: “Vertical video is driving me INSANE”.

So there you have it. The process of capturing a photo might have gotten easier, but being a photographer has never been more complicated. Do you agree? Can you think of more reasons why photography is challenging in 2026? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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Want more of my ramblings? Nikon rumor claims “almost everything” is delayed, but I don’t think this is cause for concern. Nikon never bothered to support the Nikon Zf and Zfc with retro-cool lenses, but thanks to Voigtlander it doesn’t need to. Some call it soft, I call it dreamy: Why Nolan’s The Odyssey was a focus puller’s nightmare.

A new exhibition coming to London, England, will delve into the history of children as photographers and how photography transformed from a pastime reserved for the elite to a DIY hobby for all youngsters.

Curated by Annebella Pollen, a professor of visual and material culture at the University of Brighton, Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers will explore how youngsters saw the world through a viewfinder and built communities with cameras in hand.

The exhibition will feature previously unseen images taken by children across a range of settings, from family life to playing in the great outdoors, to archive materials such as influential photography magazines that helped photography become more than just a niche pursuit.

Different types of cameras are explored, too, including homemade devices such as the “Wellieflex” – a pinhole camera which, believe it or not, employed a Wellington boot for the body.

The Wellieflex, along with a handful of other homemade camera models made using everyday items, was the invention of activist and photographer Terry Dennett.

According to Dennett, who published about his DIY cameras and children’s photography workshops in a 1976 edition of the magazine Camerawork, the devices, essentially a light-tight container, a lens and a film holder, “worked”.

Competitive photography increased uptake of the craft, too, which is also detailed in the exhibition. Between 1958 and 1972, the Junior Photographer of the Year was a major national competition organized by the Photographic Information Council (PIC), helping to establish over 1,000 school darkrooms.

Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers runs from October 14 2026 to February 21 2027, at The Photographers’ Gallery, London. On-the-door admission costs £14 (approximately $18 / AU$26), and online bookings are cheaper at £12 ($16 / AU$22).

Visit the gallery website for opening times and concession prices.

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Here's a fact that should shock you: there are, at the time of writing, only two northern white rhinos left alive anywhere on the planet. That's right, just two.

Fatu and Najin, mother and daughter, live under permanent protection at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya – and neither can ever be returned to the wild. Both were born into captivity and their species is basically extinct, outside a fenced enclosure watched round the clock by armed rangers.

It's the kind of emotive subject that countless photographers would relish. But it's also a topic that could easily tip into cliché: all sorrow, symbolism and empty hand-wringing.

Thankfully, photographer Mital Patel has taken a refreshingly different route – as his online exhibition The Caretakers, running on All About Photo this month, demonstrates. Rather than making Fatu and Najin the entire story, Patel points his Nikon Z9 camera just as often at the humans who spend their lives beside them.

A ranger laughing with his arm braced against a rhino's flank. A four-man foot patrol – one carrying a rifle, another a leash and a tracking dog – walking out across dry grassland toward two grazing shapes on the horizon.

A man standing beside a stone memorial reading "Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, 1973 to 2018," his hand resting on it the way you'd touch a friend's headstone.

This is not just an extinction story. It's a story about the unglamorous labor of keeping something incredibly special alive, day in, day out.

Technical approach

From a technical point of view, what's striking is how Patel gets you close enough to share that experience.

Some of the strongest images use a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 extreme wide-angle lens pushed right up against a rhino's face; close enough that the horn distorts and looms into the foreground while the animal's herd carries on grazing, unbothered, in the background.

It's a technique that only works with animals used to human presence. And it does something that a longer lens never could: it collapses the safe distance a telephoto gives you and puts the viewer intimately inside the frame.

This contrasts nicely with the more conventional side-on portraits – rhino and ranger sharing the same patch of golden light, shot on what looks like a standard portrait length.

Switching registers between reportage and something closer to formal portraiture gives the series as a whole a sense of verve and dynamism.

Meanwhile the image above, used on the show's poster, sums up the story in a single frame. Two rhinos graze at the edges of the picture, a ranger standing in the empty middle distance, dwarfed by the animals on either side.

It's a picture that could be titled either 'Guardianship' or 'Futility', depending on how you feel about the odds.

Conservation photography typically asks you to mourn for a species. This one asks you to also think about the people who show up for it.

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The largest owl in Chile is often called the ghost of the desert because, as photographer Francisco Castro Escobar explains, "Seeing one is so rare that it’s like an apparition." When he spotted the owl in northern Chile, after walking for hours through the desert, he captured the bird of prey beautifully.

"In the distance, we noticed the silhouette of a bird perched among the cacti. I approached slowly without a sound, hiding behind the plants to avoid any disturbance. Once near, I was thrilled to see through my lens an imposing Lesser Horned Owl," he explains.

This rare and mystical shot has been awarded the Grand Prize in the Audubon Photography Awards – a competition honoring photographers who used their skills to highlight the beauty, challenges and threats that birds face across Chile, Colombia, Canada and the United States. You can explore all 2026 winning images here.

Grand Prize

Contest: Chile and Colombia
Species: Lesser Horned Owl
Location: Paposo ​​​​Natural Preserve, Antofagasta, Chile
Gear: Sony A7 IV + Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS
Exposure: 1/800 sec, f/7.1, ISO2000

Bird Lore
Until recently, this nocturnal hunter of southern South America was considered a Great Horned Owl – a species widespread from Canada and Alaska to northern Argentina. But it has a very different voice, featuring two rapid hoots followed by a guttural trill.

It’s not exclusively a desert owl, however: Like its northern relative, the Lesser Horned Owl has adapted to a variety of habitats, from scrubby forests of the high Andes to rocky canyons and lowland desert.

Judge’s Take (Sebastian Herzog)
"This photo evokes a feeling of finding an enchanted spot in the heart of Chile's natural landscape. Set against a dimly lit backdrop, the captivating gaze of this majestic owl’s intense yellow eyes stands out against its snow-white face, creating a fairy-tale atmosphere.

"Thanks to a perfectly calculated depth of field and impeccable composition, the vibrant cactus becomes an unexpected companion to the solitary protagonist. "

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It's over a century since the RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, on April 15 1912, after striking an iceberg during its maiden voyage that resulted in the loss of over 1,500 lives.

And yet, this tragedy still has a hold over our collective consciousness. So much so, that even this much-circulated photo of a boy selling a newspaper announcing it will be instantly recognizable to many.

But who was this boy, stood outside the White Star Line's offices on Cockspur Street, just off Trafalgar Square in London, the following day, holding a placard reading "Titanic Disaster, Great Loss of Life"?

For most of the 20th century, he was simply known as "the newsboy." In fact, his name was Edward John Parfett – known to his friend as Ned. And unfortunately, this would not be the only time in his life that he was associated with tragedy.

The story of Ned

Born in 1896 to an Irish Catholic family, Parfett worked in construction before an injury pushed him into newspaper selling. He was around 15 or 16 when the Titanic photograph was taken, one of four brothers from Cornwall Road, Waterloo, who'd all eventually enlist for the First World War.

He joined the Royal Artillery in 1916, first as a dispatch rider, later moving to reconnaissance duties at the front. It was dangerous, exposed work – and Parfett was good at it.

He was mentioned in dispatches and awarded the Military Medal for gallantry, with an officer later writing that Parfett had accompanied him "on many occasions" through severe shelling and that he'd always placed "the greatest confidence in him".

Of the four Parfett brothers who served, three came home. Ned didn't. On October 29 1918, less than a fortnight before the end of the war, he was killed near Valenciennes when a shell hit the quartermaster's stores where he was collecting fresh clothes ahead of leave.

Had he survived another two weeks, he'd have been going home to England. He's buried at the British war cemetery in Verchain-Maugré in northern France.

A face that outlasted its name

The Titanic picture Ned is remembered for today did its job well, conveying the shock and grief of the moment far better than any headline. Yet Ned was never identified in the picture caption and, for decades, he remained an anonymous figure, even as the photo continued to circulate.

It took researchers and Parfett's own descendants, including his great-nephew Dominic Walsh, to finally identify Ned in the late Nineties; a soldier who'd been mentioned in dispatches and decorated for bravery, and who died in a war only a few years after the Titanic sank.

Oceanic House, where the picture was taken, is now home to a Tex-Mex restaurant. And the photographer? We still have no idea who they were.

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When you visit a picturesque waterfall in the middle of the day, there’s a good chance that there will be a lot of light about, even sunshine. And that makes capturing a long exposure shot of a waterfall much trickier than doing it at dusk. However, don’t let that put you off, you just need strong enough neutral density filters and a circular polariser. And a tripod obviously, don’t forget that. So armed, I headed for my nearest babbling brook complete with tumbling waterfall.

Settings: 20 secs, f/8, ISO 100, CPL, ND8 filter

What gear I used

For this feature I used the NiSi JetMag Pro Landscape ND Kit, which contains an adapter ring for your lens, then a circular polarizer, FS ND8 three stop filter, FS ND64 six stop filter and FS ND1000 10 stop filter. It’s available in three kit sizes - you pick the size up from the lens filter size you are fitting it to, so in this case it was the 82mm kit, which costs $499 / £359.

Using the circular polarizer

Bright light creates more distinct reflections on the water so with it being cloudy and the pool at the bottom of the fall being in the shade, there was less of it. However, there was still reflected glare from the waterfall in the pool. The effect of the polariser is to remove the reflections on the surface of the water so you can see through, but it also has a secondary effect in reducing the available light, which was ideal when used in combination with the neutral density filter.

Step by step: Setting the camera up

1 Attach filters

Having found the spot to shoot from the first task is to attach the filter thread for the lens. The filters fit lenses up to 82mm but first you attach the magnetic filter ring that has the same thread as your own lens - 77mm in this case. Then you can simply add the magnetic filters, which snap on. I added the CPL and the ND8.

2 Metering mode

Using centre weighted or zone metering usually makes the water over exposed and even in Raw it’s impossible to get the highlights back. You either need to start dialling in minus exposure compensation, or switch to Highlight Metering, which specifically looks for the bright tones in the image.

3 Remote releases

For a long exposure you want the camera to be nice and still so you can either use a remote release or set the release mode to be delayed. Here i set it to a five second delay after fully depressing the fire button. On a DSLR you can also use the mirror up function to avoid vibrations when shooting.

4 Focussing through glass

On a sunny day, when there is plenty of contrast, focussing is less of a problem, but on an overcast day like this, AF through filters can struggle. In that case, switch to manual focus. I focussed just in front of the waterfall, which was 5m away, as with a 20mm focal length, everything in the shot was then in focus.

Shooting vertically

Composing using gridlines

Look where the rule of thirds gridlines fall. The base of the waterfall is along the bottom third, the start and end points of the final drop are on intersections and the main waterfall is down the left side vertical.

Before you go...

To shoot long exposure shots at waterfalls you'll need a filter system like the NiSi JetMag Pro system, as well as a decent tripod and a wide angle lens.

Capturing the dream shot is on every photographer's list – but actually finding yourself in the right place at the right moment, after all that effort, is something fewer experience. For three years, 17-year-old wildlife photographer Maksym Breushas been chasing the same elusive moment: a hobby swooping over the water, its talons poised to pounce on a dragonfly.

After more than 200 hours of observation, Maksym finally captured this moment at Redgrave and Lopham Fen on the Norfolk border, UK – and the extraordinary image has now won the Norfolk Wildlife Trust's 2026 Nature Photography Competition.

The competition called Maksym's image a "once-in-a-lifetime shot", and for good reason. Hobbies are among the fastest birds in the world in horizontal flight, making an already fleeting hunting sequence incredibly difficult to photograph. Yet he managed to freeze the split-second encounter with remarkable sharpness at 1/6400sec, using a Canon EOS R full-frame mirrorless camera and a 150-600mm super telephoto lens.

Overall Winner 'Hobby chasing a dragonfly'

Tech info
Canon EOS R + Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 DG OS HSM | C
1/6400sec, f/6.3, ISO 1250

This incredible shot required a great amount of patience from the talented young wildlife photographer, as Maksym explained, "For three years I've attempted to capture a legendary shot of a hobby chasing a dragonfly.

"After more than 200 hours spent observing, the delight of achieving my dream shot was absolutely indescribable!

"For me, wildlife photography was never just about showing an animal, I want to show people the behaviour, story and fleeting moments that make each encounter special."

The Norfolk Wildlife Trust's 2026 Nature Photography Competition

The competition celebrated the best images of Norfolk’s birds, mammals, marine life, bugs, plants, fungi and landscapes – taken anywhere from one of NWT’s reserves to your own garden within the past year. It's your chance to feature in our 2027 calendar, as well as exhibitions around the county.

Discover more winner images on the Norfolk Wildlife Trust's website.

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Looking for a great deal on a photo magazine that arrives through your door every month - then this new subscription deal is the perfect solution to kickstarting your photography this spring!

Getting a photography magazine is a great way to help improve your picture-taking knowledge and to keep up with the latest kit and trends. Right now, you'll get a great introductory deal, where you can get three issues sent to your home for just £3, making it a great gift for yourself or any other photographer in your life!

We'll send the magazine direct to your door as soon as it is printed - and we'll give you free access to the digital edition too, so you can read your magazine (and our archive of over 200 past issues) on your phone, tablet or computer.

With Digital Camera magazine being published 13 issues per year, a magazine subscription really is the gift that keeps on giving – whether for yourself, partner, friend of family member.

Read more:

50 best camera accessories, gadgets and gifts for photographers

The best books on photography

T&Cs
Offer open to new UK subscribers only. After your trial issues, your subscription will continue at £27.99 every six months. We will notify you in advance of any price changes. Please allow up to six weeks for delivery of your first subscription issue. Payment is non-refundable after the 14-day cancellation period unless exceptional circumstances apply. For enquiries, please call: +44 (0) 330 333 1113. Lines are open Monday-Friday 8:30am-7pm, Saturday 10am-3pm BST (excluding Bank Holidays) or email: help@magazinesdirect.com. Calls to 0330 numbers will be charged at no more than a national landline call, and may be included in your phone provider’s call bundle.

Michael Jackson may no longer be with us, but it appears he has channeled his spirit into a peculiar type of fish – which, for what is believed to be the first time ever, has been caught on camera quite literally walking backward along the seafloor.

Much like the King of Pop, famed for his iconic backwards “moonwalk,” the armored sea robins in the footage glide with seemingly minimal effort in all directions, including forwards, backwards and laterally.

Armored sea robins (Peristediidae), also known as armored gurnards, are a subfamily of ray-finned fishes belonging to the sea robin family.

Found in deep tropical and warm temperate waters of the world's oceans, these fish have specialized, stiffened fin rays that act like independent, leg-like appendages, enabling them to walk along the seafloor. See for yourself:

ABOVE: Watch armored sea robins walking along South China Sea floor using their specialized, stiffened rays

The video, which shows three different types of armored sea robins, was captured by marine biologists from Sun Yat-sen University, China, in the South China Sea.

Using human-operated and remotely operated underwater vehicles, the researchers were able to record the fish at depths between 1,151ft and 1,551ft (351-473m).

In the subsequently published research article, the scientists commented that the three live sea robins moved in a sideways, crab-like way, but also backwards – a movement previously unobserved in any other fish.

The researchers said that when the fish walked, the specialized, stiffened rays acted like a “sweeping rake” across the seafloor, occasionally touching sediment bumps or rocks.

While the researchers noted that this morphological trait and its movement seemed “inconvenient” for walking, they believe that it is adapted to help sea robins probe sediment for prey.

Although these fish might not be as evolved as the King of Pop was, they have done a good job of getting their moonwalk up to scratch. Perhaps in a few more millennia, we’ll have footage of them too shredding the dance floor.

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After his previous success with a split-second wildlife shot showing a Eurasian hobby catching prey in mid-air, 16-year-old photographer Jack Crockford has now been recognized by another prestigious photography competition – this time for an extraordinary image of a swift flying almost perfectly aligned with an airplane.

The Art of Flying has now been highlighted by the world's leading wildlife photography competition, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, developed and produced by the Natural History Museum in London, England.

The awards published a sneak peek of this year's Highly Commended images and, in the 15-17 Years category, Jack's shot of a low-flying swift, as its shape is echoed by an incoming plane approaching Heathrow Airport, stood out.

Using the same kit as he used to capture his previous award-winning image, Jack shot with the Nikon D500 – a DSLR camera that Digital Camera World praised as a "dream camera" when reviewing it – paired with a 200-500mm telephoto lens to get close.

When observing the swifts, Jack recalls that most were flying too high to capture, but one of the occasional low-flyers finally enabled him to create the composition he'd been hoping for.

'The Art of Flying' – Shortlisted at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026 competition

Tech details
Nikon Nikon D500 + Nikon AF-S 200-500mm f/5.6E ED VR

Exposure info
1/5000 sec, f/8, ISO1600

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year states, "Jack observed swifts flying overhead, completing their yearly migration back to London and filling the air with their piercing, high-pitched calls.

"Swifts' physical characteristics allow them to migrate from equatorial and southern Africa to breeding grounds in northern Europe.

"Their long, scythe-shaped wings enable exceptional speed and maneuverability. Living almost their entire lives in the air, they usually only land when they’re ready to breed. "

The category winners and the prestigious Grand Title and Young Grand Title awards will be announced on October 13. You can watch the ceremony live on YouTube. The full set of highlighted images will be showcased in an exhibition from October 16 at the Natural History Museum, with tickets available here.

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The James Webb Space Telescope has captured images of all sorts of stellar spectacles since its launch in 2021, but now it appears to be picking up the weird, as well as the wonderful, too.

Astronomers from the European Space Agency (ESA), who jointly operate Webb alongside NASA, have published a photo captured by the telescope depicting a galaxy they can only describe as “unusual”.

According to the astronomers, whose findings were published by the ESA, galaxy NGC 3239 – also known as Arp 263 – not only has an “unusual, distorted” shape, but its stars are oriented differently to its hydrogen gas, where they would normally be symmetrical.

Categorized as an “irregular” galaxy, according to the astronomers, Arp 263 was the result of a cosmic convergence of two separate galaxies, which would explain its irregularity.

The astronomers believe that the other galaxy involved in the merger, but now “nowhere to be found”, was likely a dwarf galaxy small enough to have been completely dissolved into the larger NGC 3239.

However, the astronomers also noted that Arp 263's unusual shape and behavior is expected of galaxies previously involved in what they called a “gravitational tug-of-war” with a former companion galaxy.

The focal point of the recently released image is undoubtedly the extremely bright star that appears at the top of the frame.

This is BD+17 2217, and it looks exponentially brighter because it is, in fact, located within the Milky Way, much closer to home at approximately 7,000 light-years away. This star often appears in the foreground of deep-space images and has gained a reputation among astronomers as a “photobomber.”

While astronomers have known about Arp 263 for well over two centuries, the recent image has revealed new insights. Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) allowed scientists to look “inside” the thick dust clouds for a glimpse of what they called a “stellar nursery”: clusters of recently formed stars.

According to the astronomers, the recent observation will help further understand how stars are born. They added that, because of its “unique” appearance, Arp 263 stands as a fascinating target for future investigations.

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Birds are among the most popular subjects in wildlife photography and powerful indicators of the planet's health. Now, the National Audubon Society announced the winners of the 2026 Audubon Photography Awards, honoring photographers who used their skills to highlight the beauty, challenges, and threats birds face across Chile, Colombia, Canada, and the United States.

Across categories including Birds in Landscapes and Conservation, emerging photography talent also had the opportunity to gain recognition through dedicated Youth categories. The featured species ranged from Roseate Spoonbills, whose populations were severely threatened by plumage hunting in the 18th and 19th centuries, to a Gentoo Penguin swimming just beneath the water's surface near Chilean bases.

For more than 120 years, the National Audubon Society has used science, conservation and community action to protect birds and the places they need to survive and thrive. Visit the website for information about initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean and Audubon’s Plants for Birds program. Explore all 2026 winning images here.

2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Winners and Honorable Mentions – Highlights

Grand Prize: Jacqueline Burke
Species: Roseate Spoonbill
Location of the photo: St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park, St. Augustine, Florida, USA

Plants for Birds Colombia - Winner: Santiago Giraldo
Species: Yellow-eared Parrot and Quindio wax palm
Location of the photo: Anaime, Cajamarca, Tolima

Conservation - Honorable Mention: Rodrigo Vega Neira
Species: American Oystercatcher
Location of the photo: Llolleo Beach, Ojos de Mar Wetland, San Antonio, Valparaíso Region, Chile

Coastal Birds of Chile - Winner: Gonzalo Bertolotto Quintana
Species: Gentoo Penguin
Location of the photo: Fildes Bay, Antarctica, in the vicinity of the Chilean bases

Birds Without Borders – Winner: Nick Parayko
Species: Tennessee Warbler
Location of the photo: St. Albert, Alberta, Canada (in his backyard)

Youth - Honorable mention: Parham Pourahmad
Species: Red-tailed Hawk
Location of the photo: Cupertino, California, USA

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The winners of the 2026 New Zealand Institute of Professional Photography (NZIPP) Iris Awards were recently announced and, in the Australian branch, dogs took the “Animal” category crown, but cats put up a fight, also claiming glory.

While the overall category winner was Charlotte Reeves, a Brisbane-based pet photographer who captured a dramatic series of pooches in the outdoors, Melbourne-based pet photographer Belinda Richards claimed the highest-scoring image with a creative frame of a feline.

The NZIPP Awards are New Zealand’s most recognized photography awards for professional and amateur photographers and, two years ago, expanded into Australia.

In its inaugural Aussie year, Reeves was also crowned Animal Photographer of the Year. This year, she told the organizers she was “honored” for the accolade, while thanking her business partner for encouraging her to enter.

Reeves claimed victory with three dramatic images of dogs in the outdoors, each taking a striking pose. Judges scored images out of 100, with “Gold” claiming a minimum of 90 points, “Silver” 80–89 points, and “Bronze” 75–79 points. Reeves’ trio all gained at least a “Silver” rating, with two marked with distinction.

Although Reeves’ dogs took the Animal category, the cats of the competition put up a good fight. Belinda Richards’ frame scored a whopping 99/100, the highest from any entrant across New Zealand and Australia.

Above: watch how Belinda Richards created her winning image "Catitude"

It’s no wonder Richards scored so well. In a recent Instagram video, the renowned pet photographer revealed how the shot was essentially a major DIY project involving custom set building. Richards had success across the competition too, taking first place in the “Creative” category.

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Oppo's ultra phones have been steadily pushing closer to replacing a traditional camera, and the Find X9 Ultra may be the most convincing yet. In our testing, Digital Camera World found it to be hands-down one of the best camera phones on the market, and the closest a smartphone has yet come to feeling like a real camera in your pocket.

Now the Oppo Find X9 Ultra has picked up a major accolade, winning the prestigious EISA Photo & Video Smartphone 2026-2027 award. EISA praised its versatile focal-length range, premium quality and design, and the creative freedom it gives photographers, calling it a serious competitor to superzoom cameras.

The Find X9 Ultra's impressive camera system includes a 200MP 23mm main camera, a 50MP 14mm ultra-wide and two telephoto options: a 200MP 70mm camera and a 50MP 230mm super-telephoto. The 230mm camera also features sensor-shift stabilization, helping photographers capture sharper handheld images at extreme focal lengths.

EISA Photo & Video Smartphone 2026-2027

EISA says, "OPPO’s Find X9 Ultra raises the bar for smartphone photography with its uncompromising approach.

"An innovative camera system, developed in collaboration with Hasselblad, offers a 14mm–230mm focal length range for outstanding versatility, while the 230mm telephoto lens opens new creative possibilities for mobile photography – adding the optional teleconverter extends focal length to an exceptional 300mm.

"Thanks to this flexibility, plus intelligent shooting and image processing technologies, OPPO’s flagship model is a competitor to super-zoom cameras.

"For photographers seeking the ultimate range, image quality and creative freedom in a smartphone, this is the place to look."

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Perpignan is a southern French city near the Mediterranean coast and the border with Spain. With a population of around 120,000, it's pretty slow-paced for most of the year. But all that changes for a couple of weeks in late summer, when it suddenly becomes the world capital of photojournalism.

Churches, convents, even a former prison get turned into galleries, and almost twice the town's population again turns up to experience the most immersive pictures of wars, famines and everyday life the profession has to share.

Visa pour l'Image, aka The International Festival of Photojournalism, was the creation of one man, and this week we sadly lost him. Jean-François Leroy died on August 31, of cancer, at his home in Paris, aged just 69.

He lived to see this year's 38th edition of Visa open, and although he wasn't well enough to attend, was fully involved in selecting the programme. That included choosing the headline exhibition: a retrospective of the work by the French photographer, photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Raymond Depardon.

Why Visa matters

Launched in 1989 with the backing of Roger Thérond, the editor of Paris Match, Visa pour l'Image has proved to be far more than just a way of extending Perpignan's tourist season. For many, it's been an professional lifeline: a free, public festival where those with no gallery representation or book deal can still get their work seen by picture editors, agencies and juries.

That ethos of supporting photographers is firmly in the festival's DNA, not least because Leroy came up through the trade himself. Born in Paris in 1956, he first shot assignments for Sipa Press before moving into editing at Photo Magazine, where he became editor-in-chief. However, he judged his own pictures harshly and decided his real talent lay in championing other people's.

That instinct for spotting and backing talent became the foundations on which Visa pour L'image has prospered: discover young photographers, celebrate the ones already known, and rediscover the historic ones the industry has let slip.

It made him plenty of friends and just as many people who found him exhausting. Tributes this week describe a tall, chain-smoking, skull-ring-wearing figure who could be tough and critical. But he was also someone who changed lives: the French photographer Axelle de Russé recalled hanging up on him, thinking his phone call telling her she'd won a Visa award was a prank.

What makes his death particularly poignant is the theme he chose for this, his final festival: "Reality strikes back", a direct response to the threat of AI-generated imagery to the profession. He leaves the festival team pledging to keep Perpignan "a beacon for photojournalists". Long may it continue.

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, Wex Photo is offering savings of up to 35% 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.

DSLRS

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Lenses

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Bodies

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

DxO PhotoLab 10 has launched with a raft of new updates, and it’s available right now. DxO Labs is calling this latest incarnation of its flagship photo-editing software “our most powerful RAW editor yet.” And with all-new tools, powerful upgrades and boosted functionality, that certainly looks to be the case.

The headline feature is Depth Masks. An all-new tool that uses AI to form a depth map of the image in question. As DxO Labs product director, Cyril Duchêne said: “It will emulate the depth of field as if you were moving it directly with your lens. So it will help you select – precisely – a zone on your photo to edit it as if, for example, a ray of sun was touching just a part of that picture, naturally.” The mask is controlled via a series of sliders and adjustable feathering handles to create the desired effect.

PhotoLab’s standard AI masking has been treated to an upgrade, enabling it to identify “every person” in a photo. This is designed to allow photographers to group multiple people under one mask or tackle individuals with separate masking.

Portrait AI masking has also been enhanced with the introduction of face segmentation. A huge range of facial features, including eyebrows, eyes, facial hair, pupils and lips, are now selectable. This lives alongside existing selective masks for elements such as skies, subjects, animals and vehicles.

DxO’s U Point tech now features a Control Brush, allowing users to introduce hand-drawn custom shapes while maintaining the U Point workflow. New elliptical Control Points have also been added and AI Masks can now be combined with the U Point eyedropper, enabling users to select color and luminosity within the confines of an AI-generated mask.

That’s not the only color upgrade. DxO PhotoLab 10 brings with it a new “advanced” color grading tool. This exists within a single color wheel, with sliders for Hue, Saturation, Luminance and Balance. However, a neat little trick is the ability to move all plotted points on the color wheel in unison. As Cyril puts it: “That means you keep the balance you created at first (...) you can move all of them.”

DxO PhotoLab 10 also boasts a “seamless connection” with Canva’s free photo editor, Affinity. At the click of a button, you can open an image from PhotoLab directly in Affinity. And according to DxO, further enhancements are planned for releases in the future.

As you’d expect, there are also a range of quality-of-life upgrades. For example, the crop tool now features original as-shot ratios and you can make histogram adjustments within PhotoLibrary. DxO has also presided over improved folder management, database backup and restore tools. The software also boasts a new AI-powered RAW dust-removal tool.

DxO PhotoLab 10 is priced at $249.99 / £229.99 for a new perpetual license, while anyone upgrading from PhotoLab 8 or 9 can enjoy a discounted rate of $129.99 / £114.99. It's available for purchase now and can also be test-driven via a seven-day free trial.

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The street photography of Martin Parr was always divisive. In the mid-1980s, many residents of New Brighton, a seaside resort on the Wirral in Merseyside, England, believed his work was ridiculing them. But time, it seems, heals all wounds. Now, less than a year on from his death, the town is fundraising to put a giant tribute to him on its seafront.

New Brighton Creative Futures, a community arts group, has announced plans for a large-scale mural honoring Parr and The Last Resort, the iconic color photo series he shot in the town between 1983 and 1985. 

The project is being developed with the Martin Parr Foundation, and the group is asking local people to donate, sponsor and even come forward if they think they might be one of the faces in the original photographs. It's a neat conclusion to a 40-year story.

From backlash to acceptance

It's worth remembering just how much that original body of work upset some people. Martin Parr didn't set out to show New Brighton in its best light. Instead, he focused his lens on its litter-strewn beaches, its overflowing bins and its crowded, sunburnt families; all shot in the saturated colour that was looked down on in serious documentary circles at the time. 

Locals and critics alike accused Parr of being a class tourist, of making a declining resort look worse than it was, of being voyeuristic with people who hadn't signed up to be part of anyone's art project. I know some who still hold these thoughts to this day, although they're less outspoken than they once were.

Parr himself was aware of the backlash, but it didn't deter him in the slightest. "I realised pretty early on that controversy didn't do you any harm," he once told Magnum. "And now of course it's seemed to have all settled, and people are much more appreciative of that body of work than they were in the 80s."

That settling took decades, and it happened not in an instant, but more through the pictures simply outlasting the argument. The photographs that once looked like an insult now read, to most eyes, as an affectionate and honest record of how the British enjoy summer, exactly because Parr refused to prettify it.

New Brighton's Victoria Quarter has spent the past eight years building itself into one of the country's densest clusters of large-scale murals, and this tribute will join that open-air gallery rather than stand alone. 

What the finished piece will add to that collage remains to be seen. But the mere fact of its existence says something Parr would probably have appreciated: the town that once resented being looked at so closely has made its peace with Parr.

September 2026 marks a turning point for astrophotographers in the Northern Hemisphere. After months of short nights, darkness returns quickly after sunset, bringing longer and more comfortable observing windows. At the same time, the Milky Way’s bright core begins to slip away from the evening sky, making this a final opportunity to capture it until next spring. The month also features the equinox — often a time of auroral activity at northern latitudes — and the warm glow of the Harvest Moon.

Here’s everything you need to know about astrophotography in September 2026:

September 3: Moon and Pleiades

Look to the northeast just before midnight, and you'll see the Pleiades, a familiar sight of the winter night sky. Tonight, it will be flanked to the lower left by a 54%-lit waning gibbous moon.

Read: The best cameras for astrophotography

September 4-15: Dark sky window

With new moon on September 10, the preceding week offers some of the darkest skies since spring. This is your final realistic opportunity in 2026 to capture the Milky Way’s core in the evening sky from mid-northern latitudes. Look southeast after dusk to find the brightest region low on the horizon, gradually sinking earlier each night. A wide-angle lens, fast aperture (f/2.8), ISO 1600–3200 and exposures of 10-20 seconds will capture the structure of the Milky Way, though a star tracker will reveal extra detail.

Read: The best star tracker camera mounts

September 7: Moon and Mars

Are you ready for a couple of very early starts? Rise an hour before sunset today, and you’ll have a chance to capture a beautiful 19%-lit waning crescent moon just a few degrees from Mars. Shining in the northeast, they’ll be close to Castor and Pollux, the two brightest stars in the constellation Gemini.

Read: When to photograph the moon

September 8: Moon, the Beehive Cluster and Jupiter

A delicate 11%-lit waning crescent moon will this morning sit across one of the most beautiful open clusters of stars in the night sky. The Beehive Cluster is a cluster of around 1,000 stars in the constellation Cancer. Below the pair will be Jupiter, shining brightly.

Read: 10 must-shoot events for astrophotographers in 2026

//IMAGE//

https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/traditional-rorbu-during-the-northern-lights-royalty-free-image/1618263208

CAPTION: The Northern Lights often surge around the equinox. (Image credit: Roberto Moiola / Sysaworld via Getty Images)

Tuesday, 22 September: Equinox and aurora

The September equinox marks the official start of autumn or fall in the Northern Hemisphere and brings nearly equal day and night. For astrophotographers, it signals the return of longer nights, but it’s also the perfect time for heightened auroral activity. Sure, you can wait for unusually high activity that produces faint aurora above the U.K. or U.S., but if you’re set on actually seeing the Northern Lights, consider a trip to the auroral oval, where aurora is very common after dark. Head to the Arctic Circle in Alaska, northern Canada or northern Scandinavia (Norway, Finland, Sweden and Iceland).

Read: Northern Lights photography: tips and techniques for stunning images

September 26: Full ‘Harvest Moon’ rises

September’s full moon is the Harvest Moon, the full moon closest to the equinox. Although tonight is the best night to capture it (not least because it’s very close to Saturn), it actually rises close to sunset for several nights in a row, making it ideal for repeated attempts at moonrise photography. As always, the best time to shoot is at moonrise, when the moon appears largest and most colorful. Use a long lens (200–600mm) to capture detail or incorporate a foreground subject for scale. Do some rigorous sun and moon planning to capture it.

Read: How to photograph the full moon

Astrophotography shot of the month: Zodiacal light

Mid-September brings an opportunity to image the famed zodiacal light. In the days around the equinox, look east before dawn for a faint triangular glow rising from the horizon. It’s sunlight scattered by dust between Mars and Jupiter.

The best time to capture it will be any clear night from around September 9-22. However, you will need a very dark site — use a light pollution map or find a Dark Sky Place. Once in position, capture is the same as for the Milky Way: use a wide-angle lens on a tripod, ISO 1600-3200, and exposures of 15-25 seconds. Zodiacal light is subtle, but your camera will find it. Just don’t forget about composition.

Read more:

• Astrophotography tools: the best camera, lenses and gear

• The best lenses for astrophotography

• The best star tracker camera mounts

I'm always on the lookout for movies about real photographers, from dramas like Lee (2023) to documentaries like All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022). So my eyes perked up when I saw that H for Hawk (2025) had recently popped up on my Netflix homepage. 

To be clear, its plot isn't about photography at all: it's the true-life tale of how English academic and naturalist Helen McDonald (played by Claire Foy) dealt with grief over her father's sudden death through training and bonding with a bird of prey. 

But the father she's grieving for was a real-life photojournalist, and to my mind his story is just as interesting. 

Alisdair Macdonald, who's played in the movie by Brendan Gleeson, spent 26 years shooting for one of Britain's biggest newspapers, the Daily Mirror, and also helped launch Today, Britain's first full-color national paper. 

He photographed the Beatles from 1963 onward, travelling with them to Paris for their Olympia shows, and kept snapping the individual members well beyond their split in 1970. He picked up a World Press Photo award in 1989, in the humor category, for a shot of a workman fleeing a burst water main.

All of these details are subtly woven through this film in a way that adds extra emotional depth to the main character's sense of loss and grief. 

This climaxes in the film's eulogy scene, in which Helen delivers a tribute to her father built around a slideshow of his own photographs. These are Alisdair Macdonald's actual images, many of which live on in the Getty archives today.

Work ethic

McDonald left school at 15, trained at Regent Street Polytechnic and was hired by the Mirror as its youngest staff photographer at just 20. By Helen's own account, he was the type to scope out a location then stand there for the best part of a day rather than risk missing the shot. 

In the case of his shot of Charles and Diana kissing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after their wedding, that meant a full 24 hours of not eating and drinking, after which he was dreadfully ill and nearly collapsed.

Macdonald didn't just apply this approach to professional life, but his own personal projects too.

Above: trailer for H is for Hawk

"At home, dad rigged up infrared beams over ponds to photograph bats swooping to drink, their complicated noses pressed to watery darkness," she once told Woman And Home. "One year he fixed a glass-backed nest box to the shed and photographed a pair of blue tits rearing their brood of chicks: the whole family was entranced."

Just to be clear, this is a movie about the daughter, not the father, and birds not photography: allusions to the latter are purely incidental to its main plot or themes. But as an example of a real-life drama hitting the right notes, both in terms of Alisdair Macdonald himself and his approach to photography, it deserves full marks nonetheless.

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 44% 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.

Most photography competitions offer a cash or equipment prize, but I’m sure many of us would trade that off for a job as a photographer with a dream organization.

That’s exactly what Newfoundland-based photographer David Sturge has won after recently being crowned the Canadian Wildlife Photographer of the Year by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS).

He now gets to work as a photographer for Canadian Geographic, RCGS’ bimonthly magazine, covering assignments across culture, environmental and travel in British Columbia.

Sturge, who’s based in Paradise, Newfoundland, and works as a provincial park ranger and wildlife guide, won the competition with a stellar portfolio of animal portraits.

Among them were a dramatic shot of a puffin holding a feather in its mouth and looking directly at the camera, as well as a photogenic fox seemingly posing for the shot.

Sturge is also a member of the The Canadian Conservation Photographers Collective (CCPC), a group of photographers and videographers formed in 2021 to promote environmental conservation and science education through visual storytelling.

Speaking to Canadian Geographic, he explained his goal of using photography to raise awareness of how the natural world is changing and the importance of protecting wildlife. “I love to create beautiful images and connect with these creatures,” he said, “but I know these stories need to be told.”

According to the organizers, the 2026 edition of the photography competition attracted more than 10,000 entries. 18 photographers in total were honored for images depicting terrestrial and aquatic animals, flora and fungi, and winged species.

Steven Marriott claimed first place in the “Terrestrial Life” category for an action freeze-frame of an American mink dashing toward his lens after catching some prey at a conservation area in Ontario.

While in the “Aquatic Life” category, winner Jean-Christophe Lemay got the judges’ vote with a mesmerizingly colorful shot of a sandworm swimming on the surface of the St. Lawrence Estuary.

Over in the “Flora and Fungi” category, entomologist Anthony Zerafa came first with a shot of Scheuchzer’s cottongrass growing on the shore of Colour Lake on Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut.

And Saskatchewan-based biologist Jon Behuniak won the “Things with Wings” category with a macro frame of a thick-headed fly on a raspberry cane.

The Canadian Wildlife Photographer of the Year is an annual photography competition celebrating the flora and fauna within Canadian borders. Photographs must be taken in Canada by photographers who are permanent residents in the country.

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South African photographer Chris Fallows became interested in wildlife when he was a youngster and started taking photographs of marine life when he was a teenager.

Best known for his photographs of great white sharks and marine animals, which are captured with a fine-art aesthetic, Fallows was runner-up in the General – Black & White category of 2025's Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum International Photography Award (HIPA) competition.

His low-angle black-and-white shot of a herd of elephants in Kenya's Amboseli National Park certainly chimed with the 'Power' theme of the awards.

Fallows' breakthrough photo was taken at sea, however, where he spends most of his time.

'Air Jaws', a great white shark breaching the waves at South Africa's Seal Island, was captured in 1996 and set him on the path to global recognition.

He prizes a minimalistic look and feel, and the resulting work lends itself to being displayed at scale – including public spaces like Times Square in New York City and Dubai International Airport.

Fallows sells large prints of his pictures, and invests the proceeds in conservation projects.

"Certain subjects are really strong for black-and-white photos," says Fallows. "On the ocean, I like to shoot into a choppy sea state that gives that mood and really powerful feel when you apply black and white processing to it."

Fallows spends a lot of time at sea, and we spoke to him following a spell working off the South African coast where he photographed 304 humpback whales in one day – a world record.

So let's find out more about the man, and his marine photography…

Find out more

Discover more about Chris and Monique Fallows' art and conservation work or to find ways to collaborate with them, go to www.chrisfallows.com or follow Chris on Instagram at @chrisfallowsphotography

Read more in Digital Camera magazine

A longer version of this interview appears in issue 311 (September 2026) of Digital Camera magazine.

Every issue of Digital Camera magazine is packed with tips, techniques, pro advice, reviews, news and inspiration.

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You can buy limited back issues of Digital Camera magazine in print at our Magazines Direct secure store.

Alternatively, there is a range of different digital options available, including:

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The ColorChecker – a small card featuring 24 color patches – has turned 50. And, to mark its half century, Calibrite, the manufacturer, has launched a virtual museum exploring the history of the iconic design.

Calibrite has said that the virtual museum forms part of a year-long celebration of its color-accuracy tool. These will also include a challenge teaching what each of the 24 color patches does and a “perfectionist” quiz matching creators to the right Calibrite products.

The original ColorChecker, later known as the “Macbeth chart,” was created by scientists at the Macbeth company, who designed it for the TV and movie industry.

To determine the correct paint colors, they used a spectrophotometer to measure the actual spectral reflectance curves – how much light is reflected at every individual nanometer wavelength of the visible spectrum – of real-world materials like human skin and leaves.

Over the next 50 years, the ColorChecker brand changed corporate hands several times, from the newly merged GretagMacbeth company in the late 1990s, to X-Rite in the mid-2000s, and finally to the current owner, Calibrite, in 2021.

As the owners of the ColorChecker changed, so did the technology behind it. These days, ultra-precise laser scanners measure the light of each color patch, translating them into universal digital coordinates that computers and software can understand.

This enables the digital ColorChecker products to determine correct screen colors beyond the original handheld card. In fact, here at Digital Camera World, we use a ColorChecker Video when editing our Bokeh Face podcastt to ensure we don’t get any quirky hues before publishing an episode.

Calibrite’s 50th anniversary of the ColorChecker went live today, September 1, and you can check out the virtual museum and other celebratory online activities at the official hub.

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The filter that lives on my favorite camera lens a majority of the time is a diffusion filter, which gives light sources a glow that feels like a retro film lens. But now a new slider from Adobe is mimicking that retro effect – and it’s a new launch hidden inside Adobe Camera RAW.

While Photoshop got a major announcement last week with a new light adjustment layer, the new update to Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) came with little fanfare. ACR is Adobe’s RAW file converter that edits and preps RAW files before opening them inside Photoshop.

ACR now has a new slider called “Glow.” The new slider acts a lot like a digital version of a diffusion filter. As Adobe describes, “Glow spreads light from the brightest areas of your image into surrounding tones, creating everything from a subtle haze to a strong cinematic bloom.”

With the diffusion filter as one of my favorites, I immediately had to try out Adobe’s new Glow slider. The slider spreads out light sources in the photograph, but in spreading it out, the tool also seems to dim the light source just a bit.

Importantly, the glow tool works for all the brightest areas of the image, not necessarily just light sources. For example, when I used the tool to exaggerate a sun flare, it also emphasized the sun’s reflection off the building and obscured some of the details in those highlights.

Like any slider, there’s such a thing as going too far. At 100 percent in some shots I tried, the light-up windows in a city streetscape took on a more unnatural hard edge. That’s why the tool is built as a slider, giving photo editors the power to choose how much or how little of the effect to dial in.

But, there's a bit more control built into the new tool than just the overall slider. Clicking on the arrow next to the tool opens up additional sliders for more control, including adjustments for the amount of light spread.

A drop-down filter here also allows creators to choose from different types of glow effects, including halation and bloom, along with the standard diffusion. Bloom is my favorite, as this slider allows the light to spread into the darker portions of the image as well.

The new tool will also mimic the look of a warm diffusion filter by using the warmth slider.

The new glow slider is also available inside ACR's masking tools, which is useful if you want one light source to spread but not another.

Modern camera lenses are often built with multiple coatings that help suppress flare and ghosting. Vintage lenses often didn’t have these coatings – or at least had fewer of them – which is why film cameras tended to create a glow around light sources. A diffusion filter can help modern lenses mimic that look, but now there’s a tool to play around with before opening a RAW file inside Photoshop.

The new Glow Slider is located inside Adobe Camera RAW version 18.6 under the “Effects” section of tools, just underneath the grain tool.

Editing multiple RAW files tends to be easier in Lightroom than in ACR – so this is a slider that I really hope to see come to Lightroom next. It’s not uncommon for a tool to arrive in ACR before launching in Lightroom, like with the recent reflection removal tool, so I don’t think hoping for a similar Lightroom tool is too far-fetched.

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