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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The importance of format

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A miniature world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expert analysis of 'Kingfisher' by Dave Newman

Overall impact

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

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

Eye contact

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

Frozen water and spray

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

Beautiful background

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

Depth of field

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

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

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

Vertical composition

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

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

Read more from Digital Camera magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The power of a picture

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

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

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

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

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

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

O'Connor's gear and settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prestigious-Ad-5238's gear and settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We all remember the class portrait photo from our school days, and not always in a kindly way. Rows of children, arranged by height, squinting at a stranger behind a lens. Getting shouted at to comb your hair. Being berated for not smiling properly. It wasn't everybody's idea of fun.

And yet if someone keeps the print, and it turns up a couple of decades on, we're generally pleased. Not because it's a great photo: it's typically average at best. The light is whatever the light happened to be. The composition is entirely predictable. At least one or two kids end up blurred.

No, whether we're talking about a 100-year-old portrait or a 20-year-old one, what makes it precious isn’t usually anything the photographer did. It’s how well someone captioned them afterwards.

A face to a name

Take the 1927 photo from Mountain School in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, at the top of this page. On its own, it’s just fine.

A young teacher, nine pupils and a small, curly-haired child, on a lawn. The boys’ socks are wrinkling down their shins. One girl squints hard into the sun.

Then you turn it over. On the back, someone has written down every name, row by row: Paul Kittredge, James Curns, Gilbert Stacy, Wilfred Bennett along the front, then Madella Stacy, Georgia Curns, Florence Dupont, the teacher Pearl Supernow, Janet Piper and a girl whose surname they weren't sure of (“Louise?”). The toddler is listed as “small child visitor Clare Tupper”.

That list makes the difference between just a nice old picture and a truly fascinating historical document. If you just have the picture, it's nothing special. With the list, you have real, breathing people, with families and descendants who are able to find them today.

An invaluable help

Sometimes the info is right there on the picture itself. This 1906 picture from Fairview School, Illinois, shows the classic structure of the class portrait: small ones at the front, tallest at the sides, two teachers in the doorway, almost no one smiling. Along the bottom, in careful copperplate, are the words: “Niles Township, Ill – District 72 – Sept. 1906”.

It’s barely a dozen words. But it means an archivist 120 years later can tell you exactly which school this was, where it stood and who probably ran it. That's not just helpful, it's invaluable. Especially considering the building has long gone, and the town isn’t even called Niles Center anymore (it’s Skokie).

Finally, we have the graduating class of 1901 in Independence, Missouri, posed beneath a stained-glass window. And again, we know exactly who’s in it, because someone recorded all the names, row by row.

That's just as well, because the boy fourth from the left in the back row is Harry S Truman, future 33rd President of the United States. His future wife, Bess Wallace, is there too.

Here’s what's bothering me. We now take more photos in a month than some of these people took in a lifetime. Automatically, our camera will record the time, a date and maybe even the GPS location. But it won't know that the girl second from the left is your great-aunt, or that the toddler was only visiting. Those details need to be written down by an actual human.

So, here's my plea: think of future generations. And next time you shoot a group of people, take five minutes to write down who’s who. It’s not fun, and it's not glamorous. But half a century from now, it may well be the only part that matters.

The moon can be tricky to photograph – but astrophotographers are in for a moon treat in the second half of October.

When I was browsing through some of the top news photos from the past week, I had to stop and take a closer look at this shot from photographer Gary Hershorn. The photograph places a waxing crescent moon directly behind the torch from New York City’s Statue of Liberty.

The orange glow of the Moon, only ten percent lit, appears as if it's an extension of Lady Liberty’s torch itself. Hershon used a 300mm lens – mounted on the Canon EOS R7 – to get the shot, which helps the moon to appear larger in the image.

Hershon’s photograph from October 13 is an excellent shot of a crescent moon. But October is ripe with opportunities to photograph the moon – and one of October’s biggest astrophotography events is yet to come.

October’s full moon is on October 25, but the full moon will be closest to the horizon when it rises on October 26. When the moon is the closest to the horizon, its light has to pass through the thickest part of the Earth’s atmosphere, which gives it a warmer color like orange or yellow.

That’s why the sliver of moon in Hershon’s photo is orange. But October’s big moon event, the Hunter Moon, will be another opportunity for astrophotographers to catch the moon in a warm glow at this month’s full moon.

An orange moon isn’t a rare occurrence. But October’s full moon is often a photography favorite because it rises close to sunset, so there’s often enough sunlight left to offer some light to the rest of the landscape.

Digital Camera World’s astrophotography expert Jamie Carter recommends using a telephoto lens (ideally 200-600mm) to photograph this month’s Hunter’s Moon on October 26. The moon will be fairly bright – it’s a supermoon, though a smaller one – so photographers will need a lower ISO and faster shutter speed to avoid overexposing the details on the surface of the moon.

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If you like photography, you've probably heard it being described as "painting with light". It's a phrase that's been in use for at least a century, but it's never felt more relevant than looking at this picture, which has just been named Photo of the Year at the Siena International Photo Awards.

Light is the first thing you see, and the thing that makes the biggest impression, as sun pours through patterned curtains into a small room. Then your eye moves right, past a wooden door, and you meet a woman's gaze.

Her name is Amina. She stands on the dark side of the door, half-hidden, her face framed by a black headscarf. She doesn’t smile.

Amina was captured by Italian photographer Stefano Rosselli in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, a country in the grip of a tyrannical government run by the Taliban. She lives with her mother, a sister and a brother. Her father was a driver and has been missing for two years.

It's a story Rosselli has heard again and again as he entered the homes of Afghan families: “families where the death or disappearance of men has left an unfillable void, silencing all hope.”

That loss hits hard in a nation where, as Rosselli puts it, women are “deprived of the right to work and their independence, the only weapons to change their destiny”. With no man in the house, the future is bleak. “Stories in Afghanistan all resemble one another,” he says, “marked by the awareness that a happy ending will rarely, if ever, be written.”

Dividing lines

What's impressive about this picture is how much it tells you, without actually telling you anything. The door divides the frame in two. On the left is an empty room. On the right is Amina, squeezed into a narrow strip of shadow. The light that floods the room barely reaches her face. As a visual metaphor for a life lived in the shadows, it couldn't be clearer.

The details only serve to emphasise this theme. The contents are sparse: a couple of trunks, a fan on the wall, fabric across the ceiling. The colors are restrained too, with the dusty pinks and golds of the curtains balanced by the cool grays of the wall and the deep black of her scarf.

Many images of suffering show their subjects looking away, which can make them feel passive. Amina meets the camera directly, and that makes the image both powerful and uncomfortable, in all the right ways.

Rosselli’s path to this moment is an unusual one. He spent 30 years working in advertising at agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi, DLV BBDO and Leagas Delaney. Recently though, after years of portraying what he calls “a perfect world far from reality”, he felt the need to show the real world “without filters or censorship”.

Amina and the other winning images are on display until November 29 at exhibitions in Siena, Castelnuovo Berardenga and Sovicille, Italy. Find out more on the Siena Awards website.

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“Rigid” and “unforgiving” are perhaps two adjectives that come to mind when describing ballet. But that’s not Idaho-based photographer Weston McGhee’s approach to shooting dancers.

Through his ongoing photo series, Interval, he’s captured these artists in settings beyond what he calls the “polished performances” of practice studios and stages, highlighting how the beauty and emotion of this art form can exist spontaneously, too.

For one of these images, Weston photographed a dancer named Cydney in a garage, the last place you might expect to see a ballet act. “Most of the time during this shoot, it was me letting her do what she knows best and trying to time these movements correctly,” he said.

This image was recently selected by the photography platform VSCO to feature among The Fifty, a current project drawing attention to practicing photographers across the US. Weston’s frame was chosen from some 13,000 entries and is now being displayed on a billboard in his home state.

Weston and Cydney were meeting for the first time, having connected through a mutual friend. The photographer encouraged the dancer to express herself “freely,” rather than follow a planned choreography.

“I told her that I wanted this to be a collaborative shoot. I said, ‘Turn on some music and create!’” Weston explained.

The garage was located in Boise, the capital city of Idaho, and was a prime spot on Weston’s list of shoot locations, having scouted here several times. “Each time always had a different feel, but this time, in May, the direct sun was perfect,” he said.

Weston placed Cydney in an illuminated spot on the ground, “absolutely loving” the way the light entered through the opening in the roof. He then distanced himself to not “interfere” with the dancer's movement. “I wanted to see her whole body and freestyle movement in that patch of light,” he said.

To capture the scene, the photographer used a recently purchased Fujifilm X100VI. The 40.2MP camera features a fixed 23mm f/2 lens, which Weston balanced with a fast shutter speed. “I didn’t want any motion blur for this series,” he said.

Throughout Interval, Weston has shot images in color, later changing them to monochrome in post-production, and this frame was no different. “I believe it helps eliminate any other distractions, and I like to have a timeless look,” he said.

But for Weston, the series is much more about the emotions and vulnerabilities expressed through the dancers’ bodies than the aesthetic appeal of its individual images.

For him, the photographs reflect a place between posed portraiture and the “quieter, unguarded moments” that spontaneously emerge through trust and shared time between dancer and photographer.

“I just want to give thanks to all of the amazing ballet dancers that have collaborated with me so far,” he said. “I would also like to thank VSCO. Having this photo put on a billboard in the city I live in is such a cool experience.”

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Many bird photographers set out to capture a frozen, pin-sharp scene, every feather in place. But sometimes, it's better to go in the opposite direction, and swap clinical detail for drama and excitement instead.

This shot of a Brandt’s cormorant by Kevin Lohman nails that approach perfectly. Local resident Lohman captured it at Natural Bridges State Beach in Santa Cruz, California. “From a public walkway above a Brandt’s Cormorant colony, I watched as birds repeatedly flew in with nesting material,” he explains to Audubon magazine.

He was shooting on a Nikon Z9 with the Nikon Z 400mm f/2.8 TC VR S, at 1/100sec, f/2.8 and ISO 1100. The image received an honourable mention in the Plants for Birds category in the 2026 Audubon Photography Awards.

Slow shutter, long lens

For a bird in flight, 1/100sec is a strikingly slow shutter speed. Most photographers would go for 1/2000sec or faster to freeze the action. But Lohman isn't most photographers.

“I slowed my shutter speed while panning, which blurred this bird’s wings and kept its head and the bundle of grass sharp,” he says. By swinging the camera to follow the bird, he kept its body still relative to the sensor, while the beating wings and background smeared into blur.

In practice, it must have been tricky, to say the least, with a lens that weighs nearly 3kg. Indeed, Lohman admits that “holding a long lens made the process more challenging and most frames were not useable, but I caught this moment.”

Creatively, the effect is striking. Judge Marlene Pantin noted that “the blurred wings in the clouds give an almost ethereal cast to the photo, creating a feeling of deep tranquility.” The palette is restrained, too: dark plumage, cool blue-grey surroundings and a single burst of green and gold from the surfgrass, which acts as the focal point.

“What drew me to this scene was the connection between ocean and cliff,” says Lohman. “These cormorants rely on marine vegetation like surfgrass to build and maintain their nests, linking the health of the nearshore ocean to their success on land. I hope the image highlights the effort behind this behavior and the importance of protecting coastal ecosystems.”

The Audubon Photography Awards, organised by the National Audubon Society, is now in its 17th year. The contest celebrates photos that capture the beauty of birds and the challenges they face. You can see all the winners and honourable mentions on the Audubon website.

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At first glance, it looks like something out of a sci-fi blockbuster: a swirling tunnel of teal and coral-red gas, opening onto a deep, star-speckled void. The image by Israeli astrophotographer Kfir Simon was named runner-up in the Stars and Nebulae category of ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2026. And you can see why.

But what are we actually looking at? The picture, titled Beyond the Wormhole, captures the centre of the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), which is around 650 light years away in the constellation Aquarius.

The bright star in the middle is a white dwarf: the remains of a star that shed its outer layers thousands of years ago to form the nebula. But the truly interesting story is not the nebula itself but what's behind it.

As Simon explains: “This image of the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293) showcases the galaxies that sit many millions of light years beyond it, as if we are looking at them through a wormhole. The picture is a crop of the central core of the nebula and has been processed in order to reveal the tiny galaxies. To my surprise, there are many more than I had imagined.”

Location and kit

The image was captured in June 2025 at Tivoli Southern Sky Guest Farm near Windhoek in Namibia. Studies have ranked the location as having one of the least light-polluted and darkest night skies on Earth, with artificial light increasing the natural sky brightness by only about 2%.

Simon shot the scene with a Moravian Instruments C3 Pro camera, built around a 61MP, full-frame Sony IMX455 sensor. He was shooting through an ASA 600 telescope, whose main mirror measures 600mm (24 inches) across, with a 4,200mm focal length.

That long focal length gives the telescope extraordinary reach. Each pixel records a patch of sky about as wide as a penny seen from 23km away, which is why galaxies just a few pixels across show up at all.

The trade-off is a narrow view: the whole frame takes in a patch of sky roughly the width of the full Moon. And because the Helix is one of the largest nebulae in our sky, appearing almost as big as the Moon itself; even this frame only just contains it.

Simon cropped the full 9,576 x 6,388-pixel frame to around 7,087 x 5,209 pixels and still had enough resolution to pick out galaxies that were only a few pixels across.

Most images of the Helix show the whole thing as a giant eye, commonly known as the Eye of God. By cropping the shot in this way, though, Simon has transformed the nebula from a subject into a frame. The gas looks like the walls of a tunnel, with the white dwarf a beacon at its centre, drawing the eye through and out into the far universe.

The ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year is the world’s largest astrophotography competition, hosted by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, London. The winning and shortlisted images are currently on display at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

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A pair of red-crowned cranes emerged from what looks like a blank canvas, in a dance of courtship across the snow-capped landscape.

With their dark plumage and red crowns standing out as the only anchors of color, the scene raises the question: how much detail can a photographer remove before an image stops working?

“The set I came away with reads more like ink-wash paintings than wildlife photographs,” said Somdutt Prasad, the ophthalmologist and multi-award-winning photographer who created the image as part of a series in Hokkaido, northern Japan.

Choosing Hokkaido and the high-key look

However, this high-key aesthetic was no attempt to salvage an overexposed set of photos, rather a thought-out artistic decision to capture a unique wildlife subject in a unique way.

“I was already thinking about how to make the images intertwine with the crane’s (tanchōzuru) folklore and its place in Japanese culture, rather than simply document it,” said Prasad.

The photographer explained that producing colorful, fully saturated scenes would have resulted in a "fairly standard" photographic series, so he instead chose to push the images toward a monochrome look

“High-key was the obvious direction,” Prasad added. “These birds are essentially black and white already, with color confined to a small patch on the head and neck.”

Planning before pressing the shutter

Achieving this visual effect began before taking any images, with Prasad planning his visit to the northern Japanese island in January, during Hokkaido’s coldest period. In search of the heaviest snow cover, he braved temperatures below −20°C, which strained batteries, hands, and patience.

In the field, Prasad prioritized mornings, looking for fog rising from warmer, spring-fed areas of marshland to compress the tonal range and separate the cranes from their surroundings.

Although this was no easy feat, the photographer explained that the high-key effect depended on isolating a single crane or, at most, a pair of cranes away from the bustling flock.

“That meant a lot of waiting – for a wing to open against a clean background, for a neck to arch into a shape worth keeping – rather than simply firing at whatever moved,” he said.

The equipment and technique

Snow can easily fool a camera’s metering into rendering a bright scene too dark, so to achieve a high-key look, photographers must deliberately increase the exposure. But push too far and you risk “burning the highlights,” and important details, such as birds’ feathers, can disappear, explained Prasad.

Shooting in RAW on a Nikon Z8 and Nikon Z9, the photographer explained how he kept a “constant” eye on the histogram displayed in the electronic viewfinder to assess exposure while pressing the shutter.

“You have to deliberately overexpose beyond what feels natural and then protect the highlights rather than the midtones,” said Prasad.

Prasad's gear for the red-crowned crane series

• Nikon Z9
• Nikon Z8
• Nikon Z 24-120mm f/4 S
• Nikon Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR S
• Nikon Z 400mm f/2.8 TC VR S

The “real transformation” happened in Photoshop

After overexposing “right up to the edge” of clipping, Prasad’s first editing step was to recover detail in the snow by adjusting the “Exposure” and “Highlights” sliders in Lightroom Classic.

Then he ran the images through Photoshop, which, according to Prasad, was where the “real transformation happened.” The photographer masked the birds, carefully refining these masks near the edges of the feathers by hand.

Prasad explained that if a crane was standing on snow, he sometimes included the snow around its feet, using a feathered lasso selection or soft radial gradient.

To create the negative space in each image, Prasad then inverted the masks to select the background, pushing its exposure to the maximum and burning or clone-stamping out any remaining “stubborn” color flecks.

“The processing became an extension of the same minimalist instinct as the framing, stripping out distractions and leaning on negative space,” said Prasad.

For the final touches, the photographer masked the birds’ bodies, deliberately leaving their necks and red crowns untouched, before desaturating the body plumage. “Only then the image is done,” he said.

Controlled, conscious decisions

Prasad’s high-key technique proves that wildlife photography doesn’t always have to capture the rich colors of scales, feathers, or fur.

According to Prasad, when the exposure is controlled and post-production edits are made thoughtfully, a photographer can “strip a scene down to its essentials” by removing most of its color and background detail while still depicting the subject in an interesting way.

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Hobbyist wildlife photographer Brian Johnston has spent much of the summer looking for an elusive “white hart,” a rare albino male red deer, after first photographing one last year. So when he got a tip that the stag had returned, he spent a weekend trying to frame the magical-looking creature in his lens.

Johnston not only managed to capture several photographs of the rare deer, but also found another animal on his wish list in the same weekend: two young foxes.

Johnston, who is a lorry driver (truck driver) by weekday and hobbyist photographer by weekend, set out last Saturday with a friend and fellow wildlife photographer Will Cory near Devon, England. The pair was lucky enough to spot the white deer, but the stag got wind of them and left before the photographers could get a photograph.

While disappointed that he hadn’t managed to get a good photograph of the white hart, what happened next is one of Johnston’s favorite encounters during the three years that he’s spent photographing wildlife. As the two photographers continued walking around, they spotted a fox in the distance and stopped to wait – and then two young foxes came out and played right in front of them.

“I’ve been wanting to get foxes for ages and ages,” Johnston said. “Two young foxes appeared, and they were happily playing in front of us. We watched them for about ten minutes, and we managed to get some really nice photos. That was pretty special. I wanted to get pictures for so long, and normally you see them from afar, so being up close to two foxes was really good.”

The following day, the photographers returned to the area and spotted the white stag sleeping in the field. While the creature was sleeping, the photographers quietly found a good vantage point, then waited. After about half an hour of watching the white hart sleep, the deer woke up and stood, allowing the photographer to capture several photographs.

The wildlife encounter is the second time that Johnston has photographed the white stag, after previously photographing the creature last fall, when the stags are most active due to the mating season.

Seeing an albino red deer is unusual. Leucistic male red deer are more common than a true albino deer, according to the British Deer Society. A leucistic deer will have white fur, but still have normal colors to its eyes and nose. Albinism is a genetic condition that causes a lack of pigment. The deer that Johnston photographed has the light nose and eyes that suggest the deer is albinistic, not leucistic.

The unusual sight is, in part, what drew Johnston into wildlife photography. “The first time I’ve ever seen one was three years ago, when I first started doing wildlife. A friend of mine, Will Corey, kept going on to me about this white stag that he had seen a few years ago. I thought, ‘He must be joking, making it up.’ But then, when I actually saw it, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was unusual to see something like that. It’s become a bit of an obsession, trying to see him again and get pictures of him.”

Johnston photographed the white stag – and the foxes – with the Nikon D780 DSLR and a Sigma 160-600mm f/5-6.3G lens.

For new wildlife photographers. Johnston advises patience and persistence. “When you are out and about, stop and listen. Wait, and you’ll start to see something.”

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A series of videos is quickly picking up viral fame on social media after an October 13 SpaceX launch left an unusual “space jellyfish” behind in the sky. Now, NASA is explaining the science behind the viral artwork in the sky that delighted skywatchers even hundreds of miles from the launch site.

The SpaceX CRS-35 cargo mission launched in the early hours of October 13 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, carrying the spaceship Dragon and supplies and equipment on a resupply mission for NASA.

But while space launches often create epic photos and videos, that October 13 launch created what NASA is calling a “Space Jellyfish,” a brightly colored shape that expanded from the rocket’s launch path and hung suspended in the sky for several minutes.

The sight was visible as far away as Washington DC – which is around 800 miles from the launch site – and videos from multiple sources of the strange shape in the sky quickly started going viral.

NASA has now shared its own photographs of the space jellyfish, taken by NASA photographer John Kraus, along with an explanation of the magic (AKA the science) behind the sight.

The rocket launched just before sunrise at 6:33 AM ET. Sunlight reaches the Earth’s upper atmosphere first, so while the ground was still in darkness, the upper atmosphere was getting the day’s first rays of sunlight. That early sunlight backlit the rocket’s exhaust plumes, making them far more visible in the night sky than during a daylight launch.

Essentially, early morning sunlight is making the often difficult-to-see exhaust plumes stand out like fireworks in the night sky. NASA says this phenomenon can also happen when a rocket launches near sunset.

Using light to make something hard to see suddenly highly visible is actually a tactic used in photography. Placing a light behind rain makes it pop in the photos. Using a fog machine near a window creates a visible beam of light. That’s the same thing that happened with the rocket launch – the "space jellyfish" just on a much larger scale.

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NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured a dramatic panorama revealing what the space agency says is the “most detailed view yet” of distant, rugged cliffs that its scientists had been awaiting a closer look at.

According to NASA, the sunrise panorama is a compilation of six images captured using the rover’s Mastcam, which features a “Left Eye” 34mm camera and a “Right Eye” 100mm camera, at 8:30 a.m. Mars time on August 11.

The agency said that Curiosity’s Mastcam was able to render “striking blue hues” in the foreground while also capturing the “bright morning light” illuminating the yardangs, a series of rocky crags on the horizon.

“NASA’s Curiosity rover offers the most detailed view yet of distant, wind-carved Martian cliffs, highlighting features the mission’s scientists have long been waiting to see up close,” the space agency released in a statement.

According to NASA, the yardang layer extends roughly 10 miles across the northwestern surface of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall mountain that Curiosity has been ascending since 2014.

Over the past 12 years, NASA scientists remotely controlling Curiosity from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, have used the rover to examine the different geological layers making up Mount Sharp.

The space agency explained that these layers each hold clues about a “distinct period” of Mars’ history, revealing secrets about lakes and streams that covered this part of the Martian surface billions of years ago.

“The yardang layer looks out of place. It’s the wrong color, the layers tilt at an odd angle, and it almost appears plastered on,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA’s JPL. “But that’s what makes it exciting to reach. No one is sure exactly what created this layer, but one idea is it may be ash deposited by ancient volcanic eruptions.”

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The eleventh book in the Remembering Wildlife conservation series has just gone on sale.

Remembering Giraffes will raise funds to protect the world's tallest mammal, and buyers can also view the 20 winning images from the Remembering Wildlife competition that featured in issue 307 of Digital Camera magazine.

A 146-page hardback printed on high-quality art paper, Remembering Giraffes features the work of world-leading wildlife photographers including Jonathan and Angela Scott, Marsel van Oosten, Frans Lanting, Greg du Toit – and many more.

Proceeds from Remembering Giraffes will be allocated to conservation projects for giraffes.

An official hybrid launch event for the book will take place on Wednesday, October 14 – live at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington, London, UK, and also online.

Focusing on giraffe conservation and wildlife photography, attendees will hear inspiring talks from keynote speakers Stephanie Fennessy, Executive Director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation; Marcus Westberg, a contributing photographer to Remembering Giraffes; and Margot Raggett.

Online viewers of the launch will also be treated to exclusive content before the event and during the interval.

Remembering Giraffes costs approx $75/£59.50 and copies can be purchased here.

Ahead of the book going on sale, we caught up with Remembering Wildlife's founder and producer Margot Raggett and asked her to bring us up to date with the series so far – plus what buyers of Remembering Giraffes can expect to see…

Buy 'Remembering Giraffes' now

Remembering Giraffes is a 146-page hardback book that's perfect for your coffee table at home. As it is produced to a very high standard, printed on top quality art paper, the photographs are presented at their very best.

Buy a copy and do your bit for wildlife conservation. Remembering Giraffes costs approx $75 (£59.50) and copies can be purchased here.

A “mom hack” for saving money on school photos is going viral – but the AI hack could end up costing hundreds of dollars in legal fees while opening up photos of children to privacy risks.

Back to school is usually followed by school photos, a longstanding tradition often taken against a patterned blue muslin backdrop. The average family may spend between $25 and $60 on those school photos in the US and anywhere from £20 to £100 in the UK.

But a number of influencers have taken to social media to share mom “hacks” for avoiding those costs. There are two similar hacks going viral on social media. The first is to take the child’s school photograph, upload it to AI, then ask the AI to remove the watermarks.

The second is to take a smartphone snapshot and ask an AI to make it look more like a school photograph.

The first hack could leave families with hundreds of dollars in legal fees, while experts warn that uploading a photo of a child to an AI platform could carry hidden privacy risks.

Removing the watermark from a photograph in order to avoid paying for the rights to that photograph is copyright infringement. In the US, fines for copyright infringement range from $750 to $150,000. In the UK, a copyright case can incur both the cost of the photo as well as legal fees that are often far more than the cost of the photo.

One influencer who racked up more than a million likes on one such video of a “mom hack” has now taken the video down.

Copyright infringement is not a victimless crime. There is a real photographer behind those stolen school photographs, and one who is also likely struggling to make ends meet. The average salary for a school portrait photographer in the US, according to ZipRecruiter, is $36,217, which is right around the poverty level for a family of four.

Taking the photograph themselves and asking an AI to add the blue background is the more legally safe hack of the two. But many experts caution parents to consider all of the potential privacy risks before uploading a photo of a child to an AI platform.

A photograph contains more information than what’s visible in the photo. Besides the child’s likeness, the background or a school uniform can reveal information like location and interests. A photograph also contains hidden metadata, including GPS coordinates of where that photo was taken, which gives the AI not just a child’s likeness but also where they live.

A photo of a child uploaded to an AI platform can be used as training data if those settings are not turned off. Parents need to assess the risks and understand that particular AI’s privacy practices before uploading any identifiable photographs of children to an AI.

Not every family can afford a school picture package or a session with a professional photographer. But as a mom of three and a photographer myself, what strikes me about the blank wall photos that were uploaded to ChatGPT to look like school photos is this: What was wrong with the original photos?

I actually liked the plain white background better – and it comes without potential privacy risks, AI warps, and copyright infringement.

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The wild cat conservation group Panthera has spotted a highly elusive jaguar thanks to the use of trail cameras for the second time this year.

The adult male cat was sighted in June in the Bi-National Corridor, a critical jungle passageway along the Guatemala-Honduras border connecting jaguar populations in these countries.

It comes after an earlier sighting of an adult male in February this year and marks the first time in a decade that Panthera has observed the species on both sides of this border region.

“We are definitely very excited,” said Dr. Bárbara Escobar Anleu, Panthera’s Guatemala country coordinator.

“Seeing an animal as majestic as the jaguar using areas that both Panthera and other institutions are working to conserve serves as an excellent motivation and a reminder of why we do this work.”

Jaguars are the largest cat species in the Western Hemisphere and live in 18 countries across the Americas, with conservationists estimating that there are some 173,000 individuals in the wild.

However, habitat destruction and fragmentation have meant that the species has lost roughly 50% of its historical range, with jaguars classified as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

According to Dr. Anleu, Panthera began monitoring jaguars in the Bi-National Corridor as a joint effort between its Guatemala and Honduras divisions in 2017.

Since then, the organization has placed “at least 120 camera traps” throughout the corridor, Dr. Anleu said, with a particular focus on detecting female jaguars to gather evidence of whether they are reproducing.

Female jaguars, however, are much more elusive than males. Unlike wide-ranging males that roam massive territories (observed covering up to 40,000 hectares), females practice philopatry, whereby they stay close to their natal territory.

Although both sightings this year were of male jaguars, Dr. Anleu explained how they provide vital evidence that jaguars are still using this passageway.

“The camera-trap images of the jaguars in both Honduras and Guatemala give us hope — showing that jaguars are still present, even in the midst of all the challenges and threats they face,” she said.

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For most of photographic history, the camera didn't treat every human skin tone equally. Early references cards featured only white women, and so chemical emulsions and exposure standards were optimized for those skin tones. Pictures of darker skinned people, in turn, were often underexposed, poorly balanced or lacking distinct facial features.

Kodak finally introduced multiracial reference cards in the mid-1990s, just as digital photography was emerging. This new tech did not, though, automatically fix the problem. The same historical biases were simply coded directly into the new sensors, algorithms and editing software.

It's only recently that true fixes have starting arriving, led by Google's Real Tone, introduced in 2021, with other smartphone makers quickly following suit.

Among them were Chinese brand TECNO, whose Universal Tone technology officially began launched in October 2023.

Two-year project

This is the backdrop to 100 Portraits of Becoming, a two-year project from visual artist Angélica Dass, paid for by TECNO, spanning Kenya, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Brazil.

On the one hand, this is clearly a marketing campaign; shot on TECNO's Camon 50 Ultra 5G and presented as branded posters with logos and quotes.

But at the same time, Dass is a serious artist, and the questions she's asking here good real ones, so it's well worth paying attention to.

Dass is certainly a smart pick, as she's best known for Humanæ, a long-running project in which she photographs people against backgrounds matched to the exact Pantone shade of their skin.

Lined up together, the portraits make a powerful point: no one is really "white" or "black", and these labels seem quite odd when you look at the actual color of people's skin.

This later project takes that idea beyond skin tone and into identity. As Dass puts it in the introductory video: "A photograph can put a label on you, or it can take every label away."

First-person stories

The first 20 portraits are now live. They've all been shot outdoors in Kenya against boldly draped fabrics, and each is accompanied by a first-person story about the subject.

Alex Mutua Muli, for example, watched a neighbour cut down an entire mango orchard when he was 14 because there was no market for the fruit.

While everyone told him to head for the city, he stayed and co-founded a company turning local produce into dried fruit for bigger markets.

Jelimo Cheboi took up skateboarding in 2022 and, finding it heavily male dominated, grew GirlSkate Nairobi from a WhatsApp group into a thriving community. Elsewhere, Brian Muchiri talks about refusing to be defined by his wheelchair, while Phillip Mbuthia Ranja, a creator across several disciplines, credits dyslexia with helping him to see differently.

"Every image shapes assumptions – why it matters, who matters and how people are understood," says Jack Guo, general manager of TECNO. "That makes fair and accurate representation increasingly important in the AI era." Quite. But it's also worth pointing out that fundamentally, this project is about people, not processing.

"Kenya showed me that meaningful portraits are never created by technology alone," says Dass. "They begin with trust, with listening, and with the generosity of the people who choose to stand in front of the camera. The camera is simply the tool that allows those encounters to be shared."

Recreating the look of a photo from a 1980s mall studio has become a viral AI trend. But one photography duo is taking “high-quality bad photos” without AI and with a heaping serving of humor – and the response has been overwhelming.

M4LL PH0T0 (@m4llph0t0) is a pop-up photography booth visiting festivals and events and re-creating the 80s and 90s studio portraits popularized by “mall photos” like Sears.

While photographers Leeanna and Aaron DiGruccio say that M4LL PH0T0 started from boredom, the two Ontario, Canada-based photographers have more than just decades of photography experience to build on.

Leeanna DiGruccio was working for CPI in the US, the company behind store-based portrait studios inside Sears and Walmart, when the company went under. That day, she stayed for 12 hours just to make sure everyone received their photos.

Fast forward, and now asking AI to generate a photo that looks like it came from an 80s mall portrait has become a viral trend. The DiGruccios are taking those photos the traditional way, without generative AI – though the Sony A7 IV bodies and 24-70mm f/2.8 used for the portraits are far from 80s tech.

“When you use AI to generate an image, that is not that person. It's not you,” Aaron said. “We photograph you. That's the only picture like that of you that exists. It's not this amalgamation of every image that's been fed into an AI model.”

Part of M4LL PH0T0’s success comes from the experience. The duo sets up a booth at festivals and events, often punk and music festivals. The photographers joke with their portrait subjects, and at the end, guests choose from a treasure chest, like going to the dentist in the 1990s.

Everyone who walks into the M4LL PH0T0 booth at a festival gets three different photographs, all themed after the “floating head” style of photography that was popular in the 1980s: A plain background, a laser background done in Photoshop, and a surprise third set.

“We are characters. We don't take ourselves seriously,” Leeanna said. “Sometimes photography can be very serious. Everybody always says, like, "Oh, I look bad in photos." I always say back, ‘But we take them professionally.’”

“We've had people say, ‘hang on, I'm going to run home and get my cat,’ and they'd run home and come back out of breath with their cat over their shoulder for a photo with their cat in the floating head inset,” Aaron said.

He added that people have also asked to use portraits of deceased loved ones in the floating head inset, while one couple used the portraits as a pregnancy announcement. “As much as it’s a humorous premise, people have used these for actual sentimental purposes,” he said.

A typical M4LL PH0T0 portrait session takes about 90 seconds – though pets will often take longer – and costs CA$25 a person (about $18 / £13). That price point isn’t by accident – it’s also the number Leeanna found on old Sears advertisements for sitting for a session.

The couple also runs an event photography business, but M4LL PH0T0, along with being built for humor, makes real photography more accessible by running short, affordable sessions in high-traffic venues.

Adding an 80s-themed portrait booth during festivals came with unique challenges – chiefly, lighting the shot inside a small booth outdoors. The couple works from a tent with three walls in order to have the most control over the light, working with Godox V1 flashes off-camera with umbrellas.

The response to M4LL PH0T0 has been overwhelming, the couple says, with a long line to the booth at many festivals and daily messages asking what event they’ll be at next. Several guests have traveled from outside of Ontario – and even from the US – to get a photo.

In addition to working as photographers, the duo also works in tech: Aaron in IT support and Leeanna as an industrial engineer, including installing Apple devices for the Artemis II mission.

Leeanna says she’s built AI systems that ended up making her position redundant. “We’ve seen the tragic outcomes of what AI does, and we absolutely believe AI should not be in art,” Leeanna said.

“We've had people come up to us like with huge Pit Viper sunglasses and lightning bolt windbreakers be like, ‘We're ready.’ And it's like, ‘I've never met you, but you know us,’” Aaron said. “We love these little interactions. Photography is about relationships for us. It's not just get you and get you out, unless that's what you want. We are here for you.”

The name M4LL PH0T0 even has a dash of humor with its hidden Easter eggs. The numbers come from 400, the error code for a bad request, while replacing letters with numbers is part of early internet culture that Millennials – like the DiGruccios – will recognize.

M4LL PH0T0’s event schedule is available on their website.

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Leica has announced that legendary Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide is the recipient of its 2026 Leica Hall of Fame Award, recognizing a remarkable career that has helped shape the way we see documentary photography. Widely regarded as one of Latin America's most influential photographic voices, Iturbide was honored during Leica's Celebration of Photography on October 8 at Leica World in Wetzlar, Germany. Her extraordinary body of work, spanning more than five decades, has captured everything from indigenous communities and cultural traditions to the often-overlooked beauty of everyday life. To celebrate her achievement, Leica has also opened a special exhibition featuring more than 50 of her photographs, while selecting one of her most recognizable images as its Leica Picture of the Year 2026.

What makes Iturbide's photography so captivating is her ability to transform seemingly ordinary moments into something almost otherworldly. Working predominantly in black and white, her images explore the relationship between life and death, tradition and modernity, and the complicated connections between people and the environments they inhabit.

There is a wonderful sense of mystery running throughout her work, with recurring symbols such as birds, masks, and religious imagery creating photographs that feel as much like visual poetry as traditional documentary photography. Perhaps her most famous photograph, Nuestra Señora de las iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas), taken in 1979, captures a market woman in Juchitán wearing a remarkable crown of living iguanas. It is a wonderfully surreal image, and one that perfectly demonstrates Iturbide's extraordinary ability to find something magical within reality.

Born in Mexico City in 1942, Iturbide's journey into photography was shaped by both personal tragedy and an early fascination with the medium. Her father was a keen amateur photographer, but it wasn't until she began studying film in 1969 that her creative direction started to take shape. A year later, she became an assistant to the celebrated Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, traveling with him through rural Mexico and discovering the country's diverse indigenous communities.

Following the devastating loss of her six-year-old daughter, Cláudia, Iturbide devoted herself to professional photography, developing a deeply personal approach to documenting the world. Her first exhibition took place in Mexico City in 1975, followed by a New York exhibition the following year, before international recognition began to grow throughout the 1980s. Since then, she has received numerous prestigious honors, including the Hasselblad Award in 2008 and the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2025.

To accompany her induction into the Leica Hall of Fame, the Leica Gallery in Wetzlar is presenting an extensive exhibition featuring more than 50 photographs from five of her most important series. These include Juchitán, documenting life in the Mexican city between 1979 and 1988; México Clásicas, spanning more than three decades of work; Pájaros, her poetic exploration of birds; Desierto de Sonora, photographed in 1979; and Viajes, which brings together photographs taken during her travels through Ecuador, Panama, Argentina, and Cuba.

Together, these collections offer a fascinating insight into a photographer whose work has consistently challenged the boundaries of conventional documentary photography. Rather than simply recording what appears in front of her camera, Iturbide invites viewers to look deeper, finding connections between culture, spirituality, identity, and the human experience. The exhibition will remain open until January 2027.

Leica has also selected Iturbide's Na’ Lupe Pan, photographed in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1986, as its Leica Picture of the Year 2026. Taken from her celebrated Juchitán series, the photograph will be available as an exclusive limited-edition print through Leica Galleries worldwide.

The Leica Picture of the Year initiative was introduced in 2021 to celebrate outstanding photographers inducted into the Leica Hall of Fame, with previous honorees including Ralph Gibson, Thomas Hoepker, Elliott Erwitt, Herlinde Koelbl, and Joel Meyerowitz. For collectors and admirers of Iturbide's photography, the release presents a special opportunity to own a piece of photographic history, while also celebrating an artist whose distinctive visual language has influenced generations of photographers.

Established in 2011, the Leica Hall of Fame recognizes photographers whose images have not only stood the test of time but have genuinely changed how we understand the world. Iturbide becomes the 15th photographer to receive the distinction, joining an extraordinary list of names that includes Steve McCurry, Nick Út, René Burri, Bruce Davidson, and Elliott Erwitt.

Her induction formed part of a wider celebration of photography in Wetzlar, which also saw the winners of the 2026 Leica Oskar Barnack Award and the inaugural LOBA Women Grant announced, with the shortlisted photographic series exhibited at the Ernst Leitz Museum until February 18, 2027.

However, beyond the awards and recognition, Iturbide's remarkable career is a reminder of what makes photography such an incredibly powerful medium. You don't always need dramatic events or extraordinary circumstances to create an unforgettable photograph. Sometimes, all it takes is an exceptional eye, an understanding of humanity, and the ability to find beauty and meaning in the world around us.

Shooting animals from a platform rocking about on water offers interesting challenges compared to doing from the security of dry land. No matter whether you’re sailing down the Amazon river, braving a midge-infest Scottish loch or traversing the lake at Longleat Safari Park (like I was).

The first consideration is safety, for both your body parts and your camera equipment. Always make sure that you’re securely braced when shooting because a sudden boat movement can cause havoc if the flooring is wet. Falling in when there are hippos about is not a good idea as these amiable-looking creatures are, in fact, aggressively territorial and will happily tear you limb from limb. And then eat the bits. Seals are the next menace because there’s little difference to them between a juicy fish and a fleshy hand holding a camera over the side.

Obviously you need to have the camera secured, so consider having a strap from it attached to you, in case you lose your actual grip on the camera. If you drop it over the side, no-one is going in to get it back for you. Assuming you and the camera are all secure, let’s take a look at the practicalities of shooting from a rocking platform.

How to capture the action

01 Which mode to use

For the first couple of trips around the lake I used the Mode dial (your camera may have a P/A/S/M or a P/Tv/Av/M dial) to set the camera to Aperture Priority and the ISO to 1000. I was aiming for a shutter speed of 1/1,000 sec but the light was changeable and increasingly murky, so I switched to Manual mode.

02 Let’s go Auto

Having had difficulty capturing the fast moving seals I decided on f/6.3 and 1/1,600 sec as the manual settings, along with Auto ISO. It’s a trade between noise and getting the speed and aperture that you want. A wider aperture on a faster lens would let in more light but an f/6.3 aperture meant that focussing on a gorilla’s face resulted in all the animal being in focus.

03 Autofocus area and subject

This was set up with a wide area box for the focus detection and animals as the subject detection. Focussing on the gorillas, hippos and monkeys wasn’t a problem, because they weren’t moving around very quickly so even with the rocking boat, locking onto them was easy. However, again, with the seals it was much harder as they moved so fast, but this combination worked the best.

04 Continuous shooting

The focussing was set to continuous, which was essential for the seals. Having Auto ISO and fixed settings here was also the best option because with reflective water and patchy sunshine by this point, the metering was changing with every shot. It was also better to have a slightly wider view than a tight crop, in order to get the seals in the shot and not be half out the frame.

What else did I shoot?

How long a lens do you need?

A lot depends on how close the boat you are on gets to the shoreline or within range of the water-based animals. I took my 180-600mm f/5.6-f/6.3 lens which was perfect for the gorillas, even though we were some distance away, because they are quite large. When the hippos are in the water, all you see are eyes and ears so a longer reach would be preferred, but on land 600mm was long enough. The photos of the smaller monkeys on their colony needed cropping, so with those an 800mm lens would have been needed to fill the frame. The seals got quite close to the boat so anything from 150-300mm would have been fine to get a close up shot of them.

Before you go...

To capture animals at long range you'll need a big telephoto lens, a fast memory card and a big camera backpack to put your stuff in.

Drone photography can reveal hidden patterns and create a sense of scale. But this week, I came across an aerial photograph so powerful that I had to stop and take a closer look.

This photograph comes from the lens of AFP photojournalist Jack Guez, shot with a DJI Air 3S.

The photograph shows a commemorative art installation on a beach in Tel Aviv on the third anniversary of the October 07 Hamas attacks on Israel. The day is recognized as the deadliest day for Israel, leading to the deaths of around 1,200 people, along with 251 people taken hostage.

The art installation on a beach in Tel Aviv turns the number of those lost into a physical representation of everything the country lost that day.

Photographing the memorial from the sky creates a sense of scale – both for the memorial itself and the number lost on that day. The silhouettes on black fabric create a pattern that demands a closer look – and only then, once I looked closer, did I realize that the closely cropped photograph is not even all of those lost.

A full aerial shot, also by Guez, shows the full art installation on the beach, shadowed by nearby buildings.

The photograph is a devastating reminder of the tragedy and the war that followed. But the photograph also illustrates why getting an unusual perspective can create a more powerful image. Photographing the scene from the skies creates a sense of scale that’s not fully apparent from the photographs taken on the ground.

A photojournalist's job is to tell the stories of the world's history in a way that transcends language barriers, and this work by Guez is an excellent example.

On the third anniversary of the attacks, memorials were held across Israel.

According to the BBC, an estimated 74,200 people have been killed in the military offensive sparked by the October 07 attack. Around 1,400 people have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire nearly a year ago.

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Filmmaker and ocean explorer Barny Dillarstone has an entire YouTube channel dedicated to dropping cameras to the bottom of the ocean and inland bodies of water in the hope of unearthing new species and secrets of the deep.

I’ve reported on his adventurous exploits before, like when he used a cheap underwater camera to record a deep-sea creature that had likely never been filmed alive before. But in one of his latest videos, he dropped a night-vision camera into London’s famous River Thames and ended up inadvertently filming two invasive species.

The citizen scientist used a night-vision camera attached to a specialist cage in which to house various stinky-looking types of bait. This rig was then lowered into the depths using a simple rope system. Unfortunately, the notoriously murky water made visibility extremely poor. The first two drops were performed in the heart of the city, but for the third and fourth series of drops, Barny traced the river towards the fringes of the city and set off in a row boat.

It was here that he encountered the first invasive species, a signal crayfish, which hails from North America and was introduced in the ‘60s. Barny explains that these big and brash crustaceans outcompete native species and can cause riverbank corrosion.

It’s at the final location that he encounters a Chinese mitten crab, and it’s the same story as the signal crayfish in that it’s upsetting the river’s ecosystem by outcompeting rivals and eroding river banks. Make sure you watch the full video to find out what other species Barny encounters, including a giant river fish and an apex predator.

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It looks like Patrick Star has a real-life counterpart, as marine scientists have released images of a starfish closely resembling the beloved Bikini Bottom-dwelling character from the children’s cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants.

According to the researchers – a combined team of marine scientists from various Argentine institutions led by Dr. Daniel Lauretta – the image was also live-streamed at the time of creation, August 2025, to an audience of nearly 4 million viewers, “propelling the starfish to global fame.”

Since then, people commenting online have found it particularly funny that the starfish photographed by the marine researchers also appears to have the buttocks of its lookalike cartoon character.

Wider coverage of the famous starfish revealed that it also gained the nickname "big butt". And one Digital Camera World reader asked why it's "so cheeked up", hilariously following up with how it's "accurate to [SpongeBob] lore."

The photo of “Patrick Star” – in reality a bright orange sea star in the genus Hippasteria – was snapped during a 20-day expedition of the Mar del Plata Submarine Canyon, a chasm in the ocean floor off the coast of Argentina reaching depths exceeding 3,500 meters.

While “Patrick Star” may have become a global sensation, he wasn’t the only superstar sighted. Throughout the expedition, the scientists, working aboard the research vessel Falkor, used a remotely operated vehicle, named SuBastian, to discover 57 new species previously unknown to science.

These included 20 copepods – tiny crustaceans found in the deep-sea sediments – and 22 echinoderms – the group that includes sea cucumbers and crinoids.

Among the echinoderms was “Loki” (Peniagone sp.), a striking horned sea cucumber photographed and filmed alive at 2,577 meters, which resembled the Norse god thanks to its pair of horned appendages.

The 2025 expedition marked the first in-situ observations of the Mar del Plata Canyon’s deep seafloor, enabling scientists to determine the diversity and distribution of its biological communities.

According to the Schmidt Ocean Institute, which provided the research vessels, many of the newly discovered species were further studied using taxonomic analysis during a workshop in Buenos Aires this summer.

The team led by Lauretta is now planning a follow-up expedition to begin in February 2027, this time targeting a different submarine canyon expected to have “high levels of endemism.”

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When Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others set up a photographic co-operative back in 1947, the legend goes that they named it after the oversized champagne bottles they liked to celebrate with. Nearly 80 years on, Magnum has returned to its roots, in a way.

Some of its photographers, including Mark Power, Emin Özmen, Rafał Milach, Bieke Depoorter and Cristina García Rodero, have been spending the summer in drinking holes across the continent. But they haven't been slacking; they've been on a job for Heineken.

The result is Europe's Living Rooms, a series that documents pubs, bars and tavernas in 11 European countries: the UK, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Greece, Poland, Austria, Italy, Belgium and Czechia (what we used to call the Czech Republic).

And while it's a commercial campaign – timed to coincide with research into how much tourists spend on beer – the images are nonetheless fascinating to me. Not least because they highlight exactly how differently documentary photographers tackle the same brief.

A range of approaches

Take Bieke Depoorter's shot of Café Pieper in Amsterdam, an establishment that's been running since 1665. Captured at blue hour with a slow shutter speed, the drinkers milling outside dissolve into ghostly blurs while the building, outlined in light bulbs, stays sharp. That's a clever of way of hinting at the centuries of customers who've passed through these doors.

Mark Power, in contrast, gives The Devonshire Arms in London's Soho a crisp, carefully composed treatment. Office workers cluster around high tables in bright sunshine in their shirt sleeves, and every hanging basket and cobblestone is rendered in sharp detail.

In a vaulted brick bar in Poland, Rafał Milach goes for bold symmetry, focusing on a huge glass chandelier that funnels the eye towards the drinkers at the far end. In Ireland, Enri Canaj finds three friends chatting in front of a sunlit sash window framed by glossy red shutters; a hang-out to die for.

Then there's Madrid, where fans in face paint and Spanish flag capes are caught mid-roar while watching the World Cup. The picture freezes each open mouth and raised glass, while an older drinker looks on with quiet bemusement.

Why Magnum works

It's these small moments which explain exactly why the beer brand went to documentary photographers rather than a typical advertising crew.

As Marine Mérindol, chief operating officer of Magnum Photos, puts it: "These are the details that so many miss if they are just passing through."

Documentary photography, she adds, "doesn't just illustrate a place; it witnesses it. These photographs capture something true about how people in Europe live and connect together.”

Whether Cartier-Bresson would have approved of swapping champagne for lager, who knows? But he and his fellow Magnum founders would surely have recognised the instinct to point the camera wherever people gather, raise a glass and forget their troubles for a happy moment.

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The King Island scrubtit is one of Australia’s rarest and smallest birds. So when award-winning wildlife photographer Brad Leue visited King Island's Boulder Wildlife Sanctuary, with the audacious ambition of photographing one, the odds were stacked against him.

Experts estimate that only 100 King Island scrubtits are left, a subspecies of the much more prevalent Tasmanian scrubtit. But at only 12cm in length and with markings that blend into their habitat, spotting one is extremely rare – and photographing one is even rarer.

Brad was well prepared. He analysed sightings of the birds to pinpoint potential hotspots and armed himself with his trusty Canon EOS R5 and 100-500mm super-telephoto lens. But with only a week in which to photograph the island’s wildlife, the clock was ticking.

A few days in and the scrubtit was nowhere to be seen, but on the fifth day, Brad’s luck changed. While operating by the coast and exploring the edge of a forest, a little brown job appeared. He told me: “In this type of environment, the targets are mainly small birds, so I had my camera set up for fast movement.” The scrubtit didn’t hang around: “I was only able to grab a few shots that were in focus before the individual ducked back into the forest.”

Thankfully, the encounter enabled Brad to capture two sharp images, which he sent to the Australian Wildlife Conservancy for confirmation. “I was confident I’d photographed the right species, but given how rare they are, I also had a bit of doubt.” Thankfully, it was a King Island scrubtit, making Brad a member of an exclusive club of photographers who have managed to photograph the rare bird.

When asked about the importance of photography for conservation, Brad told me: “We’re a very visual species. Through conservation photography, people can connect with some of the world’s most vulnerable species, allowing them to care and empathise on a much deeper level.”

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When researchers in West Africa’s Côte d’Ivoire Taï National Park spotted vibrant orange, yellow, and black feathers, what followed looked almost like choreography. With one researcher with binoculars and another with a camera, the team managed to capture photos of a bird species that hasn’t been spotted for 13 years: The Ghana cukooshrike.

Field research fellows Paulo Ditzel and Stephanie Bartlett were nearing the end of a six-month, four-country expedition with the International Bird Conservation Partnership earlier this summer when they were scanning the trees for birds in Taï National Park.

Ditzel first spotted the bird and used his binoculars to relay the bird’s location in the tree canopy to Bartlett. “If I had seen that bird with anyone else, it wouldn’t have worked out,” Ditzel said, “and we would not have gotten a picture. We have this perfect little way.”

The Ghana cukooshrike spends much of its time in the canopy of Africa’s forests – which, combined with its vulnerable status as a species, means that one hasn’t been spotted since 2013. The new photos from the researchers recover a “lost” species and hint that conservation efforts in the region are working.

“I got a photo of the bird before I saw it,” Bartlett said.

As Bartlett took photos, the cukooshrike moved through the canopy along with some chestnut-capped flycatchers and a white-breasted nigrita. Dietzel ran back to the station to give the rest of the research team a chance to see the lost species as Bartlett continued to record the bird.

But by the time Dietzel returned, the bird had disappeared into the canopy again. The bird only reappeared again after most of the team had returned to the base, when the cukooshrike snatched a white caterpillar.

Director for The Search For Lost Birds John Mittermeier described the photos as “probably the best photos ever taken of this bird.” The Ghana cukkoshrike’s preference for thick canopies and vulnerable population makes it a rare bird to photograph.

Bartlett also captured what's believed to be the first videos of the species.

Birding in West Africa’s forests is often a challenge. “They’re scared of you,” Bartlett explained. “You don’t get close to them, and so often you have to use the camera as a tool for identification.”

Researchers are hopeful that the Ghana cukooshrike’s sighting suggests that conservation efforts in Taï National Park are working, while recovering the lost species indicates further efforts are needed.

Taï National Park is part of the Upper Guinean rainforest, an ecosystem under threat as logging and agriculture shrink the rainforest’s size.

In the 1970s, the Ghana cukooshrike was spotted frequently, with 20 sightings within just 62 days. But according to the Search for Lost Birds, in a nearly two-year survey in 2005 and 2007, the bird was only spotted two times. The last time the bird was photographed was in 2013.

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A photo of an unusual fox is quickly picking up viral fame on social media – and authorities at the Michigan Department of Natural Resources say that it’s “an incredibly rare sight.”

On social media, the Michigan DNR has confirmed that a photo of an unusual dark-furred fox is actually a melanistic gray fox. “This is an incredibly rare sight, and it’s the only example we’re currently aware of in the Midwest,” the government organization said in an Instagram post.

The DNR explained that melanism is a genetic condition that gives an animal a much darker coat than the species usually exhibits. Michigan’s most common example of melanism is the black squirrel, which is actually a melanistic gray squirrel.

Michigan has two different species of foxes, the more common red fox and the less common gray fox. The DNR says that the photo is a melanistic gray fox.

Melanistic red foxes, commonly referred to as silver foxes, are uncommon, but more frequently spotted than melanistic gray foxes. A key indicator is the tail. Red foxes have a white tip to the tail, while gray foxes have a black tip. Gray foxes can also climb trees, while red foxes cannot due to differences in their claws.

The social media comments on the post, however, were quick to point out that Michigan’s rare melanistic “black” gray fox actually looks rather purple. So what’s going on in the photograph?

While the fox’s different look is due to genetics, the fox’s “purple” is likely due to a photography error. The photograph appears to have an incorrect white balance. White balance adjusts a photo’s colors based on the light source, and an incorrect setting can skew a photograph’s colors towards orange, green, blue, or purple.

Looking closely in the background of the shot, the white clover flowers also take on a purple tone, suggesting that the purple coloring likely comes from a camera setting and not from manipulating the fox with software.

The Michigan DNR is currently looking for reports of fox sightings, both current and past, particularly with photos, as part of research to better understand where red and gray foxes live in Michigan. The DNR encourages reporting Michigan fox sightings and photos with an online reporting tool.

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

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

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

Forbidden craft

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

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

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

Full-circle moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How it was shot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A project created from unraveled plans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A warped world combining the imagined with the real world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intentionally creating problems to solve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Chantelle got her super shots – technique assessment

Set the subject

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

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

Adjust AF sensitivity

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

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

Use lens function buttons

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

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

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

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

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

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

How it was shot

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

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

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

Why it won

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DRONES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Gurton's top five tips

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

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

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

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

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

Website: www.chrisgurtonphotography.com
Instagram: @chrisgurtonphotography

Read more…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency), the operators of the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb), have released a new image taken by the telescope that depicts a cluster of galaxies warping the light emitted from more distant cosmic bodies.

Known as “gravitational lensing”, the phenomenon – which was first theorized by Albert Einstein – occurs when gravitational forces produced by massive objects, such as galaxies, bend spacetime, which in turn warps and magnifies light traveling in their path.

The newly released image was made the Webb Picture of the Month for September by NASA/ESA. In the foreground we see a handful of extremely bright stars, along with a cluster of galaxies – which appears to contain a compact subgroup of distorted orange galaxies.

According to NASA/ESA, the galaxy cluster in the foreground is MACS J0454.1-0300 – which, to Webb’s instruments, appears as it was when the universe was roughly 8 billion years old.

The warped orange cluster of galaxies is, meanwhile, seen as it was when the universe was about 2 billion years old, a point in spacetime much further away from Earth than the location of MACS J0454.1-0300.

However, as the light from the more distant orange galaxy cluster is gravitationally lensed by MACS J0454.1-0300, it appears as though we are seeing a single, closer and highly packed galaxy cluster.

The astronomers explained how, in this image, some of the distant galaxies that have been gravitationally lensed appear multiple times.

According to the scientists, gravitational lensing can also cause the same image to be projected more than once, creating an optical illusion that the astronomers called a “cosmic house of mirrors.”

I don’t know about you, but now knowing what NASA/ESA astronomers deal with when capturing images with Webb, I don’t think any of us regular photographers can complain about working with tricky subjects ever again!

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This year’s ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition saw some truly unique images, perhaps none more so than the winner of the “Our Moon” category.

Taken by Czech astrophotographer Petr Horalek, the image depicts a rare lunar occultation of Venus, as the Moon passed in front of the planet for roughly one hour during a September afternoon last year.

“The most beautiful moment was when Venus had just started to disappear behind the crescent,” Horalek told the photography competition organizers. “It looked like a bright pearl on the lunar limb.”

Petr Horalek's gear and settings

• Sky-Watcher 10″ FlexTube Dobsonian telescope
• Nikon Z6 III
• f/5 / ISO 250 / multiple 1/8,000sec exposures
• Location: Ústupky, Seč, Pardubice Region, Czechia, September 19, 2025

To capture the creative frame, Horalek snapped multiple 1/8000 sec exposures as the bright planet began to move out of sight.

“It was a big challenge to find both objects in the sky and produce good shots of this unusual view,” he explained. “Fortunately, the weather was perfect and I was able to do it.”

Raul Cantemir's gear and settings

• Custom DocTelescope 16″ f/4.5 truss Newtonian
• GreatStar ADC
• APM 1.25″ coma-correcting 2.7x Barlow lens
• Sky-Watcher EQ8-R mount
• ZWO ASI178MC camera
• 4,860mm / f/4.5 (without Barlow lens) / f/12.2 (with Barlow lens) / 164-sec exposure
• Location: Darmstadt, Hesse, Germany, August 13, 2025

Two other impressive images were also commended in the “Our Moon” category this year.

Runner-up Raul Cantemir, from Germany, captured an “exceptionally detailed” close-up of the prominent crater Plato, which measures approximately 101 km (63 miles) in diameter.

Cantemir explained that the floor of the crater is covered in solidified basalt, a sign of “ancient volcanic activity”.

British astrophotographer, Tom Williams, was also highly commended for his frame of Pythagoras Crater, another prominent impact crater located near the northwestern limb of the Moon.

Williams explained that a “favorable lunar phase” meant that the central mountainous rise within the main crater was clearly visible.

The ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year is the world’s largest astrophotography competition, hosted by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, London.

This year’s overall winner was Ali Alobaidly (Kuwait) for his depiction of the rarely photographed Shark Nebula, snagging him £10,000 (approximately $13,000 / AU$19,000) along with the competition accolade. Category winners took home £1,500 (approximately $2,000 / AU$2,800).

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A British diver and underwater filmmaker has spotted a rarely seen humpback whale off the Pembrokeshire coast in West Wales, capturing footage of the moment the ocean giant swam by his vessel.

Dan Abbott, who makes a living as a professional filmmaker and ocean educator, was scuba diving near the Celtic Deep, a 100m depression in the West Wales seafloor, when the whale made an appearance.

At this moment, the cinematographer was aboard his group’s boat with smartphone in hand to capture the incredible scene. “It is a humpback!” Abbott shouted in jubilation as the whale drifted by, spraying a plume of water from its blowhole, while other group members shouted in excitement.

Above: watch the moment the humpback whale appeared near Abbott's boat

The sixth-largest whale species in the world, humpbacks can grow up to 48 to 62.5 feet (14.5 to 19 meters) in length and weigh up to around 40 tons. They have dark bodies with white undersides, a small hooked dorsal fin on a distinctive hump, and knobby bumps called tubercles on their head.

While Abbott said that seeing a humpback in Welsh waters isn’t unusual, it’s far from an everyday scene. “There have only been a couple of sightings in the last five or six years,” he explained in an Instagram post. “As you can hear in my voice, I was quite surprised,” he added.

However, according to the Marine Conservation Society, humpback sightings are increasing in the UK.

While the organization is unsure exactly why, it believes this could be down to increasing whale populations following the 1986 Moratorium (ban) on whaling, as well as warming oceans amid climate change causing the migratory species to change its movements.

A humpback whale was previously spotted off the coast of Pembrokeshire in 2024. According to the BBC, the animal was “quite small” and covered in scars and had “signs of previous viruses.”

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Here’s our pick of the best cameras for wildlife photography as well as our take on the best underwater housings for cameras and phones.

October 2026 is a transitional month for astrophotographers. Darkness arrives earlier, nights grow longer, and the sky becomes easier to work with again after summer's compressed twilight. At the same time, the Milky Way’s bright core is making its final appearances in the Northern Hemisphere’s evening sky, marking the end of its most photogenic season. The month is anchored by Saturn at opposition, a well-timed new moon, the rise of a supermoon and the peak of the Orionid meteor shower — though the latter suffers from moonlight this year. Here’s everything you need to know about astrophotography in October 2026:

Read: 10 must-shoot events for astrophotographers in 2026

October 3-13: Dark sky window

With new moon on October 10, the surrounding nights — from last quarter moon on 3 October through to a brightening crescent moon on 13 October — provide excellent dark-sky conditions (use a light pollution map or find a Dark Sky Place for maximum impact). This is essentially the final opportunity in 2026 to photograph the Milky Way’s core from the Northern Hemisphere. The Galactic Center now sits low in the southwest after sunset and sets quickly, so timing is critical. Use a wide-angle lens (14–24mm), ISO 1600–3200 and exposures of 10-20 seconds. Because of its low altitude, atmospheric haze can reduce contrast, so seek out the darkest possible location with a clear horizon. Consider including a strong foreground to balance the composition or switch to shorter exposures for sharper detail.

Read: The best star tracker camera mounts

October 4: Saturn at opposition

Saturn reaches opposition on October 4, meaning it is directly opposite the sun in the sky. Just like a full moon, it will rise in the east at sunset, remain visible all night, and set in the west at sunset. This is when the ringed planet is closest to Earth and at its brightest, making it the best time of the year to photograph it. While Saturn appears star-like to the naked eye, a telescope reveals its rings clearly. For imaging, use a telescope or a long-focal-length lens (800mm or more) and an astro or planetary camera to capture short video clips rather than single exposures. You can then stack frames from these videos in software to boost detail and reduce atmospheric distortion. Even under modest conditions, this technique can reveal ring structure. Practically speaking, a week either side of any planet’s opposition is also perfect for close-ups.

Read: The best cameras for astrophotography

October 6: Moon occults Jupiter

During the early hours of Tuesday, Oct. 6, a roughly 20%-lit waning crescent moon will pass directly in front of Jupiter, causing the giant planet to disappear for up to about an hour for observers across much of eastern North America, according to In-The-Sky. Exact times vary by location — Jupiter disappears at about 4:22 a.m. EDT in New York City, returning at 5:26 a.m. The planet will disappear behind the moon’s lit side and emerge from its dark side. A small telescope may spot Jupiter’s Galilean moons disappearing and reappearing around the planet.

October 21-22: Orionid meteor shower

The Orionid meteor shower peaks overnight on 21-22 October, but with a bright moon present, conditions are not ideal. Even so, brighter meteors may still be visible, particularly after moonset or when shooting away from the moon’s glare.

Use a wide-angle lens (14-24mm), ISO 800-1600 and 20-30 second exposures, shooting continuously for several hours. Position your camera away from the moon to maximise contrast. While results may be limited, the Orionids can still produce fast, bright streaks that stand out even under less-than-perfect conditions.

Read: How to photograph a meteor shower

October 26: Full ‘Hunter’s Moon’ rises

October’s full moon, known as the Hunter’s Moon, turns full on October 25, but will be best seen rising on October 26 As with all full moons, the most photogenic moment is moonrise closest to sunset, when it appears large and takes on warm tones near the horizon — allowing photographers to capture it above a still-lit landscape. As a supermoon, albeit a small one, it will be slightly bigger and brighter than average.

Use a telephoto lens (200-600mm) to capture detail or incorporate a foreground subject for scale. Because the moon is so bright, use low ISO and fast shutter speeds to avoid overexposure. Planning is essential — use tools like The Photographer's Ephemeris and PhotoPills to align the moon with foreground element features (a tall building or a mountain) for maximum impact.

Read: How to photograph the full moon

Astrophotography shot of the month: Star trails

As the Milky Way season draws to a close, October is an excellent time to try a star trail. Set up a wide-angle lens (14-24mm) on a tripod and take a sequence of 20-30 second exposures over several hours, using ISO 100-400 to minimise noise. You can then stack these images to create circular trails around the celestial pole or sweeping arcs across the sky. Alternatively, a single long exposure can work, though it risks overexposure in brighter conditions.

Point your camera toward Polaris in the Northern Hemisphere to create concentric circles, or experiment with different directions for varied patterns. Include a strong foreground element to anchor the composition. Star trails are a great way to visualise Earth’s rotation — and they’re easy to create.

Read more:

• Astrophotography tools: the best camera, lenses and gear

• The best lenses for astrophotography

• The best star tracker camera mounts

If you don't know much about fashion photography, you might assume it's relatively straightforward stuff: dress a model, pose a model, shoot a model. A quick flick through the pages of a modern fashion magazine though, and you'll be swiftly disabused of that notion. At the high end of the market, a contemporary fashion shoot is more like fine art, and there's no finer exponent than British photographer Tim Walker.

Known for his outsized props, elaborate sets and scenes that look like they've escaped from a children's picture book, he's spend the last three decades filling the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair, W and i-D with epic, thrilling and outlandish images. So when I first glimpsed some of the press images for his latest exhibition – a series of standard-looking portraits shot against plain white backgrounds – I assumed I'd opened the wrong folder on my computer.

But there was no mistake. Walker is going in a very different direction here.

50 years of activism

Tim Walker's Fairyland: Love and Legends at London's National Portrait Gallery brings together 250 new portraits celebrating "over 50 years of Queer activism, community and love", with subjects range from little-known activists and nurses to actors such as Ian McKellen, Ncuti Gatwa and Ben Wishaw and musicians including Lady Gaga, Kay Tempest and Chappell Roan.

The stark look of many of these portraits was a deliberate choice: Walker assisted Richard Avedon in New York in the 1990s, and the press materials describe the white backdrops here as a nod to his old boss. But ultimately, a successful portrait is not about the background, it's about the sitter. And across this collection, Walker demonstrates his usual ability to bring out a unique element of their personality.

Walker asked some of the sitters to bring an object that meant something to them. Author Jane Cholmeley brought the original shop sign from Silver Moon Women's Bookshop, founded in 1984. Filmmaker Isaac Julien holds a conch shell, a motif from his 1989 film Looking for Langston. And photographer Sunil Gupta, naturally enough brought his camera; by the look of it, a Leica rangefinder.

Walker's portrait of Ian McKellen, titled Love, goes further, with a tangle of hands forming the letters of the word in front of him.

Kitsch in sync

If you're a fan of the epic and fantastical, though, don't fret; that's also represented in the exhibition, which was designed by Shona Heath; a longtime collaborator of Walker who won both a BAFTA and an Oscar for her production design on the 2023 movie Poor Things.

The show opens with portraits of founding members of the Gay Liberation Front and Stonewall, styled after the Tudor portraits of Hans Holbein the Younger and Nicholas Hilliard; Walker calls them his "queeristocracy".

A central room, meanwhile, is given over to large-scale portraits of the post-punk collective the Rebel Dykes, inspired by Karlheinz Weinberger's photographs of 1960s biker gangs. One shows four women in leather jackets and towering beehives, sitting on chairs in a field. The word "peak kitsch" comes gloriously to mind.

The second half of the show turns to fashion and performance, including a rococo tableau of two British comedians – Julian Clary and the late Paul O'Grady and – as the Glitter Queens, and actor Ben Whishaw lit by a vertical stripe of rainbow light from a prism. It all closes with a room of staged erotic scenes that subvert fairy tales and nursery rhymes.

Coming full circle

Walker was born on 27 November 1970, the same day as Britain's first gay rights protest on Highbury Fields, and he sees the show as a full circle moment. "Just as I learned from the queer artists who came before me, some of whom I'm lucky enough to have met and photographed here, Fairyland is me saying you are not alone," he says. "I want visitors to the exhibition to remember that your difference is your power."

Tim Walker's Fairyland: Love and Legends runs from 9 October to 7 February on the ground floor of the National Portrait Gallery, and members can enter for free. The show is accompanied by a 320-page catalogue (£35), which includes an extended interview between Walker and Brown, plus essays by Travis Alabanza, Russell T Davies, Shon Faye, Lisa Power and Joelle Taylor.

Ever got frustrated that your camera's subject-detection AF missed some small detail in a picture? Spare a thought for David Koppel. For him in the 1980s and 90s, a bad day at work involved David Bowie climbing onto a table and punching him in the head.

That wasn't a one-off, either. Along the way, the London paparazzo was thumped by Mick Jagger, swatted with a rolled-up newspaper by Bob Dylan, put in a headlock by Pierce Brosnan and scolded by Joanna Lumley.

It all adds entertaining color to his new book, Spotlight, which brings together some of his best images and the stories behind them. And if that were not enough, Frank Sinatra, Princess Diana, Marlon Brando and Kate Moss all make appearances too.

Spotlight is the second volume of his archive, following 2025's Limelight, which reflected on his years as house photographer at the eponymous Soho nightclub. But where that book captured a scene, this one's all about the chase.

Take his Marlon Brando picture from 1992, shown below. A tip about the iconic actor arriving at Heathrow Airport turned out to be a bust, so he and a rival pap went for a Chinese meal in Bayswater, only for Brando to walk in and sit at the next table.

Koppel waited in a parked car until he left, then opened the door of Brando's taxi and fired six frames in two seconds. The picture ran across the national papers the next morning and earned him around £5,000 (approx. $6,625), the equivalent of around £15K (approx. $19,875) today.

Six frames in two seconds won't sound impressive to anyone used to the burst modes on a modern digital camera, or even a phone. But back in those days, all Koppel had to work with was a roll of film, no screen to check and no idea whether his shots were in focus until he'd processed it.

His kit was top of the range for the time, though. John Stoddart's portrait of him shows him with a Nikon F4, a second body, a flashgun and an Aircall pager clipped to his belt. But being a pap wasn't about the equipment; it was about getting yourself in the right place at the right time. That wasn't always as easy as it might seem, but he usually found a way around it.

For instance, he wasn't on the press rota for the 1991 royal premiere of the comedy musical movie Stepping Out. So he bought a ticket, smuggled a dismantled Nikon past security, reassembled it in the toilets and posed as an usher. His shot of Diana greeting Liza Minnelli made the front page of The Sun newspaper, which, despite his request to leave him uncredited, printed his name in large type. "There goes the knighthood," he reflects.

Rude awakening

To get his lens in front of as many celebs as possible, he drew on a network of drivers, doormen, PRs, hotel staff and informers, and stood outside hotels for as long as it took. He found the GoldenEye set in Monte Carlo after a tip from a friendly electrician. He caught Bob Dylan and his son Jakob by sprinting after their car into a hotel car park and shooting through the window.

While most of us can admire his ambition, in 2026, few of us nowadays will admire his profession. It's hard to argue with Bowie's verdict that Koppel was "SO rude" after he'd climbed down a fire escape into a club kitchen to shoot him and Jagger after being asked not to.

Public tolerance for this kind of pursuit finally collapsed after Diana's death in Paris in 1997. When Koppel bumped into Brosnan again in Phuket around that time, the actor called him "paparazzi scum" and walked off. It was Koppel's last paparazzi job.

The pictures endure, though, because they're unguarded. As the Sunday Times once wrote, he caught stars "without their minders, their make-up and the airbrush". And in an age of carefully managed Instagram grids, that's rare.

Spotlight by David Koppel will be published by Pap Art in November, priced £75. For more information, visit www.davidkoppel.co.uk.