Duane Michals, who died on June 09 in New York aged 94, was the kind of photographer who makes people uneasy. He wrote directly on his prints. He blurred things deliberately. He arranged images like comic strips and called them art.

When the street photographer Garry Winogrand saw Michals' first sequence show in the 1960s, he reportedly said: "What is this? This isn't photography." Michals would have taken that as a compliment.

In an era dominated by Henri Cartier-Bresson's idea of the "decisive moment" – the belief that a photographer's job was to catch the world at its most vivid and true – Michals did something wildly different. He staged scenes, faked ghosts, cast his grandmother as an old lady visited by Death and asked his father to play the Grim Reaper.

He wasn't capturing reality. He was insisting that reality wasn't the point. "To photograph reality," he once said, "is to photograph nothing."

Documentary to drama

Michals was born in 1932 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a working-class steel town near Pittsburgh. He trained as a graphic designer and was working in New York publishing when, in 1958, he borrowed a friend's camera for a trip to the Soviet Union. He came back with portraits of sailors and circus performers, and a new direction in life.

His early work was straightforward documentary. His series Empty New York (1964-65) showed the city's streets and subway cars depopulated, in a style influenced by the French photographer Eugène Atget. It was Atget, too, who led him toward the Surrealists, including René Magritte and Giorgio De Chirico.

From there, Michals abandoned documentary work entirely and started building his signature sequences: linked sets of small black-and-white photographs that unfolded like short films.

Typically subjects were mortality, desire, the afterlife and the strangeness of ordinary moments. The spirit leaves the body (1968) used double exposures to show a man's ghost rising from his body. Chance meeting (1970) broke down a loaded exchange of glances between two strangers in a New York alley.

Grandpa goes to heaven (1989) showed an elderly man ascending through a window with angel's wings, waving cheerfully to his grandson. Death, in Michals' hands, was never grim for long.

Not knowing the rules

By the 1970s, Michals had started writing directly on his prints: titles, poems and handwritten notes. Purists were appalled. A teacher told him the word was that his photos were so bad, he needed words to explain them. Michals replied that within five years everyone would be writing on photographs.

His belief was as much practical as artistic. Photographs have real limits: they can't tell you what was said, what the room smelled like, or what happened next. "When I write," he said, "it's to give voice to the silence of the photograph."

Michals supported himself with commercial portraiture and editorial commissions for decades, shooting celebrities and corporate clients while making his more personal work on the side.

He published more than 40 books, had major retrospectives at the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Morgan Library in New York, and was highly influential, particularly on photographers working with narrative and text. All this, despite having no studio and no formal photography training.

Rather than holding him back, though, he saw the benefits of being, metaphorically speaking, in the dark. "I didn't know you weren't supposed to write on a photograph," he pointed out. "I didn't have to unlearn the rules."

Michals lived to 94, a full life. He said he had no regrets and had done everything he'd wanted to do. And given the breadth and originality work he left behind, who could disagree with that?

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Throughout my lifetime, I've seen David Hockney described as the "world's greatest living painter". Sadly, that no longer applies: the artist born in Bradford, England in 1937 died yesterday, one month short of his 89th birthday. Most tributes will focus on his famous paintings: his swimming pools, his Yorkshire landscapes, his double portraits. But I think there's an added reason to celebrate his life: his photography work genuinely pushed things forward.

This innovation was born of personal frustration with what a camera could achieve. "Photography is all right if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralysed Cyclops, for a split second," he once said, pithily. But rather than letting that limitation put him off the medium, he burned with the desire to push it forward.

Defining the problem

It was 1967 when Hockney bought his first 35mm and started using photographs as reference material for paintings. But the thing that frustrated him was this. A photograph freezes a scene from a single fixed point, at a single moment in time, through a single lens. Yet that's not how human beings see.

We scan, we glance, we move. We look at something for ten seconds and register far more information than any shutter could ever capture. With the latter, he told the Smithsonian in 1984: "You have a fixed point, you have no movement; in short, you are not there really." For a painter who'd spent years studying Cubism and who understood, intuitively, that art needed to account for the experience of looking, this was a serious challenge.

The solution arrived accidentally. In the early 1980s, working on a painting of a room in LA, Hockney stuck some Polaroids together as a kind of mood board. Looking at the result, he realized he'd created something new: a sense of moving through the space, of time passing within a single image.

Once he'd had this eureka moment, he burst into creative life. Working with curator Alain Sayag, Hockney threw himself into what became known as his "joiners": collages made from dozens or hundreds of individual photographs, arranged to build a larger scene. He produced 150 composite Polaroid works in a matter of months, and held his first photography exhibition, Drawing with a Camera, at New York's André Emmerich Gallery in 1982.

These weren't just random collages, but philosophical statements about the nature of time, space and the act of looking. To take just one example: his joiner of Bradford, Yorkshire, shot in the summer of 1985, shows a woman in a beige jacket appear multiple times across the image as she walks past. Hockney was tracking her path with his camera, moving from left to right, so she appears again and again as she walks through the scene.

Because we see her in several positions, we know exactly how long she took to pass by: the duration of her walk is written into the structure of the image. And the point was: no single photograph can do that.

Cameras and Cubism

Much of this was inspired by Hockney's relationship with Cubism, a style of art that shows an object or scene from several angles at once, instead of from one fixed viewpoint. His joiners were his attempt to bring that thinking into photography, to make a photograph that worked the way a painting by Picasso worked. Canal and Road, Kyoto (1983) is a clear example, its fragmented, interlocking panels producing a sense of architectural depth that no single exposure could achieve.

A standard 55mm lens on a 35mm camera sees roughly 45 degrees. A wide-angle extends that to around 75 degrees without obvious distortion. Human vision, with normal eye movement, spans about 180 degrees. Hockney's joiners were reaching for that full human field of view; perhaps messily, but certainly meaningfully.

Long before smartphones made panoramic photography a tap-and-sweep gesture, before computational photography began automatically stitching images together, Hockney was doing this by hand; thinking through the problems of field of view, perspective and time that programmers would later build into software algorithms.

The digital years

Hockney never stopped pushing. In later years he moved through iPhone photography, iPad drawing and multi-camera video installations. The thinking behind all of it, though, can be traced back to those Polaroid experiments.

His 2001 book Secret Knowledge, for example, took the notion that the old masters had used optical devices such as the camera obscura and camera lucida to achieve hyper-realistic effects, and extended the same argument back through art history. The basic point was characteristically Hockney: that the relationship between the manufactured image and the human eye has always been complicated, contested, and well worth arguing about.

To photographers today, Hockney's legacy is more practical than it might first appear. His central insight, that a photograph is always a reduction of experience, is worth thinking about every time you raise a viewfinder.

The question isn't how to capture a scene; it's how to capture the experience of being in that scene. Sometimes a single frame does it perfectly. Often, it doesn't. What you do with that information is up to you.

Ishiuchi Miyako photographs abandoned buildings. She photographs scars on human skin. She photographs old Kimono fabric. She photographs lipstick. She photographs her own water-damaged prints.

But there's something that connects all her photography. Something that makes it unmistakably hers. It's not what she's photographing; it's how she photographs. She has an eye for how time leaves marks on things. With how worn objects tell stories through their texture and decay.

The key to understanding her work is this: she isn't photographing things. She's photographing how things show their age. How surfaces record what's happened to them.

A lipstick isn't interesting because Frida Kahlo owned it; it's interesting because you can see the scratches and the wear on it. The marks tell you it was used. That's what Ishiuchi is after.

Showing evidence of life

Her Frida series, for instance, catalogs the famous Mexican artist's possessions. But Ishiuchi doesn't just document them. She photographs each object to show its material history. The scratches. The fading. The discolouration.

These aren't precious objects being reverently displayed. They're evidence. They show that someone lived with them, used them, wore them out.

The Scars series works the same way. Ishiuchi photographs scars on human skin. But these aren't pictures of people. They're close-ups of skin itself, where you can see the texture of scar tissue. The body becomes a landscape. You're not looking at a person; you're looking at how time and injury have marked a surface.

It's the polar opposite of standard portrait photography, because the person has disappeared. What's left is just the physical record.

Endless Night, meanwhile, photographs abandoned buildings in Yokosuka's old red light district. You see peeling paint, weathered wood, layers of graffiti.

The buildings could be interesting as documents of a particular place and its history – but Miyako isn't interested in that narrative. She's interested in the surfaces; in what the decay tells you about time passing. The buildings are compelling to her, because their materials have absorbed decades of use and neglect.

A different take on documentary

Most documentary photography relies on the subject being interesting. The story is all-important; the moments significant. Miyako, though, is doing something different here.

Subtly, she's committing to one visual principle – showing how surfaces record time – and then applying it to whatever lies in front of her. The principle is what matters, not the subject itself.

She's been doing this since the 1970s, in a Japanese photography scene that was mostly dominated by men. Her focus on texture, decay and how materials show their age has influenced photographers of all stripes. Yet she's not as well known outside Japan as she should be.

The new book, Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces, brings together 50 years of work. It includes her most famous series, alongside lesser-known projects and unpublished photographs. She's also written new text for the book, so you can hear directly about how she thinks and what she's looking for.

For photographers trying to develop their own recognisable style, here's my big takeaway. You don't need to keep photographing the same things; you need to keep seeing the same way. In other words, pick a visual principle and stick to it, even when you're photographing completely different subjects. That's how you build a body of work that's unmistakably yours.

Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces will be published by Thames & Hudson on June 16 in the US and on June 25 in the UK, priced $65 / £50 / AU$110.

Nan Goldin made her name capturing people in bedrooms and bathrooms, with harsh on-camera flash and unflinching honesty. But when her next exhibition opens at the Hayward Gallery this November, it won't center around the kind of intimate documentary work she's known for.

Titled You Never Did Anything Wrong, the new show sees Goldin turn her camera towards classical sculpture, old master paintings and elaborate still-lifes; fusing her snapshot aesthetic with centuries of art history. And for some of her followers, this might come as a bit of a shock.

Since the 1970s, Goldin has been building what she calls "a record of my life that no one can revise". Her best-known work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, documented New York's queer subculture with a stark, flash-lit approach that changed photography forever. But in this new work, made over the past decade, she's shooting Bernini's marble sculptures and arranging flowers like a Dutch master. Quite the turnaround.

It's a great example of how the healthiest practices evolve over time. Goldin could have carried on doing the same thing forever, and no one would have complained. Instead, she's decided to step out of her comfort zone, and do something strikingly different. Having spent decades perfecting a visual language based on unmediated experience, she's now turning that language toward objects specifically created to be looked at.

Sculpture meets snapshots

Goldin built her reputation on available light and flash in domestic spaces, capturing moments as they happened. But marble doesn't move, doesn't breathe, doesn't react to your presence. It demands you bring the emotion rather than finding it already there.

In works like Marble Quartet (2013) and the recent Hermaphrodite series, Goldin applies her signature saturated color palette and intimate framing to classical sculptures. The results are neither straight documentation nor artistic reinterpretation. They're photographs that acknowledge both the subject and Goldin's trademark visual vocabulary, creating a strange kind of conversation across the centuries.

Her Death of Orpheus series takes this further, pairing old master paintings with contemporary shots that echo them. It's not about pastiche, more recognition. These stories of love of loss have always been her subjects; she's now just found a new way of visually expressing them.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is Goldin's embrace of the still life. Flowers with cup and Gaja, for instance, shows elaborate arrangements that reference Dutch and Flemish painting traditions. Of course, Goldin's documentary work was always about arrangement, about choosing what to include in the frame and what to leave out. The difference now is that she's constructing the scene before photographing it.

The technical approach, though, remains consistent: rich color, careful attention to light quality, compositions that feel both casual and precisely controlled. Whether shooting a friend in bed or a vase of flowers on a table, her eye for emotional resonance in visual details hasn't changed.

The lesson here isn't that every documentary photographer should start shooting sculpture. It's that photographic practice can deepen and expand without abandoning what made it powerful in the first place. The point is, Goldin hasn't rejected her documentary roots. She's simply found new visual ways to explore the same themes of intimacy, mortality and the need for connection.

The exhibition's title comes from a photograph of a pet gravestone in Lisbon, Portugal. "You never did anything wrong," reads the inscription; a statement of unconditional love that might stand as Goldin's artistic manifesto. Whether photographing friends or marbled gods, her work embodies the same fundamental generosity; the same insistence on finding beauty in vulnerability.

For established photographers wondering where to go next, there's inspiration in watching someone refuse to coast on past achievements. After 50 years, Goldin's still experimenting, still finding new subjects, still pushing herself.

Nan Goldin: You Never Did Anything Wrong is at Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, from 24 November to 7 March 2027.

There's a detail worth noting in the press materials for Japan House London's debut photography exhibition. The show, which opens on June 03, was originally titled Invisible [インヴィジブル].

It was later renamed Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai, presumably for clarity. But something was lost in the retitling: the original gets closer to what both photographers are actually doing. Neither is really interested in what's in front of the lens; both are focused on what isn't.

While both Japanese, Kawada Kikuji (born 1933) and Iwane Ai (1975) are separated by 42 years and work in almost entirely different registers. They've never exhibited together before, but put them together and a single question runs through everything on the walls:

What does a camera reveal that the naked eye (or collective memory or grief) refuses to see?

If you've ever made a picture that surprised you with what it contained, that question will feel familiar. And both of these artists have spent careers trying to answer it.

The two artists

Kawada came to prominence in the 1960s when he co-founded the Vivo collective, a group that collectively rewired what Japanese photography could do. His series Chizu (The Map, 1965), shown here alongside later work including Los Caprichos (1968–1981) and the Last Cosmology, is widely considered Japan's most significant photobook.

Look at The Map and you'll see what looks like abstract art: stained, scarred, almost painterly surfaces. In fact, you're looking at the residue of postwar Hiroshima, made physical through wild darkroom experimentation.

Kawada worked partly from contact sheets, found paper and detritus. The resulting images don't document history so much as make it tactile. This isn't photography as record-keeping; it's closer to something like archaeology.

Iwane is just as technically ambitious, but at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. Her photographic series A New River (2020), shot at night in the Tōhoku region during COVID, is the kind of work that makes you want to know exactly how it was made.

Working in complete darkness among cherry blossom trees, she shoots figures dressed as supernatural folkloric characters: shamanic priests, white-shrouded forms, creatures from Japanese folk tradition.

The exposures are long enough that the figures blur into the landscape, half-present and half-absorbed by the dark. The resulting images fuse together grief, hope and the consolation of ritual inside a single frame.

Her earlier series, Kipuka (2018), seems different at first: panoramic, communal, warmly documentary in its depiction of Japanese immigrant communities in Hawaii.

But showing it alongside A New River enables us to see the similarities between the two. Both series explore transience, identity carried across generations and a sense of belonging maintained by ceremony.

A UK debut

The show is directed by the folks behind Kyotographie International Photography Festival, one of Asia's biggest photography events. Founded in 2013 by Lucille Reyboz and Nakanishi Yūsuke, this Kyoto festival drew nearly 300,000 visitors last year. This is their first UK project.

It's also a first for Japan House London, on Kensington High Street, which has never staged a photography show before. The run extends to October 18 and, if you're able to get to London, it's well worth a visit.

Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai is at Japan House London, 101–111 Kensington High Street, London W8 5SA, from June 03 to October 18 2026.

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To mark 50 years of Leica Galleries, Leica Gallery London is set to present a striking celebration of photographic history, bringing unseen large-scale works by Lillian Bassman to this year’s Photo London, while also unveiling a rare exhibition of vintage Brian Duffy portraits at its Mayfair gallery.

It is a fitting way to honour five decades since the opening of the very first Leica Gallery in Wetzlar, with two showcases that underline the enduring cultural pull of both the brand and the photographers who helped define its legacy.

At Photo London, now taking place at its new home in Kensington Olympia, Leica Gallery London will focus on the extraordinary work of American photographer, art editor, and painter Lillian Bassman.

The presentation will centre on unseen oversized fashion portraits, images that emerged after her work was revisited in the early 1990s by fashion photography curator and art historian Martin Harrison while staying at her home. That rediscovery prompted Bassman to return to her archive, reworking negatives and revisiting the bleaching and toning techniques she had first experimented with back in the 1940s.

The results were images Bassman described as “reinterpretations”, atmospheric and painterly works that felt both timeless and ahead of their time. With their high-contrast tones, ghostly elegance, and beautifully abstract quality, they introduced her work to a whole new audience and sparked a major revival of her career. What followed were gallery shows, museum exhibitions, and a renewed international appreciation of a photographer whose vision had always stood apart from the crowd.

Her later years saw an extraordinary run of recognition, including a joint retrospective with her husband Paul Himmel at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, a solo show at Hamiltons Gallery in London, exhibitions at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, and, in 1996, a final haute couture assignment for The New York Times Magazine.

Inspired by the photographers she published during her time at Harper’s Bazaar, names such as Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, and Louis Faurer, Bassman’s work is defined by its dreamy sophistication, slender couture silhouettes, and darkroom experimentation using tissue, gauze, and bleach to shape tone and mood. The grand-scale prints shown by Leica were produced in collaboration with master printer Chuck Kelton when Bassman was already in her mid-eighties, which only adds to their quiet sense of wonder.

Alongside Bassman’s work, Leica will also present a small group of vintage Lith prints by Deborah Turbeville, shot in 1975 and referenced in Diana Vreeland’s book Allure. These will sit beside a carefully chosen selection of vintage and special prints by some of Leica’s most celebrated photographers, including Bruce Davidson, Terry O’Neill, Eve Arnold, Steve McCurry, William Klein, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Together, the display feels not just like an exhibition, but a celebration of Leica’s wider photographic heritage.

Back in Mayfair, Leica Gallery London will open SHOT – Photographs by Brian Duffy from 9 May until 9 July, giving collectors a rare opportunity to acquire vintage prints by one of the defining photographic voices of the 1960s. For the first time, some of Duffy’s most famous images will be available as rare vintage printings, offering a glimpse into the work of a photographer whose influence stretched far beyond fashion pages and into the wider visual identity of an era.

Of Irish descent and a member of the so-called Black Trinity alongside David Bailey and Terence Donovan, Duffy brought energy, attitude, and technical brilliance to everything he photographed. Originally trained at art school before studying dress design, he first worked as an illustrator for Harper’s Bazaar, only turning to photography after seeing a contact sheet and realising just what a camera could do.

His first commission came from Vogue editor Audrey Withers, and it had to be shot on a Leica at the request of the sitter, who had recently suffered a stroke and needed a quieter camera. From there, Duffy built a career photographing women, portraiture, and solving visual problems with an ease that made him one of the most revered photographers of his generation.

Sitters in the exhibition include Michael Caine, David Hockney, Jean Shrimpton, Grace Coddington, Len Deighton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Harry Secombe.

Few of us would ever walk around an aquarium thinking about pole dancing. But clearly, Los Angeles-based photographer Elizabeth Waterman did. The result is Propulsion, one of two striking diptych series coming to Photo London this May, and it might just make you rethink the most underused compositional tool at a photographer's disposal.

Albumen Gallery will present Waterman's work alongside Ancient Dialogues by William Stewart at Olympia from May 14-17. Both series are built entirely around the diptych: two images placed in deliberate conversation, neither quite complete without the other.

The diptych has a long history in painting, where hinged altarpieces presented paired images meant to be read together. Yet in photography, the format remains oddly neglected. We're trained to think in single frames: the decisive moment. Yet the diptych asks something harder of us. It demands that we think about meaning made in the gap between images.

Asa Stephan Schmid, director of Albumen Gallery, puts it: "Their diptychs act not simply as a formal device, but as a conceptual engine." In other words, when two images are placed side by side, the viewer's brain cannot help but search for connection, contrast or tension. The diptych exploits this instinct ruthlessly.

Analog approach

Waterman's Propulsion, which receives its world premiere at Photo London, is shot entirely on 35mm film. That choice is not incidental. The physical constraints of analogue photography – no chimping, no instant editing, no digital safety net – mirror precisely what she's shooting. Dancers whose bodies move through space with practiced precision, and jellyfish that navigate water by rhythm alone.

The pairing sounds eccentric until you look at the images themselves. A dancer's sweeping arm meets the trailing tendrils of a jellyfish; the curve of a torso answers the dome of a bell. On film, both subjects are rendered with the same grain, the same tonal palette, the same commitment to the moment. The analogue process collapses the difference between nightclub and ocean.

Waterman has spoken of feeling the same awe in dance clubs as she did watching jellyfish pulse through an aquarium tank: "Different environments, yet the same choreography of light and motion," as she put it. For photographers drawn to natural light, or to subjects defined by movement rather than pose, Propulsion offers a masterclass in looking for structural kinship rather than surface similarity.

The past in present tense

Stewart's Ancient Dialogues, meanwhile, works a different way. The Australian photographer and writer places images of ancient statuary alongside contemporary nudes, staging a visual dialogue across millennia. A bearded elder draped in red sits opposite a Roman river god from the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. The resemblance is uncanny, and that's the point.

Where Waterman uses the diptych to find the universal in the unexpected, Stewart uses it to collapse time. His viewpoint is that the sensuality of classical antiquity, suppressed for centuries by Christian morality and academic convention, is still present in living bodies today. The diptych makes that argument visible without a single word.

Both series reward close attention from anyone who makes photographs for a living or for pleasure. The diptych format imposes a useful discipline: it forces you to ask not just "is this a good photograph?" but "what does this photograph do that another image could extend, challenge or complete?" That is a harder question, but it can ultimately be a more creative and productive one.

Elizabeth Waterman's Propulsion and William Stewart's Ancient Dialogues are presented by Albumen Gallery at Photo London 2026, Booth B10, National Hall, Olympia, London, May 14–17 (preview May 13).

Firmly established in the literary world with five highly acclaimed and widely translated works of fiction, Polly Samson has also spent more than two decades documenting concert tours through both film and digital photography.

Her sixth book, Luck and Strange Studio/Live, forms the foundation of her first exhibition with Leica, presenting a vivid photographic journey that explores the atmosphere and emotion surrounding the creation and performance of an album.

The work offers an intimate glimpse not only into the recording process but also into the creative partnership between Samson and the book’s central subject, David Gilmour. Known for writing lyrics that have shaped some of contemporary music’s most resonant recordings, Samson brings a similar depth of feeling to her photography. Her images are often layered with a distinct emotional tone - thoughtful, reflective, and occasionally dark - mirroring the sensitivity of her written work.

The exhibition opens with a striking portrait of David Gilmour and the couple’s dog, reflected in a large mirror set within a misty landscape. The image establishes the atmosphere that carries throughout the show, emphasizing mood and quiet presence rather than spectacle. Light plays a central role in Samson’s visual language, guiding the viewer through scenes that move between gentle, intimate moments and bursts of creative energy.

Her photographs frequently capture subtle exchanges - a glance, a shared understanding, or the quiet trust that exists between long-time collaborators. At other moments, the work reveals the vibrancy and spontaneity of life on tour, documenting both the intensity of performance and the quiet spaces that surround it.

Samson’s approach to framing reflects her background as a writer. Each photograph carries a narrative weight while remaining open and suggestive, allowing the viewer to interpret the story within the image. In works such as Muse and Magpie, a deeply personal narrative seems to emerge, yet the full story remains just out of reach, inviting curiosity and reflection.

The exhibition also raises broader questions about authorship and presence - who stands behind the lens, who occupies the frame, and how creative identity can exist both individually and collaboratively. Through this body of work, viewers encounter another dimension of Samson’s artistic practice, where photography emerges as a natural extension of her storytelling voice.

The exhibition will run from 28 March until 7 May at the Leica Gallery London. All works in the exhibition will be available for purchase. For further information, visitors can contact Lou Proud at gallery.london@leicacamera.com.

Gallery hours are Monday to Saturday from 10:00 to 18:00, with extended hours until 19:00 on Thursdays.

Buddhist temples in Japan are major tourist attractions, and the most popular have been photographed literally millions of times. So if you're entering an image of a temple into a competition, it's going to be an uphill struggle to get noticed, especially within Japan itself.

Nonetheless, awards judges were drawn towards this shot by Rintaro Ukon, who's somehow managed to portray one of the country’s most familiar architectural wonders in a way that's more visual poetry than tourist snap.

Originally a country palace for the Fujiwara clan, Byodo-in’s Phoenix Hall was converted to a temple by Yorimichi Fujiwara to enshrine the Buddha Amida. Featured on Japan’s 10‑yen coin, it's one of the most photographed places in Japan today, and visitors queue daily to shoot it straight across the pond, to capture the full reflection in their lens.

Here, Ukon leans into that convention but innovates in terms of technical settings and composition, to create something quite different from the norm. This highly original shot won him Silver in the Architectural/Historic category of this year's Tokyo Foto Awards.

Technical execution

Silent Elegance was taken with a 61MP Sony Alpha 7R V paired with a 16mm lens, shot at 1/200 sec and f/7.1. It's a great combination for high‑resolution architectural work. The A7R V’s back‑illuminated full-frame sensor offers extremely fine detail and wide dynamic range, allowing Ukon to hold both the deep shadows in the eaves and the specular highlights in the gilded ornaments without obvious clipping.

At 16mm on full frame, the field of view is a dramatic ultra‑wide, yet the building remains free of obvious converging verticals, suggesting careful camera height, precise levelling and perhaps some perspective correction in post.

The medium aperture of f/7.1, meanwhile, hits a practical sweet spot: enough depth of field to keep foreground, temple and distant treeline all crisp, while avoiding the softening that can creep in from diffraction at smaller f‑stops on a 61MP sensor.

In terms of composition, Ukon anchors the frame on the central hall, using the bridge on the left and the extended wing on the right as vectors to guide the eye inward. His lens is positioned just high enough for the base of the hall to sit above its own reflection, avoiding the overlapping lines that often muddle pond shots at temples.

The calm mirror surface is then punctured by a single koi drifting into the lower left, its wake forming a subtle S‑curve that breaks the symmetry at exactly one point.

Small though it may be, it's precisely this storytelling accent that – to my eyes – lifts the image from a sterile exercise into a magical scene. The living subject “stirs the silence”, in Ukon's words, giving the frame a temporal moment, rather than a purely static study.

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The Sony World Photography Awards 2026 has just announced that street, portrait and landscape photographer Joel Meyerowitz will receive the prestigious Outstanding Contribution to Photography award at next year's ceremony. 

The American's impressive body of work – including appearances in over 350 exhibitions and 57 monographs – makes him a formidable addition to the list of recipients that includes names like Susan Meiselas (2025), Sebastião Salgado (2024) and Rinko Kawauchi (2023). 

But for today's photographers, this announcement is more than just a nod to a storied career. It's a potent reminder of how one individual can fundamentally shift the way we perceive and capture the world.

A career born of curiosity

While it seems strange now, back in the early 1960s, color photography was often dismissed as a serious medium, relegated to the realm of advertising or snapshots. Serious art photography, in contrast, was dominated by black and white. Meyerowitz was a quiet radical who changed all that.

His work broke this mold, using color not as an illustrative tool, but as an essential component of the scene, full of beauty and wit. From the bustle of city life to his depictions of coastal life and vast seascapes, he showed fine art photographers the extraordinary impact of vibrant color.

Meyerowitz's path to becoming a leading figure in 20th century photography began with a sudden, decisive moment. Born in New York City in 1938, he was working as an advertising art director when he witnessed the renowned Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank working on a shoot in 1962. 

It was a transformative experience: Meyerowitz immediately quit his job and took to the streets with a borrowed camera and two rolls of color film. This spontaneous decision highlights the essence of his career, which is characterised by spirit and curiosity. 

Across his career to date, his subjects have been typically diverse, ranging from his iconic street photography in New York and Europe, to his time in Cape Cod, and even his series documenting all the work inside Ground Zero in the aftermath of 9/11. Through it all, his work has been about finding the surprises that can be found by looking carefully at the scenes that surround us.

New retrospective

To mark the forthcoming award, a retrospective of Meyerowitz's work will be displayed at Somerset House, London, as part of the Sony World Photography Awards 2026 exhibition.

Running from 17 April 17 to 4 May next year, this won't just be a static display, but will feature specially commissioned new video and audio installations, created in collaboration with filmmaker Chris Ryan. The presentation ceremony itself will take place on 16 April, and a special public talk with the photographer will follow on 21 April. 

If you'd like to attend the latter, you can register your interest here. Meanwhile to learn more about the work of Joel Meyerowitz, read our interview about how he became the magician of color photography.

Liezl Zwarts is stepping into the European solo exhibition spotlight during Paris Photo Week with her new series, Hope Is A Whisper. This is a big moment for the South African photographer following her win of the 2025 Paris Photography Prize (PX3) Gold in the Fine Art/Nude category. But what makes this story particularly relevant for working photographers is the journey that led here.

For over a decade, Zwarts built a career in fashion, beauty, and advertising photography. She cut her teeth in New York, refining her craft under celebrated shooters including Sante D’Orazio and Jason Kibbler.

This background speaks volumes. It means her visual language – her mastery of light, composition, and the human form – is rooted in high-level, practical expertise. The commercial world demands precision and flawless execution. Now those skills are now being turned inward, serving a profoundly personal artistic vision.

Because Hope Is A Whisper is truly a lesson in artistic vulnerability. This body of work, quietly developed over eight years, was born from heartbreak, pain and the slow process of healing... and it shows.

Gold in the cracks

The central metaphor Zwarts employs is kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold. The philosophy is profound: breakage is not the end of beauty, but the beginning of transformation.

But Zwarts doesn't just reference kintsugi; she physically incorporates it into her creative process. On her photographs, which are printed on linen canvases, she weaves gold threads. This act transforms the scars, illuminating what was once shattered and making it more radiant than before.

It all adds up to a masterclass in mixed media and conceptual execution. For Zwarts, it's not enough to simply photograph a theme; her intentional, physical act of stitching gold into the image gives the work extraordinary emotional depth and tangible meaning.

Meanwhile the vulnerability she captures in her subjects – photographing women whose own "cracks reveal strength, turning fragility into testimony and imperfection into brilliance" – is mirrored by her own artistic vulnerability in turning personal pain into public art.

Reminder of resilience

Zwarts' work explores universal themes: resilience, identity and the female form as a vessel of lived experience. She crafts images that are both intimate and universal, drawing on a meticulous visual language of skin, shadow and shape.

Hope Is A Whisper isn't about erasing pain but honoring it, revealing the strength that emerges from quiet perseverance. It’s a message that resonates far beyond the gallery walls: hope is not always visible, but it is always present.

It’s always inspiring to watch a photographer make a significant pivot, especially when it results in the kind of deeply personal, technically stunning work we’re seeing here. Overall, it's a compelling reminder that the best art often emerges from our deepest pain, and the skills honed in the commercial world can be the foundation for true fine art brilliance.

Hope Is A Whisper runs alongside Paris Photo Week, until November 15 at Lilia Ben Salah Gallery, 6, avenue Delcassé, 75008 Paris.

When Hollywood actress Diane Keaton died last weekend, the tributes naturally focused on Annie Hall, The Godfather, and those iconic menswear-inspired outfits that spawned a thousand Pinterest boards. But here's something you might not know: she was also a photographer and visual artist whose work is seriously noteworthy.

For decades, Keaton's camera of choice was the Rolleiflex, that distinctive twin-lens reflex medium format camera that photographers hold at waist level, peering down into the viewfinder like looking into a well. It's a deliberate, contemplative way of shooting that forces you to slow down, and it produces those beautiful square-format images that became her signature. While other celebrities dabbled with 35mm point-and-shoots, Keaton was travelling with proper kit, making photographs that mattered.

Let's be clear: this wasn't some celebrity vanity project. Keaton published nine photography-related books over four decades and shot striking black and white images with her beloved Rolleiflex throughout her adult life. She rescued forgotten archives, championed unknown photographers, and built a visual legacy that's been largely eclipsed because, well, she was mainly famous for something else.

1980 debut

Let's start with Reservations, her 1980 debut that announced her as a photographer to watch. Keaton spent the 1970s criss-crossing America with her Rolleiflex, documenting the unloved interiors of classic hotels for Rolling Stone magazine. The resulting square-format images are extraordinary: stark, unsettling compositions that capture the tension between baroque excess and modernist emptiness.

A solitary Windsor chair marooned in a vast space. Velvet banquettes and rubber plants rendered strange by direct flash. A waiter cropped at the torso, a painting half-visible, compositions that feel simultaneously formal and anarchic.

The publisher's blurb called her “a strong, direct photographer with a cool and deadly eye”. They weren't wrong. These images hold their own against the atmospheric interior work of a Todd Hido or a William Eggleston.

The magpie curator

Keaton's contribution to the photography world went far beyond her own shooting. She was an obsessive collector and curator who understood something fundamental: photographs matter because they preserve what culture tries to forget. With writer Marvin Heiferman, she assembled astonishing compilations that rescued images from obscurity.

Published in 1983, her book Still Life: Hollywood Tableaux Photographs gathered Technicolor Hollywood stills so staged they became surreal. Mr Salesman in 1993 transformed mundane sales-training videos into noir-ish Lynch territory.

Similarly, Local News in 1999 pulled 92 portraits from a defunct tabloid's archives, creating what Keaton called a stockpile of neglected treasures honoring the pretty, the murdered, the ordinary and the lost.

Then there was Clown Paintings, a 2002 collection of amateur clown portraits. Bill Wood's Business salvaged 20,000 negatives by an unknown Fort Worth commercial photographer. In 2021, Dead of Night presented a county coroner's eerie car crash photos.

Each of these projects was an inspired act of photographic preservation, pulling forgotten work from basements and flea markets before it vanished completely.

The Rolleiflex and the streets

Keaton's own photography, meanwhile, evolved beyond those hotel interiors. Saved, her 2022 visual autobiography, shows the breadth of her vision. There are striking shots of pigeons in London's Trafalgar Square, taken during breaks from filming Reds in 1981; the birds caught mid-swoop in moments of manic energy. There are portraits of Hollywood Boulevard's Z-listers and street performers, shot on the star's Rolleiflex while she wandered unrecognised. One subject threw french fries at her head when he spotted the flash.

She called these people "toss aways" and saw herself among them; just one more lost soul searching for redemption. That empathy for the overlooked, the ordinary, the forgotten runs through everything she created. It came from her mother, Dorothy, an enthusiastic collagist and Brownie camera user, who taught young Diane that looking was a dedicated endeavour.

All this means that's it's not just the movie world that's mourning the loss of Diane Keaton; the photography world is too.

Her eye was sharp, her compositions sophisticated, her curatorial instincts impeccable. She understood that photography's power lies not in technical perfection but in preserving what matters before it disappears.

In the 1977 movie Annie Hall, when Woody Allen's character Alvy rambles about aesthetic criteria, Annie cuts through the pretension: aesthetic criteria just means whether it's a good photo or not. For her, and for Keaton, it was instinctive, about feeling rather than intellectualizing. That approach produced work that deserves serious critical attention. She will be missed.

Are you familiar with Jeff Wall? If not, let me enlighten you. For over 40 years, the Canadian photographic artist has been creating what’s known as 'staged documentary': meticulously constructed photographs that look like candid captures of everyday life, but are actually as choreographed as a West End show.

His latest exhibition, Jeff Wall: Photographs, has just opened at Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, and runs until 1 February. Curated by writer and critic David Campany, it features 27 large-format works from his iconic late-1970s pieces to recent productions. It’s a sweeping overview of a career that’s shaped how we understand photography itself.

But here’s the thing that keeps nagging at me: at a time when we’re hyper-alert to fake news, deepfakes and AI-generated everything, is it still ethically sound to celebrate constructed photographic realities?

Testing the limits

Let’s be honest: Jeff Wall is hardly new to this debate. Ever since Mimic (1982), a scene of casual racism recreated with actors, he’s been testing the limits of what counts as truth in photography. His images feel documentary, yet they’re the opposite: every glance, gesture and glint of light is calculated. Wall has even described himself as a “cinematographer who makes stills”.

But is this a double standard? In fine art, Wall’s elaborate reconstructions are hailed as visionary. In everyday culture—say, an influencer faking a ‘candid’ coffee shot—we’d call it deceptive. So why the double logic? Why do we forgive (and even applaud) artifice when it hangs in a gallery but condemn it when it scrolls past us on Instagram?

Intention is key

Perhaps the difference lies in intention. Wall never pretends his work is documentary truth. The term 'staged documentary' is both admission and provocation: yes, this is constructed; but so is everything you think is real. Because, let’s face it, there’s no such thing as a completely neutral photograph. The moment you frame a shot, you’re already shaping meaning.

That’s what makes this exhibition so compelling. Under Campany’s careful curation, Wall’s photographs don’t just dazzle; they prod. They make you question how easily we accept an image as evidence. They remind us that photography has always been part theatre, part testimony.

So perhaps the ethics of staged documentary depend not on whether something is constructed, but on whether it’s honest about its own construction. Wall never hides his manipulations; he makes them part of the story. His art doesn’t distort reality so much as hold up a mirror to the ways we all curate our own.

Indeed, in a world where the line between the real and the fake gets blurrier by the day, maybe Wall’s fictional realities aren’t deceitful at all. Maybe they’re actually telling us the truth; albeit a beautifully staged version of it.

The exhibition Jeff Wall. Photographs is at Gallerie d'Italia - Torino in Turin, Italy, until 1 February 2026.

I was standing in an utterly boring corner of a convention center when I met a photographer whose work I’ve long admired – and whose advice overturned much of the traditional photography advice that I’ve always heard. As I watched behind the scenes as fine-art photographer Brooke Shaden created striking artwork in a bland space with a few randomly gathered props, I realized her photography advice is just as outside-the-box as her work that graces the walls of museums and collectors.

Brooke Shaden (@brookeshaden) is an American fine-art photographer known for her dark art self-portraits exploring difficult emotions like grief and fear. But meeting Shaden in person probably isn’t what most people would expect after viewing her work. While Shaden’s work is dark art dealing with difficult topics, the photographer – who is also a photography educator and author – is quick to smile and even quicker to share a laugh.

Many who view Shaden's work before meeting the photographer herself would probably not expect the smiling photographer in a floral dress, standing in front of a group of photographers leading a photo walk at the B&H Bild Expo. But there’s a reason someone who says the scariest thing she can watch is Dexter has built a career creating art in the horror genre. “I’m scared of everything,” Shaden explained, “and that’s why I create dark art, because I’m trying to create work that addresses my own fears and lets me be in control of what I am afraid of.”

While I’ve followed Shaden’s work long enough to know that the darkness of her artwork doesn’t necessarily match her personality, the advice she gave upended some of the longstanding photography advice I’ve always heard. From never shooting a proper exposure to only taking a handful of images at each shoot, Shaden’s outside-the-box photography advice is as inspiring as her work.

How a photograph looks isn’t as important as how it feels

One of the reasons that Shaden’s photography advice often feels different from the mainstream is in part because her work is different from mainstream. Fine art photography is different from commercial photography created for a client. Shaden describes fine art photography as simply creating personal work. “Every day, I wake up and think, okay, what are you going to create today? All I have to do is please myself.”

But one of the biggest ways that Shaden’s fine art differs from mainstream commercial photography is that Shaden doesn’t set out to create an image that looks a certain way; she sets out to create an image that feels a certain way.

Shaden compared how she works to how her friend and commercial fashion photographer Lindsay Adler works. “Lindsay Adler shoots so differently than I do, she says that I don’t care what the idea is, I just want it to look good, I want it to be interesting visually. I feel exactly the opposite,” Shaden said. “I don’t even care as much how it looks, as much as if the concept comes through and it has layers of meaning to it.”

While Shaden’s photography advice often doesn’t match up with traditional rules, she’s quick to explain that both avenues are equally valid. “There are two camps of photography, and both are equally valid,” she said, discussing the differences between fine art photography and commercial photography.

Museum-quality work can still be shot with minimal gear

Shaden works without a photo assistant, and she’s often (although not always) both the photographer and the model. Walking into the woods, she usually just has her camera, one lens, a tripod, and a remote. Shaden currently shoots with the Sony A7R V, a camera she picked largely because she needs the ability to print large (one of her images is a 25-foot photograph on the side of a building), although her favorite feature is the flip screen.

Shaden says a Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 GM lens rarely ever leaves her camera.

During the shoot, Shaden used a range of small, inexpensive props, including needles and red thread, LED lights, black tablecloths, and a borrowed Smoke Ninja fog machine from the Bild Show floor.

Even the way Shaden shoots is minimal. On average, she takes between two and ten images on a typical shoot. She typically shoots two stops underexposed, explaining that she simply doesn’t like proper exposures, as evidenced by the deep shadows and tones in her work.

Play more, worry less

“If you walk away with anything,” Shaden told the group of photographers gathered to work with her, “it’s that you should be playing more and worrying less about the technique we are using. Number one, everything is fixable. If you have a good idea, then you can probably get it to where you need to be to share it. But also, life is short and I’m sick of not having fun with what I do, so that’s what we’re going to do.”

Part of playing with an idea, however, is that Shaden never knows going into a shoot if her idea is going to turn out at all. “When I’m creating, I never know if what I’m about to make is going to turn out at all. And that’s how it should be because we’re pushing ourselves to do something new.”

Creating art often means getting uncomfortable

Shaden (who worked with a model during the photo walk, rather than fulfilling the role of photographer, model and teacher) shared several stories of uncomfortable situations she’s been in for the sake of her art. She talked about jumping into mud puddles and frozen lakes. She once tied a string around her face for a photo and couldn’t get it all off, and had to drive home with the string still on her face.

She selected a boring corner of the convention center for two simple reasons: it had a window and an outlet. Simple props helped turn the small corner into a canvas for fine art.. (She had scouted an abandoned building nearby but was told that she "100 percent would get arrested," so, alas, a corner of the conference center it was)

Posing is key to emotion, but that doesn’t mean posing has to be complicated

Shaden’s artwork often creates something tangible that represents an intangible emotion. Posing is part of portraying that emotion, but Shaden made small adjustments to create simple curves to the model's pose rather than over-the-top poses.

One common feature throughout most of Shaden’s work as the face is often obscured. When Shaden obscures her own face in her work, it creates an image that’s less a portrait of herself and more of an image that could depict anyone, even the viewer themselves. “If you don’t see a model in the picture, then you can picture anyone in there,” Shaden says. “It creates a more universal experience for the viewer.”

Along with sharing inspiration for other artists on Instagram, Shaden also leads the annual Promoting Passion Convention (2025’s event is scheduled for September 22-26 in Indiana). She also shares insight in her book, Inspiration in Photography, and in online classes. Her fine art photography is available in limited-edition prints and in the coffee-table-style book, Reflection: Exploration of Self.

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Photographers who want to create fine art photographs have a tremendously broad range of genres, styles and media (both film and digital) to choose from.

However, no matter what type of fine art photographs you’d like to create, you’ll want to have a marketing strategy in order to sell your images – particularly if you consider yourself a professional photographer.

Here are a few steps to help you begin your strategy in marketing your work…

1) Study the marketplace

For starters, you’ll need to understand that it’s not something that will happen overnight. Marketing your photography will take time. But the best way to begin is to start getting to know and visiting the venues that are selling fine art photography. Get out there and see what inspires you.

2) Keep yourself organized

As a fine art photographer, you can be very creative about your work. So be sure that you also have a clear, easy-to-use and, above all, organized system to keep track of how you want to actually market your work.

Keep a dated notebook, for instance, in which you write down all your notes and to-do lists. Also, add the venues you’ve visited and why you might want to have a show there. Or, if you want to keep everything digital, use a laptop or tablet to maintain a record of your discoveries and ideas. This will also help with other facets of getting your fine art photograph seen and sold.

3) Network

Try to use any and all opportunities to market yourself and your work. For instance, if you go to one of your venues, try to chat with someone on the staff who might know how a fine art photographer can get in an exhibition – or who can point you in the right direction.

Often, you’ll want to contact one of the venue’s curators. If you do happen to meet them, be clear and focused about your work. But you don’t have to just network at a gallery or museum. There are many other groups you should access.

One very helpful group of people to ask about marketing your work is your photography friends from art school, or photographer colleagues you might have worked with. Be sure to ask them if they know any new venues that might show your work, or what their marketing strategy for selling their fine art photography is.

4) Rehearse your elevator pitch

Before you visit any of these venues or meet with someone to talk about your work, be sure you have your elevator pitch down pat. What’s an elevator pitch, you ask? It’s a brief summary of who you are, what type of photography you do and why it matters.

And it’s generally no longer than 60 seconds – the duration of a theoretical elevator ride, if you're lucky enough to be stuck in one with someone important and you want to sell them on you and your idea.

Another word of advice: have it memorized. And even if you hate public speaking, practice it over and over with a close friend or family member you trust. Ask them how it sounds, and rework it until it’s perfect.

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Whatever your subject(s), make sure you're using one of the best mirrorless cameras – ideally, one of the best professional cameras.

From 10 May to 10 July, Leica Gallery London will honor the legacy of the late Douglas Kirkland with From The Heart, a striking exhibition that offers an intimate glimpse into the photographer’s extraordinary six-decade career.

Known for his poetic eye and disarming candor behind the lens, Kirkland (1934–2022) shaped the fabric of celebrity and fashion photography, capturing the icons of his time with empathy, grace, and a rare sense of timelessness.

Canadian by birth, Kirkland’s path to photographic greatness seemed written from the start. His name is etched into the history of visual culture, with awards that include the President Award from the American Society of Cinematographers and the prestigious Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement.

His images now reside in revered institutions including the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills – a testament to both his technical mastery and cultural significance.

Long before the accolades, Kirkland began humbly in a modest Richmond, Virginia studio. It was there that he discovered Irving Penn's work. Inspired, he wrote to the master himself – a bold move that paid off, earning him a coveted role as Penn’s assistant during the 1950s.

Kirkland soon stepped out from Penn’s shadow, carving a place of his own on the pages of Look, Life, Paris Match, The Sunday Times Magazine, and Italian Vanity Fair. It was during this prolific period that he photographed some of the 20th century’s most enduring figures.

His 1961 studio session with Marilyn Monroe remains one of the most celebrated shoots in photographic history, while his portraits of Coco Chanel in her twilight years reveal an artist who captured not just likeness but spirit.

Though best known for his celebrity work, Kirkland’s lens was equally fluent in the language of documentary. During the 1960s and 70s, he took his camera beyond the studio, creating powerful photojournalistic essays and working extensively on film sets. Throughout his life, he published more than ten books, including the career-spanning Douglas Kirkland – A Life in Pictures in 2013.

From The Heart presents 17 of his images - an elegant blend of iconic portraits and quiet, behind-the-scenes vignettes. All the works will be available for purchase (if you're interested, you can get in touch with the London Leica gallery via gallery.london@leica-camera.com).

After images by photographer Sally Mann were removed from a Texas museum, the state is now looking at legislation that could penalize museums for displaying “certain obscene or harmful material.” House Bill 3958 is a proposed bill for the state of Texas that would fine museums up to $500,000 per item, per day on display for displaying “certain obscene or harmful material.”

The legislation, proposed by Representative David Lowe on March 6, comes after officials removed images from The Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The decades-old images depicted nude children, artwork that also drew criticism for photographer Sally Mann when the images were first published in a book in 1992. Mann later described the images, which are of her own children, this way: “These people who are unafraid to show themselves to the camera disarm me with the purity and innocence of their openness.”

In a description of the Diaries of Home exhibition, which featured artwork by women and nonbinary artists, The Modern echoed Mann’s sentiments: “In showing her children naked, moody, and in suggestive situations, Mann evokes an edgy, dark side of childhood that can be raw and unsettling.”

The images proved to be too unsettling for some viewers, and police seized some of the images from the exhibition. A jury declined any further action, but by then, the exhibition had already ended.

The proposed bill aims to fine museums for “certain obscene or harmful material.” The Fort Worth Report notes that the bill refers to the Texas Penal Code, which describes the “obscene or harmful” as material that “lacks literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”

But in a February letter to the Fort Worth Police Department, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and National Coalition Against Censorship, and ACLU Texas said that obscenity “is a legal term of art with a narrow, precise defition” – one that the Mann photographs did not meet, the organizations claimed.

The letter, while written before the proposed legislation, highlights a key issue at stake: “While like much art, the images’ meaning may be ambiguous or controversial, there is no question they are intended to provoke thought and challenge viewers to engage with ideas, not to satisfy to satisfy their sexual desires.”

Artwork is meant to evoke emotion – and not all of those emotions are pleasant ones. Some artwork is meant to make viewers uncomfortable. But uncomfortable is not the same thing as illegal.

Mann involved her children in the process of picking out images for the 1992 book and recent statements suggest her children, now adults, still support the artwork. The museum also displayed a sign at the door warning visitors of some more mature themes in the collection.

The proposed legislation could cost museums up to $500,000 a day for each artwork in question. The legislation also allows the attorney general to ask the museum to cover related legal fees as well. That could impose a significant financial burden to museums as, according to a 2024 survey, around two thirds of museum directors are concerned about funding shortfalls.

The bill is currently under review by the Committee on State Affairs; if the committee approves, the bill would then go on for further discussion and a vote by the House. If the bill makes it through the process and is signed by the governor, the law would go into effect in Texas only on September 1.

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In dreams, anything is possible. This sentiment is what Mexico-based photographer and artist Felix Hernandez tries to convey in his digital paintings. 

Felix is a 51-year-old graphic designer, photographer, digital and miniature artist, based in Cancun, Mexico. He’s a husband and father of two, and his life revolves around a passion for creating impactful visuals. He started 20 years ago with commercial photography for local businesses but shifted focus about a decade ago, merging his love of toys and scale models with digital image manipulation. This quickly garnered the attention of the photography community and big brands around the world.

"My day begins early, around 7am. After a quick bath, a simple breakfast and a short drive to my studio just five minutes from home, I start my workday with a cup of coffee. I spend the next two hours catching up on emails and social media before diving into creative work by 10am. Whether I’m building a new scene, shooting, or working on postproduction at my desktop, I’m always fully immersed in the creative process.

"At my photography studio, I specialize in “creative photography,” focusing on scale models and dioramas, blending practical effects with digital art. This fusion of disciplines has given rise to my unique visual language, which I call ‘Dreamphography’.

"To me, photography is more than capturing reality – it’s about bringing the ideas and dreams from my mind into visual form. The most important photo is the one I’m working on, and my best is the one I’ll create tomorrow.

"I thrive on experimentation and constantly challenge myself. Though I may not be an expert in any one field, my broad knowledge fuels my creativity. I embrace failure as a stepping stone to success.

"I’m driven by my dreams – not in the pursuit of lofty ambitions, but by using them as a source of inspiration. I don’t just “dream big”; I “dream small” and act on it.

"My singular ambition is to create. The more I create, the more fulfilled I feel. Growth, recognition, and success follow naturally when you dedicate yourself to what you love over time."

Felix's pro kit for dream-like digital paintings

1. Canon EOS R5C

"The Canon EOS R5 C is my go-to powerhouse for both photography and video. In the studio, its high-resolution 45MP sensor allows me to create large, crisp images with stunning detail. One of my favourite features is the quick switch to a dedicated video mode, offering plenty of options and without heating issues. The rotating screen is invaluable for shooting from tricky angles. I also use my Canon EF-EOS R mount adapter so I can seamlessly use my old  EF glass, too."

2. Canon TS-E 24mm f3.5L II

"The Canon EF 24mm TS-E tilt-shift lens is a game-changer for my miniature photography. Its tilt-shift functionality allows for precise perspective and depth of field control, so I can make sure straight lines remain straight. As a wide 24mm lens, it captures expansive scenes with sharpness and clarity and delivers exceptional image quality and creative flexibility. It’s such a valuable addition to my toolkit that I use it to create most of my images."

3. Laowa 24mm Periprobe T14 2X

"The Laowa 24mm Macro Probe lens is an amazing tool for videographers. It offers a unique perspective for macro shots. Its long, slender design allows you to get incredibly close to subjects, capturing intricate details that are otherwise unreachable. The lens features a wide-angle view, providing greater depth of field (f/14 to f/40) and context for macro footage. I use this lens mostly for video shots."

4. Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 tablet

"I have been using Wacom Cintiq drawing tablets for more than a decade. For my post-production process and workflow, it has been a game changer. It gives me precise and full control over my images when I’m using digital brushes or making complex masks. It features a stunning 4K display with exceptional colour accuracy with customizable ExpressKeys that make my work easier and faster."

5. Godox S60

"The Godox S60 is a versatile and powerful LED light designed for both photography and videography. What I love about this light, and find pretty useful, is the adjustable beam (focus light) that allows very precise lighting control. In addition, I can attach dedicated lenses that will focus the light further. I can also attach a ‘gobo’ or other accessory to sculpt the light exactly how I need it. I have four of the S60 lights in my studio so I can position them around the frame and light it like a filmset."

6. PMI Gear SmokeGENIE

"The SmokeGENIE from PMI Gear is a tool designed for creating smoke effects in a variety of settings. It’s great for both still images and video to create practical SFX. It’s battery-powered and produces a dense, long-lasting smoke. It’s pretty compact so the  portable design makes it easy to use and place it in tight spaces, while the adjustable output allows for precise control over the smoke density and flow. It’s a must-have item for anyone looking to shoot miniature scenes."

And here's a few of our favorite shots Felix Hernandez has crafted using the listed kit above as well as in-camera and post-processing skills in equal measure. The results are simply breath taking.

You might also be interested in the best lenses for macro and our top tips for still life photography.

I enjoy the challenge of creating dramatic images. I use many different techniques to achieve this, whether it’s playing with perspective, adding dynamic with long exposures, creating low-key images or sometimes all three. 

Monochrome tones will naturally accentuate the contrast between light and dark and help bring more attention to your subject through the absence of color. It is important to consider a wide contrast and tonal range as well as the subject and mood. A broad spectrum of tones from the darkest blacks to the brightest whites will contribute to the depth and dramatic effect, thereby increasing its overall impact on the image.

Choose subjects that allow for dramatic interpretation. The lack of color will focus the viewer’s attention on the form of the subject and the mood of the overall image. 

Perspectives

Exaggerate distances to spice up your visual language

This is the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, Canada. I was walking around with my 12-24mm lens, trying to get an interesting composition when I saw this grate cover. I got down low with my camera, to the point where the camera was just a few inches above it and shot handheld at a focal length of 12mm. 

By doing this, I was able to exaggerate the distance between the foreground and background, making it appear as though the grate cover was almost as big as the stadium itself. For full disclosure, there was a featureless grey sky that day, so I added a cloudy sky in post-processing for a little more drama.

Dynamic

Lower the shutter speed to turn backgrounds into a dramatic element

This is Greenpoint Landing in Brooklyn, New York. I photographed this at the end of the day, setting my tripod low to the ground to capture the rocks in the foreground and use them as my leading line into the background. I shot for 30 seconds at 12mm using a six-stop ND filter to add the motion in the clouds and water. For me, landscape or cityscape long exposures are enhanced when clouds are present. The wind was blowing north, which made it appear as if the clouds were going out of the frame while the rocks appeared to be going inside the frame.

• What is an ND filter and when would you use one?

Low Key

Let dark elements dominate the frame to create visual tension

A low-key image is defined by its largely dark tones, with nominal light and shadow contrast. Low-key photography gives you a clear focal point in the image and there are few to no visual distractions. It also lends itself to being even more dramatic when converted to black and white. The great thing about low-key photography is that it can be done at any time of the day, so you can create your own drama and set the scene for your images.

1. Select dark tones
To optimize contrast in your composition, prioritize including predominantly dark image elements while guiding the viewer toward the brighter elements.

2. Switch to spot
Switch to M mode and communicate to the camera that you intend to create an unconventional exposure. That means selecting the Spot Metering mode to bias the exposure toward a specific area of the scene.

3. Meter from highlights
To create a darker mood in your low-key photograph, focus on the brightest area of the scene and position the AF point here. Now take a meter reading and adjust these settings accordingly. 

4. Drop the brightness
Close down your aperture using a higher f-stop number. Alternatively, increase the shutter speed. This way, less light enters the sensor, resulting in a darker and moodier frame.

Pro Advice

1. Use ND filters
Neutral Density filters give you greater control of your exposures during the daytime. They also allow you to capture natural elements, such as water and clouds in a trail of movement while still elements remain sharp. This can add more drama or serenity to your images.

2. Find different perspectives
Go low, shoot from the hip, look up – possibilities are everywhere, not just straight ahead. Going low or high over your subject allows you to play with perspective, changing the size and shape of your foreground and background. Looking up at skylights can also make for dramatic low-key images.

3. Hone your camera settings
In general, you should shoot in Manual mode for greater control. Use as low an ISO as possible and retain a fast shutter speed – unless you’re controlling motion with ND filters. Use Spot Metering to get the meter to read off your subject and maintain darker backgrounds. Always check your histogram to ensure the desired exposure.

4. Edit for contrast
In post-processing, boost the contrast to deepen shadows and highlight the subject. Fine-tune the exposure and use curve adjustments so the image retains strong contrast between light and dark areas. This can enhance the dramatic and atmospheric qualities of low-key imagery.

When did you start out in your current photo genres?

I have always been a multi-genre photographer; I am guided by my feelings, desire, and willingness to photograph. I never stick to just one genre but can switch between several genres at the same time. For me, it is most important that a hobby remains a hobby and that I simply get paid for it. Photography as a job must not take over at all. I have turned down many photography jobs because of this. I am driven by my desire and willingness. 

What challenges did you face as a startup, and how did you overcome these?

Since I was born deaf, I have to work much harder to break into the competitive market. Once I manage to do so, everything becomes easier over time and I build good connections. More and more people want to hire me as a photographer because they desire visually appealing photos, which is ideal for me as a deaf photographer. Given that I lack any sense of hearing, I have a highly developed sense of vision.

What key skills are needed for your line of work (for example, communication or problem-solving)?

I typically review everything with clients beforehand, allowing me to fully concentrate on the photography at the event. Discussing all details in advance via email greatly simplifies the process. When on-site, if someone needs to communicate with me, they can text on their phone. Otherwise, we resort to straightforward gestures, such as signaling to come here, pointing in a direction, and so on. Nearly everyone is familiar with these kinds of gestures.

And your future plans? Are there any other genres you’d like to try or expand into? 

Right now, I’m interested in exploring a completely new genre. Despite my fear of water due to a near-drowning experience in childhood, I’m going to start snorkeling and photographing underwater. I see myself as an explorer eager to discover new worlds. I have studied space, terrestrial photography, and macro photography and now it’s time for the underwater world. I am also working on photo books that will be published on Amazon.

Mikael's main photo gear

Canon EOS R6

Great in low light. Small files are quick to work with and it’s possible to enlarge an image using AI if it needs more MP.

Canon RF 800mm f/11

For when I need lightweight and handheld for wildlife in good natural light without a tripod. It’s used more for spontaneous occasions.

Sigma 300-800mm f/5.6

A favorite lens for wildlife and sports, when I use a tripod. It’s not often you see such lenses these days.

Sigma 400mm Tele APO Macro

A vintage lens I can’t be without! Good close focus for when I’m photographing frogs or snakes. 

I’ve been to the distant lands of creativity in Photoshop. Every fad every other photographer has done, and more. Levitating women, winged women, a woman with many nipples - not my best moment. Dresses turning into oceans, hair turning into fire, or plonking a giraffe over the model completely (don’t laugh, that one ended up in the Saatchi Gallery…)

Think of it as ethical. I’ve laid out a sleeping lion in an English manor, turned a peacock into a woman’s hat, and even transformed Peter Paul Rubens’ 1617 severed ‘Head of Medusa’ into a rather fashionable telephone. All with lion and peacock unharmed, and headless man dead anyway…

But what might surprise people is that some of my most popular images used almost zero Photoshop, and they involved some rather hairy experiences to get them.

My piece White Witch Awakening literally just graced the cover of Artmajeur magazine – it’s our most sold fine-art print of all time. It was actually originally commissioned for a Nikon D810 ad campaign in 2014. Their remit was, no Photoshop. I baulked at first – then got excited, because everything we would normally magic in Photoshop, we had to source for real.

That included a dreamy styled model, the entire taxidermy collection of Aynhoe Park (an English stately home), a bucket of white paint to blank out the Orangery completely, and, just to make things extra difficult for ourselves – a live zebra.

We didn’t quite know how difficult it would be to get that final composition under pressure. What you don’t see is a zebra handler hiding every last pixel of themselves behind the stuffed polar bear. The zebra, bucking wildly between every shot, broke out from its fishing-wire leash. That slither of fishing wire is literally the only thing we were allowed to Photoshop out.

The pic went on to disgruntle an animal rights activist when he saw it on a Hong Kong metro billboard, and the ad was pulled. My dismay was assuaged when the director of Saatchi Art clamoured to make it available as a print, and I’ve made a healthy fine-art livelihood ever since.

The Governess was our own shoot in Belvoir Castle where we were told in no uncertain terms to be extremely careful with the 500-year-old carpet. We were resigned to having the model just stand there. The final shot, stitched from two images, wields no trickery. It didn’t need lions or tigers or bears – it already had enough. The model looked like some psychedelic vision as she was. The gold gilt ceiling, panned up by a stitch-shot, was enough for the wow. No Photoshopped elements, no CGI, and certainly no AI.

And then there was our time shooting for Guo Pei, known as the Alexander McQueen of China. She makes dresses that are more like art installations, and we went over to Beijing to shoot them on the Great Wall of China.

But then she brought out we called the Boat Dress. This dress was as terrifying as it was beautiful. The thinnest models you’d ever seen, queued at the casting being rejected till they found one tiny enough to fit into it. Even she took three hours to climb in. Being inside it I could imagine was probably like being in Trunchbull’s chokey. And I, who loves locations, was just as confined to the chokey of a studio to shoot it.

I fired away, rather like a lookbook, as hurriedly as I could so the model could hurry out of the fancy sarcophagus as soon as possible, and I onto the plane home to edit it. I tested placing it into different locations. But my attempts made the dress feel fake. The dress was so awesome, so detailed, that it was already the focus.

Yes, it’s a boat dress, but overboard is my middle name! Subtlety in editing is something I find difficult. But I tried something I very, very seldom do: I put it on a black background. I added dress detail into an oval border, so it looked like a locket. She looked like a tree. Locket Tree. It felt right…

Plot spoiler though, we paid someone to cut that entire dress out. Whatever of their eyesight remains, and if the model herself is still breathing, we hope they like the result too.

You can play a guessing game of which are Photoshopped, semi-Photoshopped and zero-Photoshopped at www.surrealfashion.co.uk. Some use old paintings, some use CGI. None to date use AI…

When taking photographs the light at the beginning and the end of the day is some of the best to work with. To get the most out of it you might think you have to go out and shoot stunning vistas but this simply isn’t the case. In this project, we’re going to show you how to shoot during the golden hour in the comfort of your own home and create some incredible and different fine-art results in the process. 

If you’re not lucky enough to get good light through your windows at the start or end of the day, have a search close to home and select another location nearby. For example, the garden or the garden shed could also be viable, as you don’t need much to make it work – just some natural light, a plain background and a subject to frame. For this project, we used flowers as our main subject but your main subject could be anything. You should just aim to pick something that creates interesting shadows so form and structure are important aspects to consider.  

When it comes to kit, we opted to shoot with a 50mm prime, but you could always use a wide-angle lens or a long lens. Experiment and find the right optic that matches your style of shooting.

Use the light at the start or the end of the day to capture dramatic shadows and create fine-art photos without having to go outdoors

1 Get set up 

For this project, you can either choose to shoot handheld or use a tripod. If you want to slow down and build your composition, then a tripod is a great aid; however, in terms of the camera settings, a tripod isn’t necessary. Because of the light, your shutter speed setting should be reading relatively fast but open your aperture to a wider setting, too. For our image, our aperture was set at f/2.8 and the ISO at 400. 

2 Underexpose by a stop 

You don’t want your highlights to be overexposed so take your meter readings from the lighter part of your image and not the shadowed areas. Here, we put our camera into Aperture Priority mode and then dialled in -1 stop of Exposure Compensation to make sure that we were exposing for the main subject and for the lighter parts of the image. 

3 Be experimental 

To make the most of the scene and get that fine-art appeal, look for shapes in the shadows and think about your composition. It could be that you shoot from a different angle or adjust your scene to the light. On this shoot, we had some plain black boxes to hand so that we could raise the main subject into a better position.

4 Create additional shadows

To enhance your still-life image further, you can create additional interesting shadows to fall in the background. For example, in our image, we placed a large house plant next to the window to create some softer leaf shadows. As our plant was further away compared with the shadow created by the flower jar, these shadows were not as harsh. The mixture of lighter and darker shadows adds to the overall impact.

5 Color grade in Lightroom 

Once your shadowed fine-art image has been shot, you will need to think about the tone and styling. To edit our image, we used Lightroom Classic, as one of Lightroom’s best tools for stylizing is the Color Grading option. 

For Color Grading, you can either create a global adjustment across the whole image or adjust the colors in the shadows, mid-tones, and highlights separately. We suggest you opt for the latter as this gives you a more precise result (click the three-circle icon for this option). 

For our image, we set the Shadows and Midtones to a cool tone and then the Highlights to a warm tone to contrast with each other. Note that the closer the circle is to the middle of the Color Grading circle, the more subtle the color. You don’t want the colors to be overpowering – just a hint is enough. Have a play around and experiment with the different effects, strengths and tones to see how they impact your image.

Officials have seized multiple photos from a museum in Texas after complaints over the images’ depictions of children, including images by photographer Sally Mann. Earlier this week, a warrant was issued and executed for multiple photographs on display at a group exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The images are part of a multi-artist exhibition called Diaries of Home, which features artwork by women and nonbinary artists.

Texas officials called for an investigation into some of the images on display back in December; a warrant was then issued earlier this month. The photographs in question have been removed from the museum as potential evidence, according to local news publication The Dallas Express.

The Diaries of Home exhibition included several pieces of Mann’s artwork, including Popsicle Drips (1985), which depicts a nude male child with liquid on his body, and The Perfect Tomato (1990), which shows a nude female child standing tip-toe on a picnic table. The museum's website and a sign at the entry warn viewers that the collection “contains mature themes that may be sensitive for some viewers.”

However, the images – which were taken in the late Eighties and early Nineties – also drew criticism when the photographs were initially displayed in the traveling exhibition Immediate Family and published in a book by the same name. In 1992, Mann was told by a federal prosecutor that at least 8 of her images could subject her to arrest.

More than ten years later, Mann wrote an article in the New York Times detailing the family pictures and the controversy that ensued. The images were taken over the course of a decade on the family’s farm in Virginia, which Mann said was so remote that it didn’t have electricity or running water.

“Although barely a quarter of them depicted a nude child, I was unfailingly described as the woman who made pictures of her naked kids, an assertion that inflamed my critics, many of whom had never actually seen the work,” she wrote.

In the article, Mann said that she involved her children in the process of taking and editing the photos, giving each child the photos of themselves and asking them to remove any that they did not want to share.

“It’s hard to know just where to draw that stomach-­roiling line, especially in cases when the subject is willing to give so much,” she wrote. “But how can they be so willing? Is it fearlessness or naïveté? Those people who are unafraid to show themselves to the camera disarm me with the purity and innocence of their openness.”

In 1990, Mann explained that a critic took an image of her daughter and republished it without her permission with black bars over the girl's face and genitals. The girl responded with a letter to the critic in which she wrote, “Dear Sir, I don’t like the way you crossed me out.”

Immediate Family isn’t Mann’s only series that photographs the human body with a jarring openness that Reynolds Price of Time once described as “an ardor that is all but indistinguishable from love.” Her portfolio of work also includes photographs of a nude man with late-onset muscular dystrophy (Proud Flesh) and photographs of human remains being studied at the University of Tennessee (Body Farm).

“To be able to take my pictures,” Mann wrote, “I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice.”

In a description of the Diaries of Home exhibition, the museum writes, “The artists in Diaries of Home use the vernacular of documentary photography, which creates an immediate sense of familiarity and understanding. Yet, the works subvert the implied truthfulness of the imagery by exploring the medium’s inherent subjectivity through enticing fiction and drama, or by magnifying everyday affairs.”

The Diaries of Home exhibition began in November and is expected to continue through February 02.

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Take a look at the best cameras for portraits and the best lenses for portraits, along with these portrait photography tips.

The art of minimalistic photography, featuring images that are distinguished by their simplicity, has long been a popular genre. The emphasis on sparse compositions that avoid excessive color, patterns and information can often create surreal frames that demonstrate a different perspective from our everyday experiences. 

The absence of color in this genre means that the focus of minimalistic images often lies in monochromatic gradients, which create a concentration of form, shapes and material characteristics of subjects. The importance of composition as well as the placing of light and shadow are important in achieving this look and all these elements come together to create surreal and potentially abstract frames. 

Integrating human subjects into the composition is an effective way to bridge
the gap between a real-world impression and a minimalistic image. This is a strategy that Iranian-born photographer Sara Goli follows to create mesmerizing frames with a lasting impression and a story to tell. While a minimalistic photograph doesn’t usually consist of a large number of elements, the precision and thoughtfulness in placing those are important. 

Along with a human subject, Sara usually includes negative space in her images. Here, we should differentiate between the so-called active negative space and dead negative space. Sara creates the former to direct the viewer’s gaze towards further elements in the frame to underline the impression of the shot or contribute to the mysterious feel of her photographs. By taking all of this into account, she creates frames that alter our perception of reality, thanks to her keen eye and feel for balancing light and handling contrast while effectively composing the frame. 

We spoke to Sara to discuss the challenges she has had to overcome while working in Iran in a genre that has traditionally been populated by male photographers. She also explains how she uses her camera to highlight topics such as the Iranian women’s resistance movement of the past few years.

Interview

Rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has revealed that the cover art of his highly anticipated upcoming album will allegedly feature a shot by recently re-emerged Japanese photographer Daidō Moriyama, 86.

However, in classic Ye style, the ‘announcement’ is shrouded in mystery and erratic behavior.

The new album Bully is expected to drop before the end of this year, and will be Ye’s first solo album since Donda in 2021.

The rapper first posted the image on his Instagram account on October 23, stating it was taken by Moriyama in the caption. According to Hip Hop DX, the image “appears to be his son Saint” sporting a mouth grill similar to the one Ye got earlier this year, costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars and requiring him to have his teeth remodeled with titanium.

Ye then deleted the image, and reposted it on October 25, editing the caption the next day and removing any mention of Moriyama from the post.

The identity of the subject has also not not been confirmed.

Italian digital magazine Outpump has said on its Instagram that the image was indeed taken by Moriyama, and is in reference to ohaguro, a coming of age Japanese teeth blackening practice using iron filings and vinegar popular between the 10th and 19th centuries, that was a symbol of beauty and emerging in to adulthood.

Ye has reportedly been living in a hotel in Tokyo while recording Bully, having moved recording equipment in to the room.

Despite Ye initially captioning the now deleted image “shot by Daidō Moriyama,” it’s not clear why he then deleted the post, or if this is true.

It’s an unlikely partnership, but not completely outside the realms of possibility. The cover art of one of Ye's most popular albums Graduation, 2007, was designed by fellow Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.

Moriyama was born in Osaka in 1938, growing up in the aftermath of World War II. He published his photobook Japan: A Photo Theater in 1968, and his subsequent work focused on street photography, documented the harsh realities of urban post-war life in Japan with a rawness captured through blurred movements, harsh contrast and grained textures.

Highly decorated within the industry, he has also had a prolific career, producing more than 150 photobooks since 1968.

His latest book Record 2 is a sequel to Record, 2017. Published by Thames & Hudson, Record was a collection of photographic work from Moriyama’s magazine of the same name. Record 2 picks up where its prequel stopped, featuring work from 20 issues of the magazine, from 2017 to today.

Record 2 is available from Thames & Hudson for £60 ($75).

Take a look at our guides to the best retro cameras, the best camera for street photography, and the best cameras for black and white photography.

What do you get when you mix Peak Design's industry-leading innovation with Carryology's signature aesthetics? The answer – a capsule of photography essentials with an added bit of flair!

Peak Design is an industry leader in photography carry gear, manufacturing some of the market's best camera backpacks, camera slings, wrist straps, and camera straps, each featuring attention to detail that provides photographers and their equipment with security and convenience.

The 'Peak Design x Carryology Essentials Collab' will feature in the Carryology Essentials Program, a series of product collaborations that Carryology hand-picks to celebrate the best-in-class everyday carry gear. Carryology then infuses these with modern designs and new aesthetics, making it a winning alliance.

Carryology states, "This is where we work with the world’s best brands to deliver ‘best-in-class’ essentials for your pockets and packs. These products are chosen because they’re category leaders – and then they're given our signature Carryology upgrades."

The collaboration will feature a capsule of six of Peak Design's most iconic photography tools including a special edition Slide, Slide Lite, Leash, Cuff, Capture Clip, and Mobile Tripod, featuring new colorways and improved slash-proof materials.

Carryology has infused the products with a sleek modern colorway of black and orange, including its signature Auxikko pattern to the hard goods. The Auxikko pattern was coined from taking inspiration from ancient Japanese Kikkō (hexagonal plates built into Samurai body armor) and auxetics, which are materials engineered to grow strong under stress – celebrating the balance between traditional design and modern technological design.

The collection also introduces new material that adds to Peak Design's already robust products. Ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) fibers have been incorporated into the edges of the strap webbing providing higher resistance to cutting or slashing which unfortunately is an all too common occurrence in 'on-body theft' (mugging/street crime where the attacker has a knife).

The Peak Design x Carryology Essentials Collab launches on October 29 via Carryology's Essentials Program.

Check out our guides to the best camera straps, tripods for smartphones, and camera backpacks.

The new issue of Digital Photographer is out now!

Subscribe today to get DP delivered to your door and device.

This month we have another amazing issue for you, featuring professional tips, reviews, and practical how-to guides. Here's a sneak peek of what's inside!

Capture beautiful flowers

It may seem like a niche area but flower photography is a genre that tests all of your skills, from complex lighting to tricky compositions and colour control. In our first feature in this issue, we explore the key techniques you can use to capture stunning flower portraits, using both household lighting and flash. In the process, you'll learn essential techniques you can apply in almost every type of professional photography, honing your studio skills and finding innovative ways to capture detailed images.   

Create travel visuals

We teamed up with award-winning travel blogger and photographer Bella Falk for our travel photography guide. Flip to page 36 of the magazine to discover how to plan best and photograph your next adventure.

Starting with kit advice, discover how to capture iconic landmarks with a fresh but also creative approach and talk about how you can earn money once back at home. Also, Bella gives us an exclusive interview about her mesmerising travel stories and discusses the most challenging aspects of travel photography.

Get in the zone for landscapes

Starting on page 14, join qualified landscape architect and photographer Andrew Haggar on a day in the beautiful natural scenery of Cumbria. Haggar has devised an innovative long-form project, photographing an area of one square kilometre and capturing it regularly over several years. 

He says, “The idea is to explore your space in depth through repeated visits.” Haggar also offers insight into his kitbag and gives advice on how to start your own MySqK project. 

Shoot outdoor portraits

Find our step-by-step outdoor portraiture guide from page 50 of the magazine. Instead of firing up the flash, Holly Wren explains that a simple reflector may be all that is required.

MAXIMAL minimal 

For our interview slot this month, we talked to Iranian photographer Sara Goli. Starting on page 76, Sara explains the gear she uses, the challenges she faces as an Iranian female photographer and what inspires her award-winning creative style.

Advice from the DP community 

Our network of pro photographers has got all the inside scoops you need!

Latest review and kit 

Get your copy of DP Issue 283 today!

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When did you start out in your current photo genres?

It was a natural progression. I was shooting architecture, cityscapes, and night photography from the beginning. By around 2010, I felt that I needed to bump up my creativity and challenge myself. I still take that approach now. I assign myself creative tasks and challenges to take different approaches and capture things in new ways. Niemeyer’s Brasilia was the first series I produced along those lines, then Gehry’s Children. They were both successful series and were published in major exhibitions in cultural spaces and museums in New York and Tokyo. 

By 2020 I started producing more pensive and abstracted series, including Inverted and especially Metropolis Abstracted. Those series were the subject of a solo show last year, Andrew Prokos: New Abstraction. I feel that this progression from representational to more abstract work is the result of my perspective as an artist maturing.

What challenges did you face as a startup and how did you overcome them?

The photography industry has changed drastically but I would say the most immediate challenge was getting the level of my work up to the competition. You have to be brutally honest with yourself and prune any work that isn’t up to snuff. I moved up to medium format and spent a year shooting and replacing work that wasn’t on the level it needed to be on. Then I adopted a 6x17 panoramic (film) camera to produce large-format prints. 

It was a gradual process of building my archive and reputation. Starting photographers should arm themselves with as much information as possible about how to estimate shoots and negotiate fees and they should also register their work at the USCO. I have benefited tremendously from having registered all my work from the beginning. The foundation of a photography business entails a lot of necessary steps.

How do you decide which images will work best together as part of an exhibition?

I’m obsessive about order and flow. I start by grouping pieces by colour and visual characteristics. For example, with a series like Metropolis Abstracted, I organized the images by subtle colour grade – the blues together and the warmer tones together. The pieces at the beginning had an Art Deco look since they were all based on NYC architectural details, while later pieces were captured in Dubai and included circles and curves. I bounce it off friends to get a quick opinion, and, if there is a curator or exhibition director involved, that’s a natural person to go to. I have learned when to let others take over.

To see more of Andrew's work, visit his website

Andrew's main photo gear

Fujifilm GFX 100

It’s not small, and it’s definitely not light, but it produces the sharp and detailed high-definition images that Andrew needs for his large-scale work. It has 102 megapixels on a medium-format sensor, which allows extensive cropping or, more importantly, the ability to print exceptionally large images, without loss of fine textures. Large camera bodies such as this can always be a challenge to work with, but since Andrew's work often benefits from use of a tripod anyway, the balance of resolution and build quality is very useful.

FUJIFILM GF 32-64mm f/4

Andrew tries to carry as little equipment as possible when he is traveling and even so, his gear and rolling bag are still quite heavy to carry all day, up and down stairs. Being a zoom, this lens is versatile, covering the majority of the main landscape and cityscape focal lengths, while offering a constant aperture of f/4. However, there have been many times when Andrew has felt he needed just a little more width.

FUJIFILM GF 100-200mm f/5.6

For more distant subjects, or to compress perspective more strongly than the 32-64mm optic will permit, Andrew uses this telephoto zoom, which offers an equivalent focal range of 79-158mm in 35mm terms, taking into account the 0.79x magnification factor of the Fujifilm GFX 100. While the maximum aperture of f/5.6 isn't too bright, the larger-than-full-frame sensor of the GFX System creates a natively shallower depth of field.

FUJIFILM GF 1.4X teleconverter

This optional accessory comes in handy when Andrew needs to capture close-ups with greater magnification, extending the reach of his existing lenses. This might be called into action when he needs to isolate a smaller detail in a scene or pick out just one part of a building.

4x/8x Neutral Density filters

Andrew breaks out these accessories when taking long-exposure images during the day. He says he always tries to purchase ones with the least color cast possible, so as to minimise the amount of post-processing work that is required. These filters came in handy when Andrew was shooting his 'Flux' series, the images of which incorporated moving elements in a range of lighting conditions. 

There truly are no limits to how creative you can be with photography. While it can be as simple as pressing the shutter to take your standard portrait, Tarryn Goldman, a photographer based in South Africa, is blurring the lines between photography and painting with a new series of creative fine art portraits that look exactly like Impasto artworks. 

While asking “What is fine art photography” she came up with a process that involves not only painting a background but painting a model to fit the scene and aesthetic. Fine art photography is about more than just the lens sees, it’s about a concept or an idea that the photographer is trying to relay. It could be based on an emotion, a memory, or a topical event and can vary from landscape, portrait, or even still life. 

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At first glance, you wouldn’t be a fool for believing that her photos are paintings, and in some ways they are. The process of creating the background and painting the model took two days to complete. Something I love about some of the images is that she’s left the paints and brush in the picture. In the caption on Instagram, she admits she might’ve interpreted the term fine art photography a bit too literally but what she has created is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. 

Showing such imaginative use of art and photography in a world that is currently so centered around AI proves that no matter how far it advances, there will always be a place for organic creativity. You just need to think outside the box and find a way to create something magical which Tarryn has done spectacularly. 

Judging by her Instagram feed, Tarryn is a photographer who is continually looking for new ways to define photography. By combining surreal imagery with fashion photography she challenges the standard conventions and in doing so has carved a unique niche for herself. 

Photographers like Tarryn inspire me to think about my own creative pursuits and how I can be more imaginative and use different mediums in my photography. If you’re ever feeling uninspired or can't shift that feeling of a creative block, Instagram is an amazing place to re-engage your creative flair, and perhaps get the shove to try something new.

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A group of fine art photographers have rallied together to launch a series of NFTs in an effort to battle climate change… but who is buying NFTs these days? It very much seems like they have had their heyday and, as much as I am here for climate-fighting initiatives, I can’t help but feel that selling NFTs isn’t the answer. 

In the last few months, it feels like AI has replaced NFTs as the latest tech trend. For a period of time, everyone from Instagram to the Associated Press was reportedly creating NFT marketplaces and selling NFTs – but since May 2022 the market has seriously dropped. 

• This is how I sell my photographs as NFTs

NFTs first became a huge craze when Beeple's collage, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, sold for a whopping $69 million (approximately £55 million / AU$104 million). Since then photographers have sold NFTs of Nirvana much to the annoyance of fans, Ashley Benson sold an erotic slasher film as an NFT, and Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, sold the first tweet for $2.9 million (£2.3 million / AU$4.4 million).

The three photographers joining forces to raise awareness and money for climate change are Yann-Arthus Bertrand, Nicolas Henry and Namsa Leuba. None of the photographers have ever had work minted and available to buy on a blockchain, so it seems like a strange move. However, they believe that selling NFTs is the most environmental way to reach a lot of people. 

European NFT platform Rhapsody Curated has been announced as the partner, while Ethereum will be the blockchain used to mint the collection. Although Ethereum is widely regarded as the most planet-friendly blockchain, and NFTs themselves are not particularly bad for the planet, in the past blockchain companies have faced criticism for the amount of energy required to mint NFTs. 

“It’s difficult to broadcast [our environmental] message,” Pierre-Elie de Pibrac, Rhapsody’s head of curation, told Decrypt. “You need to go to Paris, you need to see the art, to begin to communicate the ideas [represented]. But with NFTs, we can broadcast this message to many more people, and use this technology to allow people to buy pieces of art they couldn’t [otherwise] buy.”

Since Ethereum changed its minting model from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake-model, the company reportedly has its carbon footprint by 99.99% according to the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute. There has been no statement about how much the NFTs will be on sale for but, if the trio are hoping to raise a serious amount of money, I can’t imagine they’ll be cheap. 

Each of the artworks available to buy as NFTs will be very different, as all three have a distinct style, but all have the same intention: to raise awareness and open conversation about climate change. While I can’t honestly say that I think the sale will make all that much difference, I truly hope I am wrong and that the trio is successful in raising lots of money for such an important cause. 

If you're asking "What are NFTs?", you're not alone! Follow these steps to make a photography NFT.

If you’re a portrait or wildlife photographer, the things you take photos of are dictated by the genre. While the job of documentary photographers and photojournalists is to capture real-life events, exactly as they happen, fine art photographers aim to capture a photo as they see it in their imagination – not necessarily as it appears. 

Unlike many genres within photography, fine art photography is very broad and can include anything from landscape shots to creative portraits, to completely abstract images. Rather than using a camera as a tool to document a moment, it's used as a tool to create a final piece that expresses the artist's vision. 

• Photography tips, videos and tutorials to help you take better photos

Fine art photos are created purely for their aesthetic quality rather than to portray a moment or event accurately. They are defined by the intention of the photographer, and the thoughts and feelings they hope to elicit from the viewer, and are open to subjectivity. There are different forms of fine art photography that can include portraiture, landscapes, still life, architecture or abstract images. 

You might look at some images and not be able to tell the difference between a landscape image and a fine art landscape. There is a bit of a grey area between the different genres, but it all comes down to what was important in the image to the photographer and what they were trying to achieve from the shot. 

Conceptual fine art photography explores abstract ideas using imagery that is often not of this world. Dreamlike worlds are presented as reality, and beauty can be found in both the ordinary and extraordinary – all dependent on how the photographer sees the final piece. 

You don't have to be an experienced photographer to start exploring fine art photography; all you need is a camera, a vision and some of the best photo editing software so you can start to create your image. Whether you shoot with one of the best mirrorless cameras or an entry level point and shoot, the camera is just a vessel that will help convert your vision. 

To help inspire you and better understand what fine art photography is, we've put together some of our favorite photographers. Some of them are very well known who are thought of as pioneers, while others are more contemporary photographers, but all their work should help expand your horizons…

Nariman

Bogdan Sorg

Raphaël Neal

Oleg Oprisco

Rob Woodcox

Adey

Natalie Christensen

Jenna Westra

Aline Smithson

Justin Dingwall

Katy Smith

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Nude drawings and paintings are easily identifiable as works of art, however, nude photography is often seen as being seedy, pornographic and taboo. It’s true that there is a fine line between an artistic nude and a seemingly pornographic one, but staying on the artistic side of this line is easier than it looks, and it will enable you to take sensual and alluring imagery. 

The best kind of photograph is intimate and engages the viewer, drawing them completely into the scene that you present to them. The removal of clothes is one way to create a powerful and intimate bond between both the subject and the photographer, as well as the subject and the viewer. 

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You are quite literally stripping your subject back to their raw and natural form and it is a wonderfully intense and evocative process. The human body is such a simple and accessible subject and there are so many photographic possibilities available. Here, we’ll be getting in touch with the body and its natural beauty. 

Discover how to approach your first nude shoot, effectively pose your model, and set up the perfect lighting. We’ll also look at making the ultimate creative and abstract shots as well as best practices for your edits. You'll notice that black-and-white processing is popular. Our aim is to create something sensual, inspiring and artistic while staying clear of the explicit imagery often associated with glamour nude photography, and stripping the color away can help that.

How to pose your model for artistic nudes

Finding the right portrait posing for your model and the type of image that you want to create is one of the most important elements of any portrait shoot, let alone a nude photo shoot. The pose you choose will determine the mood and feelings that the image conveys, and it will also influence which part of the body becomes the main point of focus. With fine-art nude photography, your goal will most likely be to depict the body in a creative, but sensual and artistic way. Being able to identify the types of poses that will flatter your model is key, and you’ll also need to adapt to their body shape as well as their own insecurities.

So, before we discuss key poses we should first think about how to direct your model and ensure they are completely comfortable. The model will be in a vulnerable position and will be putting a great deal of trust in you as the photographer. Have a coffee with your model before you begin (fully clothed of course!), and discuss the direction that you want the shoot to go in. Ask if they have any questions and if there is anything that they are worried about.

Preparing for an artistic nude shoot

It is important that you know what sort of image you are looking to get before you begin your shoot in order to be able to explain your vision to the model. Look online at nude imagery and choose a few key poses that you’d like your model to try. It can be a little daunting on your first nude shoot and conveying your vision to the model isn’t always easy anyway, so having visual examples of the poses you want can be really helpful. Find inspiration (for example in journals and on photography sites) and think about a nice project. Be open and be very clear about the intended results and the procedure.

“Posing is equally important to lighting. It defines whether the image is artistic or erotic, powerful or delicate, conveying emotions from the model and invoking feelings from the viewer,” explains Mike Parker. “In the case of bodyscapes we are often trying to create shapes that mimic the environment, such as mountains, valleys, sand dunes, or rugged terrain. Lighting must complement or purposely contrast the pose to create an exceptional image.”

Directing your model into poses can be difficult at first, and sometimes it is hard to describe the pose you’d like. Mimic the pose you would like them to do. If you feel stupid doing it, just remember that you are asking them to do it too, and it might help break the ice and ease any tensions if you are willing to look a little silly. The visual examples of poses mentioned already will help here too.

Generally, when it comes to taking pictures of women, many photographers concentrate on their curves. Female bodies tend to be made up of soft lines and smooth shapes, whereas men are often formed of straighter lines and more angular shapes. This obviously isn’t always the case, but it is a starting point. 

Try to concentrate on poses that will accentuate the curves of your female model. Creating an S curve with their back is a popular pose and should probably be the first one on your shot list. It emphasizes the curve of the hips, bust, and waist, while also making the waist look smaller – ask the model to extend their hip and drop their shoulder for the best results. With female models, keep it sensual and delicate. In contrast to female bodies, men tend to be far more structured and angular, so poses that accentuate muscle and deep lines around the body will be the most effective.

Keeping the poses as natural as possible is important as you will be able to tell instantly in the final shot if the model was uncomfortable. There’s no point trying to get your model to do a sexy handstand or balance awkwardly unless they have a core made of steel – keep it simple.

We'll be continuing this as a series with advice for lighting the body, editing, and more. For now, why not discover this project for creative nude lighting with a projector? You might also like to look at lighting kits.

Parts of this article originally came from Digital Photographer magazine, the kitbag essential for advanced and professionals.

When Elvis Presley was asked his views on war protesters during a press conference at Madison Square Garden in 1972, he famously said: “I’m just an entertainer.” Had it been John Lennon in the hot seat, I think the reporter would have received a very different answer… 

Art doesn’t have to be political, but some of the world’s greatest works are. Bob Dylan, Don McCullin, Andy Warhol and George Orwell would be remembered very differently if they shied away from creating anything that was remotely political. 

Following issue 114’s interview with photojournalist Nina Berman, N-Photo received several emails suggesting the magazine had no place for politics. And that seemed like a very interesting topic to address in my usual column for N-Photo magazine, Parting Shot.

Political gains

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and I can understand – especially in these politically charged times – why somebody would seek escapism from the political quagmire. And one of the most effective ways to do that is to indulge in a hobby.

N-Photo magazine tries to remain objective and cater for as many photographers as possible. The team tries to include content that covers all photography genres, budgets and systems. And while absolute objectivity might be a pipe dream, the magazine tries its darndest to reach it. And that includes catering for those readers who are interested in photojournalism and documentary photography. Two very similar genres that, by their very nature, involve some form of political agenda. 

The views and opinions expressed by N-Photo’s contributors (including me) are their own, and asking a photojournalist to avoid any talk of politics is a little like asking a landscape photographer not to mention mountains. Political censorship sets a difficult precedent too. If photojournalism is too political for the pages of N-Photo, should it ban wildlife photographers from promoting conservation efforts? 

To return to my music analogy. I really don’t think a music magazine would shy away from including an article on Bob Marley or Creedence Clearwater Revival because some of their music is political. 

I want N-Photo to be a space where all photographers feel welcome to share their passion for photography. The magazine can’t guarantee you’ll always agree with the views and opinions of its contributors, but it won’t ask you to either.

N-Photo: The Nikon Magazine is a monthly magazine that's written by Nikon enthusiasts for Nikon enthusiasts, you can be sure that all the content is 100% relevant to you! So for the best Nikon-focused news, reviews, projects and a whole lot more, subscribe to N-Photo today – with our unmissable subs deal!

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Since the series launched in 2019, Hasselblad Heroines has been highlighting the work of talented female photographers all over the world. Each year a number of women are selected to be included in the series for their work in genres including portrait, landscape, product, documentary wildlife, nature, architectural or even food photography.

The series is announced annually by Hasselblad, which produces some of the best medium format cameras used by professionals, to tie in with International Women's Day, on 08 March, and Women's History Month, which runs all month long. Among the winners was Aline Smithson, a film photographer and founder of the daily photographer journal, Lenscratch.

Following on from the 2022 series announcement, we wanted to find out a little but more about this year's Hasselblad Heroines, so we reached out to Smithson.

How old were you when you first took up photography?

I began photographing in college, but then shifted to painting. After having children, I took on the role of family documentarian, took a photography class and never looked back. Though I was in my thirties when I started, I appreciated that I had lived other lives and had a lot to bring to my work.

Who or what inspired you to do so?

I came to my own work after a career as a New York city fashion editor, working with many of the greats in fashion photography. My uncle was an editorial photographer and my father was a hobbyist photographer with a darkroom in the basement. After starting my journey as a fine art photographer, I realized that I have been surrounded by photography my entire life. So all of those inspirations gave me the motivation to keep going.

Do you have a favorite photo or project you've worked on?

My series, Arrangement in Green and Black, Portrait of the Photographer’s Mother, was a deeply personal, transformational experience. I had so much fun propping and styling the photographs (all shot with a Hasselblad), and the time with my mother was profound, as she passed away shortly after I was finished shooting. After printing the images as silver gelatin prints, I hand-painted them. And each time I sell one, I get to spend time with her again, as I repaint the photograph. It was also the series that put me on the map.

If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be?

To be fearless and to follow my instincts.

What does it mean to you on being chosen as a Hasselblad Heroine?

Receiving this honor is incredible validation as an artist, but more importantly, as a woman in the arts. So much recognition in the arts has been extended to men and Hasselblad’s endorsement and support feel powerful. There is nothing more important than feeling seen and this meaningful acknowledgment means a lot to me.

What has been your biggest obstacle in getting to where you are?

Being a fine art photographer is not an easy path. You have to create work conjured from your own imagination and/or life and hope it resonates with the world. There is no one who guides you, no agent to take care of business. So much of the journey is figuring out how to get work out, learning all the tools beyond the taking of the photograph – Photoshop, printing, shipping, navigating contracts, considering installations, and so on. If I had to boil it down to one thing, it would be the marketing of photographs, when honestly, all I want to be doing is making work and not spending hours on pushing the work.

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A research team at Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands, has created the most detailed image ever taken of a work of art, that being Rembrandt's baroque painting The Night Watch. 

The photograph is a whopping 717 gigapixels in resolution, with pin-sharp clarity of the paint pigment particles. This eclipses the 44.8 gigapixel image of the same painting produced by the museum last year.

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The Night Watch was painted by Rembrandt van Rijn in 1642, using oil on canvas, and displays a military group portrait featuring the Militia Company of District II with Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. The artwork situates within the baroque collection of famous Dutch Golden Age paintings.

The complete composite image of The Night Watch is made up of 8,430 individual photographs (up from 528 from the previous image) that measure 5.5cm x 4.1cm.  Artificial intelligence used to stitch the smaller photographs together, in order to form the final colossal image that has a total file size of 5.6 terabytes.

To ensure that each image was correctly focused, the surface of the painting was first scanned using lasers and the camera accurately calibrated. After each individual photograph was taken, a neural network would check the color and sharpness.

Not only is this new photograph four times sharper than its predecessor, with possibilities to zoom in even further on previously unseen minute details, neural networks can now be used to rapidly detect pigment particles that are similar and also identify lead soaps. 

The photograph was made possible due to research administered by Operation Night Watch, a dedicated team and restoration project operating at the Rijksmuseum.

"January 2022 will see the start of the conservation phase of Operation Night Watch," said Taco Dibbits, General Director at the Rijksmuseum. "The front of the painting will not be visible for a short time, but thanks to this image the public will continue to be able to admire Rembrandt’s masterpiece in the minutest detail".

This new image is enabling scientists involved in Operation Night Watch to study Rembrandt's masterpiece remotely and in even greater detail. It should also enable researchers to track future aging processes with greater accuracy.

The next phase of Operation Night Watch conservation begins on 19 January, with a goal to conserve the painting for the future in optimal ways. The first procedure being to mount The Night Watch on a new stretcher as to improve ‘deformities’ in the canvas, such as ripples in the upper left corner.

The full 717 giga-pixel image is available for viewing now on the Rijksmuseum website.

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Architecture is a very popular, yet specialized area of photography. This is likely due to the innately artistic nature of building design itself - older structures convey the grandeur of times past, while newly-built, modern structures show the progressive nature of current trends and construction technologies. 

Much like human portraiture, every building has a character that can be challenging to accurately capture in an image. Exploring the nature and form of a structure appeals to our creative tastes as photographers and allows us to experiment with a seemingly unlimited number novel and exciting compositional approaches. 

The key challenges of this genre are capturing a flattering perspective, which accurately depicts the shape and design and showing or controlling the context of the building’s environment. Additionally, finding unique angles and dealing with distractions within the frame, can challenge our artistic abilities. Beyond this, there are the many legal considerations we must keep in mind - it is easy to forget that buildings are property and we must take care not to infringe the rights or privacy of the owners. 

All of these aspects may make urban photography seem like a complex and potentially intimidating area to tackle. However, with some forethought, a creative skillset and a proper understanding of what we are entitled to shoot, it is possible to enjoy urban areas as photographic ‘playgrounds’, exploiting the endless opportunities for stunning and dramatic imagery that they present to us.   

1- Vary your style

Not all buildings are the same. This might seem like an obvious statement, but from a photographers perspective there are some important consequences. Depending on the style of the buildings around you, your creative approach needs to be adapted. 

When you arrive on location in any major urban area, it is possible to feel slightly overwhelmed by the vast array of potential engaging subjects for our attention and study. Knowing where to start and how best to capture the atmosphere and tone of a city, in a two dimensional photograph, can seem like an impossible task. A common strategy adopted by beginners is to try and capture everything, all at once, often employing very wide angle lenses and creating extensive compositions. This is likely a mistake, as the dense levels of detail can quickly swamp an image, and reduce the overall dramatic effect. 

One style does not fit every building type and design. The age of the structure has a great influence on how the photographer should approach the subject.

Old buildings frequently feature a large amount of coloured, high textured stone, with an often angular profile. The difficulty this presents is that these building materials reflect very little light back towards the camera, resulting in the subject appearing dull when lit from the front and easily underexposed with back-lighting. 

Warm-coloured stone can also introduce White Balance problems, by confusing auto-WB systems into making unsightly cyan or green colour casts. To combat exposure issues, take a meter reading from a neutral mid-tone, such as grey) and use +⅔ EV exposure compensation to lift the shadows, while simultaneously neutralising unexpected colour shifts. Using a preset WB or manual colour temperature also offers more predictable colour control.

When shooting modern structures, which use large amounts of glass in their construction, be prepared to adjust camera settings to compensate for the highly reflective properties. Bright ‘hotspots’ are common, especially under midday sun, so use -1EV approximately, to avoid loss of highlight detail. Compose so that the sun is not directly visible in a reflection, to make exposure calculation manageable. 

Contemporary designs use more curves and sinuous lines than pre- 20th Century architecture, so try wider framing, to emphasis the ‘direction’ of the design philosophy - the leading lines. Another challenge is lack of contrast, where reflections blur boundaries between building and sky. In these cases, focus on colour contrasts, even when small in the frame, to better define where one part of the composition ends and another begins. 

More: Shoot a city skyline indoors!

2- Look for unusual angles

Composition can make or break any image. Cities and other built-up urban areas are usually densely populated, with both people and buildings, making it challenging for the photographer to correctly isolate a single subject on which viewers can concentrate. Furthermore, buildings themselves often feature a great amount of detail and engaging design elements that need to be arranged with some thought if the final image is to have the desired impact. 

One of the key aspects that may let an architectural image down is the angle from which the structure is shot. If a photo shows a building at eye-level, it is simply recreating a scene anybody could view with their own eyes, stripping away the potential intrigue of the scene. In addition, selecting a perspective on a building that merely shows it from one well-known angle is far from creative and wastes the potential demonstrated by all details that are out-of-shot. Although many have an iconic facade, that is instantly recognizable, it is good photographic practise to explore new angles. 

Try changing camera height, to exaggerate or hide low-level foreground detail. Then experiment with tilting your camera up or down, to see how perspective is altered and how this impacts depth. 

3- Exclude the ground

By excluding the often busy lower half of the frame, which contains people, cars and street furniture, producing a bottom-heavy feel, you can produce a more balanced frame. Cityscapes really benefit from an immersive atmosphere, where the vibrant tone of the environment is clear to viewers. This can be lost if the incorrect lens focal length is used - too wide and details seem overly distant, too long and points of interest may be excluded. Vary lens choice to intentionally experiment with placing a building or architectural design in or out of context, by showing more or less of the surroundings. An entirely different theme can be conveyed by simply zooming a few millimeters.

4- Experiment with exposure

There is a great deal of movement in urban locations. From traffic speeding through busy road intersections, to commuters flowing along pavements during the morning rush hour, cities are full of energy. It is therefore vital that we consider how this will appear in our images and take control of exposure, to ensure the dynamism of our subject shows through. Ultra-short shutter speeds won’t often find a place in an architectural and cityscape photographer’s arsenal, since the frozen movement these generate produces unnaturally static compositions.

Long exposures can be used for a multitude of purposes. They can be employed to soften skies for contrast against sharp structural detail, and to produce a soft light quality, that creates a painterly style. This balances the distribution of detail throughout the frame. 

Exposures of several minutes will also help to minimize distracting elements by removing people and traffic, providing they are not stationary for extended periods.

5- Shoot at different times of day

Many tourists only shoot in the middle of the day. This is bad for their photos, but is good news for you! This means by shooting at other times, in different light, you can create photos with a difference. 

One of the great qualities of urban environments, is that the densely populated scenes very easily take on new appearances as the light changes, either reflecting or absorbing colour and tone from the sky. In modern cities, for example, the predominance of glass results in light ‘bouncing’ between buildings, altering its softness and hue. It is possible to shoot the same scene at sunrise, midday and sunset and produce an almost entirely unique atmosphere in each frame. Meanwhile, after dark, a city can adopt an otherworldly style as the artificial light from within buildings produces vibrant contrast against the low light surroundings.

6- Experiment with colour

Try shooting with the 'wrong' white balance to exaggerate the colour of the light. At sunset, for example, use the Shade WB preset on your camera to make the reds and yellows really pop. Meanwhile, after dark, use Tungsten to push the blues and other 'cooler' colours. Shooting in RAW allows you to play with colours further in post processing.

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Photographer Lynn Goldsmith has won an appeal over a copyright dispute over how Andy Warhol had used a photograph that she'd taken of Prince. The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals has officially ruled that Warhol's Prince Series (which used Goldsmith's image as reference) wasn't transformative, which therefore means that it violates Goldsmith's copyright. 

The 2nd Circuit Judge Gerard E. Lynch has said, "crucially, the Prince Series retains the essential elements of the Goldsmith Photograph without significantly adding to or altering those elements". 

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As reported by PetaPixel, Vanity Fair licensed one of Lynn Goldsmith's images of Prince for $400 in 1984. Andy Warhol used this image to create an illustration of Prince for an article in Vanity Fair called "Purple Fame". However, Vanity Fair didn't inform Goldsmith that this photo would be used in this way and she didn't see the article when it was published.

In fact, Goldsmith only discovered that her photograph had been used as a reference for Warhol's illustration in 2016, after seeing a commemorative magazine for Prince from Condé Nast that had licensed one of Warhol's artworks. It turned out that Andy Warhol hadn't only used Goldsmith's photograph as a reference for the Vanity Fair illustration, he'd also created 15 additional artworks as well. 

Goldsmith informed the Andy Warhol Foundation (AWF) that Warhol's artwork had infringed on her copyright in late July 2016, kicking off four years of legal battles. 

The AWF initially filed a "preemptive strike" in April 2017 against Goldsmith before she had a chance to file a copyright infringement lawsuit. Goldsmith countersued, but the initial verdict ruled in favor of the AWF's claim that Warhol's paintings fell under 'fair use'. 

The US District Judge John G. Koetl said that Warhol's paintings had transformed Goldsmith's original image. "The humanity Prince embodies in Goldsmith's photograph is gone. Moreover, each Prince series work is immediately recognizable as a 'Warhol' rather than as a photograph or Prince."

However, Goldsmith went on the appeal the ruling – and has been successful. The appeals court stated that they, "feel compelled to clarify that it is entirely irrelevant to this analysis that 'each Prince Series work is immediately recognizable as a Warhol'. Entertaining that logic would inevitably create a celebrity-plagiarist privilege; the more established the artist and the more distinct that artist's style, the greater leeway that artist would have to pilfer the creative labors of others."

Barry Werbin, the attorney who represented Goldsmith in the lower court, said that this ruling was "a long overdue reeling in of what had become an overly-expansive application of copyright 'transformative' fair use. The decision helps vindicate the rights of photographers who risk having their works misappropriated for commercial use by famous artists under the guise of fair use." 

Meanwhile, Goldsmith herself told AP that she was grateful for the ruling, saying that the foundation wanted to use her photo without "asking my permission or paying me anything for my work. I fought this suit to protect not only my own rights, but the rights of all photographers and visual artists to make a living by licensing their creative work — and also to decide when, how, and even whether to exploit their creative works or license others to do so."

Goldsmith's fight isn't over just yet, as the AWF has already said that it will challenge this ruling. However, if this decision stands then it will be interesting to see how it will affect other copyright legal battles for photographers in the future.

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Landscape photography is a genre which benefits greatly from monochrome treatment, most probably because black and white landscapes conjure up images of the work of Ansel Adams and others experimenting with photography, as an art form, in earlier days of the medium. While many landscape scenes are all about colour, there are occasions where monochrome is a better option for conveying the atmosphere of a location. In some circumstances an absence of colour enables the viewer to appreciate the weather conditions present at the shoot, by forcing them to call on their other senses. 

A colourless image can encourage the audience to imagine the texture of a rock, the cold air on their face and the sound of water lapping at a shoreline - a more depthful experience. 

However, as we have explored elsewhere this issue of the magazine, the best black and white images can only be achieved when the photographer commits to a monochrome way of thinking. Here we explore how, when capturing a black and white photograph, you should adjust your camera work to distribute the tones optimally. Then we shall consider a processing option which enhances the timeless feels of a scene and captures the natural atmosphere the location has to offer. 

What you'll need

• Wideangle zoom
• DSLR or Mirrorless (ideally Full Frame)
• Variable ND Filter
• Pro tripod and ball head

Shooting steps

1- Explore the scene

For this type of image we want a clean composition, so walk around the location to explore multiple angles. Alter the camera height and pitch to experiment with achievable perspectives and check the scene for a clear fore, middle and background, seeking defined shapes.

2- Alter focal length

Fine tune the composition by altering either the focal length setting or the camera-subject distance. Look to arrange elements to create a strong sense of direction, or to divide the frame into identifiable zones - an approach which suits contrasty monochrome images. 

3- Slow things down 

For a subtle introduction of movement add a Neutral Density filter to lengthen the exposure. Here a 2 - 8 stop variable ND was attached to the front of the lens to precisely control the shutter speed, adding motion while retaining detail. 

4- Control using aperture

Adjust the shutter speed by setting the aperture in Aperture Priority Mode. This allows you to alter the style of your image quickly, by adjusting two parameters simultaneously - motion blur and depth-of-field. This helped me find the balance between sharpness depth and water motion. 

5- Use lowest ISO

Early films were not very sensitive so to force a similar shooting process I set the lowest ISO possible. This helped to slow the exposure and create a fine grain, guiding the composition process. Take care of highlight clipping at extended low ISO settings. 

6- Vary exposure

For this image I wanted bright highlights to glow against dense shadows, for a filmic quality. I pushed the exposure as high as possible without blowing highlight detail, knowing it was better to darken shadows than to brighten them. Metering was done from the ocean surface. 

Edit your shot

1- Standard adjustments 

Start by correcting any tonal imbalances and by setting the black and white points. This will ensure a good amount of contrast before we move on to monochrome conversion. Here the colour made it easier to see where there may be some danger or highlight clipping. 

2- Mono conversion

If working in Lightroom or Camera Raw, toggle the Black and White radio button to convert the image to monochrome. By default the image will be a little flat so finalise the global tonal adjustments to ensure good overall contrast.    

3- Curves adjustment 

We’re going to introduce slightly faded look to enhance the misty atmosphere of this winter dawn seascape, while adding overall contrast. Lift the bottom of the curve up, while spacing the lower and upper midtones. A highlight ‘dip’ was added to hold some sky detail. 

4- Darken the sky

A fog bank is partially obscuring the horizon but above this there is some detail in the sky. To add back some structure the Gradient Filter Tool (M) was used to drag in a darker tone at the top of the composition and add weight. 

5- Dodge and Burn 

In Photoshop use the Dodge and Burn tools to brighten areas of upper midtone and darken some lower midtones. We used the Adjustment Brush (K) here to selectively add back some negative Blacks and positive Whites to create some local contrast and shape the rock and sand. 

6- Extract texture

In your RAW editor use the selective adjustment tools to introduce some Clarity and Texture. Here the Lightroom Adjustment Brush was useful for bringing out more of the beach patterns, with Clarity set to +33 and Texture at +24, on a soft brush. 

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Find out how to shoot fabulous fine art portraits with two leading practitioners of outdoor photography – Sujata Setia and Roberta Baneviciene’s Spring Shoots talk is now available to watch on demand. 

Sujata and Roberta’s respective creative journeys began when they taught themselves how to take pictures after having children. 

They both specialise in photographing children and families – and in Sujata’s case, animals as well.

Having since become successful photographers, they are both ambassadors for nPhoto, a photo album and photo products manufacturer popular with professionals and photography studios. 

Sujata and Roberta joined us in the Spring Shoots virtual studio for their Fine Art Portraits talk.  

They discuss how they started their photographic practices, how they approach their shoots (when they’re not locked down during pandemics, of course) and why photographers really should embrace TikTok – as a marketing tool. 

“I picked up a camera when my daughter was born and started taking pictures,” Sujata recalls. “That’s where my journey started. 

“I love looking for stories in everyone's lives, in mine and my daughter's lives, and then transcribe that into a visual narrative in the form of my images. I have been doing this for six years and have started to become known as a visual storyteller.” 

Roberta’s formative experiences in photography were in the same vein, although becoming a photographer wasn’t as easy as it is now. 

“When my first daughter was born, 10 years ago, we didn't have smartphones,” says Roberta. 

“In order to take a picture, you had to use a camera and using a camera was not so easy. I just had to learn so I put all my effort into taking a decent picture, and then things developed. 

“I tried everything – maternity, wedding, newborns – but I wasn't happy. Slowly I realised what makes me happy, and that was taking pictures of my kids and my clients' kids, pictures of families.” 

Roberta did try working in a studio but didn’t like it so headed outside instead. She has worked outdoors for the last seven years, and is still “so excited” to do so. 

Sujata is a great believer in taking time out to keep one’s creative batteries topped up. 

“It’s so important to do something for yourself every month,” she enthuses. “I make sure I take time to do shoots for myself, something that comes from somewhere within me. That's how you create your own niche, your own style.” 

Sound advice – and there’s more where that came from in Sujata and Roberta’s talk, which is available to watch now. 

Go to Sujata Setia’s website

Go to Roberta Baneviciene’s website  

One of the advantages of shooting in a studio is that the photographer has full control over the intensity, direction and spread of light, allowing easy management of background detail. 

Furthermore, in a studio setting, seamless backgrounds can be used to produce a clean, distraction-free environment, ideal for portraits or still life subjects. 

There are great benefits of natural light however – it is soft, directional and freely available. It therefore pays to be able to bring studio-like effects outside. The technique discussed here is a simple method of shaping light, by controlling where it spreads within the frame. 

Read more: Photography tips

This is done by shooting in direct sunlight (slightly diffused by cloud cover where feasible) and using exposure controls to eliminate ambient light as much as possible. This generates a high-contrast, underexposed look, which approximates the appearance produced using strobe lights and a black background. Direct sunlight is best as the intensity will widen the exposure differences between the illuminated and shaded areas of the scene. 

Try shooting in the mid-afternoon as this will place the sun high in the sky, but with some direction in the lighting. Precise metering will ensure that no highlight detail is lost and that the subject itself does not seem underexposed – only shaded areas will be noticeably darkened. 

1. Pick a subject 

First you need to select a specimen that is well lit by natural daylight. Ideally the background will be more shaded, so that there is already contrast – for example, patches of light in woodland are perfect for this style of shooting.

2. Select aperture and ISO 

Choose an appropriate initial aperture for your subject, starting around f11. Ensure that you use the lowest ISO setting available to minimize ambient light capture, generating increased background contrast.

3. Meter from the highlights 

Use Spot metering mode and place your AF point over the brightest part of your subject, to calculate exposure from the highlights. Take note of the exposure settings that any of the P, A or S modes suggest.

4. Switch to Manual mode 

Set your camera to Manual and dial in the settings calculated in step 3. This will guarantee you have full control over the brightness of your shot and that exposure won’t change unexpectedly as you compose. 

 5. Increase shutter speed 

Next shorten your exposure by around one stop to underexpose the background and render it solid black – if your metered exposure was 1/125sec, increase this to 1/250sec etc. Leave f-stop and ISO fixed for now.

6. Customize settings 

Shoot and review your image. If you need a darker background, increase exposure further in half-stop increments until you have a seamless background effect or alternatively, select a higher f-number.

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London-based artist Juno Calypso works with photography, film and installation, and studied photography at the London College of Communication. During the course, Juno began taking pictures of herself disguised as a character named Joyce. 

In 2015 Juno took Joyce to a romantic-themed hotel in the US. Posing as a travel writer, Juno gained access to multiple rooms and used them to stage a series of solitary self-portraits – studying solitude, desire and femininity through a dark comedy lens. 

Learn more about this work on the Super Stage at The Photography Show, on Tuesday 17 March at 1.15pm, during Juno's 'Exposing Myself: From Bedroom to Billboard' talk. 

Tickets for the Super Stage speakers are available now for £12 each. The talks will be held in the Toute Suite, just outside the main hall of The Photography Show. 

In the meantime, find out more about Juno and her career to date as she answers five quick questions ahead of her Super Stage appearance… 

Five quick questions with Juno Calypso   

1. At what point in your career do you think you arrived at the style you have now?

My final year project at university. I got dressed up and photographed myself jumping out of a giant cake. It was kitschy, timeless nostalgia.

2. How do you achieve such a clean style? Does most of the work happen in camera, or afterwards in editing?

I really enjoy editing. At the start I couldn’t get my head round lighting, but I could clean up the most terrible images and make them look natural. Nowadays I try and get as much done in camera as possible. I still don’t take much lighting equipment with me on location. Just a flash gun. But I prefer to save myself the headache and regret when reviewing the images back home. I do a lot of bracketing which gives me lots of lighting options to work with in post production.

3. Do you ever use purpose-built sets or just adapt what is already there? 

In my university project I built the set and the giant cake myself, but it took weeks doing it part time after school. I’ve designed sets for commercial projects, because there’s budget and a team. 

All of my personal projects have been on location, though. When it's an art project it feels better to have a story to tell about where it was. 

The history of the location, the story of my time spent there… All the strange and embarrassing things I had to do to achieve the shots, and how I kept it all a secret from the property owners. 

4. Do you think you will start to use much more video in your work in the future?

Yes, I would love to. I would like to stay behind the camera for that, so I need to get more experience directing other people first. I’m so used to working completely alone, and video demands collaboration. 

5. Can you describe your favourite colour palettes to work with, and any early inspiration that set you on the path you are on today? 

I have an obsession with the colour pink. It never gets old for me. Is that because it has been assigned to me at birth because of my gender? Probably. But I don’t care. I enjoy revelling in the feminine aesthetic and all its cliches.

Booking details 

Catch Juno Calypso on the Super Stage on Tuesday 17 March 2019, at 1.15pm. Tickets cost £12. 

There are over 200 exhibitors and over 300 free talks and demonstrations at The Photography Show, and sister event The Video Show. Tickets for the main show are available now, and you can get 20% off standard adult tickets if you buy them before 11 March – just use the code DCWTPS20 when checking out. 

Don't miss the other Super Stage speakers 

Read more about TPS 2020

The Photography Show 2020: everything you need to know

Download your free 32-page Photography Show 2020 preview

Line-ups for Photo Live & The Studio stages at TPS 2020 

10 great travel photography tips from a professional photographer

Sir Patrick Stewart is the subject of a new work of fine art portraiture, shot in the style of legendary Flemish painter Sir Anthony van Dyck, by British celebrity photographer Rory Lewis. 

Most famous for his turns as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor X in the X-Men movies, Stewart has become a pop culture icon. However, as a staple of the Royal Shakespeare Company for 16 years, his career is steeped in tradition – so it's fitting that he was asked to sit for a portrait in the style of a classical baroque portrait. 

• Photography tips: studio portrait lighting setups 

Lewis was commissioned to photograph the star in New York, in the triple portrait style of van Dyck's famed oil painting 'Charles I in Three Positions', which is currently in the Royal Collection and was the basis for Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini's marble bust of the monarch.

The historic work by England's leading court painter, created in 1635 or 1636, depicts the King of England in three positions: full profile from the left, face-on, and three-quarter profile from the right.

Stewart as Stuart

Lewis' interpretation of the Stuart-era painting captures Stewart in three-quarter profile from both sides, with the photographer directing the actor to give a variety of theatrical and more serious expressions. 

“What emerged from the session was a complex and vigorous character, embodied by energy and animation; a side of Sir Patrick that I thoroughly enjoyed watching unfold in front of my lens,” said Lewis, who found the unique sitting challenging but was satisfied with his presentation of the star "in a coherent state of mind". 

Ten limited edition prints of the portrait, each individually numbered and signed, will be issued by the photographer, costing $279. More information about 'Sir Patrick Stewart in Three Positions' can be found on Lewis' website.

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Watch the video:  how to photograph fine-art nudes

Undertaking a nude model shoot can be daunting, especially if you’ve never done one before, but don’t panic – help is on hand with our guide to shooting fine art nudes with confidence.

• More photography tips: how to take pictures of anything
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We’re going to show you how and where to find a model to pose, if you cannot find a willing partner or friend. We’ll show you how to get set up, how to pose and light and, most importantly, how to ensure your shoot runs smoothly.

There’s a number of ways to pose and light a nude model and this depends on what equipment you have, what ‘look’ you’re after and, of course, the model themselves.

There’s a fine line between capturing a stylish ‘fine art’ nude and something altogether less tasteful. A good starting point is to try and think along the lines of an implied rather than full nude – a simple suggestion of nudity, rather than outright display, often creates the most powerful images. 

It’s also a good idea to direct your model to avoid eye contact with your camera’s lens in order to get a classier, more tasteful look.

Once you’ve got the model into a pose, take a few shots, then change the angle and focal length to get a variety of shots. You’ll often find that the shoot will start to evolve easily once you get going. 

Checking your settings and kit between poses will give your model a chance to change position without feeling under scrutiny, and will help avoid feelings of awkwardness, as well as ensuring that you’re set up for the best possible photographs.

1. Find a model

If you cannot find someone to pose, try freelance modelling sites such as Purpleport, where photographers and models trade services. Models who want shots for their portfolios are often willing to work for copies of the images, or a modest fee.

2. The nitty gritty

Make sure that you’re upfront about what you‘re expecting – this way you’ll avoid any misunderstandings with your model. It’s essential to see proof of age and photo ID, and get a signed model release form.

3. Be prepared

Plan your poses, lighting and location before the shoot. Look to the photographic greats such as Edward Weston and Bill Brandt for inspiration. Show examples, so that your model can see what you’re hoping to achieve.

4. Make it mono

Nudes work well in black and white. Switch your camera’s shooting mode to mono so that the display is in black-and-white – this way you can better visualize the end result and concentrate on the form, texture and shapes in your composition.

5. Lighting for nudes

Studio lights are great for nudes, but natural light is simpler and often much better. The available light from these large windows was perfect for our shots. Use a simple reflector to bounce light into areas of deep shadow.

6. Communication

Communication is crucial. Keep interacting with your model so they’re aware of what you’re shooting. Listen to your model, too: you’ll get better results through a collaboration and they might think of something you haven’t. And remember: DO NOT TOUCH THE MODEL. If a strand of hair needs moving or their pose needs adjusting, tell them and they will make the changes themselves. 

More videos:

• 147 photography techniques, tips and tricks for taking pictures of anything
• Boudoir photography tips: lighting, posing and camera skills
• Studio portrait lighting: essential tips and setups explained
• Headshot photography tips: how to shoot the perfect head-and-shoulders portrait
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