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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The power of a picture

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

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

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

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

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

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

O'Connor's gear and settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How he captured the award-winning image

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

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

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

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

Why the image stood out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evan McKay's gear and settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LCE POTY 2027: Categories...

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

Prizes and judging panel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insta360 Global Awards

Deadline: October 30

Fee: Free

Open to: Photographers and videographers of all levels

Requirement: Entries must be shot on Insta360 or Antigravity products

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

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

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

Environmental Photography Award

Deadline: November 01

Open to: Photographers of all levels

Fee: Free

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

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

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

IAPB World Sight Day Photo Competition

Deadline: November 18

Open to: Photographers of all levels

Fee: Free

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

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

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

World Sports Photography Awards

Deadline: November 23

Fee: Free

Open to: Photographers of all levels

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

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

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

Sony World Photography Awards

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

Fee: Free

Open to: Photographers of all levels

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

Categories: up to 10 different categories depending on competition

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

Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Deadline: December 03

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

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

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

Concrete in Life

Deadline: December 04

Fee: Free to enter

Open: Photographers of all levels

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

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

The Tideway Prize

Deadline: December 31

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

Fee: Free

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

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

Oppo Photography Awards

Deadline: December 31

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

Fee: Free

Theme: "Super Every Moment"

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

Prizes: $76,500 prize pool across 38 awards

LCE Photographer of the Year

Deadline: January 20

Open to: Photographers of all levels

Fee: Free to enter

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

Prizes: £10,000 prize fund

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The award-winning image 'Center of the Cosmos'

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

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

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

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

The Epson International Pano Awards

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prestigious-Ad-5238's gear and settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Photographer of the Year

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

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

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

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

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

The Epson International Pano Awards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lost and found

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rikardsen's gear and settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Two consumer cameras sit among Japan’s Good Design Award top rankings, as the Nikon ZR and Kodak Charmera earn a spot in the competition’s top 100 designs. But for the eighth year in a row, the brand with the most accolades from the international product design competition is a camera company: Fujifilm.

The Good Design Award gives out a badge to every entry that passes a quality and value screening, which means the list of 2026 winners has more than 1,400 entries, giving about 29 percent of the entries honors. A dizzying number of those awards have gone to cameras, from the unusual gimbal design of the DJI Pocket 4 series to the tiny Instax Pal 2.

While the program gives badges to every entry that meets its design standards, the program also gives out top-tier awards and a Top 100 designation. Two consumer cameras sit in the Top 100 for 2026, the mirrorless Nikon ZR and the viral keychain camera, the Kodak Charmera.

The Nikon ZR takes the Z6 III and crams it into a smaller body built for filmmakers – but also adds RED color science. The result is a camera that has now earned several accolades – including a TIME Best Invention as well as awards from EISA, TIPPA, Red Dot and iF. Digital Camera World gave the camera a 4.5-star rating, calling it “a true videographer's dream.”

The Kodak Charmera also sits among the top 100. The Charmera’s initial launch was so popular it sold out in 24 hours. The camera’s popularity is not due to what’s inside – it’s just 1.6MP – but rather stems from a tiny, retro blind box design at $35 / £35.

The brand that appears the most on the Good Design Awards list for 2026 is Fujifilm, which has 35 products earning honors, making it the eighth year in a row that Fujifilm has been the most-awarded company for the Good Design Awards.

Awarded Fujifilm cameras include the entry-level mirrorless X-T30 III and medium-format GFX100RF Fragment Edition. Instax swept even more awards with the Instax Pal 2, Instax Mini Evo Cinema, Instax Mini 13, Instax Mini 99 in silver, Instax Wide 400, Instax Link Wide 2, and Instax Mini Link+.

Fujifilm’s first disposable camera preloaded with black-and-white film, the Quicksnap Black and White, also earned an award along with the XC13-33mm f/3.5-6.3 OIS lens and several broadcast and cinema lenses.

Additional notable award winners among the entries include the Panasonic Lumix L10, the Canon EOS C50, and the DJI Pocket 4 series. The MyFirst Instant Print camera made for kids also won an award. (A Panasonic HyperSpectral Camera also sits in the top 100, but it’s an industry camera, not a consumer camera.)

Several lenses also won honors, including the Canon RF 7-14mm f/2.8-3.5 L Fisheye STM. Canon’s entire f/1.4 L VCM series and Nikon’s entire second-generation Z f/2.8 zoom lens series also earned recognition.

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Award-winning wildlife photographer Tom Way captured a heartwarming moment between a newborn giraffe calf and its mother. The beautiful black-and-white image shows the tiny calf standing beneath its mother's legs – a fleeting moment that may soon become a thing of the past.

Way explains, "This young giraffe was no more than a few hours old when we first found both the mother and infant in a small thicket close to the open plains of Kenya's famous Mara North Conservancy."

The touching scene was captured with a professional full-frame DSLR camera and a fast telephoto lens. Nikon has now announced the image as the winner of the prestigious Remembering Wildlife Photographer of the Year award.

'Under Mother's Guidance'

Tech info
Camera: Canon EOS 1D X
Lens: Canon EF 400mm f/2.8L IS II USM
Accessories: Canon Extender EF 1.4x III
Exposure: 1/640sec, f/4, ISO 640

The story behind the still
Way says, "We watched at a distance as the young giraffe suckled, still wobbly on its legs before coming forwards towards us perfectly framed between the mother's legs."

He continues, "Although newly born, an average infant giraffe still measures 6ft in height, taller than the average human and, by growing around an inch a day, it will not be too long before this young giraffe would not be able to fit under its mother at all.

"At this age, newborns are extremely vulnerable and it requires a vigilant mother to raise their infant to adulthood."

Remembering Wildlife
Among more than 70 images, Way's photo is featured in the 11th book in the Remembering Wildlife series titled Remembering Giraffes.

All book profits are donated to conservation projects, with this year's proceeds supporting essential giraffe conservation. To date, the series has raised more than £1.28 million for conservation, supporting 86 projects across 36 countries.

As a proud sponsor, Nikon gifts Way a Nikon Z8 and a Nikon Z 180-600mmm f/5.6-6.3 VR. Discover all winning images; visit the Remembering Wildlife website.

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

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

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

A face to a name

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

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

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

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

An invaluable help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Three extraordinary street photographs from Rome, London and Hong Kong have taken the top three spots in the Street Photography category at the 2026 Siena International Photo Awards, celebrating the art of capturing those fleeting moments that most people would simply walk past. Announced during the Siena Awards Photo Festival in Italy, the winning images offer three very different perspectives on everyday life, but they all have something rather wonderful in common: an extraordinary eye for composition, timing and storytelling.

Taking first place is Italian photographer Luca Paccusse with Urban puzzle, a brilliantly observed photograph captured at a bus stop in Rome. Against the chaos of passing traffic and the warm evening light, a face on an advertising poster becomes part of a wonderfully complicated composition, with the gazes of strangers appearing to intersect and overlap. It's the sort of photograph that makes you look twice, and what I particularly love about it is the patience involved. Paccusse recognised the potential in an otherwise ordinary scene, waited for the elements to fall into place, and produced an image that perfectly demonstrates why observation is one of the most important skills in street photography.

"Amid the chaos of Roman traffic and the warm glow of the sunset, Luca is struck by a face on a poster at the bus stop. After a few minutes of waiting, he manages to compose this interlocking of gazes, which intertwine and overlap, capturing the layers and complexity of a city where diverse identities merge and blur, like tiles in an ever-shifting urban mosaic."

Second place went to Olesia Kim for The fan out, a wonderfully colourful and energetic photograph captured during London's famous Notting Hill Carnival. While the event itself offers an almost endless supply of photographic opportunities, Kim has chosen to concentrate on something much smaller, capturing three figures partially concealed behind decorative fans against a graffiti-covered urban backdrop. The contrast between the elaborate fans and the raw surroundings is particularly striking, while the positioning of the figures gives the photograph an almost choreographed appearance. It's playful, full of character, and another fantastic example of how an everyday gesture can become something genuinely special when viewed through a photographer's lens.

"During the Notting Hill Carnival, London’s West End transforms into a whirlwind of steel pans, booming sound systems, and vibrant masquerade bands. This event, Europe’s largest street festival celebrating Caribbean culture since 1966, attracts millions of visitors each year. Under the sweltering August sun, attendees from all over the world cool themselves with bright fans, becoming part of the living performance. In this intimate frame, three figures hide behind ornate fans. Their rhythmic waving, set against a backdrop of raw urban graffiti, adds a sophisticated, fluttering layer to the carnival’s famous kaleidoscope of colors, turning a simple gesture of cooling down into an exuberant choreography."

Rounding out the top three is Paul Mckenzie with A family affair, an intimate and rather fascinating photograph captured at the Wah Fu housing complex in Hong Kong. Here, Mckenzie has used framing and shadow to tell a much bigger story than the photograph initially suggests. A child bends down to retrieve a toy, a father is represented only by his shadow, and a woman's striking gold high heel makes an unexpected appearance within the composition. It's an unusual combination of details, but that's precisely what makes the image so compelling. There's a wonderful sense of humour and humanity to the scene, with the contrast between the glamorous footwear and the weathered surroundings creating a photograph that feels almost theatrical, despite being rooted in an ordinary family moment.

"In the densely populated Wah Fu housing complex, worn by time and life, and home to an economically disadvantaged working-class community, a father plays with his child as the mother casually walks into the frame, like an unexpected apparition in an intimate fragment of daily life. The scene highlights the contrast between the mother’s perceived glamour and her humble surroundings: as the child bends down to pick up a toy, only the mother’s leg and a foot in an eccentric golden high heel are visible. The father remains just outside the frame, present only through his shadow playing with the child."

The Siena Awards were established with the ambition of transforming the historic Italian city into an international centre for photography, bringing together established professionals, emerging photographers, amateurs and enthusiasts through a series of competitions, exhibitions and cultural events. The project celebrates photography as a universal language, connecting people and cultures through powerful visual storytelling. This year's winning photographs form part of the Siena Awards Festival, with exhibitions running until November 29, 2026.

What makes these three photographs particularly special, at least in my eyes, is that none relies on an extraordinary event to make an extraordinary picture. Instead, they demonstrate the real beauty of street photography: finding order in chaos, recognising the unexpected, and having the patience to wait for everything to come together. From the reflections of a Roman bus stop to the energy of Notting Hill Carnival and an intimate family moment in Hong Kong, these images are a wonderful reminder that some of the best photographic stories are happening right in front of us. Sometimes, all it takes is someone with a camera who knows when to press the shutter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dividing lines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slow shutter, long lens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Street photographers are taught to simplify. Find a clearly identified subject, moment or scene amidst the chaos of city life. Focus in on it, and minimise the visual clutter. Wait for the decisive moment, then pull the trigger. Alex Webb, though, does the opposite.

His images are dense and layered. There's no obvious focal point, which prompts you to keep looking at every nook and cranny. Take the photograph above, for example. There's no obvious theme.

There's a smiling woman in a brown hat… or is she grimacing? Meanwhile, a man in a flat cap, stares into the middle distance, enveloped by the reflection of a huge black-and-white face from an advertising poster. And that's just on the left-hand side of the picture. On the right, a mural explodes with color: a man in a red coat crosses the street and another strides out of the frame.

Overall, some of these people are behind the glass, some in front of it, some reflected in it. It's visual chaos. It's also what cities actually look like.

This is the cover image for Alex Webb’s new book Walking Blues, published by Aperture. Over more than a decade, Webb travelled to some 40 cities across the US, from Erie to El Paso and Atlanta to Oakland, and shot what the press materials call: “moments of connection between communities”.

Busy scenes

Webb has been one of the great names in street photography for decades. Born in San Francisco in 1952, he became a full member of Magnum in 1979 and has since published more than 20 books, including The Suffering of Light (2011) and La Calle: Photographs from Mexico (2016). He's known for his use of saturated color and love of busy frames, packed with several things happening at once.

Take this shot from 2010. In a park in Erie, Pennsylvania, a rainbow arcs through the spray of a sprinkler, dividing the frame neatly into two. On one side, one child stands with arms raised; on the other, a second lies flat on the ground. In the background, a man sits on a bench and watches. Nothing dramatic is happening, yet everything is. It's a shot that evokes joy, stillness and the sense of an older generation looking on at the youth.

These types of picture might look spontaneous, but in practice they demand huge patience. In street photography, it's rare for all the elements to line up like this. To capture such a moment, you have to walk, wait and fail an awful lot.

Why Walking Blues? According to Aperture, Webb was inspired by the “lift and pull” of blues music, and his pictures “express the improvisation of chance encounters”. And it's a metaphor that makes sense to me.

The blues works through repetition and variation: a familiar structure, played again and again, with something new each time. Similarly, in Walking Blues, elements repeat from city to city (a corner, a wall, a slab of shadow, people passing by) but the creativity lies in the improvisation.

Why it's important

This feels like a timely release. Right now, street photography is under pressure as never before, challenged by everything from privacy concerns to legal restrictions to a flood of AI imagery that makes us doubt every image we see.

Walking Blues is a powerful reminder of what we’d lose if this kind of work disappeared. Webb isn't mocking or exploiting his subjects. He's talking pictures of ordinary people living alongside each other. Nobody staged them, and no algorithm could have imagined them.

Alex Webb: Walking Blues is published by Aperture. A related installation of prints will be on view at Aperture, 380 Columbus Avenue, New York, from November 18 to January 10.

It's natural to assume the selfie is a modern invention, a spontaneous development brought about by the inventions of the smartphone and social media. But it's actually been around since the beginnings of photography itself. And here's an example that more people should know about.

Back in 1898, a wealthy Bostonian photographer called F Holland Day pointed his 10x8in glass-plate camera at himself, checked how he looked in an attached mirror, and created one of the most earliest self-portrait projects in the history of photography.

The result was The Seven Words: seven close-up platinum prints in which he acts as Jesus in his final moments on the cross. There's one shot for each of his final phrases, from “Father, forgive them” to “It is finished”.

The work, as you can imagine, caused a stir when it was first shown. Then, for over a century, it was largely forgotten. Now, though, people are paying attention once more. The Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio has bought one of only three known original prints of The Seven Words, and director Adam M Levine is excited. “This is the most important photograph that people don’t know about,” he told The Art Newspaper.

Why they're important

What makes The Seven Words so remarkable is partly the concept itself, partly sheer commitment Day put into fulfilling it. He didn’t just dress up: he grew his hair long and fasted to change his physical appearance. According to the New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns another of the originals, he even imported cloth and a cross from Syria.

It's also worth pointing out that The Seven Words was part of a larger project. Between 1895 and 1898, Day shot around 250 images depicting scenes from the life of Christ, from the Annunciation to the Resurrection, again taking on the title role himself. Toledo’s curator of American art, Erin Corrales-Diaz, says only around a dozen of those 250 plates were successful.

Painterly quality

What strikes me most about The Seven Words is their painterly quality. That's no accident: Day was a keen advocate of Pictorialism, a movement that believed photography deserved to be treated as a fine art, on a par with painting and sculpture. Pictorialists favoured soft focus, careful staging and expressive printing; another way in which Day now feels astonishingly ahead of his time.

Back in the late 19th century, however, not everyone was convinced. When The Seven Words first debuted, many viewers were uncomfortable with the use of the new photographic technology to depict sacred subjects. People might have been used to paintings of the crucifixion, but seeing a real man, sweating and suffering under a crown of thorns, must have been quite a jolt.

Controversy alone, though, doesn’t explain why the work slipped from view. Plenty of religious leaders actually approved of it. Edward Steichen was also an admirer, writing that "few paintings contain as much that is spiritual and sacred in them".

A bigger problem was that Day himself was gradually written out of photography’s story, overshadowed by his contemporary rival, Alfred Stieglitz. Bundle that in with a subject the history books never quite knew what to do with, and it’s not hard to see why, over 100 years on, most of us have never heard of it. All the more reason to applaud Toledo’s acquisition in 2026.

The Seven Words will go on display when the Toledo Museum of Art reopens its reinstalled permanent collection galleries in autumn 2027.

Marbling is the ancient practice of dropping colored inks onto thickened water and creating swirling, creative patterns with pins, combs and anything else you want to stir it with. The process has traditionally been used for decorating paper edges and covers in bookbinding.

The Japanese had their version with Suminagashi, meaning ink floating, while the Turkish called it Ebru, or cloud art. You can finish this project by making paper prints from the liquid, or simply stick to photographing it, which is what we’re going to do here. It’s a fun project to do, but tends to get messy quickly, so have wet wipes or a cloth handy. The first thing to do is get yourself a marbling kit, and these can be found in craft shops and online, for as little as $15 / £12, which is what I paid here.

Setting it up

1 Lighting options

It’s better if you have a light source for this project so that it’s more evenly distributed across the surface and also so that you don’t need to have a higher ISO rating. Here I manually set the color temperature of the lights to 5600K.

2 Camera position

The camera needs to be above, shooting down, parallel to the surface of the ink tray so that it’s completely flat to the camera. I used a 24-85mm lens at the 85mm setting to fill the screen. You don’t need a macro lens, just a short telephoto.

3 Configure the settings

If you have a flip-out LCD screen it will make this easier to set up and change the settings. It’s best to do some test shots for the lighting first, then switch to Manual mode. The camera needs to have all the right settings before you start doing the final pattern creation in the tray as the ink dissipates quickly.

4 Get ready to paint

Setting the thickened water up takes a few hours so do it a few hours before you’re ready to start inking and photographing. This kit came with an A5 tray, which is the ideal size to fit under the camera. Have all your inks ready as you’ll need to work fast to capture the results.

5 Tripod is required

It makes sense to use a tripod so that you can take the time to get it perfectly lined up. Also, once marbling you don’t want to be fussing over lining it up each time. Lastly, it helps keep things still. I decided to increase the ISO to 200 so I could go from 1/25 sec to 1/50 to ensure there was no camera shake.

Prepare for marbling

This marbling kit came with three sachets of Carrageenan powder, 12 paints, a variety of tools to create the patterns with, and some hanging ornaments and papers if you wanted to create a physical product out of it. The first step was to pour the Carrageenan powder evenly around the tray and fill it with 400mg of water. Stir it to blend and leave for 4-6 hours for it to become thick enough to support the paint. Personally, after trying this, I’d be tempted to use only half that amount of water and the same amount of powder. To apply the inks, you put drops from 1-2cm onto the surface, wait for it to spread and then create the patterns.

Step by step: Marbling madness

Getting the camera set up first is key to successfully capturing the emerging patterns.

1 Set the lights

I set the key light to 5600K and then set the camera to the same setting using the custom white balance settings. It’s not critical when shooting in Raw but it helps make the editing process quicker afterwards. If you get reflections off the surface you could use a polarizer or shoot later to remove ambient light.

2 Work out the exposure

I did some test shots in Aperture Priority mode at f/8 with zone/eval metering and it was overexposed. I changed this to Highlight Metering which gave the best results. With a basic mix in the ink tray I then switched to Manual mode, increased the ISO to double the shutter speed and used the settings.

3 The settings

So these were the final settings for all the subsequent shots. I used the f/8 aperture to ensure sharpness across the image. The shutter speed was fast enough to avoid any shake, but just to make sure I also used a 2 sec delay. The focussing used a wide area, single shot focus mode which easily worked on the patterned surface.

4 Start marbling

With all the settings worked out you can now work on creating the patterns. There are two ways to do this - use black/brown paints for the background and then bright, light colours for the patterns. Or, do it the other way, use white paint for the background and darker colours for the patterns. You need to work quickly though, as the paint can sink from the surface, depending on the quality of the kit used.

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

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

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

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

Location and kit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choosing Hokkaido and the high-key look

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

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

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

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

Planning before pressing the shutter

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

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

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

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

The equipment and technique

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

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

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

Prasad's gear for the red-crowned crane series

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

The “real transformation” happened in Photoshop

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

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

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

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

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

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

Controlled, conscious decisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Exposure One has announced the winners of its Photographer of the Year Awards 2026, bringing to an end the latest edition of one of the world’s major celebrations of black-and-white photography.

This year, the competition crowned an International Photographer of the Year from its professional entrants and an International Discovery of the Year from its amateur entrants.

Snagging the professional accolade was Joshua YeheNara, with a series of 8x10 large-format film frames of rocks seemingly floating through the air. The New York City-based photographer told Exposure One that he used “some specialized equipment and techniques” to create the illusionary effects.

In fact, YeheNara is an ultraspecialist photographer who not only shoots with, but restores and even modifies, classic, rare Deardorff large-format studio cameras.

“I am currently the only known photographer to own both an 8×20-inch and an 11×28-inch panoramic Deardorff studio camera,” he told the event organizers. “Fewer than 350 of these cameras were ever manufactured.”

Another New York State-based photographer, Ed Healy, took the overall amateur accolade at this year’s contest. Healy’s winning frame depicted a snowy, moody, yet endearing scene following a blizzard in Buffalo on Christmas Eve 2022.

Exposure One also announced “Gold” winners across 20 categories – again differentiating between professionals and amateurs.

In the “Aerial” category, Cristina Ford (US/professional) snapped a beautiful scene of waves retreating from a black-sand beach, while Francesco Calarota (Germany/amateur) captured a large ship resting alone in dark waters, held to the rocky shore by a single fragile line.

There were also noteworthy winners in the Event category. Los Angeles-based Scarlett Freund captured the joy of the Pride Festival in her city, winning the professional award.

Swiss photographer Nady Rizk took the amateur accolade, snapping a creative frame of a performer at the Montreal Jazz Festival in Canada, rendered on the LCD screen of another festival-goer’s camera.

According to Exposure One, the jury was made up of photography and arts professionals affiliated with institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Leica Gallery Los Angeles, Aperture, and the Art Gallery of Alberta.

To see all the winning images for this year’s Photographer of the Year Awards, head to the Exposure One website.

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Skylum, the photo-editing software brand behind Luminar (formerly Luminar Neo), has launched Luminar on Web, a brand-new platform that promises to bring Luminar’s advanced editing tools to your browser window.

But far from a pared-down experience, Skylum is touting “technologies and workflows that have never existed on the web before,” with cross-platform RAW editing and cross-device syncing, Light Depth technology, and a shared Prime assets library all featured.

Luminar has been focusing on cross-platform editing since the release of the Luminar Ecosystem last year, and this latest release now means that Luminar is also the world’s first photo editor with a lifetime license across desktop, mobile and web.

Skylum is targeting its browser-based offering at a broad range of skill levels, calling it "capable enough for advanced users yet simple enough for beginners." The software is designed to work on any device with a web browser, so you don’t have to worry about accommodating large swathes of local storage.

Skylum is also calling it the first online editor to feature presets and LUTs, combined, as well as the first web editor with a "broader landscape, portrait, and everyday editing toolkit."

And of course, Luminar on Web is bringing with it a whole host of Luminar’s famous AI-powered tools, including GenErase, Photo Restoration, Sky, Bokeh, and more. Luminar on Web is available right now. The software’s basic functionality can be used for free, providing access to basic tools, full RAW file support, 100MB of cloud storage, and standard-quality exports.

You can also buy a lifetime Web Full Access plan ($69 / £69), which also includes Luminar on Mobile and comes with additional features including: presets, filters, Erase and Light Depth, unlimited AI edits, cloud storage access from web and mobile, and cross-device editing. Skylum has also introduced a $159 / £159 All Platforms plan, which adds Luminar on Desktop to the package.

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14-year-old photographer Oscar Whitfield has won the prestigious Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year award with a striking black-and-white close-up image of a determined dung beetle rolling a ball of dung, with a swarm of flies nearby.

The award-winning image, Labour of Love, was taken with a full-frame mirrorless camera and telephoto lens during a family game drive in Zimbabwe, where the British photographer lives. The photo has earned Oscar one of the biggest honors in wildlife photography.

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year, developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London, announced him as the winner of the 11–14 Years category and the competition’s Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year Grand Title.

The Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026

Tech info
Camera: Canon EOS R6 Mark II
Lens: Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 DG OS HSM | C
Exposure: 1/1250 sec, f/6.5, ISO 3200

"This is exceptionally well done. Photographing such a small, constantly moving subject is challenging, yet the image feels so intentional. The composition reveals an entire story and by doing so the photograph quietly reveals how life cycles depend on what we often overlook or dismiss," explains Jury Member Jasper Doest.

Oscar is a Stonyhurst College pupil, where students have access to state-of-the-art facilities to help them explore and develop their skills in photography.

"We hope his success will inspire other young people to explore their own creative interests and discover the extraordinary opportunities that photography can offer," explains Sarah Joseph, Deputy Head Academic.

She also highlights the technical skill and creativity behind Oscar's award-winning image, as well as "the patience, curiosity and attention to detail required to capture something truly special."

See the winning images

The sixty-second Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition will be on display from October 16, 2026 until July 11, 2027 at the Natural History Museum in London. Tickets are available here. Discover more winning images on the Natural History Museum website.

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The larger the light source, the softer and more flattering the light is – but the larger it is to pack. When one photographer and YouTuber paid more than US$500 in airline baggage fees just to get his lights to a shoot, he started sketching solutions. Now seven years later, that sketch has turned into a light that fits in a water bottle holder but unfurls to act almost like a 21-inch softbox.

The Maven Talon is a portable LED video light series that unfolds into a three-armed fan shape in order to create the softer look of a much larger light source. The light comes from Maven Filters – and founder, photography educator, and YouTuber Michael Andrew, better known as Michael the Maven.

The Maven Talon is launching with three different LED flights, along with a compact light stand. The Talon Mini folds down to 15 cm / 5.9 inches long and weighs 178g / 6.3 oz. Unfurled, the Mini stretches to 13 inches and outputs up to 55 lux from 1 meter / 3.3 feet away.

Both the Talon Pro and Talon Max pack down to just larger than a standard 12 oz water bottle – or in photographer terms, around the size of a 70-200mm lens, the company says. But both lights unfold to create a 21-inch light source. The Pro creates 287 Lux from 1 meter / 3.3 feet away, while the Max delivers twice that.

As with any light, moving the light closer to the subject creates more light and softer shadows – so the lights are designed without fans, eliminating noise. From 1 foot / 30 cm away, the Mini offers 490 lux, the Pro 2,130 lux, and the Max up to 4,340 lux.

Besides making a small light look big, the fan-shaped design uses independently articulating arms that allow creators to adjust each arm independently to shape the light. Each light is also color-adjustable.

Compact lights, of course, have less room for a built-in battery – but all three lights can also run on continuous USB power. The Mini has a run time of 45-60 minutes without plugging in. Maven Filters didn’t list a runtime for the larger lights, but those kits pack a larger 4,000 mAh capacity battery over the Mini’s 1,000 mAh.

The three lights are also launching with a portable light stand that folds down to 36.5cm / 14.37 in but stands at 205 cm / 80 inches at full height.

Maven Filters, as the name suggests, is better known for its magnetic lens filters. Its founder spent seven years developing the Talon series after hauling his lights, stands, and modifiers on a flight, which required $275 in baggage fees each way (about £207 / AU$398 / CA$390).

The new lights are launching on Kickstarter, where the campaign has already reached its original goal. All crowdfunding carries some risk, and the Talon lights haven’t yet completed final testing and production. But if everything proceeds as planned, the company expects to begin shipping in April 2027.

Early pledges that include the Talon Mini start at $129 (about £97 / AU$187 / CA$183), and the Max and Pro at $159 (about £120 / AU$231 / CA$226), while multi-light kits are also available.

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The AOP Emerging Talent Award winners were just announced. Austin Bradley (UK graduate, 2025) wins Gold with photographs shedding light on a shrinking glacier in Iceland. The Silver award goes to Ritchie Elder, who documented the final day of the term at the Ukrainian Saturday School at Leith Academy in Scotland – the first-of-its-kind.

"This year’s prevailing genre shining through both still and moving image submissions is undoubtedly human-focused, even where the human imprint is on places and animals.

"It's an impressive selection of work, chosen by our expert panel of judges, for our 2026 Emerging Talent finalists, and I’m looking forward to seeing their career development with anticipation," says Isabelle Doran, CEO of the Association of Photographers.

'57 Metres: Iceland’s Shrinking Glacier' wins Gold

AOP states that "Bradley wanted to find a way to visually communicate glacial retreat" making viewers understand the significance and impact of climate change through photography.

He rigged a 57-metre highline across Sólheimajökull Glacier in Iceland, "with the length of the line representing approximately how far the glacier retreats each year due to a warming climate."

Bradley spent several carbon offset days working with highliners, a small film crew and a glaciologist to capture the process on camera, with the footage set to feature in an upcoming documentary.

'Saturday School' receives Silver

Ritchie Elder documented the final day of the school term at the Ukrainian Saturday School at Leith Academy in Scotland – a first of its kind. Established more than three years ago, the school gives Ukrainian children displaced by war the chance to still be connected to their heritage, learning the language, culture and history.

Titled Saturday School, the series forms part of a wider documentary project developed in collaboration with the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain.

See the award-winnig works

Sponsored by BUILDHOLLYWOOD, the Gold-winning work by Austin Bradley will be exhibited from October 19th–25th, 2026 across selected BUILDHOLLYWOOD digital sites throughout London, creating a street gallery for the work across the city.

In addition, co-sponsor Wex Photo Video will exhibit all finalists’ work onsite at their Putney store location in London.

Discover the 15 finalists' works here. For more information about the winners and exhibition, visit the AOP Awards website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Wildlife Photographer of the Year, developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London, has just announced its winners. The prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year title goes to Italian photographer Federico Veronesi, who captured a female elephant carrying a deceased calf in Huab River Valley, Damaraland, Namibia.

The heartbreaking image, The Aftermath, is a powerful black-and-white photograph that, as researchers suggest, could show us how elephants understand death. This behaviour has been observed in Asia and Africa; researchers also say it could be interpreted as a sign of grief.

"This photograph works on so many levels. Emotionally it's a gut punch, heartbreakingly poignant. Intellectually it's proof that animals have cognition. This photograph says it all!" says Kathy Moran, Chair of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Jury.

Tech details
Gear: Nikon Z8 + Nikon Z 400mm f/2.8 TC VR S
Exposure: 1/1000sec, f/2.8, ISO 72

The story behind the still
When Veronesi was photographing elephants in Namibia, an unusual trail of drag marks across the dry riverbed caught his attention. Soon he followed up with the family group. Then he witnessed the female emerge with the calf, its leg wedged between her tusk and trunk.

See the winning images
The sixty-second Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition will be on display from October 16, 2026 until July 11, 2027 at the Natural History Museum in London.

Tickets are available here. Discover more winning images on the Natural History Museum website.

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According to the United Nations, the number of people over the age of 60 will more than double to 2.1 billion by 2050. And as populations continue to age, there are concerns that there won’t be enough young people in the workforce to meet the growing needs of health services.

In 2019, Ukrainian photojournalist Dmitry Kostyukov captured what seemed like a novel scene of an elderly woman interacting with a robot at a nursing facility in Jouarre, on the outskirts of Paris, where decision-makers were considering these challenges.

But Zora, the robot, was anything but a “futuristic marvel,” the photographer explained in an Instagram post. It was, in fact, “at the center” of an experiment in France to change care for elderly patients, Kostyukov explained.

Under the control of a nurse, the 58cm-tall robot can provide entertainment, support communication, and even lead exercise sessions.

“When Zora arrived at this nursing facility, a strange thing began happening,” Kostyukov said. “Many patients developed an emotional attachment, treating it like a baby, holding and cooing, giving it kisses on the head.”

While Zora Bots, the company behind Zora, believes its technology will help take pressure off staff by offering alternative ways of caring for an aging population, others think differently.

Some healthcare professionals and researchers say that replacing human carers with robots could risk further isolating vulnerable individuals or, at the very least, lead to infantilization, where elderly patients are treated like children.

Amusing, intriguing, or dystopian – however you view Kostyukov’s picture – the image went on to win the “Medicine in Focus” category at the 2019 Wellcome Photography Prize, a major photography exploring the intersection of science and society.

Now, the organizers of the contest are making a final call for entries to the 2027 edition, for a chance to win £10,000 (approximately $13,000 / AU$19,000). You can make yours at the official event webpage before 11:59 GMT on October 21.

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The image Power Play has won several awards this year. Now, the split-second capture of a female puma caught in a dramatic hunting attempt in Chile has earned its third photography prize, winning the Animals in their Environment category at the prestigious Siena International Photo Awards.

Retired tech executive Kevin Shi, who decided to pick up a camera and become a photographer, captured the scene at 1/2000sec. He described the moment as a "rare treat" and said that, in the end, the guanaco managed to escape.

"For days, Kevin had been following the predator, a mother of two cubs who depended on her for food. At dawn, after observing the guanaco for a long time, the puma cautiously approaches and launches her attack, repeatedly trying to pull it down and bite into its neck to suffocate it," states Siena International Photo Awards.

Animals in their Environment category winner

Image info
Title: Power Play
Location: Torres del Paine National Park, Magallanes, Chile

Tech info
Gear: Canon EOS R5 + 600mm lens
Exposure: 1/2000sec, f/6.3, ISO 1000

The wildlife photo was previously recognized as a winner at the Travel Photographer of the Year competition, the Chromatic Awards, and received a Merit Medal from HIPA.

The Siena International Photography Awards

The Siena International Photo Awards launched in 2015 in Siena, Italy and is part of the broader Siena Awards and Festival. The competition welcomes entries from professionals, amateurs and students across nine categories.

To get more information and to see all winning images, visit the award's website.

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Keeping your ISO as low as possible seems to be a fixed mantra for many photographers, but what if you don’t have the time or the light to adjust your exposure? Do you skip the shot or risk ungodly grain and motion blur?

“It’s the picture that counts,” not the settings, says wildlife tour leader and multi-award-winning British photographer Andy Rouse, who was recently named the Honorary Award winner of this year’s MontPhoto Contest, despite using what many would call sacrilegious settings.

Rouse captured his winning frame of a black leopard named Giza at Laikipia, a high-altitude, biodiverse plain in central Kenya, shooting at ISO 51200 and a 1/15-second shutter speed.

According to the photographer, there are “thousands and thousands” of images of Giza and, as he wanted to take “something different,” he cranked the ISO right up, initially planning to capture a portrait of the feline illuminated by a nocturnal lamp.

Andy Rouse’s gear and settings

• Sony A1 II
• Sony FE 70-200mm f/2.8 GM OSS II
• Focal length: 122 mm
• Exposure: 1/15 sec | f/22 | ISO 51200

Watch: Andy Rouse tells the full story behind capturing his award-winning frame of Giza the black leopard

“When I saw it [Giza] walking, I didn’t have time to change it [the ISO], so I just left it where it was,” said Rouse. “If I’d done it again, obviously I’d have taken the ISO down,” he continued, adding that with the animal now on the move, he had to act quickly.

“You know what, though, it’s high ISO, but I took it out of DxO (post-processing software) and it (the image) won a major award,” said Rouse, adding that his frame “should stop everyone in their tracks” who worries about high ISO.

Rouse said that images you enter into a competition need to be “something special” and believes that by using the settings he chose, he was able to capture a “different take” on a much-photographed subject, impressing the MontPhoto judges.

You can see more of Andy Rouse’s work at his Instagram and access exclusive content on his Patreon page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buy 'Remembering Giraffes' now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I love the whole debate around using a sophisticated mirrorless or DSLR camera versus a smartphone, and this contest-winning image is yet again proof that cameraphones can stand up to professional rigs.

Taken by photographer Dianne Slotten in Catalina State Park, Arizona, on an iPhone 16 Pro, the image went on to win the Grand Prize at the 2026 America’s State Parks Photo Contest – a whopping $10,000 (approximately £7,500/AU$14,300). Not bad for a smartphone image…

Slotten’s photo, which ReserveAmerica, the contest co-host, said captured the “moody and mystical” atmosphere of a drizzly November morning in the Sonoran Desert, even pipped two other photographers who were both shooting with a Nikon Z8.

Sometimes called the “baby Z9,” the Z8 features the same powerhouse 45.7MP CMOS sensor as the flagship Nikon Z9, not to mention the solid autofocus made up of 493 phase-detect and contrast-detect points.

Chris Dahl's gear

• Nikon Z8
• Nikkor Z 24–120mm f/4 lens

The two Z8 photographers, great artists in their own rights, were Chris Dahl and Angie Precure. Dahl placed first in the “Shores & Waterways” category for what the contest co-hosts called a “quiet, deeply reflective composition” of a waterway in Hunting Island State Park, South Carolina.

Precure, meanwhile, won the “Peaks & Plains” category with a landscape shot of Steptoe Butte State Park Heritage Site, Washington, which depicted clouds during a “dramatic transition.”

Angie Precure's gear

• Nikon Z8
• Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8

The America’s State Parks Photo Contest is an annual national photography competition hosted by America’s State Parks in partnership with the National Association of State Park Directors (NASPD) and ReserveAmerica/Aspira.

Visitors submit photos to showcase the natural beauty, wildlife, and outdoor recreation found across state parks in all 50 U.S. states. To see all of this year’s contest-winning images and hear from the winners themselves, watch the winners video below…

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With the launch of the Nikon Z5IIC I thought it was time to address the raging debate as to whether or not you should ever rely on the rear LCD as a serious photographer. In reality, I think the answer is quite simple. Nobody has ever looked at a photograph and gone: “I can see it a mile off; you didn’t look through the viewfinder!”

Viewfinders rule!

So why do many photographers constantly look down on composing via the rear LCD? Well, the pitfalls do outweigh the advantages. Looking through the viewfinder allows you to stabilize the camera more, helping to reduce camera shake. And unlike the rear LCD, bright conditions won’t impede your view when looking through the viewfinder. And finally, the viewfinder blocks your peripheral vision, allowing you to focus entirely on your composition.

That seals the deal then – no point ever using the rear LCD again. Not so fast. For sports and wildlife, I always look through the viewfinder because the setup is too heavy to hold away from my face. However, I actually prefer composing images using the rear LCD screen – when the conditions are right.

Hidden benefits of the rear LCD

This is entirely personal preference, but I don’t particularly enjoy my eye being so close to an EVF (optical viewfinders for the win), and I also find it hard to take in my entire composition when my eye is so close to the frame. That’s why, should the situation allow for it, I will occasionally pull back from the EVF and look at the rear LCD.

And despite what some photographers will tell you, this is a very common thing to do. Just ask a landscape photographer. When a camera is locked off on a tripod, it’s often much more awkward to refine your composition as you’re hunched over the viewfinder. Looking through the rear LCD in landscape photography is commonplace.

The rear LCD can also benefit portrait photographers. Seasoned models won’t care, but if you’re photographing, say, corporate headshots or family portraits, looking through the viewfinder can sometimes create a little tension. Pulling back to view the rear LCD so they can see a big smile on your face and you can readily look up to encourage them can often settle any nerves.

Only results matter

I’ve spent years educating photographers on how to take photos, and while I’m all too happy to impart my knowledge when it comes to technique, I try to avoid telling photographers exactly how they should operate their camera. Don’t get me wrong, if somebody came to me with a series of blurry images, I might suggest they raise their shutter speed and look through the viewfinder to help minimize camera shake, but if a photographer is comfortable looking through the rear LCD and their images look great, what’s the harm?

I said it at the beginning of this article, and I’ll say it again. Your audience only cares about the end product. You could have captured the photo looking through the rear LCD while holding your camera with one hand and munching on an apple in the other, all while riding a unicycle for all anyone cares. If it’s a good photo, it’s a good photo no matter how you take it.

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Want more of my ramblings? My old DSLR made me realize how much I miss optical viewfinders – and how much I dislike EVFs. What on Earth is this “boring” seven-year-old last-gen APS-C mirrorless camera doing in Japan’s top-10 camera sales? Plus, here's the latest camera news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A photo of a steam train festooned with disco lights won the Christmas Parties and Seasonal Events category at the 12th annual Event Photography Awards.

It was taken by leading railways and British royal family photographer Jack Boskett, one of 250 guests who attended the ceremony at the Central Hall Westminster in London, UK.

The Event Photography Awards (EPA) is a not-for-profit competition founded to highlight the importance of great photography to the international events industry.

Over 2,300 images of events held all around the world, from photographers in over 20 countries, were entered in 2026's competition.

The EPAs comprise 18 core categories, plus a new Black & White Award – sponsored by Digital Camera magazine – introduced for 2026.

Also new is the Event Photographer of the Year accolade, bestowed in conjunction with the Best Portfolio award.

View the current and past winners of the Event Photography Awards here.

We caught up with Jack Boskett after the ceremony and asked him to illuminate us about his colorful capture…

"It was an absolute shock and I was delighted to win," Boskett said. "I think this is the fourth year running that I have won an award at the EPAs.

"Winning makes all the hard work of being a photographer worthwhile, and it's even harder for photographers to stand out these days because of AI.

"So when genuine photography wins awards – I'm not just saying me, but everyone else who has won this evening and everybody who was shortlisted – it's absolutely fantastic to see so many stunning, genuine photographs."

Boskett's photo was taken during an event on the Severn Valley Railway in England, UK, called the Boogie Lights Express.

A bespoke sound and light show, "thousands of coloured LED lights make the steam train look magical inside and out," says the SVR website.

A family-oriented event, passengers are given colored LED wristbands, and get to enjoy a disco on the two-way 70-minute journey between Kidderminster and Highley stations.

Photographing 'The Boogie Lights Express'

"It was a hard shot to take," Boskett adds. "The locomotive is doing about 25 miles an hour in the dark, and you've got to focus on having the right camera settings.

"I cranked up the ISO quite high, but the shutter speed was very low – 1/50 sec. It was literally pitch black and there was no light around me.

"When the locomotive came through the cutting, through the trees, it just shone and lit up everything around me and looked better than I expected.

"I wasn't expecting 'The Boogie Lights Express' to win tonight. There were some very, very good photographs in the category, so it was a really nice surprise to come out on top."

Camera used: Nikon Z 9 and Nikon Z 70-200mm f/2.8 VR S at 70mm. Settings: 1/50 sec at f/3.2, ISO 2000.

Click here to see more of Jack Boskett's photography.

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

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

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

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

Two-year project

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

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

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

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

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

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

First-person stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the pitch darkness of night, a lifesaving rescue takes place on a Mexican beach. Under the fiery red light of a nocturnal lamp, conservation worker Isreal Oblea helps an olive ridley sea turtle move her newly laid eggs farther up to beach from the shoreline.

The mother turtle is exhausted, having made the long pilgrimage to El Suspiro in Baja California, and has nested too close to the water. With the rising tide comes the risk of her eggs being swept away, but Oblea’s actions mean that the offspring will get a chance at life.

The shot was taken by Spanish photographer Miguel Serrano Ruiz (Miguel SR) and is a part of a series that recently won the “Portfolio” category at the 2026 Ocean Photographer of the Year Awards (Ocean POTY).

Miguel SR's gear and settings

• Sony A7 III
• Sigma 24-70mm DG DN Art
• 1/100 / f/3.5 / ISO 3200

An independent documentary photographer and filmmaker, Miguel SR’s work focuses on social and environmental stories. He told the Ocean POTY organizers that he’d initially gone to the conservation camp in El Suspiro to document the olive ridley turtle nesting season (July-December).

But the photographer explained that living among the conservationists for a month shed light on how they “dedicated their lives” to ensure the survival of this turtle species, which is included on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Miguel SR also photographed Deira Gordillo, who, like Isreal Oblea, was captured burning the midnight lamp. Only Gordillo’s essential work that night was to record nesting and hatching data for Mexican environmental authorities. According to Miguel SR, Gordillo’s team patrols the beach every night from 2:30 a.m. until sunrise to observe nests.

Sometimes, however, the conservationists find that a turtle has died and are tasked with digging graves for it in the sand to prevent the spread of bacteria and disease, Miguel SR explained. This is a sad reality of the work, despite the paradisiacal setting.

As the “Portfolio” category winner, Miguel SR took home £1,000 (approx. $1,300 / AU$1,900), along with being featured in this year’s competition winners book. The overall Ocean POTY winner for 2026 was Julien Anton for his paternal scene of a father seahorse with his offspring.

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'Slayer Fans' was crowned best photo in the Music Events – Audiences category in the Event Photography Awards 2026.

It was taken by events and wedding photographer Brian Robinson at a Slayer concert in London in 2025.

A not-for-profit competition, the Event Photography Awards (EPA) was established to highlight the importance of great photography to the international events industry.

Some 2,300 images of events from around the world, taken by photographers in over 20 countries, were entered in 2026's competition.

18 core categories form the EPAs, and a new Black & White Award – sponsored by Digital Camera magazine – was introduced for 2026.

Also taking a bow this year was the Event Photographer of the Year accolade, bestowed in conjunction with the Best Portfolio award.

View the current and past winners of the Event Photography Awards here.

After the ceremony at the Central Hall Westminster in London, UK, attended by more than 250 guests, we caught up with Robinson to discover more about his winning image…

"I was photographing the Slayer show at Finsbury Park in 2025, working with film director Ryan McFall," Robinson recalls, "and was shooting behind-the-scenes photos for the film crew filming Slayer.

"While I was photographing the crew, the band and literally everything to do with the show, I clocked the fan in the middle of the shot who was absolutely loving it.

"As most photographers would have done, I took a quick gauge of my settings, turned around, burst off a few frames and went back to work, photographing the crew and the band."

"When editing it later I noticed how much passion was on the faces of everybody else, and also the legs that were flying across the top – at that moment, I knew it had to be a black and white picture."

Robinson is a Slayer fan himself, so photographing the band was a dream come true for him.

"I've been that guy on the front row, so I felt how he was feeling and hope I've captured that."

Photographing music and live events is Robinson's passion. Collaborating regularly with film director McFall has opened doors to working at big concerts like Slayer's.

"Event photography is not just about the band – it's more about shooting [what goes on] behind the scenes.

"I've only entered a few competitions before, for weddings, which I occasionally shoot, but this is the first award I've won.

"It was definitely worth making the long journey from Cornwall [in south-west England] to London!"

Camera and lens used: Canon EOS R6 and Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM at 46mm. Exposure: 1/500 sec at f/3.2, ISO 800.

Click here to see more of Brian Robinson's photography.

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I'm not making enough money as a photographer (cue sympathy, violins, and offers of a million pounds). So: what's the next best thing to taking your own photos? Starting an interior design website and writing about other people's photos, of course.

Which is where my blossoming relationship with the stock image library iStockPhoto comes in. For a mere $125 / £142.80 a month, I get to download 50 premium photos and keep them forever, and I've been having fun choosing and using them.

Owned by Getty Images, iStockPhoto assures me that it is "always AI free. iStockPhoto doesn’t allow any AI-generated visuals in our library. Every visual at iStock is crafted through human expertise, creativity, and ingenuity."

Which is kind of hilarious, because as soon as you purchase a photo, iStockPhoto encourages you to "customise this image" using AI!

Amusingly, if you click to follow that very instruction, it immediately sets about removing the background of the photo in question – which as you can imagine, is undesirable with, say, a kitchen. Removing the background of a kitchen leaves you with a worktop in the middle, and not much else.

If, however, you want to change any other aspect of the photo – and I often do, as I am a picky creature – you should actually use the text box at the top of the page, which asks you, "What would you like to change?" Type in, for example, "Change the plant to green" and hit "Modify." Hey presto, you have a green plant.

Admittedly, the AI sometimes changes it to an entirely different type of plant – I couldn't tell you what, for I have no botany credentials – but hey, it'll be a green one.

Against my better judgement, I also asked iStockPhoto's AI to turn a bath bright pink. The result made me feel a little nauseous but was very convincing – you couldn't tell the bath hadn't been pink in the first place.

The whole "our photos aren't AI, don't worry. But why don't you use AI with our help if you want to?!" thing is, I think, endemic of a world where many creators absolutely detest and resent AI, and the rest of us will happily use it.

Stock image companies don't know which section of the population to appease and pander to, but more than anything, they don't want to be left behind by other photo libraries using AI to their advantage.

So you get this comical situation where they're straddling both camps with a foot in each and wobbling around wildly. Still, at least they can turn plants green and baths pink. And what more can you really ask for?

You might be interested in our guide to the best photo stock sites.