On May 18, 1980, at 8:32 a.m. PDT, all hell broke loose as Mt. St. Helens, a 9,677-foot (2,950-meter) stratovolcano in Washington state, US, violently erupted.

The blast collapsed the northern face of the volcano, sending a pyroclastic flow, a destructive, superheated avalanche of gas, ash, and pumice, racing outward, reaching an estimated speed of 670 mph and temperature of 800°F (400°C).

In its path, just four miles away, stood photographer Robert Landsburg. “I wonder, was he scared, was he… excited, was he just at peace with knowing that he was gonna’ pass away?” said Jill Dutchess, Landsburg’s niece, interviewed for the forthcoming documentary film, 8:32.

The film, currently in development by award-winning documentary maker Marq Evans, sheds light on Landsburg’s final moments and the frightening series of images he captured during them.

As the pyroclastic flow enveloped him, with no hope of surviving, Landsburg raised his Nikon F2 Photomic loaded with Kodachrome 64 film and fired off a series of frames capturing the deadly eruption from a terrifying perspective.

Before the surging volcanic cloud reached him, Landsburg’s final act was to rewind the film into its case, place his Nikon camera inside his camera bag, and lie directly on top of it to shield it from the blast.

“It’s amazing that this (Nikon F2) survived a volcanic eruption,” said Dutchess. “You can see ash that’s inside the lens.”

But more than simply telling the story of Landsburg’s valiant final moments, which are well documented, 8:32 delves deeper into the photographer’s dedication to the craft, bringing his family into the narrative.

“He wanted to be a National Geographic photographer; that’s what his goal was,” said Dutchess. And Landsburg’s dream would come true, albeit posthumously.

Seventeen days after the eruption, the photographer’s body, camera and film were found. The negatives were developed, and Landsburg’s final images were published in the January 1981 issue of National Geographic.

“Bob’s (Robert’s) last act was a photographer’s act. He made the pictures, protected the film, and trusted it to outlast him,” said Evans. “In a moment when we’re all wondering what’s real and who made it, those four frames say something simple: I was here, and these are mine.”

The producer added that he expects to complete shooting for the documentary by the end of this year, with the film set to be released next year.

You might also like

Here’s our expert take on the best cameras for landscape photography. Our analogue expert, Seb Oakley, also shares his pick of the best film cameras here.

Who would’ve thought that there are clouds on Mars? I, for one, have always thought that the Martian planet was just a barren red landscape. But apparently not, as NASA has given us all the meteorology lessons we never knew we wanted.

Thanks to the space agency, which treats us daily to its Astronomy Picture of the Day, us regular non-astronomy folk now know that Mars does, in fact, have floating cotton candy in the sky, just like here on Earth.

Today’s image depicts what astronomers call the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC) – a giant water-ice cloud that, according to NASA, can stretch over 930 miles / 1,500 kilometers in length and 93 miles / 150 kilometers in width.

AMEC forms daily downwind of Arsia Mons, a 12.4-mile / 20-kilometer-tall extinct Martian volcano. Around sunrise, the cloud begins developing on the western slope of the volcano and expands rapidly for some three hours. It then detaches from the volcano before evaporating as late-morning temperatures rise.

NASA has said that AMEC was first imaged by the Viking Orbiter 2 in 1977, but more recent images of the “strange” cloud have helped the agency observe it in greater detail.

According to Aster Cowart, a planetary geologist based at the Planetary Science Institute who processed today’s Picture of the Day, the image was taken in 2018 by the Mars Express.

The spacecraft, which is remotely controlled by the European Space Agency, was launched in 2004 to study the surface, atmosphere and climate of the Red Planet, with Cowart saying that the image was taken during its 18,627th orbit.

The Mars Express carries a High Resolution Stereo Camera, which features a “pushbroom” scanner design.

Instead of snapping a full 2D frame all at once like a traditional camera, the HRSC contains nine charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors that scan the Martian surface line by line, relying on the orbiter’s movement to capture the next line.

This enables Mars Express to beam back multi-angle, near-simultaneous 3D stereo imagery alongside four distinct color channels (red, green, blue and near-infrared) in a single pass.

NASA has said that it will continue to study AMECs using the Mars Express to better understand how they form, but also in the hope that it may reveal secrets of how clouds form on Earth, too.

You might also like…

Here’s our expert astrophotographer, Jamie Carter’s, take on the best cameras for astrophotography.

The first time you glance at this photo, it looks like a pretty mundane mountain landscape. A craggy rock face. Snow-dusted peaks in the distance. A valley below. All fairly standard stuff.

But look closer at the right-hand side of the picture. Curled up together on a ledge, their grey spotted coats blending beautifully into the stone, are two snow leopard cubs. If there were ever a perfect demonstration of how good nature is at camouflage, this is it.

Appropriately titled Hidden in Plain Sight, this endearing picture was taken by wildlife photographer and filmmaker Awais Ali Sheikh near Ghalapan village in Gilgit-Baltistan, northern Pakistan. It's now won him the Pure Nature – Land category of the OurNature Environmental Photo & Video Award.

“Perfectly camouflaged in their rugged habitat, [the cubs] are almost invisible at first glance, their spotted coats blending seamlessly into the surrounding stone,” Sheikh explains. “Only after a few moments does the mountain reveal its secret.”

Finding them at all was no mean feat, as snow leopards are famously elusive. They live in remote, high mountain ranges across Central and South Asia, and their camouflage is so effective they’re known as the “ghosts of the mountains”. Seeing one is rare. Seeing two together is rarer still.

Given that, it would have been understandable if Sheikh – who was born and raised in Pakistan and is now based in Portugal – had wanted to fill the frame with them. Instead, happily, he made the creative decision to pull back and show them as a tiny part of a vast landscape.

This allows us to get involved in the challenge of spotting a snow leopard ourselves, making the picture feel wonderfully immersive.

The photograph was captured by a DJI Mavic 4 Pro drone, using its main Hasselblad camera, which has a 28mm-equivalent field of view. The settings were 1/640sec at f/2.8 and ISO 100, set manually. The shot was taken on February 12, in the depths of the Himalayan winter, around 3,000m above sea level.

For me, what makes the picture so powerful is how the camera was pointed almost perfectly level, giving the feel of a view from a neighbouring ridge rather than a typical overhead drone shot.

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

You might like...

Browse the best cameras for wildlife photography and the 5 best trail cameras for tracking wildlife.

My most unusual wildlife encounters are rarely when I’m trudging through a wildlife refuge with a camera in hand. The most amazing wildlife encounters always seem to happen when I don’t have my gear with me. Earlier this week, I was at a busy park when I encountered an unusual animal that I had never photographed in the wild before: a river otter. The longest lens I had on me? Just a 90mm prime I use for portraits.

I went to the park to enjoy some unseasonably warm temperatures for October in Michigan. I had some new kid cameras to test for my role as the US Editor for Digital Camera World, but at the last minute I grabbed my mirrorless camera and a 90mm prime so that I could take photos along with my kids.

I went to a riverside park that’s so busy; the most unusual wildlife that I’ve ever seen there is the very common mallard duck. There’s a playground with kids screaming, a pedestrian bridge full of joggers, and a loud highway nearby – it’s one of the last places that I would think to go for wildlife photography.

Imagine my surprise then, when, as we were walking across the pedestrian bridge, my 7-year-old shouted, “Look, an otter!”

My first thought was that my son had probably spotted the more common but similarly shaped muskrat. Instead, when I peered over the bridge into the river, I was greeted with the tell-tale ears, large nose, whiskered face, and narrow tail of the North American River Otter.

Only wildlife photographers will understand the mix of wild excitement at spotting an unusual animal mixed with the imminent dread of being wildly unprepared for such an encounter. I had a bag full of single-digit megapixel kid cameras – and my Fujifilm X-T4 with the 90mm f/2 R LM WR lens.

The 90mm lens – equivalent to a 135mm on full frame – is a lens that I picked up for the creamy background separation of a longer focal length for portraits. The lens, while lovely, isn’t what I would grab for wildlife. I prefer something with more reach, like a 400mm or 600mm lens.

Still, standing on the bridge over the river, I was so close that I could actually hear him crunching on the fish and crayfish that he was catching. I had never been close enough to photograph a wild otter before (the zoo doesn’t count), so I grabbed my 90mm and hoped for the best.

Adding to the challenge, the evening light was uneven. The otter would swim under the shadow of the bridge, then back into bright sunlight.

I wish I had had a super telephoto with me to catch his whiskered face as he popped up from the water with a crayfish in his mouth just below me. Still, the river was spotted with colorful fall leaves, and the otter was having a good old time swimming and catching fish, unbothered by the noise and people around the park.

I managed to get a few environmental “portraits” of the otter. The images certainly aren’t magazine cover-worthy, but the experience brought a smile to my face – and that’s what really mattered.

I did, however, feel like I was standing inside a real internet meme – you know, the one about all the wildlife disappearing as soon as photographers grab their actual wildlife photography gear. Because, of course, I would see an unusual animal while out testing kid cameras and not a new wildlife lens.

The otter encounter is far from the only time that I wished I had a super telephoto lens with me. I’ve spotted countless unusual wildlife opportunities while driving, and once spotted an unusual bird in a grocery store parking lot and then too, I wished my wildlife kit wasn’t so heavy or expensive that I could bring it everywhere with me.

The North American River Otter was once a rare sight in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, but in recent years, the species population has rebounded – a sign of cleaner, healthier riverways. The North American River Otter is the only species of the 13 types of otters in the US that are not considered vulnerable, threatened, or endangered.

You may also like

The 90mm is a great lens for portraits – but these are the best lenses for wildlife photography.

A puma lies along the top of a fence, eyes closed. It seems to be dozing in the late afternoon sun. Behind it, a golden grassland stretches off to the horizon. On the face of it, it's a beautiful, tranquil scene.

Well, sorry to burst the bubble, but in fact, this animal isn’t sleeping. It’s dead, tied to the fence and put on display as a trophy.

The photo was taken by Chilean photographer Francisco Negroni in the province of Santa Cruz, in Argentine Patagonia. Titled Warning Sign, it just won the Photojournalism category of Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026. The Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London. He told the organizers it was a scene he had “never witnessed or photographed before”.

So what's going on, exactly? Well, Santa Cruz officially banned the hunting of pumas in 2025. But it turns out, the practise continues, albeit illegally.

Farmers say they lose sheep to the pumas and often respond by killing them. But campaigners say there are other approaches, such as keeping sheep in enclosures at night and using guard dogs. In southern Chile, some landowners have even given swapped sheep farming for puma tourism.

Negroni shot the Puma image on a Canon EOS R5 with a Canon RF 70–200mm f/2.8L IS USM lens, at 70mm. The exposure was 1/640 sec at f/3.2 and ISO 100, set manually.

The EOS R5 is getting on in years, having launched in 2020 and superseded by the EOS R5 Mark II, but it remains popular with wildlife shooters thanks to its 45MP sensor, fast burst shooting and superior animal-detection autofocus.

You'd assume from this photo that Negroni is a wildlife specialist by trade, but actually that's not the case. Known globally as El Cazador de Volcanes, aka The Volcano Hunter, he's spent his career photographing eruptions, volcanic lightning and lava. He describes himself as not just a photographer but “a witness to Earth’s most violent and beautiful transformations”.

This time, though, the transformation he captured was a human-made one, making the image especially powerful and disturbing.

Warning Sign will be on show from October 16, 2026 until July 11, 2027 with the other winning images in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London. Tickets are available here.

You might like...

Browse the best cameras for wildlife photography and the best lenses for bird photography and wildlife.

A girl stands between a towering row of spinning frames, which dwarf her tiny stature. A gang of boys, dressed in the dusty uniform of the coal miner, stare blankly into the camera. Three grim-faced girls stand outside the cannery where they shuck oysters for a living.

These are some of the photographs taken by Lewis Wickes Hine, a teacher-turned-photographer who spent 1908 to 1924 travelling the United States to document child labor.

His story has been retold this week by the Alliance for American Manufacturing as part of its Unsung Heroes series. It’s a clear reminder of what photography can achieve for a cause.

Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 1874. As a teenager, he had to work long hours to support his family after his father died. But he kept up his education and, in 1901, moved to New York to work as a teacher.

He first picked up a camera as a teaching tool. He took his students to Ellis Island and photographed newly arrived immigrants. According to the Smithsonian, he wanted to counter growing anti-immigrant feeling by showing them as “brave, dignified pioneers of a new land”. Realising that documentary photography could be a great tool for reform, he volunteered for a major project for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), a campaigning body.

At the time, many American children worked in textile mills, mines, factories, canneries and fields, often in dangerous conditions and for long hours. Hine travelled across the country to photograph them.

To get access, he adopted a range of disguises, posing variously as a fire inspector, a postcard seller, a Bible salesman and a photographer who was only interested in machinery. This was risky work: Hine was often threatened by foremen and factory police.

The NCLC used the pictures in its lobbying campaign, and the federal Children’s Bureau was set up in 1912. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 finally brought the practice of child labor in the US to an end.

Continuing to crusade

Hine’s went on to photograph the Red Cross’s relief work in Europe during and after World War One. Back in the US, he made a series of “work portraits” celebrating the dignity of industrial workers.

Most famously, in 1930 he documented the construction of the Empire State Building. To get a good angle, he was swung out in a specially designed basket, 1,000ft above Fifth Avenue. His final years, sadly, were troubled ones. Commissions dried up, interest in his work faded, and he lost his house and had to apply for welfare. He died in 1940, aged 66.

Hine called his pictures “photo-interpretations”, which emphasized his personal involvement, as opposed to professional detachment. It was an approach that influenced generations of documentary photographers. And today, more than a century later, his images remind us that a camera, in the right hands, can help change the world.

Northern Hemisphere finally get extended hours under truly dark skies in November 2026. The Milky Way’s bright core has slipped from view, but in its place come the rising winter constellations, dense star fields and bright targets that reward longer stargazing sessions. The month also features a well-timed new moon, a bright supermoon and a meteor shower, but it’s less about headline events and more about technique, patience and making the most of the darkness. Here’s everything you need to know about astrophotography in November 2026…

Read: 10 must-shoot events for astrophotographers in 2026

November 1-12: Dark sky window

With the new moon on 9 November, the first week of the month offers some of the year's darkest skies. Look east after sunset – preferably from somewhere that looks dark on a light pollution map – to see Orion, Taurus and Auriga rising. These regions are rich in bright stars and deep-sky objects that photograph well even under modest conditions. Use a wide-angle lens (14–24mm), a fast aperture (f/2–f/2.8), ISO 1600–3200 and exposures of 10–20 seconds to capture the starry scene. A star tracker allows longer exposures and reveals more detail in star clusters and nebulae — such as the Orion Nebula below Orion’s Belt.

Read: The best star tracker camera mounts

November 17-18: Leonid meteor shower

The Leonids peak overnight on 17-18 November, producing around 10-15 meteors per hour under ideal conditions. However, a bright first-quarter moon will significantly reduce visibility this year. Even so, you may still capture brighter meteors. Use a wide-angle lens (14-24mm), ISO 800-1600 and 20-30 second exposures, shooting continuously for several hours. Aim away from the moon to maximise contrast. While results may be modest, you have a good chance of capturing one or two bright meteors.

Read: How to photograph a meteor shower

November 21: A celestial triangle

Be outside at midnight tonight, and you’ll see, rising due east, a lovely conjunction of Jupiter, Mars and Regulus, the latter the brightest star in the constellation Leo. Use a telephoto lens (50-135mm) and try exposures of 5-15 seconds at ISO 800 to capture the trio.

Read: The best cameras for astrophotography

November 24: Full ‘Supermoon’ rises

November’s full moon is a supermoon, occurring when the moon is near its closest point to Earth on its slightly elliptical monthly orbit. It will appear slightly larger and brighter than average, dominating the night sky.

As always, the best time to photograph a full moon is at moonrise. Use a telephoto lens (200-600mm) to exaggerate its size relative to the foreground or capture it rising behind buildings, hills or trees. Use ISO 100 and fast shutter speeds — it’s a very bright object. However, bracketing exposures can help retain detail in both the moon and the surrounding landscape.

Read: How to photograph the full moon

Astrophotography shot of the month: Orion rising

November marks Orion's return as a dominant evening constellation, making it the month's standout subject. Its bright stars and distinctive shape make it ideal for beginners and experienced astrophotographers alike.

Use a wide-angle lens to capture Orion within a larger winter sky scene, or a short telephoto lens (50-135mm) to isolate the three stars of its Belt and the surrounding region. Exposures of 5-15 seconds at ISO 800-1600 will reveal detail without star trailing, while a star tracker will allow longer exposures and finer structure.

Orion also serves as a gateway to the winter sky. Follow its Belt downward to Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, or upward to Aldebaran in Taurus. Including these connections in your compositions can add depth and context.

Read more:

• Astrophotography tools: the best camera, lenses and gear

• The best lenses for astrophotography

• The best star tracker camera mounts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might also like…

Here’s our expert pick of the best cameras for landscape photography. These rigs are ideal for shooting architectural subjects, especially ones located among beautiful scenery, like castles.

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

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

A great egret mid-catch

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

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

A bird-filled tree with a rainbow

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

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

A camouflaged owl tucked in a tree trunk

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

A songbird amid colorful leaves and mushrooms

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

A rescued elephant at a new sanctuary

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

Photographer Patricia De Melo Moreria captured the photo.

You may also like

Take a look at the best cameras for wildlife photography, or the best lenses for bird photography.

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

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

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

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

David Lloyd's gear and settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might also like…

Here's our roundup of the best cameras for wildlife photography

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

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

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

The golden era

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

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

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

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

A new way of LIFE

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

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

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

Why it's important

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cameras that can influence the game

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supporting photographers with kit

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

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

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

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

Sony audio on the sidelines

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

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

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

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

You might also like...

For more, check out our guides to the best Sony camera or the best camera for sports photography.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may also love

Love photographing the stars? These are the best lenses for astrophotography and the best cameras for astrophotography.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might also like…

Here’s our pick of the best underwater housings for cameras and phones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might also like…

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

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

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

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

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

The importance of format

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A miniature world

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

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

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

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

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

You might like...

Browse the best camera for macro photography and the best macro lenses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expert analysis of 'Kingfisher' by Dave Newman

Overall impact

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

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

Eye contact

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

Frozen water and spray

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

Beautiful background

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

Depth of field

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

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

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

Vertical composition

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

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

Read more from Digital Camera magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may also like

Take a look at the best cameras for wildlife photography or the best lenses for bird photography.

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.”

You may also like

Read about 50 iconic photographers from history

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.

You might also like…

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

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.

You may also like

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

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.

You might also like…

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

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.

You may also like

Read about October's astrophotography events to photograph. Or, take a look at the best telephoto lenses.

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.

You might like...

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

“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.”

You might also like…

Here’s our monochrome expert, Seb Oakley’s, pick of the best cameras for black-and-white photography.

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.

You might like...

Browse the best cameras for wildlife photography and the best lenses for bird photography and wildlife.

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

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.

You might like...

Browse the best cameras for astrophotography along with the best lenses for astrophotography.

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

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.

You might also like

Here’s our pick of the best editing software for your post-production work.

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.”

You may also like

Build your own wildlife photography kit with the best cameras for wildlife photography and the best lenses for bird photography.

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.

You may also like

For more space inspiration, take a look at the best lenses for astrophotography.

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.”

You might also like…

Here’s our astrophotography expert Jamie Carter’s take on the best camera for astrophotography

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.

You may also like

Want to take your own school portraits? These portrait tips will help you get a better result.

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.

You might also like…

Here’s our pick of the best cameras for wildlife photography.

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

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

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

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

Two-year project

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

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

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

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

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

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

First-person stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may also like

Take a look at the best lenses for portraits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to capture the action

01 Which mode to use

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

02 Let’s go Auto

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

03 Autofocus area and subject

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

04 Continuous shooting

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

What else did I shoot?

How long a lens do you need?

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

Before you go...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may also like

Browse more stories of powerful photojournalism. Or, take a look at the best camera drones.

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

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

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

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

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

You might also like...

Want more from Barny? YouTuber dropped a night vision camera into the ocean – and managed to get the first footage of an elusive shark. And for more camera trap news: Over 300 custom-made camera traps spread across an area the size of Cape Verde make important wildlife discoveries. Plus, here's the latest camera news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might also like…

Here’s our pick of the best underwater housings for cameras and phones.

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

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

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

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

A range of approaches

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

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

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

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

Why Magnum works

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

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

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

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

You might also like

Check our guides to the best books on photography and the best books on street photography.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might also like...

If you're interested in the role photography has to play in wildlife conservation, over 300 custom-made camera traps spread across an area the size of Cape Verde make important wildlife discoveries. Photography is at the heart of remarkable discovery of a new cat species – even if it was science that delivered the definitive proof. Plus, here's the latest camera news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may also like

Take a look at the best cameras for wildlife photography, or dig into the best lenses for bird photography.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may also like

Take a look at the best cameras for wildlife photography, or the best lenses for bird photography.

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

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

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

Forbidden craft

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

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

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

Full-circle moment

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

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

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

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