Photography News

Most woodland advice tells you to wait for flat, overcast light. Summer dawn breaks that rule, handing you a narrow window where low, dynamic sun arcs through the canopy and rewards anyone willing to lose sleep over it. 

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Photography has a fantastic ability to isolate things: details, shapes, colours or patterns. You can remove a subject from its distracting surroundings in just the same way that you can place it there; by thoughtful framing. During your travels see if you can find patterns in the places you visit that will remind you of the trip later.

 

1. Gear Choices

There is no special equipment needed to photograph pattern, though standard and slightly longer lenses can make the framing easier, but you do need to look carefully at what you are shooting. Very long lenses are also useful since they will flatten the perspective of distant shapes which often uncovers the patterns they make. Try and fill the frame aligning the pattern carefully. A tripod makes this easier but is not essential. You can crop out distractions later, but it is better to get it right ‘in camera’.

 

2. Patterns Are Everywhere

 

Patterns can be quite addictive: once you start seeing them it is hard to stop. Look for quantities of a single item and see how they fit together, regularly or random. In nature, this could be stones on a beach or marks in the sand, clouds or a flock of birds, even the leaves on a tree. In towns, look along streets at how the buildings fit together, sometimes just the steps leading to the door of a building make a good pattern.

Markets and Souvenir Shops are great places to find patterns: stockpiled high or artfully displayed is a gift to a photographer. Whether it is tourist tat or delicious-looking local produce it is likely to work as both a reminder of your holiday and an interesting composition. Look out especially for shops selling lots of versions of a similar thing; they often fit together really nicely. Don’t be afraid to get right in close.

Buildings and architecture by their very nature are full of patterns, but look beyond the obvious: bricks and tiles work, but so do whole buildings if viewed from the right angle. If you can get above the roof level of a town the rooftops will often make beautiful patterns. The great thing about patterns is that they do not have a particular scale; they can be vast or macro, but to make a good picture out of a pattern, the pattern needs to be the star.

 

3. How To Capture Patterns Successfully

 

There are no rules other than that you should crop tight to fill the frame. You may like to avoid irregularities (though I rather like them since they seem to emphasize the pattern). You can shoot square on or oblique and, if you are shooting oblique, you can shoot wide open to isolate a detail in the shot or stop down to keep it all sharp, so set the camera to aperture priority to make life easier. Whatever you choose make it a definite choice, very narrow depth of field or very deep, otherwise, it won’t look intentional.

You will generally only need to add a little extra contrast to emphasize the pattern, this can be achieved with a simple curves adjustment. But the graphic nature of patterns means that they are often ideally suited to image manipulation if you want to.

Even the most mundane subject can give you a good picture; you just need enough of it to make a strong pattern.

 

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1. Where To Find Them?

The horizon has to be the most popular horizontal line photographers shoot. It's easy to find and most of the time rather simple to shoot. Just remember to not cut your image in half, position the horizon in the top or bottom third of the image, keep it straight and try to break it up with other shapes to give your shot more interest. Fallen trees and people laid down will give you horizontal lines that are a little less obvious while frame-filling shots of lots of horizontal lines together, such as boards on sheds or even lines on stripy jumpers, will give you more abstract shots that focus on the pattern the lines create.

 

2. Which Orientation?

Generally, lines which are obviously flowing in a particular direction such as left to right or up and down are best photographed in the same orientation. However, flipping to portrait when you're photographing horizontal lines can create the impression that there's so many and they're so wide that they can't fit in the frame. Where possible, shoot straight on for more impact and make sure shadows from surrounding objects, including yourself, aren't in the shot. Talking of shadows, if you're photographing something such as wooden panelling, bright sunlight can form deep shadows along the ridges of the individual planks, enhancing the shapes or even adding more lines to your frame.

 

3. Keep It Straight

Horizontal lines need to be straight or as straight as you can possibly get them for your shot to work. If they're wonky it'll just annoy the person who's viewing your shot and make them tilt their head to one side. Check the horizon is level with your frame before hitting the shutter, using a grid line that's built into most cameras or by using a tripod with a built-in spirit level. If your tripod doesn't have one you can buy spirit levels that sit on your camera's hot shoe. You can also correct any tilting horizons in Photoshop.

 

You've read the technique now share your related photos for the chance to win prizes: Daily Forum Competition

In the first two weeks of July, humpback whales turned up trailing fishing line on both sides of the Pacific, and rescue teams scrambled to reach them. Some whales were freed, some vanished before responders could find them, and at least one died.

 

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Google researchers have published a paper laying out the system YouTube appears to be using to delete AI spam in bulk, and the numbers are large. Over six months, the system terminated 50,000 clusters covering 130,000 channels.

 

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For most of us, a portfolio website is a clean, deliberate space where we curate our perspective and control the sequence of our imagery without the platform getting in the way. Yet it also has to work hard behind the scenes. It houses the blog where we track our evolving creative ideas, and it serves as the primary lead-generation engine that connects our work with actual clients. For years, Squarespace was the quiet default that balanced those needs seamlessly. You built your site, you wrote your thoughts, and you let the platform run in the background.

 

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You take a photo of a beautiful sky, glance at the back of the camera, and it looks fine. Later, on your computer, the sky is a flat sheet of pure white with no clouds, no gradient, nothing to recover. That is clipping, and it is one of the most common ways a promising shot quietly dies. The good news is that clipping is easy to understand, easy to spot in the field once you know where to look, and almost always avoidable. Learning to catch it before you press the shutter is one of the highest-value habits a photographer can build. 

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I've never been able to decide whether writing is more demanding than photography or the other way around. Every few years I convince myself I have the answer, and then something happens that proves me wrong.

 

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The Perseid meteor shower is often the most spectacular meteor shower in the Northern Hemisphere due to frequency as well as its appearance in summer. 2026 is special because the peak occurs during the darkest possible skies. Here's how to photograph it!

 

 When Is the Best Time to Photograph the Meteor Shower?

This year, the Perseid meteor shower can be seen from July 17th, 2026 to August 24th, 2026. They should peak around just before midnight on August 12 until before dawn on August 13, 2026. 

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If you shoot long exposures at night, you know the frustration — your intervalometer dangling from your camera, swinging in the breeze, pulling on the cable. Not good. The Ruggard RTC-10 Timer-Remote Case (Standard) fixes that with a padded holder that straps directly to your tripod leg. It works great, with one Velcro gripe we'll get to shortly.

 

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Warm highlights, cool shadows, and a foreground green cast that has to go: this is the color puzzle behind most sunset landscapes. Getting those tones to feel intentional rather than accidental is the difference between a flat raw file and an image people stop scrolling to look at. 

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A 12-20mm zoom at f/2.8 sits right in the sweet spot for astrophotography, wide enough to swallow the Milky Way and fast enough to pull in faint starlight. Most shooters reach for a prime when the sky gets dark, which makes a zoom that can keep pace worth a real look. 

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Astronomers have directly imaged the faintest exoplanet ever seen from Earth, a gas giant called Beta Pictoris d — and it turns out the planet had been sitting in telescope archives for more than 11 years before anyone managed to pull it out of the noise. 

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Strip Ansel Adams of his name, his reputation, and his place in history, then hand him a fresh account with zero followers. How many likes does "Monolith, the Face of Half Dome" actually pull? That thought experiment cuts straight into how you judge your own images and whether follower counts have anything to do with artistic worth. 

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Camera Raw quietly gained a set of tools that fix a problem you have probably fought with for years: masks that stop short of the leaves, the hair, or the edge where you actually need them. Two new sliders now let you push a mask outward or pull it back, and they work on the specific mask types you reach for most. 

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Always an interesting subject for photographers, standing stones and stone circles have fascinated people for centuries; but what is the best way to photograph them?

 

1. Lens Choice

Use a wider angle lens 16-20mm (about 24-30mm in 35mm terms)
 

2. Focus On Parts Of The Circle

Try isolating two or three of the stones and shoot from a low angle.

3. Get Up High

Find a vantage point at a distance where you can shoot the entire ring from a higher point to show its shape.
 

4. Check The Weather 

Shoot on a bright day for contrast and texture in the stones, but watch for shadows.
 

5. Get Down Low

Shoot from a low viewpoint to make the stones appear large and dominating.

 

 

6. Go Mono

Try switching to black & white or shoot in infrared for a more moody result.
 

7. Use Filters

Use a polariser to darken the blue sky to give the shot more impact.
 

8. Try HDR

Bracket the exposure and merge using HDR technique rather than using a graduated filter as the filter will darken the top half of the stone.
 

9. No People

Avoid shots with people if you don't want to date the photograph.
 

10. Create Scale

Include people if you want to show a sense of scale.

 

 

11. Look For Angles

Walk around a few times without taking pictures to get a feeling for the stones and the best angles.
 

12. Early Or Late?

Light is usually better at the start or towards the end of the day, however as fewer people prefer early starts, photographers tend to have to get up early if they want to capture people-free shots.
 

13. Think About The Sky

If you're trying to capture the whole circle, you'll need an interesting (large) sky to add balance to your shot as the foreground will appear to be long and thin.
 

14. Give Panoramas A Try

Try shooting a panorama where you take a series of images that can be joined in post-production (or most cameras have this feature built-in) to capture the whole circle.
 

15. Do Your Research

For inspiration and to find out the location of some of the most photogenic stone circles do you research before you leave your house. We have an article listing some of the most popular stone circles in the UK, you can read it here: Stone Circle Locations

 

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A small crew of storm chasers is doing something that sounds impossible: flying camera drones straight into active tornadoes. The OTUS Project — short for Observations of Tornadoes by UAV Systems — has now pulled off more than a dozen successful intercepts, and this June it live-streamed a drone punching into an EF3 for the first time. 

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The U.S. Copyright Office has officially started the clock on a significant fee change that will impact how photographers protect their work. On July 14, 2026, the office submitted its final proposed fee schedule to Congress. This triggers a statutory 120-day review period, meaning that unless Congress intervenes, a new set of higher fees will automatically go into effect in mid-November 2026. For working pros and serious enthusiasts who regularly register their images, this policy update shifts the baseline economics of their practices.

 

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Patreon just started actively blocking the AI bots that scrape creators' work to train models, and it's good to see a platform plant a flag on the creators' side. I just wouldn't mistake it for protection. 

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If you have spent any time reading about camera settings, you have heard the advice to keep your ISO as low as possible for the cleanest image. The lowest normal ISO setting your sensor is built around has a name: base ISO. Understanding what it is, and why files shot there look better than files shot anywhere else, is one of those small pieces of knowledge that quietly improves every photo you take. It explains why your daylight shots look so crisp, why your dim indoor shots get grainy, and when it is worth chasing the lowest number versus letting it climb. 

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