Autumn Photography Walk Advice
Photo walks are probably something you associate with summer, however with autumn shades decorating our countryside and lights getting switched on sooner in cities, you can capture just as interesting shots at this time of year.
Where you walk and how long for really depends on how long you have and what you want to capture but here are a few tips you'll find useful no matter where you walk.
A sling-style bag is great for city shoots as they make accessing gear quick and easy. If you're planning an autumnal walk that'll last a few hours or even all day a rucksack would probably be better as you'll be able to pack other supplies and weight will be distributed evenly across your back.
Check The Weather
If a clear night is forecast you should plan an early start as frost will be decorating fields and leaves. Closer to home, look for cobwebs and if it's really cold, ice forming on ponds or puddles if it's rained the night before.
Misty sun rises work well as do snowy landscapes and shots of wet streets after the sun's set and lights are switching on.
Dress For The Weather
By taking the time to check the weather forecast you'll have a good idea on what clothing you'll need for your walk. Sticking your head out of the door is also a good idea as weather forecasters aren't guaranteed to get it right every time! For cold days, wear lightweight layers rather than a couple of thick bulky items as you can always remove layers if you're too warm or add more if you need them. A good pair of boots or shoes that support your ankles, have a good sole and are ideally waterproof are also essential.
Have A Route
A quick, short route that circles back on itself will be fine. Taking a path through woods is good at this time of year and shouldn't be too strenuous. It's also the season when towns begin putting up and switching on Christmas lights so a quick route around your town's streets should also give you plenty of opportunities to capture some interesting night-themed shots.
What To Look For
In towns, get up high to stop problems with converging verticals, plus it'll give you the opportunity to capture some cityscapes. Don't be afraid of getting in close to capture some abstract shots of buildings and capture unique perspectives by changing your angle.
Tell People Always tell someone where you're going, how long you'll be and give them an idea of the route you are going to take. This is particularly important at this time of year when cold and icy conditions can make routes harder to navigate. Even if you are only going for a walk around your town, it's still a good idea to let someone know where you'll be, especially when heading out after the sun sets. In fact, if possible, take someone with you on the walk.
Be Aware Of What And Who Is Around You
Traffic in towns, crowds on busy shopping streets and ice at the side of rivers are just some of the dangers you need to keep an eye out for. It's easy to get carried away when you have your eye stuck to a viewfinder, and you can soon be falling over something because you took too many steps forward while you had your eye glued to the camera. This is another good reason for taking someone, especially if they are a non-photographer, with you as they'll be an extra pair of eyes looking out for hazards on your route.
Kodachrome Ended in Parsons, Kansas: Dwayne's Photo Ran the Last Roll on January 18, 2011
In the last week of December 2010, a railroad worker named Jim DeNike drove from Arkansas to Parsons, Kansas, and loaded a dozen boxes holding nearly 50,000 slides into an old maroon Pontiac. He had sent Dwayne's Photo 1,580 rolls of Kodachrome and paid $15,798 to have them developed, borrowing against his father's retirement account to cover it. Every frame in those boxes was a picture of a train.
The Feature Nikon Never Shipped
Every camera owner has their own list of things they wish their camera could do—features that seem easily achievable with a simple software update. Normally, that list dies quietly the moment a camera leaves the manufacturer's support cycle. Take the Nikon D3 as an example: unless you take matters into your own hands, nobody at Nikon is going to allocate resources to add new features to a flagship body from 2007. This is where I stumbled upon Marcus Low's firmware experimentation. He was kind enough to document and share his thoughts and the technical process of how he got there.
Why a Sub-$100 Godox Is the Most Versatile Flash in a Wedding Photographer's Bag
Rangefinders like Leica's M bodies and compacts like Fujifilm's X100 line have pulled a lot of people back toward on-camera flash, and finding a speedlight that fits those small bodies without overwhelming them has never been simple. The flash you pick decides whether you get harsh direct light, a softer bounce, or an off-camera look, and it decides how much weight hangs off your neck through a four-hour reception.
What 30,000 Free Doritos Commercials Can Teach You About Spec Work
Doritos once got more than 30,000 Super Bowl commercials made by fans, and most of the people who made them got nothing. If a client has ever asked you for a free test edit, a sample shoot, or a quick concept before they commit, you've been offered a smaller version of the same deal.
Lumix vs. TTArtisan vs. Viltrox: Why the Priciest 40mm Isn't the Clear Winner
Panasonic, TTArtisan, and Viltrox all make a compact 40mm autofocus prime for full frame L-mount cameras, and one of them costs noticeably more than the other two. When three lenses share a focal length and a mount, the choice comes down to build, rendering, and how much each extra dollar changes what ends up in your files.
Excire Foto 2027 Adds Advanced Video Search and Reverse Geocoding in Free November Update
Pattern Recognition Company (PRC), the company behind the award-winning Excire software, released a major update to Excire Foto 2027, its standalone photo- and video-management program. The update – which is free for all Excire Foto 2027 owners – introduces an array of time-saving features for photographers and video creators, including advanced video indexing, tools to search for specific moments within clips, video frame extraction, and reverse geocoding.
Designed for photographers and content creators who work with both still images and video, the update makes it easier to browse, organize, and search for content across a mixed media library. Users can find specific videos via specialized AI-powered search tools: natural-language content search, visible text search, people search, face search, keyword search, and similarity search. Users can then open a matching clip to see the precise point where the desired content appears. Individual frames can also be saved as photos and managed alongside other images in the database.
“Photographers and visual creators increasingly work with both photos and video, and they need secure, practical ways to keep that content organized and accessible,” said Erhardt Barth, CEO of PRC and a machine learning expert at the University of Lübeck. “This update dramatically expands what Excire Foto 2027 can do with video while maintaining the local processing and privacy that are central to our software.”
New Tools for Content-Based Video Search and Organization
Highlights of the November update include:
Advanced video indexing. Excire Foto 2027 analyzes each video file and extracts a range of frames that represent the video’s content. These frames are automatically keyworded; they also make footage searchable through natural-language prompt search, face and people search, keyword search, and similarity search, all of which help users retrieve specific clips based on their contents.
Find specific moments within videos. After searching for content, users can open a matching video from the results to review the precise point where that content appears. This makes it easier to locate a particular person, subject, or scene within a clip.
Control over extracted frames. Users can add or remove extracted frames, add metadata to those frames, and use individual frames as references for similarity searches. Adding or removing searchable frames is non-destructive and leaves the original video untouched.
Save video frames as photos. Individual frames can be saved as separate photos without leaving Excire Foto 2027. Once saved, these images can be brought into Excire Foto, analyzed, searched, culled, and exported just like standard image files.
Automatic location metadata with reverse geocoding. Excire Foto 2027 can use a file’s existing GPS coordinates to identify the city and country where it was captured and add that information to the corresponding metadata fields.
The new capabilities expand Excire Foto 2027’s existing tools for searching, organizing, and culling photo and video libraries. AI analysis runs locally on the user’s computer, which ensures complete privacy.
Price & Availability
The updated version of Excire Foto 2027 is available for both Windows and macOS beginning November 3rd, 2026; the program can be purchased directly from the Excire website. The software is offered for a one-time license fee (no subscription) of US$249 / €229 / £229 / CHF 229.
Excire Foto 2024 users can upgrade to the updated version of Excire Foto 2027 for US$99 / €99 / £99 / CHF 99, while Excire Foto 2025 users can upgrade for US$79 / €79 / £79 / CHF 79.
Existing Excire Foto 2027 users receive the update free of charge.
A 14-day trial version is also available for download. With the update, the trial period has been reset; therefore, users whose free trials expired can test the program a second time.
About Pattern Recognition Company
Founded in 2005 by internationally recognized computer-vision and machine-learning experts from the University of Lübeck, Pattern Recognition Company (PRC) has developed a variety of cutting-edge AI products and applications in automated image analysis, including Excire’s award-winning line of AI-powered photo-management software. PRC’s offerings include Excire Foto 2027, a standalone application for photographers; Excire Search 2026, a Lightroom Classic plugin; and Excire Foto Office Edition, a network-enabled program for team-based workflows. The Excire API makes this powerful technology available to third-party platforms. For more information, please visit https://excire.com/en/.
High-Speed Sync vs. Global Shutter for Flash Portraits in Bright Sun
Shoot a flash portrait at f/1.2 in midday sun and you run into a wall fast: most cameras stop syncing with a flash somewhere around 1/160 to 1/250 s, and anything faster leaves dark bands across the frame. Sony's a9 III and its global shutter offer a way past that wall, which puts high-speed sync, the usual workaround, in an interesting spot.
Seven Tutorials On Capturing Motion And Movement
Motion and movement is a wide and varied photographic subject and as a result there are many ways a photographer can create a sense of motion or movement in their shots. Slow shutter speeds can be used to exaggerate the flow of water while fast shutter speeds will freeze the force of a wave as it crashes against a sea wall. ePHOTOzine has written many tutorials that cover motion in some shape or form and as a result, we've decided to group the most popular ones together so, hopefully, you'll be fuelled with enough inspiration and ideas to make you want to head out to capture motion. Here's our top seven:
John Gravett shows us how wind movement can make interesting and more dynamic landscape shots. Plus, he includes tips on capturing the popular 'blurry' water shots at the coast and with waterfalls.
How To Use Blur To Create A Sense Of Movement
Blur isn't always a bad thing as it can help emphasis speed and create motion in a shot. Read on for tips on using shutter speeds, flash and zoom lenses to create blur.
Photo by David Clapp - www.davidclapp.co.ukBeginner's Guide To Capturing Motion
Mike Browne from PhotographyCourses.Biz shows how easy it is to capture a sense of movement.
Camera Panning Techniques
Peter Bargh talks through a few tips to improve your panning technique. Panning is a great technique for action and, once perfected, the main subject will be sharp against a blurred background.
Tips On Photographing Action And Movement
Here are a few tips on shutter speeds and how to focus so you get sharp action shots every time.
How To Capture Movement
Ben Boswell shares his tips on capturing movement. Tips include making sure movement looks deliberate, when to use a pan, what shutter speeds are appropriate and if a tripod is needed.
More Tips On Capturing Movement In The Landscape
Do landscape shots always have to be static? If you think about it you'll realise that they're often not. This tutorial adds to the tips John Gravett gave in his article, covering clouds, trees and people as subjects.
The Preacher Who Patented Flexible Film in 1898 and Died Before Kodak Paid $5 Million for It
Hannibal Goodwin's application for a photographic pellicle reached the Patent Office on May 2, 1887, and stayed there for eleven years and four months while a succession of five examiners rejected it. George Eastman's chemist filed his own flexible film application on April 9, 1889, and had a granted patent eight months later. By the time Goodwin's US Patent 610,861 issued on September 13, 1898, Kodak had been selling transparent roll film to the public for nine years.
You Don’t Need a Macro Lens for Mushroom Photography. There, I Said It.
There is a tendency in photography to believe that if we want to photograph a particular subject, we need to buy the equipment designed specifically for it. Want to photograph wildlife? You need a long telephoto lens. Want to photograph the night sky? You need a fast wide angle lens. Want to photograph mushrooms? You need a macro lens.
But do you really?
Why One Superzoom Might Be All You Need on a Long Hike
The OM System M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100mm f/4 IS PRO covers the same range as a 24-200mm zoom on full frame, so it raises an obvious question if you hike long distances with a camera: can one lens stand in for the three you usually carry? A single weather-sealed zoom saves weight and spares you lens changes in wind and spray, but landscape work also asks for real wide angle coverage, close foreground focus, and sharpness from corner to corner.
Why a Rained-Out Race Is Worth Photographing on Film
A storm that cancels an event usually sends everyone home, camera included. On a long trip, the days that fall apart often produce the frames you end up keeping, and with film you won't know which ones worked until the rolls come back.
Why the Panasonic Lumix S1RII Is a Great Buy for Everything but Sports
The Panasonic Lumix S1RII pairs a 44-megapixel full frame sensor with 8K video for about $3,300, and that sensor isn't stacked, so it reads out slowly. If you shoot both stills and video, that one design choice shapes nearly everything about how the camera behaves in your hands.
Why It's OK to Come Home From a Landscape Shoot Empty-Handed
Watch enough landscape videos and you start to believe the professionals walk out at golden hour and come home with a portfolio image every time. That belief shapes how you judge your own outings, and how hard you are on yourself when the sky catches fire and your card holds nothing you want to show anyone.
Introduction To Firework Photography
We are only a few days away from this year’s Bonfire Night and we couldn’t really kick November off without mentioning a few tips that’ll help you capture spectacular firework photos.
Gear Suggestions
As long exposures are a must you will need to take a support with you. A tripod’s great but at busy events you may be better off with a monopod that takes up less room and is easy to move around with.
If you’re a compact user, it can be harder to capture firework themed images but it's not impossible as most compacts have a range of scene modes and a firework mode can often be found among them. Plus, the longer zooms that are available on some compacts will now get you closer to the action too.
Wider lenses will capture more of the sky, increasing your chances of capturing a burst. You may want to try shooting a few in a portrait orientation, though, to capture the long trails left by the firework as it climbs to the spot where it explodes.
Finally, pack a torch as it’ll be dark and you may need it when making changes to your settings and for putting your kit away.
Switch to manual focus and turn your focus to infinity (check your manual if you’re unsure how to do this). This is to ensure the firework explosions stay sharp as they can be further than the maximum focus setting on your camera. Setting an aperture of f/8 or f/11 will increase your depth of field, further increasing the chances of capturing a sharp shot of a colourful explosion. Make sure your flash is switched off too.
RAW Or Jpeg?
If you shoot in RAW you’ll be able to tweak colours and brightness levels when you’re back in front of your computer once the display has finished.
Exposure Times
For shots filled with bursts of colourful explosions you’ll need to switch to Bulb mode. This mode allows you to keep the shutter open for longer but as you need to keep the shutter button pressed, it’s a good idea to use a cable release to prevent shake. If your camera allows it, you could fire the shutter wirelessly via a smart device.
In Bulb mode, you basically need to keep the lens covered (a dark piece of card will work) until a burst erupts. At this point you need to uncover the lens. Replace the card until another burst occurs and continue to do this with however many bursts as you like. It can take a while to get right as timing is key but you can create some great shots when you’ve perfected the technique.
If you don’t have a bulb mode you can capture single explosions with exposure times between 1-4 seconds. This should give you shots that show a light trail as the firework climbs as well as the final burst of colour at the end.
Photo by David Clapp - www.davidclapp.co.uk
Watch The DisplayAs displays don’t tend to be short affairs it pays to watch a few bursts so you can see where the fireworks are being launched into the sky and you’ll also be able to see how long it takes them to climb, plus how long the explosions last for. This will make framing easier, although you can’t obviously guarantee every burst will appear where you need it to. It’s worth doing a few test shots to make sure you’re happy with the composition too before the big display begins.
Add Interest
Buildings and other structures can add an extra level of interest to your shots but if they are illuminated it can mean they end up looking ‘blown out’ so adjust your exposure accordingly.
Critique the Community: Unique Edit
Welcome to the November installment of the Critique the Community! This month's critique theme is going to be "Unique Edit," and we want to see your best photographs that were brought to life with a new or unique editing style or specific editing software.
In 2013, Researchers Pulled Recognizable Faces of Bystanders Out of the Eye Reflections in a Portrait
An anonymous peer reviewer worked through a manuscript, looked at one of its figures, and recognized one of the authors. The face was a reflection in another person's eye. Across the study's bystanders, those extracted faces ran 27 to 36 pixels wide and covered roughly 322 pixels apiece, and that accidental recognition became the paper's second experiment.
Affinity for iPad Is Here With Free Core Tools
Canva has launched Affinity for iPad, an app built for touch and Apple Pencil that puts sketch, vector, photo editing and page layout in a single .af file. It includes a new Sketch Studio, iPad-first tools such as the Mask Tool and Sketch to Shapes, and AI features through Canva AI Studio, which need a Canva premium account. The core tools are free for individuals, and the app is available now in the App Store, depending on regional rollout. A free Canva account is needed to use it.
From Canva:
- Affinity for iPad combines pro-grade vector graphics, photo editing, illustration, page layout and AI.
- Brand new Sketch Studio optimised for Apple Pencil and touch creates the perfect environment for illustration or to convert sketch to vector.
- AI optimised for human creativity: it's designed to empower designers, not replace them.
Canva, the visual communication platform used by hundreds of millions of people, has today launched Affinity for iPad. Created specifically for the touch-first interface and unique capabilities of iPad and Apple Pencil, the app brings professional sketch, vector, photo and layout editing together with the same pro-level power of Affinity on the desktop.
Affinity for iPad introduces the brand new Sketch Studio for freehand drawing and simplifying complex sketch-to-vector workflows, as well as iPad-first features like the Mask Tool and Sketch to Shapes. There’s also Affinity’s powerful photo editing, and a full selection of AI tools in the Canva AI Studio.
Professional creativity has long been split across apps. Switching takes time and loses momentum: users draw in one app, build vectors in another, use a third to retouch photos, and work in yet another to lay out a finished document. Creativity thrives when these tools work together and Affinity for iPad is making that smoother than ever, allowing creatives to move seamlessly between tasks, maintain momentum, and bring their ideas to life.
Affinity for iPad
With Affinity for iPad, creatives can take a project from first sketch with Apple Pencil to print-ready file on iPad alone. And it's free for individuals, just like Affinity on desktop, which has recorded more than seven million sign-ups since launching a year ago.
“Creative work doesn't stay in one discipline, so your tools shouldn't either,” said Duncan Clark, CEO of Pro Design at Canva. “Since we brought Affinity together on desktop, our biggest user request has been the desire to bring it to iPad. Today we're delivering it: a fully-fledged, professional app built for touch.”
One file, from start to finish
Sketch, vector design, photo editing, and layout all live in the same .af file, so users can move between them with a tap. Non-destructive edits render in real time and nothing needs to be exported, converted or remade.
- Sketch: Rough out concepts the moment they land, with the unique capabilities of Apple Pencil like pressure and tilt in every mark, thick where you press and soft where you tilt. A full brush library comes with controls to shape each brush into the exact tool you need. Sketches stay live in the file to build on, rather than trace again.
Affinity for iPad sketch to vector
- Vector: Responsive, smooth and under control. Build a full logo or icon system with real curves and precise nodes, or bring a rough drawing through from Sketch. Sketch to Shapes turns hand-drawn forms into clean vector shapes.
Affinity for iPad Vector Studio
- Photo: Fine-tune RAW files, make intelligent selections, retouch in real time and build full composites at the shoot or on the go. Users can even sketch over a photo first to plan where a subject or prop should sit. The Mask Tool finds the boundary as the Apple Pencil pixel precision runs along a challenging edge, so hair, fur and foliage take a stroke rather than an afternoon. Every mask, grade and retouch stays live and undoable, even thousands of layers deep.
Affinity for iPad Pixel Studio
- Layout: Create multi-page documents such as ‘zines, lookbooks and photo books, with text and images flowing across pages; master pages and grids keep everything consistent, and typography exactly right. Projects go all the way to a print-ready file with proper colour handling.
Affinity for iPad Layout Studio
Built for touch, not shrunk to fit
The new app’s interface is designed for iPad, with tools where the hand reaches for them and the clutter stripped back so nothing stands between the creative and their work.
Affinity supports the advanced capabilities of Apple Pencil Pro, including pressure, tilt, barrel roll, squeeze and hover, alongside natural gestures. Every adjustment, filter, and effect updates live, heavy files with thousands of editable layers stay fast and smooth. And like its desktop counterparts, Affinity for iPad is compatible with all major file types.
Powerful AI that supports your craft
AI tools are brought to Affinity for iPad for the first time in the Canva AI Studio, offering a powerful set of features that leverage the unique capabilities of iPad to tackle the tedious tasks, so creatives spend more time on the decisions only they can make, without ever giving up control.
Designers can use Generative Expand to fit an image to a new format or bleed, then set the type and export a print-ready document. An illustrator pulling in a low-resolution reference or texture might scale it up to meet print or merchandise needs, before applying it over their vector artwork.
For photographers, motion blur reduction and noise reduction can be applied instantly. Decompose Layer splits a flat image into editable layers.
Live controls and real time rendering mean users can fine-tune how much adjustment is applied and shape every detail such as how much grain to clear, or how softly a background falls away. Canva AI Studio is there when users want it and out of the way when they don't.
Leading the way on iPad
Affinity has been enabling serious creative work on iPad and Apple Pencil since 2017, when Affinity Photo was named Apple's iPad App of the Year. It signaled that professional-grade design didn’t need to be tied to a desktop.
Affinity for iPad builds on that legacy, and has been shaped by feedback and requests from the designers, illustrators, and photographers who make up the professional community, including the Canva Designer Advisory Board, industry experts, and creative forums.
“Affinity has built groundbreaking tools for iPad for almost a decade, and our community has shaped every step,” said Duncan Clark. “This is the result of everything we've heard and learned, worked over until every gesture and panel felt right under the hand.”
“Affinity for iPad delivers the full power of Affinity, together with the versatility and portability of iPad,” said Affinity Head of Product Design Neil Ladkin.
“Every development decision was made by people who create on iPad themselves, from how the Apple Pencil responds to where the tools sit. If you’re the sort of person who rotates the canvas 40 times to get one line right, Affinity for iPad was made by people who’ve done exactly that.”
Free for individuals
Affinity for iPad’s core sketch, vector, photo editing, and layout tools are free for individuals. Canva AI features can be accessed with a Canva premium account.
Affinity for iPad is available now* in the Apple iPad App Store. Customers need to create a free Canva account to use the app.
Read more about Affinity for iPad at www.affinity.studio/ipad-app.
*Subject to App Store regional rollout timings
The Luminar Fall Update Has Some Powerful New Tools
Luminar has released a solid fall update with some new features and some enhancements. The update is free to current owners and can, of course, be purchased by photographers who are interested.
This new update is version 1.29.0. The update should appear automatically, or you can click "Check for Updates" in the Luminar dropdown menu.