Candid Old Boys Portrait Wins 'Photo Of The Week'
A wonderful candid monochrome portrait, Two Old Boys from Daisymaye, is one that is well worth a closer look.
The image features two older gentlemen, both wearing caps and sunglasses, looking off into the distance in what feels like a quiet and natural moment between friends. The subject nearest to the camera is sharp and detailed, while his companion softens gently out of focus behind him, producing a fine sense of depth within the frame.
The monochrome treatment is a very fitting choice, removing all distraction and letting the mood, the detail, and the character of the scene come through with great clarity. It is a fine and thoughtful piece of candid photography.
Every Photo of the Week (POTW) winner will be rewarded with a Samsung 128GB PRO Plus microSDXC memory card with SD adapter, providing top-tier storage for all your creative needs across multiple devices. But that's not all! In January 2027, we’ll crown our 2026 Photo of the Year winner, who will take home the ultimate prize of a Samsung Portable 1TB SSD T7 Shield, courtesy of Samsung. It’s time to shoot, submit, and showcase your best work for a chance to win these incredible rewards!
This Handcrafted Wooden Pinhole Camera Shoots 6x17 Panoramas and Lets You Change Focal Length Mid-Roll
Pinhole photography strips the camera down to almost nothing: a box, a hole, and light. Most pinhole cameras are exactly that simple, but the Mania, handcrafted by German woodworker and photographer Ralph Mann, is a modular wooden pinhole system that pushes what a camera without a lens can actually do.
24-70mm vs. 70-200mm: Which Zoom Should You Buy First?
Choosing between a 24-70mm and a 70-200mm zoom is one of the most common lens decisions you'll face when building a kit. Both are professional staples, both are genuinely useful, and neither obviously replaces the other.
Top Tips On How To Photograph Lighthouses And The Detail On Them
1. Gear Suggestions
Your normal kit is fine for many shots, but if you can't get close you will find that the telezoom might be worked harder than your wide-angle or standard zoom. Because the sky will almost certainly feature in your compositions, you should find room in the camera bag for a polariser. A warm-up would be handy too.
If you're taking shots inside a lighthouse there may not be room for a tripod, however, there should be plenty of room for a support outside it. Something light-weight will be easier to manage than a heavier model, especially when walking upstairs with it in or fastened to your bag. Talking of bags, as space could be tight, you want a bag that's easy to access and doesn't take up too much room.
2. What Time Of Day Is Best?
At this time of year, the light can be quite harsh and as most lighthouses are white (and red or black) the high contrast can be a real nightmare. On really bright sunny days, you might be best advised not to waste your time until the sun is shielded by some cloud or just waiting until later in the day. Obviously, much depends on how much time you have to hang around.
Lower, warmer light will undoubtedly give a more attractive end result and you and enhance that warmth with a warm-up filter while a polariser will enrich a blue sky. Late in the day and exposing for a brightly lit structure you might find that a saturated sky will result anyway so keep an eye on the preview image.
3. What Detail Will I Find?
Zooming in with a telephoto and picking on detail is fun to do, although if you shooting externally you might find that there is precious little detail to enjoy apart from a few windows. If you are on a tour visit you have more opportunities – except that you might not have that much time and space because of being in a group. Shoot quickly in this instance and do your best to crop out fellow visitors.
Other techniques to try might be to shoot sections of the lighthouse for a 'joiner' image when you get home to the computer. You could also shoot a vertical panorama and merge the images during post-production. For a vertical stitch, you probably need to be further back with the telephoto to get a straight-on perspective rather than angling the camera upwards.
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How To Photograph Lighthouses In The Landscape
The UK's coastline has many lighthouses which are worth a visit with your camera. Some are open to the public and are definitely worth exploring, but here we discuss using lighthouses within the wider landscape.
1. What Kit?
Take your camera and all your usual lenses and you will not go far wrong. You may find a camera with a smaller body more useful as they can be often fit in jacket pockets or if you prefer to carry your gear in a bag, it'll take up less room leaving space for a flask of tea and your packed lunch!
A tripod is needed if you intend getting there early or staying in late. Other than that, it is perfectly fine to shoot handheld. Filters are also definitely worth packing, especially the polariser that can be used to cut-down glare to enrich colours and saturate blue skies.
In terms of lenses, wide-angle and telephotos are equally valid. Wides let you use more of the foreground while telephotos let you pull in detail and are also excellent at putting the lighthouse within its environmental context.
2. Do Your Research
If you're looking for lighthouses have a look at the Trinity House website for more information and locations close to you. Have a look at where other photographers have visited too, plus a quick online search will find you visitor information as well as GPS coordinates and directions quickly.
Use your feet! Walking around your subject is always advised and is especially effective with using lighthouses. That way you can put your subject into context of the beach or town that the lighthouse is situated.
3. Time Of Day & Weather
Many lighthouses are still in use so a good time to shoot them is at dawn or at dusk when there is colour in the sky and the lighthouse's lamp is on. Do remember the lamp will be considerably brighter than the whole scene and you can end up with a light that's overexposed if you don't meter correctly.
At this time of day, there's not much light around so you will need the tripod and a remote release. If you set a sufficiently slow enough shutter speed you will get a complete rotation of the lamp.
Low light and stormy skies shouldn't be overlooked either, particularly if you can capture the waves crashing against the lighthouse or rocks nearby.
Lighthouses look photogenic in most lighting situations, but bright sun can be tricky because of high contrast problems – white is a popular lighthouse colour. Bland white skies are also an issue for the same reason. Other than that, get shooting.
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Leica Is the Most Honest Camera Company, and Also the Most Expensive
There is a thing Leica does that no other camera manufacturer is willing to do, and it is the thing that makes Leica interesting even to photographers who will never own one. Leica refuses to pretend to be what it is not.
When Expensive Gear Stops Working
Most photography now lives online. In the feed, in algorithms, in a constant stream of images. This is where the idea of what a photographer is supposed to need gets formed. Cheap did not become better. It became sufficient.
This Photographer Tested 800 Lenses and These Are His Three Favorites for Portraits
After testing more than 800 lenses, Christopher Frost has narrowed his personal favorites for portrait work down to three. The picks span a wild range of price points and design philosophies, which makes the list genuinely worth paying attention to.
The Fujifilm X-M5 Might Be the Best Small Camera You Can Actually Afford
Choosing an everyday carry camera is harder than it looks. You're balancing size, image quality, and price, and most cameras force you to sacrifice at least one of them.
The Art of Noticing: Why Most Photos Are Lost Before You Even Pick Up a Camera
Picking up a camera is the easy part. The harder skill, and the one almost nobody talks about, is learning to see what's actually worth photographing in the first place.
Small Town Photographer? Here's Why You're Still Leaving Money Behind
Pricing your work below what the market can actually bear is one of the fastest ways to stall a photography business, and the problem isn't unique to small towns. Whether you're shooting in a rural county or a major metro, the underlying issue is almost always the same: you're pricing for the wrong client.
How To Photograph Dandelions Creatively
Before you dig up the humble dandelion, have you ever thought about photographing it? If you haven't, here's a straightforward guide on how you can capture a rather fun and creative image of one without too much effort on your part. You can also create your own backdrops and swap them in and out for an extra level of creativity, too.
All the photos show above are of the same dandelion taken from the same standing position with the stalk held at arm's length. The starting point was facing down with a green grass background and I then raised my arm towards the sky and took pictures at several positions on its journey.
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The Set-Up- Pick a dandelion that has a full seed head.
- Hold it at arm's length in your non-camera hand with it positioned in front of grass (you can use a tripod as this will free both hands, making adjustments easier).
- With your camera manually set to close focus and held to your eye, move the dandelion closer to the camera until it fills the frame and is in focus, then take a photo.
- Adjust the exposure if the dandelion is too bright or too dark. If your camera is automatic take the photo when it's focused.
Experiment With Backgrounds
You can repeat the process but positioning the dandelion against different backgrounds. Each shot will look different and no doubt one will be preferred.
Here are just a few of the backgrounds you could use:
- Trees
- Blue sky
- Cloudy sky
- Coloured paper
- Textured walls
- Carpets
- Silhouetted against the sun
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Why the Nikon Z9 Is Aging Better Than Anyone Expected
When Nikon announced the Z9 in late 2021, the camera was treated by most of the photography press as Nikon's "we are still here" moment. The brand had spent the early mirrorless years getting beaten in feature comparisons by Sony, criticized for slow autofocus updates, and described in obituary-adjacent language by gear reviewers who had decided Sony had won the format war. The Z9 was supposed to prove Nikon could still build a flagship. It did. Then something more interesting happened over the next four years.
Back to Basics: Relearning Photography Through Mini Projects
The article emphasizes the importance of slowing down and reconnecting with the joy of photography by creating a series of images of simple things that we admire. Let's look at photos of a remote Namibian railway station that show the beauty of decay and history through intentional composition.
Shooting a Full Fashion Editorial With Just One Light Modifier
A while back I was very focused on having complex lighting for my editorial work. I would often create precise setups with many light sources. Yet, as time went on, my setups became simpler. So much so that my recent editorial for Numéro was done with only one light. Here is how.
Why Your Presence Is Ruining Your Street Photos
Street photography lives and dies by your ability to go unnoticed. In a genre where the goal is to capture real moments, your presence is the single biggest variable you can control.
7 Habits That Are Quietly Killing Your Photography Style
Gear has never been better. Autofocus is smarter, noise is lower, and sharpness is almost a given — yet scroll through Instagram or any photo forum and everything starts to look the same.
Photoshop's New Remove Tool Can Find and Erase General Distractions Automatically
Adobe just pushed a significant round of updates to Photoshop, and several of them are directly relevant to cleaning up photos and managing complex edits. If you use Photoshop as part of your workflow, at least three or four of these features will change how you approach specific tasks.
This Swing Lens Camera Forces You to Rethink How You Compose Landscapes
The Horizon 202 is a Soviet-era swing lens panoramic camera that produces a field of view roughly equivalent to 14mm on a 35mm camera, with almost none of the distortion you'd expect from an ultra wide angle lens at that focal length. If you've ever wanted to capture an entire mountain range in a single frame on film, this is the kind of camera that makes that possible.
There Is No Such Thing As Bad Weather: Top Landscape Photography Tips For Rain Or Shine
The right light is an interesting concept. I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as bad weather – only different types of lighting. I get annoyed at the number of articles that say you can only take creative landscape photographs in the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset. To me, that leaves a whole chunk of the day with a camera sitting unused in a bag!
It's Wet Out!
Certainly, though, certain subjects work better in particular lighting conditions and when the rain is hammering on my office window I'm fairly happy to be sitting in front of the computer rather than trying to capture landscape photographs! That said, I have been at the side of Buttermere in torrential rain and high winds and still managed to work with the conditions.
Mist and fog also create ideal light for pastel, almost painterly pictures, easily isolating foreground elements from the background; and while these conditions are certainly more prevalent early morning, they can happen at other times. Heavy snowfalls can also create monotoned, isolated elements, even resulting in pen-and-ink style pictures that are perfect for black and white.
The Sun's Out
When the sun does shine through, make the most of the textures, shadows and lighting angles; and even that doesn't always mean early or late in the day, I have a number of Lake District locations where the sun offers excellent graze lighting, really bringing out the textures of barn walls or dry-stone walls even in the middle of the day.
The best way to know where the sun works best in any location is to know the location well, and photograph it regularly; ideally even knowing which month offers the best elevation as well as the angle of the sun. If you're new to a location check on a map – remembering that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Even Google maps can provide some help if there is a road anywhere near your chosen location. Computer-based maps can give a good idea of the terrain and are sometimes easier to realise the contours than a traditional map.
Certainly early and late in the day offers low lighting angles which can naturally create longer shadows, but to truly reap the benefits, you need to either have side-lighting or even be shooting into the sun.
By all means, plan some of your shots before you go out, but always be ready to adapt to the conditions - don't come back without any photos because the light wasn't exactly what you had planned, but adapt to the lighting that's there. Only by doing that will you train your eyes to see opportunities that otherwise would be so easy to miss.
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