Photography News

 

14–17 January 2026 • Novotel London West, Hammersmith

Trade Show 15–17 January – FREE ENTRY

The UK’s most exciting photography Convention is back — bigger, bolder and packed with more inspiration, education and industry powerhouses than ever before.

The 2026 London Photo Convention & Trade Show brings thousands of photographers together under one roof for four days of hands-on learning, live demos, exclusive deals, and world-class speakers. If you’re serious about your photography — this is where you need to be.

FREE Trade Show: 15–17 January — Meet the Biggest Brands in Photography

Get ready for three electric days on the Trade Show floor, with leading camera and lighting brands showcasing their latest kit. Expect:

• Hands-on access to the newest cameras & lenses
• Live demonstrations from top pros
• Expert advice from manufacturers
• Show-only offers and exclusive discounts
• Retailers showcasing must-have accessories

Whether you're upgrading, testing, comparing or just curious — the Trade Show is 100% free to attend and absolutely packed.

 

 

Over 200 Hours of Training with Masterclasses & Superclasses

If you're hungry to learn, the Convention’s education programme is unmatched.

Masterclasses

Dive into a huge lineup of practical, inspiring and business-boosting sessions covering:

• Portraits • Weddings • Lighting
• Wildlife • Macro • Post-production
• Creative storytelling • Branding
• Business growth for photographers

Top photographers, award-winning educators and industry leaders share the techniques and insights that elevate your photography fast.

Superclasses

Want hands-on training with the best in the business?

The Superclasses deliver small-group, practical workshops with some of the most respected names in the industry. Limited spaces — these sell out fast every single year.

 

 

The Photography Event You Simply Can’t Afford to Miss

If you want to improve your skills, grow your business, network with other creatives and immerse yourself in the world of photography — this is your event.

 

Join thousands of photographers for the ultimate start to 2026. 14–17 January • London Trade Show FREE Masterclass Passes & Superclasses available now

 

Book your tickets now!

 

© Affinity

 

Affinity has unveiled an all-new design app that brings together photo editing, drawing tools, and layout features in one easy-to-use platform. It’s built to be flexible, so you can set up your workspace the way you like, combine different tools, and even share your setup with others. Whether you're editing pictures, creating graphics, or working on documents, everything is now in one smooth and powerful space.

The best part is that Affinity is now completely free. This full-featured design software used to cost money, but now anyone can use it without paying. The update also comes with a fresh new look and marks Affinity’s next step as part of the Canva family, making high-quality creative tools more accessible to everyone.

 

From Affinity:

When Affinity joined the Canva family last year last year, we made a promise to preserve its power while expanding what’s possible. Today, that vision comes to life with the all-new Affinity: a studio-grade creative app that brings vector, photo, and layout tools together in one high-performance platform. Fully featured. Lightning-fast. And completely free.

For too long, professional designers have had almost no choice in the tools they use, from bloated software that slows them down, to subscriptions that stack up, and workflows that interrupt creativity. Across the creative community, we’ve heard the same frustrations: a call for speed, for power, for freedom. Designers have been asking for the tools they love, so we listened, and we built something better.

 

A new era for Affinity

For ten years, Affinity has been the tool of choice for professionals who care deeply about craft. Designers who value precision, speed, and control, and who expect their tools to keep up.

Now, that legacy enters a new chapter. The all-new Affinity was built in close collaboration with its community of creators, shaped by thousands of conversations, feature requests, and shared ideas. Guided by Canva’s Designer Advisory Board, this release reflects what professionals told us matters most: performance, reliability, and creative freedom.

From the smallest details to the biggest design systems, every feature has been built with respect for the people who use it.

  One app to craft it all

The all new Affinity app brings professional vector, photo, and layout tools together in one powerful space, featuring everything you need to design, edit, and publish without switching apps or breaking flow.

For designers who think in lines, curves, and grids, Affinity’s vector tools deliver precision and speed in perfect balance. Every adjustment happens in real time: paths adjust instantly, shapes snap into place, and even large files pan and zoom smoothly. From comprehensive brand systems to complex illustrations, everything feels responsive and effortless.

Affinity’s award-winning photo editing tools give you the freedom to experiment without limits. Every adjustment, from RAW development to retouching and compositing, is non-destructive, so you can refine endlessly without losing your original work. Plus, GPU acceleration keeps even the most complex files fast and fluid, while intelligent tools like Smart Selections, live filters, and batch processing help speed up repetitive edits.

With Affinity’s layout tools, structure and creativity work side by side. From short brochures to multi-page reports, you can edit images, graphics, and text directly within your document and see every change update live. Smart Master Pages, shared text styles, and advanced typographic controls keep everything consistent while giving you the freedom to experiment.

Whether you’re editing a portrait, building a brand identity, or designing a publication, the all new Affinity keeps you in flow, combining power, precision, and speed in a single studio-grade environment.

 

Design your workspace, your way

Every designer works differently, and now, Affinity does too. The updated app introduces a new level of personalization with fully customizable studios.

Creatives can mix and match tools from the Vector, Pixel, and Layout studios to build a workspace that fits their unique process. Rearrange panels, choose the tools you need, remove the ones you don’t, and save multiple setups for different projects or tasks. Custom studios can also be shared and downloaded, opening new ways for teams and creative communities to exchange workflows and learn from one another.

It’s flexibility built for focus, with professional tools that adapt to you and the way you work best. And no matter how you work, Affinity keeps up. Built on a high-performance engine, every adjustment updates in real time, from instant previews and detailed edits at 10,000,000% zoom to projects with thousands of layers. It’s ultra-fast, super-smooth, and precise down to the last pixel.

While the all-new Affinity has been reimagined, it still feels instantly familiar to those who know it best. The tools, workflows, and precision you rely on are all here – refined but not replaced. Every update builds on what professionals already love, so you can pick up where you left off and feel right at home.

 

© Affinity

 

Free for everyone

From the beginning, Affinity set out to challenge the idea that powerful design tools should come with a hefty price tag. Today, we’re taking that even further.

 

Affinity is now completely free, forever. 

The full, professional-grade Affinity experience, available to everyone.

There’s no catch, no stripped-back version, and no gotchas. The same precise, high-performance tools that professionals rely on every day are now open to all, because creative freedom shouldn’t come with a cost.

Whether you’re an independent designer, a creative studio, or a team building your brand, we believe everyone should have access to the tools they need to create their best work.

 

Affinity and Canva: Stronger together

Affinity has always been built for people who care deeply about design. Professionals who notice the details others might miss, who stay up late perfecting the final pixel, and who take pride in their craft. That hasn’t changed. But we couldn’t launch the all-new Affinity without something special for the Canva community.

For everyone with a Canva premium account, Canva AI’s tools are now accessible directly inside Affinity through the new Canva AI Studio. This includes familiar favorites like Generative Fill, Expand & Edit, and Remove Background – powerful features that speed up repetitive steps while keeping designers in full control of every detail.

Everything that makes Affinity a precision tool for creative professionals remains at its core: the speed, the control, the depth. Now, those same qualities are enhanced by Canva’s technology, giving you new ways to work faster, experiment more freely, and know that your tools will always keep up. Whether you’re refining a complex composite or extending parts of an image, these features work quietly in the background, supporting your process without ever getting in the way of craft.

We know that transparency around AI use and data handling is essential, and your creative work will always remain yours. Canva AI features are built with privacy and control in mind, ensuring that your creative work in Affinity stays secure, runs on the user's device, and work is not accessed to train AI features.

And when you’re ready to collaborate, scale or publish, you can export your Affinity projects into Canva in just a few clicks, to share with colleagues or clients. It’s the first of many steps toward connecting professional design with everyday creation.

This is a new chapter for professional design. We know some of our community may be curious about what this means for Affinity’s identity. It remains exactly what it’s always been: a professional design suite built for people who care deeply about their craft, now strengthened by Canva’s support and resources to take it even further.

You can also bring your existing work with you. Affinity supports PSD, AI, PDF, SVG, TIFF, IDML, and more, making it easy to open, edit, and collaborate without starting from scratch.

Today is just the beginning. We’re continuing to invest in both Affinity’s professional design tools and Canva’s all-in-one platform, building a future where everyone can design at the highest level, without barriers.

The all-new Affinity is available today for Mac and Windows, with iPad coming next year. The Canva community can activate Affinity with their existing account, while existing Affinity customers and new users can create a free Canva account to download Affinity directly.

For more information, please visit the Affinity website.

Did you edit that picture? Was it Photoshopped? These questions miss the point. Editing is a part of the photographic process from the outset, before the shutter is even fired.

[ Read More ]

Your contract is either your career’s best friend or a ticking time bomb. I’ve been in this business for over 15 years, and I’ve seen creatives lose thousands of dollars, and in some cases, entire portfolios because they didn’t write things down clearly. Photographers, if your contract doesn’t say this, you’re in trouble.

[ Read More ]

Halloween - it's a perfect time to shoot some portraits and capture some of the small details that make Halloween so spooktacular.

 

Low Light

Most Halloween themed activities don't start until after the sun's begun to set and that means there's not a lot of light left around to play with. If you're shooting still objects such as pumpkins, you can put your camera on a tripod and use slower shutter speeds but with kids that are running around high on sugar, longer shutter speeds will turn them into streaks of blur. Try using a slightly higher ISO or just shoot your portraits under a porch light or street lamp, to add a little bit of extra light to the scene. You can also head out at dusk when there's still light in the sky but the atmosphere you're trying to capture is just beginning to build.
 

Jack-O-Lanterns

If your flash is set to automatically fire, switch it off as you'll end up with a shiny looking jack-o-lantern that's lost all of its glow. Instead, use a longer shutter speed, making sure you have your tripod with you to stop shake spoiling your shot. If you find the glow from inside the lantern isn't bright enough, use a few more candles or switch the candles for a torch. You'll just have to position yourself so the torch can't be seen in shot. You can also try bracketing if you find metering to be a problem.

 

 

Portraits

There will, of course, be plenty of people in costume and shooting candids while you're out with your kids trick or treating, should give you plenty of interesting shots. If you're taking photos while they're knocking on a door, position yourself so once the door's open, it won't block your view.

For shots with more impact, get down to the child's level before you take your shot and fill the frame. If you have more than one child to photograph, make sure they're stood close together when taking group shots as people have a habit of putting space between themselves and another person.

Take time to study their makeup and costume to see which parts are the most interesting and should be focused on. If they have a particularly interesting mask, shoot a headshot and if you're going for a full body shot, make sure you take a look at their feet before you do as people tend to head out in shoes that aren't Halloween themed and they can spoil the overall feel of the shot.

Don't forget your basic composition rules such as filling the frame, rule of thirds and giving your subject space to look into. 

 

Small Detail

Look out for the spider's webs, decorations and pumpkins as shots of these, combined with shots of people in fancy dress will give you a great overall account of the day's events.
 

Graveyards

If you fancy heading to a graveyard to shoot some close-ups of detail or want to use them as a backdrop for portraits, have a look at our previous technique: Graveyard Photography
 

Have A Play In Photoshop

If you want to give a house a spooky feel, as David did with his image above, or add a ghost to a shot you've already taken, open up Photoshop and have a play around with the various tools and features to see what Halloween-themed image you can create.  

Every photographer has been there. You're at a dimly lit wedding reception, a moody concert venue, or walking the streets at night, and your camera is begging for a tripod. But tripods aren't always practical, welcome, or even permitted in these environments. The good news is that you don't need one. With the right combination of technique, body mechanics, and smart camera settings, you can consistently capture sharp, usable images in challenging low-light situations without any support gear.

[ Read More ]

Slow season tempts you to coast, but it is also when the biggest jumps in your photo business are possible. Treat the next 60 days as a focused sprint instead of downtime and you can enter the new year with momentum and real bookings already in motion.

[ Read More ]

Micro four thirds always seems to spark an argument about “good enough” image quality, especially if you are used to a big full frame body and heavy glass. When a camera like the OM SYSTEM OM-3 promises serious performance in a small body, the real question is: how far you can push it before you start to miss those larger sensors?

[ Read More ]

Fast, sharp portrait primes at lower prices can change how you shoot, especially if you are trying to build a capable kit without paying flagship money. A lens that claims flagship sharpness at a budget number is worth a closer look.

[ Read More ]

A 102-megapixel medium format sensor with a fixed 35mm lens is not a common combo, and it changes how you work from the first frame. If you care about resolution, cropping flexibility, and traveling lighter without giving up detail, this camera lands in a very specific sweet spot.

[ Read More ]

As the leaves turn colour and fall off the trees they present us with another photographic opportunity to shoot autumn themed images in a very different way. The technique we're talking about is freezing colourful leaves and photographing the ice block.

By freezing whole leaves in a pan of water you'll not only have colourful photography, but interesting and unique ice patterns to photograph too.
 

 

It's best to do this technique outside if you can as the light's better, they'll be less cleaning up and there isn't electrical equipment to fry as there is in a studio!

Kit wise, you'll need a macro lens on the front of your camera so you can get in close to the cracks that spread over the colourful leaf textures in the ice. You can leave the tripod inside, but make sure you have a reflector handy as it will help direct light into the dark areas the sun can not reach.
 

How to make a leaf ice block Place your leaf, vibrant autumn colours work the best, face down in the container, add water and put it in the freezer. If you can, pick leaves with splayed tips so light can shine through them. After about 30-40 minutes check your container as the leaves may have floated to the surface and moved position. Once it's frozen take the container outside and start shooting.   Make a support for your ice block

If you have something that can support your ice block so light can shine through it – great. If not, freeze it in a clear container and place it on a light coloured surface. Shallow containers work the best as you only need a few inches of water for this to work. You may also find coloured paper/card useful to add a punch of colour to the background of the image.

 

Camera settings

 

Small apertures, around f/22, will give you great depth-of-field so you'll be able to shoot patterns right through the ice. Check your camera's meter reading and if needs be spot meter from the leaf so the camera doesn't get confused from the light shining off the ice. Look for interesting designs, areas where air bubbles have gathered and unusual shapes that cut across the colourful leaf.

As it will take a while for the ice to melt, head back inside, put the kettle on and come back out to the ice every half an hour or so to snap the frozen air bubbles and water as it melts.   

 

Discover how to navigate the challenges of rejection in street photography while transforming setbacks into opportunities for growth. What are the secrets to building confidence and fostering meaningful connections with your subjects?

[ Read More ]

An 85mm f/1.8 lens is one of the simplest ways to upgrade portraits, giving tighter framing and strong subject separation without a huge, heavy setup. When that lens also costs about as much as a budget kit zoom, it becomes a very real alternative to saving up for a big-brand prime.

[ Read More ]

There's a moment that separates the professionals from the amateurs in location photography, and it happens long before you ever press the shutter. It's the moment when you realize that the stunning golden hour shoot you envisioned has turned into a nightmare because the sun is directly in your client's eyes, the "perfect" spot is actually locked behind a gate that closes at 4 PM, and your backup plan is to pray for clouds. We've all been there, and we've all learned the hard way that great location photography isn't about happy accidents. It's about meticulous planning, strategic scouting, and having a foolproof system that accounts for everything from parking logistics to power lines.

[ Read More ]

Street photography often seems to be governed by unspoken rules. However, these rules may be stifling your creativity. Let’s explore five common myths about street photography that you should abandon to truly free your artistic vision.

[ Read More ]

The Leica SL line draws you in when you care about strong files, steady handling, and a system that stays dependable in rough conditions. You know how much that matters when you push a camera through long days outside or fast-paced work where you can’t baby your gear.

[ Read More ]

Fast 35mm primes are where a lot of everyday shooting, street work, portraits, and video all collide. When that lens also aims for strong character instead of a sterile, clinical look, it becomes a real decision point if you want your images to feel a bit more distinctive.

[ Read More ]

Packing for out-of-state weddings is where travel logistics and paying clients collide, and sloppy planning can cost real money. When your cameras, clothes, and backup gear all have to survive flights, hotels, and wedding timelines, a solid packing system lets you focus on shooting instead of babysitting bags.

[ Read More ]

As a landscape photographer, wide-angle and ultra wide lenses simply cannot be ignored.

The most common error made when using wide-angle lenses is simply using them solely for their wide-angle, by just trying to get everything into the shot. The resulting picture often simply has too much in it, and the subject is just lost in amongst everything else. Really, you should consider a wide-angle lens not as a way to get more into the picture, but as a way of emphasising foreground detail and perspective.

  Think about your viewpoint

In use, in a landscape situation, select your viewpoint carefully, as well as your foreground detail, and if possible, ensure that foreground element relates directly to the landscape and has a degree of shape harmony with the picture. If, for example, you choose a rock near the side of a lake on a calm day with reflections, ensure the rock is positioned to fit into the shape of the reflections. The benefit of working closely to your foreground subject is that repositioning the camera by only a few inches can make huge changes to the composition and visual balance of your photos. Roads, paths, walls, in fact, all lead-lines become powerful and dramatic, but make sure they are supporting the main subject of your photo rather than simply becoming the subject in themselves.

 

Photos By John Gravett. 

Remember - wider lenses give a greater depth of field

While front-to-back depth of field is useful in wide angle landscapes, it's important to remember that as an ultra wide-angle lens has an inherently greater depth of field than standard lenses, really small apertures might not always be necessary. Often f/11 or f/16 will give front to back sharpness without having to revert to f/22, where many ultra wides may suffer slightly from diffraction.

The same extensive depth of field can often affect choice of graduated filters to use. With longer focal length lenses, hard-edged grads work but when used with an ultrawide lens, they often show a distinct line where they are used, so usually, a soft-edged grad is a better choice, particularly for the stronger ones.

Wide-angles are so often prone to over-use, but used properly and with care, can produce truly amazing, powerful pictures.
 

Article by John Gravett of Lakeland Photographic Holidays - www.lakelandphotohols.com

Ask a non-photographer about their ideal shooting conditions, and they'll probably describe a clear, sunny day with blue skies. Ask a professional, and you'll get a very different answer. The photographers whose work stops you mid-scroll on Instagram aren't waiting for perfect weather. They're actively hunting for the atmospheric conditions that most people hide from.

[ Read More ]