Table of contents for July 2025 in Digital Camera Magazine

Last month’s cover feature about capturing historic structures in scenic photographs (June issue, 295) made one notable omission: the folly. These objects were erected by the owners of landed estates for a variety of reasons – commemorating an eminent family member, a battle or military campaign of national significance, a monarch or a public figure – or sometimes simply because the landowner wanted to have another prominent display of their wealth. So this month, we’re making up for this oversight with a visit to Hawkstone Park Follies in Shropshire, where photographer Emma Finch has arranged a ‘Couture in Nature’ shoot. Finch is a leading practitioner of photography that empowers women and she previously appeared in our One to One shoot at Allerton Castle (Spring issue, 293), which was organised by…

There are over 130 breeds of duck in the world, from the rarest, the scaup, to the most common, the mallard, which you’ll find everywhere. There’s even a duck that’s not actually a duck. That’s the muscovy, which has the body of a duck but hisses like a goose, roosts like a chicken and has a breast like a turkey. It’s a South American waterfowl and sounds delicious. Anyway, to photograph our feathery friends you want them to be doing something – either landing, taking off or taking umbrage with other ducks. If they are on your local duck pond, you should be able to get a close-up shot with a 150-200mm lens, but if they’re in the middle of a lake, you might need a 300-800mm focal length. Metering…

When you think of intentional camera movement (ICM) and trees, the usual practice is an upward motion, with a wiggle to emphasise the tree trunk. However, when we consider flowering trees, such as cherry blossom, weeping willow, crabapple and magnolia, other creative possibilities emerge. Some of these trees appear in spring, while others only flower in summer, giving you plenty of opportunity to create some interesting effects. Rather than concentrating on the tree trunks, the idea is to exaggerate the flowering part of the tree, creating a blaze of colour, especially on a sunny day when you have a blue sky to set it against. The sunnier the conditions, though, the harder it is to get the longer exposure time needed for a slow capture. Consequently, using a telephoto lens…

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This month: The seaside Head to the coast this summer for photo opportunities galore Candy floss, sandcastles and fish and chips might be your idea of seaside heaven – or perhaps sea air, tranquillity and big skies are more to your taste? Whatever floats your boat, the lure of the coast for photography is irresistible. Summer seaside shooting has many pros but just as many cons. Long hours of daylight and warmer temperatures make it more appealing, but the flipside is busy resorts, especially during the school holidays, which means longer journey times, parking hell and people strolling into your meticulously crafted compositions. Of course, it depends on what you want to achieve with your camera. You might appreciate the hustle and bustle of busy resorts and the opportunities for…

MEET YOUR TRAINERS Edit like a pro with their expert insights James Abbott Specialising in landscapes and portraits, James Abbott is an advanced Photoshop user and has created hundreds of tutorials. James Paterson With over a decade as a writer and photographer, James Paterson knows which Photoshop and Lightroom tools and techniques matter most. Sean McCormack A photographer and writer based in Galway, Ireland, Sean McCormack is the author of books including The Indispensable Guide to Lightroom CC. Wendy Evans LRPS The author of over a dozen books on the subjects of photography, CGI and Photoshop, Wendy Evans has used Photoshop since version 3.0.…

www.sigmauk.com Perhaps it’s an L-Mount Alliance in-joke, but the Sigma BF just out-Leica’d Leica. Maybe the two companies placed a wager on whether Sigma would be first to outdo Leica’s cameras or Leica would be first to outdo Sigma’s lenses. Either way, the Sigma BF is a clever little camera for some familiar reasons. It’s so beautiful that it makes your heart skip a beat. It’s made from a single block of aluminium. It boasts a bountiful internal memory. It strips physical controls and an EVF in favour of a friction-free touchscreen-driven experience. And it uses the L-Mount. What has that got to do with Leica? Because back in 2014, it launched the Leica T – a camera that was also achingly beautiful, made from a single block of aluminium,…

www.excire.com Excire claims that its Foto 2025 software can provide ‘flawless photo management’ using powerful built-in AI to find and cull images. New features for this latest version include the ability to analyse video clips, face-tagging using AI to quickly find images of specific people in your collection, and the implementation of AI-powered culling to root out your best shots based on how sharp they are, whether subjects have their eyes open or are smiling, and also using Excire’s own aesthetic score which it applies to each and every photo you analyse, along with adding keywords. Interface and usability The interface will feel familiar to anyone upgrading from Excire Foto 2024; for anyone new to the software, it’s easy to navigate and use. Launch the application and a comprehensive 12-step…

Emma Finch Photographer Whether it’s boudoir or family photography, Emma Finch loves to celebrate the female form. We join her on location in Shropshire for a ‘couture in nature’ shoot. Page 8 Will Cheung Photographer & writer A fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and the former editor of many photography titles, Cheung is the man behind Camera Clinic, which continues on page 72 Kate Kirkman Photographer Shooting weddings led to Kate Kirkman adding food photography to her skillset. She explains her style, and how she captures photos to make you feel hungry. Page 100 Chris Coe Photographer and educator The Travel Photographer of the year founder offers his strategies for success in the 2025 edition of the competition, which is now open for entries. Page 118 Jon Devo Photographer…

1 | PHOTOSHOOT Mill around with your camera Wendy Evans explains how to capture windmills and watermills The countryside is dotted with examples of early technology in the form of wind and water-powered mills. Both types of mill used the power of nature to crank machinery that ground flour, pumped water or, in modern times, is used to generate electricity. We needn’t concern ourselves with the bird-battering eyesores of today; what we want to photograph are the mills of yesteryear. For windmills, that means capturing them as part of the landscape, rather than just a close-up shot. It’s better to show them in the context of the local environment. You can also get inside some windmills, especially ones that still work, to photograph the various floors and machinery. Also, on…

The advent of drone photography has meant that some traditional photographic subjects like machines harvesting wheat can be approached from a fresh perspective. Taking heed of safety concerns and permissions, why not send your drone out over a machine as it chops down the crop and funnels it into a storage container? While you can shoot this from an angle, one of the more interesting options is to shoot straight down, so that it all becomes an exercise in geometric shapes. You have the lines of the crop and harvested debris, offset by shadows from the late evening sun. Use your tips cards This project features in this month’s photo tips cards, which are also available as a digital download (see p6). For a handy guide to capturing photos like…

Whether it’s your offspring or just because another parent knows you’re handy with a camera, you may be tasked with capturing a pre-prom group photo of over-dressed teens. Rather than muttering, ‘Why me?’, here are some ideas for you to shoot decent pre-prom pics. Be aware that groups come with more challenges than dealing with just two excitable youngsters. The first decision is the choice of location, which means having a nice background rather than your front room or a car park. 1 Choice of lens This is more complex than you might think. To get everyone into a group shot you may be tempted to go wide-angle, but resist this temptation as you’ll get horrible distortion. The further you can stand back and zoom in, the better. Anything over…

Welcome to our monthly reader photo challenge, where the winning image will feature in the magazine so you can claim bragging rights over everyone else who entered. This month, the theme is ‘Wildlife’, so you can feature birds, foxes and big cats (but not Mr Whiskers on the back lawn). It must be wild and alive, so this excludes farm animals (we did that last month). Shots of animals at safari parks are allowed, as the carnivores would eat you given half a chance. So let’s get to see your most dramatic and wild photos! Enter via email or Facebook Email digitalcamera@futurenet.com with ‘Wildlife’ as the subject. Please attach your entry and include a brief description of the image, such as the location and settings. Alternatively, look for the ‘Wildlife’…

OVERALL WINNER and WINNER: Food for the Family (supported by the Felix Project) ‘The Elderly Having Delicious Food’ Xiaoling Li (China) On an early spring afternoon in Shuangliu Ancient Town, Sichuan Province, China, five elderly ladies in their eighties sit together. Wearing colourful jackets and wool hats, they happily eat the famous Sichuan snack of spring rolls. A wrap of thin homemade dough, filled with cucumber, carrot and shredded scallions, drizzled with green mustard, Sichuan pepper, red oil and sweet sauce, and sprinkled with sesame seeds. They are ‘setting up a Dragon Gate formation’ – an expression used in China to refer to neighbourhood friends coming together to chat, gossip and share stories. Food makes these people happy; they enjoy a beautiful and joyful life. WINNER: Bring Home the Harvest…

However good a photo of a coastal scene is, can it ever really compare to the beauty of a Turner painting? Perhaps not, but there is a simple way to give your landscapes the look of an old master. Photoshop’s Color Transfer filter lets you copy the colour scheme of an image – whether it’s a photo, a painting or anything else – and transfer it to your own images. It’s one of Photoshop’s Neural Filters, which means it uses AI to create the effect. Color Transfer is in Beta mode so it isn’t a fully rounded filter yet – and it often displays haphazard results – but if you hit upon the right combination of reference image and photo, the effect can be magical. Here, we can evoke the…

Z fc speed thriller Q I’d like to get a fast prime lens for my Nikon Z fc – one with a fairly standard focal length and preferably a similar retro look and feel. Any ideas? Rick Gifford A You can use any full-frame compatible Z system lens on your DX (APS-C format) Z fc camera, but Nikon currently only makes one specifically DX format prime lens. That’s the Nikon Z DX 24mm f/1.7 and while it’s a pretty good performer, it’s an uninspiring chunk of plastic. Viltrox makes a trilogy of retro-styled DX format 23mm, 33mm and 56mm metal-bodied f/1.4 lenses, all of which have an aperture control ring and fit well with the design ethos of the Z fc. They cost around £229 ($239) each. They’re also available in…

www.nikon.co.uk You pay your money and you take your choice, as the saying goes. But pricing and choices can be difficult to navigate with some of Nikon’s prime lenses, especially those with popular focal lengths. When the Z system was in its infancy, the first trilogy of upmarket S-line primes had an f/1.8 rather than f/1.4 aperture rating, such as the Nikkor Z 35mm f/1.8 S, Z 50mm f/1.8 S and Z 85mm f/1.8 S. Image quality and all-round performance were good and they were relatively compact and lightweight, but they weren’t as fast as the f/1.4 lenses to which professional photographers are more accustomed. Perhaps more surprisingly, Nikon recently launched the Nikkor Z 35mm f/1.4 and Z 50mm f/1.4, which are naturally faster but lack S-line credentials and are…

ENTER THIS URL www.digitalcameraworld.com/dc296 Enter the URL www.digitalcameraworld.com/dc296 into the destination bar of your internet browser – we’re using Google Chrome, but other browsers work in a similar way. Please do not enter it in any search field or search bar. This will take you to a page on our website. JUST CLICK THE HIGHLIGHTED LINK Click on the link labelled ‘Download the files for Digital Camera 296’ and your download will start, delivered from our own server. Please override any browser warnings about downloading from a non-secure source – our server is safe! ACCESS YOUR FILES Open the. zip In your Downloads folder, or wherever you chose to download your files, double-click the dcm296-files.zip file icon. When it expands, double-click on Digital Camera 296 files, and the download content…

Don’t worry, we’re not rubbing amulets and chanting a benediction to higher powers – this month’s creative project uses sunlight and chemicals to work its magic, with a little digital help. We are, of course, talking about cyanotypes, which consist of photo-reactive salts embedded into paper that react to sunlight. You create your print by putting things on top of the paper, to reduce or block the sunlight. Where the sun hits the paper it turns blue, where it’s blocked it stays white – once you’ve washed the reactive chemicals off. The trick is to get the exposure time right. This can be anything from 15-30 minutes, depending on how bright the sunlight is and the suitability of the image. It’s not advisable to try this when it’s cloudy or…

Wherever you go on holiday, a new country or city provides fresh inspiration to capture with your camera. Over the following 10 pages, we’ll help you approach your next adventure with an enthusiasm for telling visual stories about the people you meet and places you encounter on your journey. Few photographic genres are as broad as travel photography. Take a look at the categories in any global travel competition and you’ll realise just how diverse this subject is. For this feature, we’ll concentrate on a tighter definition, one that essentially defines travel photography as the visual art of conveying the essence of a place and its people. Capturing a sense of a country’s culture takes effort, a keen eye for detail and good communication skills. You have to immerse yourself…

1 ‘Loch Ba’ by John Cuthbert ARPS “This image was captured about an hour before sunset, during a serene evening on the extraordinary lunar-like landscape of Rannoch Moor, near Glencoe, Scotland. The stillness and the quality of light were utterly sublime, making for an unforgettable moment that’s forever etched in my memory.” Instagram: @jcstudios12345 Digital Camera says: This has everything you want in a landscape photo – fantastic light and clouds, a perfect reflection, an interesting background and some big foreground interest. 2 ‘Cardinal’ by Jonathon Isola “This photograph was taken at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Superior, Arizona, USA. I saw this northern cardinal in a tree with the bird standing out from the green leaves – I hadn’t seen a cardinal in the area in a long time.…

Since 2009, the British Wildlife Photography Awards has been showcasing the best nature photos captured in Britain, raising awareness of the biodiversity and the varied species and habitats on these islands. The 2025 edition of the competition featured 10 categories that were open to adults and three for young wildlife photographers aged under 11 and up to 17. The winners were revealed earlier this year and John Waters topped the Animal Behaviour category for his photo titled ‘Butterfly Face-off’. This striking image of two speckled wood butterflies was captured using a Canon EOS 5D Mark III DSLR and an unusual optic: a Laowa 24mm f/14 2x Macro Probe lens, which created the interesting bokeh effect. Unlike traditional macro lenses that have longer focal lengths and focusing distances to keep photographers…

There’s nothing like getting out into nature while the sun is shining. Even better if you’re playing with new gear and using new techniques. Take this photo for instance. It was taken at f/2 and 1/800 sec at ISO 200, with flash. Usually, you’d expect that to mean that someone has used High-Speed Sync, but not here. The camera was Fujifilm’s X100VI, which features a leaf shutter. This allows much higher sync speed, so you need less flash power – in this case, a Godox AD100Pro with an SMDV Flip 32 softbox. I was testing to see if this was a viable kit for location portraits and it excelled. Now comes the fun bit; the edit. You have so many options in editing – you may wish to play into…

For part 2 (issue 295, June), we looked at a typical workflow, and now we’re going to buildon that in the next two parts by investigating the options in the Light and Colour palettes. This means that before we embark on the edits, the basics such as editing colour space and white balance correction will already have been done. So navigate to the photo you want to edit in the PhotoLibrary file browser, select it and click on Customize. Make your basic edits then click the icon for the Light palette on the right. If you’re following along with the tutorial image (see download folder), you’ll see it was a dismal, misty day so the light is flat and uninteresting. 1 Exposure correction Click on the Exposure toggle to activate and…

Fujifilm launches X half camera New product aims to recreate the experience of half-frame film photography in digital form – and is designed for photographers craving a fun way to get unique and characterful film-like photos Introducing the Fujifilm X half, the brand’s take on a half-frame film camera but in digital form. Styled like Fujifilm’s popular X100VI, the X half shrinks that classic rangefinder style down into a palm-sized body weighing just 240g. Inside sits a one-inch back side illuminated sensor, although Fujifilm has rotated the sensor 90º and cropped it to 3:4 to give the camera its signature vertical ‘halfframe’ look – and an orientation that’s much more social media-friendly. The X half’s top plate has a film camerainspired wind lever, which accesses the camera’s 2-in-1 mode. Wind…

www.sigmauk.com There has been a reversal of fortunes. Back when DSLRs were the order of the day, Tamron led the way in superzoom territory, launching lenses with ever greater ‘world-first’ and ‘world-best’ zoom ranges. These included the Tamron 16-300mm F3.5-6.3 Di II VC PZD Macro and the Tamron 18-400mm F3.5-6.3 Di II VC HLD, although the latter was too hefty to qualify as a ‘travel lens’. At that time, the mightiest Sigma superzoom was the Sigma 18-300mm F3.5-6.3 DC Macro OS HSM | C, which lacked the wide-angle extremity of the Tamron 16-300mm. Fast forward to the mirrorless era and Tamron released the Tamron 18-300mm F3.5-6.3 Di III-A VC VXD for APS-C format Fujifilm X and Sony E cameras back in 2021. But now it’s Sigma’s turn to rule the…