Table of contents for November 2025 in Digital Camera Magazine

Atlantic puffin “An Atlantic puffin coming into land at Farne Island, Northumberland, with a beak full of sand eels. The island is a sanctuary for seabirds and seals.” Eurasian brown bear “A Eurasian brown bear sitting in a lake in Finland close to the Russian border, enjoying a fish for dinner before hibernation time.” Kingfishers “A male and a female lock beaks in a battle for territory. In breeding season, they could mate, but outside of the season, they fight for territory instead.”…

Sure, you can love a crotch rocket, a trials bike or a tourer with more baggage than someone on their fourth marriage, but if there’s one type of motorbike that says ‘open road’, it’s a cruiser. Or a cafe racer. Or something like this Royal Enfield Classic 350. OK, that’s three things, but you get the idea – they’re all classic motorbikes. So this month, set yourself the challenge of finding someone who owns one so you can shoot it. And if you don’t move in the right circles, then surely there’s a pension pot or college fund that’s going to waste? Buying a motorbike is never a bad idea; just hide it in the garage afterwards if there are going to be issues with a more responsible other half.…

One of the most frequently asked questions is, ‘Which lens is best for landscape photography?’ There is no easy answer, since almost any lens can be used to shoot images that fall within a broad definition of the genre. That said, the wide-angle lens is often the landscape photographer’s choice. The typical scenic covers a large area, so you want an optical view that fits as much as possible into the frame. But the right lens depends on what you’re shooting. The focal length choice is dictated by the image you want and the compositional elements you can use. If your scene includes interesting elements close by, a wide-angle lens is likely to be the right tool. However, if your main focal point is some distance away, using a longer…

This month: Low light As the longer nights draw in, now is the time to master your low-light skills We wouldn’t be here without the sun, but in terms of photography, it presents all sorts of opportunities and challenges. When the skies are clear, bright light means dealing with high contrast and careful metering, but when the sun isn’t around, we must tackle different situations. Knowing how to solve the problems of low-light shooting is a fundamental skill that will take your pictures to the next level. Let’s start by clarifying what we mean by ‘low light’. While there’s no absolute definition, low light can mean anything from candlelight, dim interiors and night scenes to overcast days and twilight. How you deal with a situation depends on what you’re shooting.…

You know the feeling. You’ve captured a gorgeous portrait of your subject, but the background is in a fist fight, flailing for Maybe it’s the busy bookshelf behind them, or the twigs trailing into frame. The light on their face is perfect, the expression is pristine, but your eyes keep wandering to everything else in the frame. It could be that you didn’t have a wide enough aperture to blur the background naturally. Even with fast prime lenses, such as a 85mm f/1.4 or a 50mm f/1.8, you don’t always get the separation you’re after. Or you needed more depth of field for the face to be in proper focus, but your busy background felt it necessary to intrude. This is where Lens Blur comes to the rescue. This panel…

Lookup tables (LUTs) traditionally used to give a consistent look and feel to film projects or commercial photos, but there’s no reason why you can’t use them to give your images a different look. They work by creating a table consisting of the original colour values in an image and transposing them into different shades. Not only can you use the ones supplied with Photoshop, you can also create your own to be used on new images – that’s what this tutorial is about. It’s also important to realise that if the image you apply the new LUT to doesn’t contain any of the shades that are in the table, then nothing will change. For that reason, it’s best to create the LUT from an image that either has a…

Q I’d like to step up from using my smartphone and buy a used ‘proper’ interchangeable lens camera. What’s a compact and cheap but good option? Fred Haynes A Matthew recommends… Sony A6000 I’ve actually just bought a used Sony A6000 for testing and reviewing APS-C format E-mount lenses. It works a treat, is refreshingly compact and lightweight, plus it’s a bargain at the price. Released (year): 2014 Price new: £500/$650 ‘Excellent’ £375/$450 ‘Good’ £325/$420 The Sony A6000 launched with much fanfare, was billed as having the fastest autofocus system among APS-C format cameras with interchangeable lenses. The hybrid AF system is still impressive today, combining 179 speedy phase-detection points with high-precision contrast-detection. That comes with an 11fps maximum frame rate, complete with continuous autofocus. Other highlights include a 24.3MP image sensor, OLED…

The new iPhone has a square front-facing sensor; so does the DJI Osmo 360. This might seem like a minor hardware change, but it’s a response to a fundamental problem in modern content creation. For most of the past century, we’ve been beholden to the rectangle, but we are now seeing a move towards a more flexible future. This philosophical shift first took root in the mirrorless camera world with a legacy cinema-inspired concept called ‘Open Gate’. While most cameras crop a rectangular video from the sensor, Open Gate captures a full readout from the entire sensor area. Popularised by Lumix in cameras like the S5 II and GH6, it gives videographers a taller canvas to work with. They can shoot a scene and crop it to fit a 16:9…

www.dji.com Some might have viewed the limits on drones weighing over 250g in the UK as a restriction on consumer tech – the require users flying camera weighing over 250g to register an operator and pass a mandatory set by the Civil Aviation Authority However, DJI seems to have them as a challenge to cram as pro tech as possible into what is the most consumer-friendly category of camera drone. The reality is, of course, a little more complex. With the lighter category of drone, professionals can also take advantage of rules that let them fly closer to people, so it makes sense for everyone to have higher-spec and lower-weight drones. The Mini 5 Pro is the latest in DJI’s series of flagship sub-250g drones and it is impressive, bringing…

The tenth book in the Remembering Wildlife conservation series has just gone on sale. 10 Years of includes some of the best images the previous books, together with a new that showcases the pangolin – the most trafficked mammal. Buyers can view the 20 winning images from the Wildlife competition that in issue 294 of Digital Camera. A 200-page hardback, 10 Years of Remembering Wildlife is the biggest book in the series so far. Contributing professional wildlife photographers include Marsel van Oosten, Frans Lanting, Greg du Toit, Jonathan and Angela Scott, and many more. Proceeds from 10 Years of Remembering Wildlife will be allocated to conservation projects for pangolin and the other species in the series. To date, Remembering Wildlife has raised more than £1.23m ($1.585m) for conservation projects. In…

Paul Browning Photographer With a CV covering wildlife photography assignments in the UK and Europe, Paul was an ideal choice to mentor one lucky reader in this month’s Apprentice. Page 8 Will Cheung Photographer and writer A fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and the former editor of many photography titles, Will is the man behind Camera Clinic, which continues on page 64 Wes Kristopher Photographer His image ‘Over Owler Tor’ graces this issue’s cover, so go behind the scenes with this amateur landscape photographer to find out how it was captured. Page 78 Andrew James Photographer and writer Regular contributor Andrew used to helm Photo Answers – this month, he offers his hints, tips and insights for shooting successful landscape photographs. Page 52 Jon Devo Photographer & writer Our…

1 Focal length reach At Wildlife Dreams, up to 400mm on a full-frame camera is an ideal focal length, given the distance between the windows and the feeding stations. A 100-400mm zoom is ideal as the reach can be extended with a teleconverter. 2 Capture cards You will see lots of animals at Wildlife Dreams, so your shutter button will be well used. Make sure you can capture all the action by taking multiple memory cards – having a computer for doing daily file dumps will be useful, too. 3 Battery charging Continuous shooting won’t just fill up your memory cards – it will also drain your batteries quickly, especially when using mirrorless bodies. So stay powered up during your trip by making sure you bring multiple batteries, a charger and a plug…

10 things you can shoot and create this month, from trees and conkers to mountains and motorbikes Precise composition of a photograph is essential for a successful result. As a photographer, there are many aspects you can control, including adjusting and optimising the aperture, ISO and shutter speed. However, there are also factors you cannot control, especially when shooting outdoors in urban areas. When photographing interesting or well-known buildings, particularly in tourist hotspots, one common problem is that cars, people and even birds can become unwanted distractions, dominating the frame and drawing attention away from the architecture. To achieve a clean image, you must either spend a long time waiting for the all-clear or put in lots of extra work at the post-production stage. Thankfully, by using simple photographic methods,…

Photographing a fox in the golden light of a setting sun is one of the most rewarding experiences for a wildlife photographer. The warm tones of late evening not only flatter the subject but also create an atmosphere that feels both magical and timeless. The low angle of the sun produces long shadows and soft highlights, accentuating the fox’s fur and revealing texture that would be lost in harsher light. When approaching such a moment, patience and preparation are key. A long lens is essential, allowing you to keep your distance so the animal behaves naturally. Look for opportunities where the fox moves into open patches of light – a clearing, a meadow edge or even a rise in the landscape. The contrast between illuminated fur and a darker background…

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. For November, the theme is ‘Cityscapes’. While your photo can certainly feature people, for scale if nothing else, we’re not looking for street photography here. The star is the city, with architecture, reflections and neon lighting all key ingredients. You can shoot during the day or go for long exposures at night; the choice is yours, so let’s see those city shots. Enter via email or Facebook Email digitalcamera@futurenet.com with ‘Cityscapes’ as the subject. Please attach your entry and include a brief description of the image. Or look for the ‘Cityscapes’ post at: www.facebook.com/digitalcameraworld and upload your entry into the feed under the…

When we talk about the composition of a landscape, we’re talking about its structure and design. Many newcomers initially think that a picture is captured just as you see it, but with a bit of experience, we come to understand that we are actually trying to order what’s in front of us to produce an image with the maximum impact. We are trying to present the scene faithfully, but enhanced by how we arrange the elements within the frame. The composition of your photo is hugely influenced by a series of choices you make as a photographer. This starts with focal length, as we’ve discussed, but also where you position the camera, the depth of field, shutter speed and the available light. All these elements will have a factor in…

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sigmauk.com The CEO of Sigma, Kazuto Yamaski, referred to the company’s 300-600mm F4 DG OS Sports as a ‘dream lens’ and it’s easy to see why. When it comes to telephoto reach, you often need a lens that goes the distance, especially for genres such as sports and wildlife photography. Get too close to wildlife and, depending on what you’re shooting, you’ll either scare it away or get eaten alive. And for freezing sports action without sending your camera’s ISO into the stratosphere, as well as gaining a tight depth of field for isolating the main subject within a scene, a fast aperture is essential. Traditionally, lenses like the Canon RF 400mm F2.8L IS USM and RF 600mm F4 are the pro choice, but these are extremely pricey and are…

Star letter: Upon reflection I really enjoyed your August issue (297) and saved both the landscape feature and the September issue (298) to read during a seven-hour flight. Originating from Plymouth, I visit Devon and Cornwall a few times a year. On my last visit, I decided to capture some shots of The Barbican in Plymouth with reflections and sunrise. The weather conditions were predicted to be calm and the tide times showed the water level at the Barbican harbour would be adequate. But when I got up early that morning, the sky was cloudy and so my expectations of seeing a sunrise were quashed. However, after setting up my tripod and composing the frame, the sun shone through suddenly, bathing the far-end buildings in a golden light. I returned…

ENTER THIS URL www.digitalcameraworld.com/dc300 Enter the URL www.digitalcameraworld.com/dc300 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 300’ 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 download your files, double-click the dcm300-files.zip file icon. When it expands, double-click on Digital Camera 300 files, and the download content will display…

1 ISO settings While modern digital cameras generally handle image noise well, Paul advised Kate to keep her ISO as low as possible. He explained that he mainly shoots in the ISO 400-1600 range to capture the best image quality. 2 Use the histogram Paul monitors his histogram to make sure his exposures are spot-on. He wants to keep the graph away from the left edge, because “noise lives in the shadows”, so he will adjust his aperture and shutter speed settings accordingly. 3 ’Punching in’ If you find yourself needing more focal reach than your lens can offer, then attach a teleconverter. But if there’s a risk of missing a shot while fitting it, then do it digitally – on a full-frame camera, select APS-C or Crop mode.…

The tug-of-war is one of those traditional sports that can probably trace its roots back to medieval pageantry, but these days it seems pointless unless you’ve spent five hours in a pub first. The game involves two teams of people on either end of a length of rope, who then spend the next five minutes grunting and swearing as they attempt to drag the other team over the winning line. You may question the point of the sport, but why not grab your camera and capture both the spectacle of the event and the strained expressions of those taking part? There are two ways of shooting the tug-of-war; the first is a landscape orientation with a jaunty angle from the top to the bottom corner. This captures the people and…

The Collins dictionary defines an arboretum as ‘a place where trees or shrubs are cultivated for their scientific or educational interest’, but a more accurate definition might be ‘a place you can go to capture a variety of interesting photos, from landscape to abstract, patterns and macro’. The best time to go to one is, of course, autumn, because of the red and yellow colours adding to the greens of the all-year-round foliage. Which lenses should I take, you ask? Surprisingly, I wouldn’t go with a super wide-angle lens (like 18mm), as the widest you’re likely to need is 24-28mm and you’ll often want to zoom in to frame specific features. The other consideration is that this is a forest, so if you need more space for a shot, simply…

North Wales offers endless possibilities for landscape photography, but what draws me back time and time again is the variety of compositions you can find. One of the most iconic locations in the Ogwen Valley is the view from halfway up the mountain, Pen yr Ole Wen. It’s easy to spend a lot of time on this mountain as there is plenty to photograph, such as the river at various points and interesting rocks scattered on the mountainside. If you venture up a little further, there is a beautiful stone wall with a ladder stile that makes for an excellent combination of elements. In the composition featured above, a small river called Afon Lloer cascades down the mountain and over this small waterfall. When the weather is drab and grey,…

Landscape photography is the art of capturing the raw beauty and emotion of the natural world through the lens. Yet capturing stunning landscapes isn’t just about being in the right place; it’s about seeing it the right way by bringing together the most important elements of light and composition. A thoughtful composition navigates the viewer’s eye, while atmospheric lighting brings out depth, mood and detail. Mastering these basics will transform your images from ordinary to unforgettable. Whether it’s a silhouetted industrial scene, a hidden cove or a quiet woodland path, successful landscape photography challenges us to observe and compose effectively, responding to ever-changing light and conditions. Over the next few pages, we’ll look at the important elements for shooting consistently successful landscape photographs. PRO SHOT Mountain landscape in blue hour…

The ability to apply masks to selected areas of our photographs in both Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw has made us less reliant on using Photoshop in conjunction with our processing. Earlier this year, Adobe added a Landscape Mask to its masking options, which has made the process even more straightforward. The Landscape Mask analyses an image using AI, then divides it into a series of automatically generated masks. Potentially, it can create seven different masks, including Sky, Mountains, Water, Natural ground, Vegetation, Architecture and Artificial ground, depending on what is included in the composition. Typically, it will highlight between three and five separate masks to individually adjust. Don’t assume that the AI knows best and only rely on the ones automatically selected. You may need to use other masks,…

1 ‘Breaking Inversion’ by Ben Dale “As I dropped into Keswick and Derwentwater from the A66, I noticed that a cloud inversion was engulfing the whole area. I decided that the fastest way to get above it would be to climb Catbells, hopefully before the clouds disappeared.” Instagram: @bendale.photography Digital Camera says: There’s a lovely contrast between the sun breaking through at the top and the low-lying cloud elsewhere. 2 ‘Puffin’ by Andy Vaughan “This is my puffin shot from Skomer Island off the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales. The usual puffin shot is with sand eels, but I wanted to try to capture them collecting for pufflings nesting in burrows, which fewer people photograph.” Taken on a Lumix G9, exposure: 1/500 sec at f/4.5, ISO 200. Instagram: @andy_vaughan03 Digital Camera says: Indeed,…

There are many ways to convert black and white images, from simple desaturation to complex colour mode changes. One of the easiest options is through Adobe’s Profile browser. This indispensable tool is found within Photoshop’s Camera Raw and Lightroom’s Develop Module, and offers a host of great starting points for editing, from creative colour shifts to camera matching profiles. For fans of black and white images, the B&W set features lots of excellent recipes for monochrome conversions. What’s more, alongside the B&W set, there is a newer Adaptive set with an intriguing addition: the Adaptive B&W profile. Like other Adaptive profiles, Adaptive B&W employs AI to analyse the content of the image and come up with a tailored monochrome conversion. As such, it can often take some of the legwork…

Portrait prime time Q I’d love a Sony FE 85mm F1.4 GM II for portraiture with my A7 III, but it’s way outside my price range. Can you suggest a more budget-friendly option? Ellie Shrives A That G Master prime is a fabulous lens for portraiture, but at around £1,799 ($1,948) it’s a bit pricey for many people. The same goes for the Sony FE 135mm F1.8 GM, which costs £1,599 ($2,198). Thankfully, there are some standout bargains on the market that deliver excellent performance at extremely competitive prices. The relatively simple and straightforward LK Samyang AF 85mm F1.8 P FE is one of a new range of ‘Prima’ prime lenses for Sony E-mount cameras, and costs £348 ($449). If you’d rather have a more sophisticated lens with a faster…

www.panasonic.com Panasonic is no stranger to small interchangeable lens cameras, such as the Lumix LX100 II or Lumix GX85/80. However, with the Lumix GX9 the last of that type to be released in 2019, they appeared to have fallen out of favour. But as small, well-specified compact interchangeable lens cameras, such as the Ricoh GR III, Fujifilm X100VI and Sony A6700, make a return, the brand has launched the Lumix S9 to compete. This is no sequel to one of its previous Lumix cameras; Panasonic has made a few changes. The Lumix S9 swaps the MFT sensor for a full-frame one and gets rid of the viewfinder. No longer a rangefinder, yet not a full compact, there’s nothing else like the S9 on the market. Panasonic is aiming this camera…

www.viltrox.co.uk Before I get into this review, I have to confess to having a bit of a Viltrox habit. I bought a Nikon Z fc a while ago and wanted some like-minded prime lenses to go with it, which looked and felt the part. Eventually, I settled on the Viltrox 13mm, 23mm, 33mm and 56mm f/1.4 primes, which are available for APS-C format Fujifilm X, Nikon Z and Sony Alpha mirrorless cameras. These all have a full metal build and aperture control rings, which suit the Z fc’s handling. The newer Air series of lenses from Viltrox retain metal mounting plates but have plastic barrels, slower aperture ratings and don’t have aperture rings, making them as compact and lightweight as possible. I’ve reviewed the APS-C format AF 25mm F1.7 Air,…