Table of contents for June 2025 in Digital Camera Magazine

Established Digital Camera readers will remember Quintin Lake’s column, ‘The Perimeter’. Running between 2016 and 2020, readers were able to keep up to date with Lake’s 6,835-mile photo walk around the coastline of the UK and see the body of photographic work accumulate – almost 127,000 photos were captured while he walked. And from this month, we will all be able to see the full work in Lake’s new book, The Perimeter, published by Hutchinson Heinemann. Ahead of its publication, we spoke to Lake about how he translated this ambitious long-form project into book form. But travelling further back, for the benefit of any newer readers, why did he choose to walk around the coastline of mainland Britain and photograph it for posterity? “Long walks have been a normal part…

Although this year has seen the commemoration of the end of WWII in Europe (VE Day, 8 May) and in the Pacific (VJ Day – Victory over Japan on 15 August), which brought WWII to an end, the spectacle of pitched battles happens every year. With events like The Victory Show (Leicester) and Military Odyssey (Detling, Kent), you can discover the world of respectful re-enactment as enthusiasts showcase the bravery of all sides, often culminating in a large battle featuring troops, artillery, smoke, tanks, armoured cars and even aircraft! Before you get to that, though, there will be plenty of opportunities to shoot re-enactors with your portrait lens, or in camps with other re-enactors, with a wide-angle lens. Don’t be afraid to interact with them, as they are there to…

There are two main ways of shooting ancient structures such as stone circles. You could shoot them in the first hour after sunrise or before sunset when the light colour changes and warms up the stones themselves, as well as casting long, dramatic shadows across the scene. The second approach is to position the sunset or sunrise behind the standing stones, and expose for the colour and light in the sky, which will leave the stone circle as a silhouette, although you could take multiple exposures and combine them later for an HDR result. 1 Where is the sun? It’s all well and good having a vague idea of where the sun will come up and go down, but if you don’t know the location well, getting the shot you want…

What’s not to love about a stately home? There’s splendid architecture, history, gardens, water features, sculptures and landscaped grounds. The two biggest problems are other people getting in the way and the time of day at which you can shoot. People usually add an interesting element to an exterior shot but when part of indoor photos they tend to distract the eye – your best option here is to find somewhere stable to rest the camera and try a slightly longer exposure of 1 sec so the figures will be blurred as they move. The problem with sunlight is that stately homes tend to be open from spring to autumn, with sunset increasingly being at a time when the public has already been kicked out. The sun is lower in…

Macro magnification, shrinking apertures Q Your review of the new Tamron 90mm macro lens for Nikon and Sony cameras states that the minimum aperture is f/16, but the lab graph goes to f/22. Which is it? Irwin Segel A Tamron states that the narrowest aperture of its 90mm F2.8 Di III Macro VXD is f/16, but that’s not quite the whole story. Due to the design of macro lenses, they transmit less light through to the image sensor of the camera at close focus distances. Typically, this equates to a narrowing of two f/stops of ‘effective’ aperture at full 1.0x magnification, even though the physical aperture remains the same. So for example, a macro lens with an aperture range of f/2.8 to f/16 would have an effective aperture range of…

At this year’s Adobe Max conference, the company announced its biggest update yet. There are too many to list them all, but I’ll mention a couple of standouts that make for genuine quality of life and workflow improvements. Firefly Image Model 4 now renders detail, texture and lighting with eerie realism, a text-to-vector model pipes crisp, infinitely-scalable paths straight into Illustrator, a public-beta video model turns storyboards into motion and the new Firefly Boards infinite canvas lets teams meet in real-time. All of it sits natively inside Creative Cloud. Now you can brainstorm with prompts, refine with Photoshop’s Generative Fill, push, generate or extend clips in Premiere Pro and export them without leaving the ecosystem. Premiere Pro also gets AI-powered contextual search, so that you can find clips from your…

www.canon.co.uk The Canon EOS R5 Mark II has one huge act to follow. The original R5 was the best camera Canon has ever made – so good that, despite being launched in 2020, it’s still better than almost any camera on the market today. However, the Canon EOS R5 Mark II is more than just an obligatory update: this is a transformative camera that shifts the goalposts and proceeds to score thunderous goals. Neural net-powered in-camera upscaling and denoising, monster resolution for stills and video, better-than-ever image stabilisation, never-before-seen autofocus tech that is light years ahead of the competition… the measuring stick just changed here. Build and features The basics are all in the specs (left), but there’s much more to this camera than meets the eye. For example, its…

Documentary photographer Zed Nelson was crowned Photographer of the Year at the Sony World Photography Awards 2025 (see Hotshots, page 41) for his thought-provoking project, The Anthropocene Illusion, which topped the Wildlife and Nature category in the Professional competition. Armed with his Mamiya RZ67 medium-format camera, Nelson’s project spans many continents, capturing humanity’s strained relationship with the natural world and sparking conversation about recognition and change. Nelson received his trophy at a ceremony in London, after which I sat down with him to discuss The Anthropocene Illusion in more detail and explore what it takes to create an award-winning body of work… Congratulations on your win. Can you give a brief overview of the project? It’s titled The Anthropocene Illusion. Scientists today are calling for us to name a new…

Zed Nelson Photographer & filmmaker Having recently been crowned Photographer of the Year at SWPA 2025, we sat down with Nelson to discover more about his winning series of photographs. Page 118 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 64 Quintin Lake Architectural photographer Former Digital Camera column The Perimeter has just gone on sale in book form. We track the progress of Lake’s project from magazine pages to a hardback book. Page 8 David Young Writer & photographer Retired businessman Young is a mine of historic photographic facts and trivia, much of which appears in his book A Brief History of Photography. Page 102 Jon Devo…

1 | CREATIVE Have some fruity fun Wendy Evans concludes the series on using a fish tank for photo projects, by throwing strawberries in it Our final project from this triumvirate of tank-based tasks is to capture the effects of dropping fruit into water. You don’t need to use flash for this to freeze the motion, as we’re only going to be photographing the effects underwater, not the surface splash. However, you do need plenty of light. The first thing is to fill up your tank with tepid water – too hot or too cold and condensation will form. Position your light source above the tank, rather than in front, so you don’t get reflections from the glass. Ideally, place some silver foil under the tank to reflect light upwards,…

The brown pelican is a commonly seen bird along the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific coasts in the Americas. With a typical wingspan of around 2m, it’s an enormous bird – an adult can weigh between 2kg and 5kg. The brown pelicans I photograph are primarily found along the central coast of California. The one featured here was among a group located at Natural Bridges State Beach in Santa Cruz. One of the most spectacular behavioural displays to photograph is their twisting plunge-dive technique into the ocean when capturing small fish. I especially enjoy using a high-speed burst rate when photographing pelicans while they’re landing. This showcases a series of dramatic wing positions as they decelerate and complete the landing process. In flight, they glide ever so elegantly, often only inches…

OVERALL WINNER & WINNER: Wildlife and Nature ‘The Anthropocene Illusion’ Zed Nelson (UK) Series description: In a tiny fraction of the Earth’s history, humans have altered the planet beyond anything it has experienced in tens of millions of years. Scientists are calling it a new epoch: The Anthropocene – the age of humans. Future geologists will find evidence in the rock strata of an unprecedented human impact on our planet, from huge concentrations of plastics to the fallout from the burning of fossil fuels and vast deposits of concrete used to build our cities. We are forcing animals and plants to extinction by removing their habitats and divorcing ourselves from the land we once roamed. Yet we cannot face the true scale of our loss – somewhere within us, the…

These places of worship are often many hundreds of years old and offer the chance to photograph the building as a piece of architecture or as a part of the landscape from the outside. When you get inside, there are mystical figures, stained glass windows, reflective glass surfaces, tombs, memorials and all manner of interesting items to capture. Starting outside, though, and even standing quite far back, you’re still likely to need a wide-angle lens to get everything into the shot. The wider the lens, the more depth of field at every aperture but if there’s nothing particularly interesting in the foreground you can concentrate on the sharpest aperture for your lens and focus on the building itself. If you do find something to lead the eye through the scene,…

You could argue that vintage steam trains fall under transport photography, rather than forming a heritage landscape but nothing says ‘heritage’ more than a steam train puffing its way through glorious countryside. The best way to capture a steam train is to show it as the centrepiece of a landscape shot. You need to leave space in the composition ahead of the train engine, rather than behind the last carriage. Also, if possible, capture the train on a bend in the track, so it appears more pleasing than just a long, straight line. If there’s interesting foreground detail, then put the train on the top horizontal third. You’ll need anything from a gentle wide-angle lens (28mm) to a standard 35mm, even up to a short telephoto of around 50mm, to…

While windmills are a common sight in the countryside, watermills are far less so, being dependent upon both a water supply in bygone days and the ministrations of a heritage organisation today. You won’t see many watermills getting converted into quirky houses the way that windmills can be. The ideal type of watermill to photograph is one that still works, in that it still has a wheel that is turned by water. The composition can be tricky, depending on the size of the wheel and the kind of view of it that you have. Ideally, you should aim to show all of the wheel, the mill building and the stream of water – and all at a pleasing angle, such as this shot of a watermill in the Lake District.…

This month: Close-up and macro Get in close, closer and closer still and explore the world in a fresh way The world is a busy place and, consequently, our photographs can look cluttered and too full of things. However, your superpower is the ability to control what you include in your pictures so that tidier, more compelling and more successful photos are yours for the taking – all you have to do is move your feet or zoom in closer. Most of our photographic lives are spent capturing scenes and subjects some distance from the camera and that’s what we are most comfortable with. However, make the effort to move in close and a world of opportunity awaits. This month’s Camera Clinic turns its lens onto close-up photography – everything…

1 ‘Twr Mawr lighthouse’ by Kevin Winter “On a recent trip to north Wales, I knew I wanted to try capturing a sunset at the old Twr Mawr Lighthouse, located on a stunning tidal island off the coast of Anglesey. It’s a bit of a hike across the beach from the car park but it’s well worth it for a stunning location to watch the sunset.” Instagram: @KRwinterphotos Digital Camera says: Apart from the great lighting, the composition really works here, with the big foreground leading the eye out to the lighthouse and the sea beyond it. 2 ‘Hallett Peak’ by Melissa Richards “Wind gusts of 60-70mph made this a difficult shot of Hallett Peak in Colorado, USA. I had to keep hiding behind some rocks, waiting for the wind to subside…

www.fujifilm.eu Like many photographers, I use a standard zoom lens for everyday shooting. You can’t beat the combination of convenience, versatility and (hopefully) quality. Compared with most ‘kit’ standard zooms with a slower and often variable aperture, the Fujinon XF16-55mm F2.8 R LM WR II is the second edition of the company’s ‘red badge’ range-topping model, with a relatively fast and constant f/2.8 aperture. It also has a 24-84mm ‘effective’ zoom range in full-frame equivalence, the APS-C format X-mount lens equating to a ‘trinity’ standard zoom. Trinity zooms tend to be big, heavy and less convenient for everyday shooting. This one replaces Fujifilm’s nine-year-old original version of the lens, which was already relatively compact and lightweight, with a lens that’s even smaller and lighter, despite bigging up the resolving power…

ENTER THIS URL www.digitalcameraworld.com/dc295 Enter the URL www.digitalcameraworld.com/dc295 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 295’ 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 dcm295-files.zip file icon. When it expands, double-click on Digital Camera 295 files, and the download content…

Whether you fancy yourself as a wedding photographer or have been roped in by friends to do the job (‘You’re a photographer, aren’t you?’), there are few events as stressful, challenging and fun as photographing a wedding. The key to making a good job of it is preparation. Visit the location where you will be shooting a week beforehand, so you can see how wide a lens you will need and how light or dark it is. Meet the person officiating to find out where you can shoot from and whether flash is allowed in the wedding venue. Work out where you will be taking the group shots and whether there is an opportunity for creative photos with just the bride and groom. Always take two cameras and two flashguns…

The genre of landscape astrophotography goes further than images of the stars and realms of the cosmos. It takes us back to our roots, sharing a view our ancestors witnessed thousands of years ago. The connection to the past through stone circles and ancient sites is not to be underestimated, so let’s go on a journey to the heavens. Standing stones and megaliths are believed to have an astronomical connection, as our ancestors watched the rising and setting points of the moon along the horizon. Some standing stones are even thought to align with the brighter planets and deep-sky objects. Although more research is needed, it is a compelling thought that such celestial movements were used to interpret the seasons and the time of year, even down to the day.…

The advantage of living somewhere that has been occupied since Neolithic times is that history litters the landscape. It’s everywhere, from standing stones to medieval bridges, Elizabethan country houses to Norman castles… even cathedrals that are over a thousand years old. Wherever you go in the UK, there are many fantastic and fascinating places to explore and photograph. You can view the architecture on its own merits, or as part of the landscape it was designed to complement. You can also head inside and discover intricate frescoes, stunning ceilings, tombs and relics, all of which pose a different kind of photographic challenge. In this feature, we’ll look at the best way to photograph these elements, which lens apertures are best for each type of location, how to master the challenge…

Old stone bridges can add an element of interest to a scene that might otherwise lack a focal point. Bridges exist to transport people and goods over or between something. Old structures will usually span a river, rather than a valley or estuary, which might need a more modern suspension bridge to do the job. When water is involved, you have a range of possible approaches, starting with early morning when the sky is a deep blue and, on calm days, there can be stunning reflections in the water. In this case, use a circular polariser and rotate it so that it removes as much of the underwater detail as possible. A bridge that’s a half-circle will also make a stunning photo if there’s a perfect reflection. Late afternoon sun…

A pier can add an element of interest to an otherwise bland seaside shot but it also offers the opportunity to discover quirky details in the metalwork and structures on the pier itself. Creating a workable composition depends on what kind of access you have. If the tide is out at least some of the way, then it’s possible to place the pier on the horizon and shoot parallel to the structure. In this case, there’s really only going to be sand and some water between you and it, so the best orientation is horizontal, which will exclude what’s right under your feet. You’re likely to be using anything from a 24-35mm focal length so a narrower aperture will be required to produce enough depth of field. At 35mm, using…

Ghost signs are those faded remnants of commerce you see on the corners or sides of buildings where the original shop or service has long since gone. As they are all that’s remaining, rather than just zooming in and showing the sign, stand a little further back and frame the image so that you can both read the words and see the building they are attached to. Something like a 24-70mm lens will give you the flexibility to shoot a modest wide-angle and zoom in when needed. Then you, and the viewer, can imagine what the building looked like 60, 80 or more years ago. The other type of ghost sign is where it was simply a durable advert for something. These can date back to the 1930s and 40s,…

www.nikon.co.uk The Nikon Z5 II is the successor to the Z 5, released five years earlier as a more affordable entry to Nikon’s full-frame mirrorless ecosystem than its other full-frame cameras of the day, the Z 6 and Z 7. While the original Z 5’s 24.3MP sensor almost matched the 24.5MP of the Z 6, it was underpowered compared to that camera, with a much slower burst rate, underwhelming video and inferior rear LCD display. A lot has changed since then and the Nikon Z5 II has been endowed with much of the same tech that’s trickled into the Z 6III from the cameras above it, including its next-level subject detection autofocus. The Nikon Z5 II is a better camera in almost every way than the Z 6II – making…

www.sony.co.uk Photographers and engineers have dreamed of wide-aperture standard zoom lenses that can rival prime lenses – without being enormous beasts. Could there be a lens that combines the versatility of a standard zoom with the impressive aperture of a prime lens while maintaining a practical size and weight for professional photographers who might otherwise opt for a 24-70mm f/2.8? There have been some notable entries in this category – Sigma’s 28-45mm F1.8 DG DN Art offers a prime-like f/1.8 aperture but sacrifices some focal length. On the other hand, Tamron’s 35-150mm F2-2.8 Di III VXD provides a broad focal range but cannot maintain its maximum aperture throughout. Canon hit this focal length and aperture with its RF 28-70mm F2 USM lens, but couldn’t quite stop the lens from being…

★ Star letter ★ Contrasting colours I decided to attempt to shoot my Leica R5 as a still-life project, an idea I got from the Creative Indoor Projects feature in the March issue of the magazine (291). The Leica was placed on a lightbox with a black card surround. I used my Canon EOS 80D on a tripod at 55mm focal length and set the aperture to f/16 with ISO 100. I shot it with shutter speeds of between 2.5 and 6 sec, using the torch on my iPhone with white paper over the light to paint the camera. Multiple exposures of the necklace were taken from above and placed on black and red card to match the necklace’s colouring. This was shot at 1/15 sec and f/5.6. The watch…