RPS Digital Imaging DIGIT 107

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DIGIT

UPCOMING DIGITAL IMAGING EVENTS

IN PREVIOUS ISSUES

Details of all Digital Imaging events are available on its website at rps.org/groups/digital-imaging/

All previous issues are available from the DIGIT Archive at rps.org/di/digit-archive/ DIGIT 104 2025 Issue 2

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Group events Contacts From the chair Janet Haines ARPS Editorial Gary Beaton Pixels and perspectives Edmund Nägele FRPS My journey photographing the night sky Colin Smith LRPS War in Europe Jonathan Vaines Portraits - the human element?

Or the human elephant in the room?

Michael O’Sullivan FRPS Type matters...

Andrew N Gagg FRPS Is AI all bad?

Bob Sanders DIGIT Challenge: It’s Mine Sheila Haycox ARPS DIGIT Challenge: Still-Life ICM Susanna Hoare ARPS In previous issues

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Group events Contacts From the chair Janet Haines Editorial Gary Beaton Earth and sky: landscape and aerial Mieke Boynton Portraits - the human element?

Or the human elephant in the room?

Michael O’Sullivan FRPS Noise reduction in HDR merges Sean Goodhart ARPS Photographing Shetland’s underwater world across the seasons Billy Arthur Don’t say cheese: a guide to photographing children naturally Emma Finch Jasper wildfire Theresa Bradley In previous issues

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Group events Contacts From the chair Janet Haines ARPS Editorial Gary Beaton Foreword Simon Hill CPhot HonFRPS It needs someone to give it scale Yasser Alaa Mobarak Uncanny memories and dreams Michelle Wang LRPS Between borders: a life in translation Paula Regina Corazón LRPS Finding home in Amsterdam through instant photography Luca Arfini I wonder if I could.......?

Steven Munday-Durant ARPS Why stop at the photograph?

Dimitrios Theodorakis How to become a pro photographer without getting lucky Jacob Watson-Howland In previous issues

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DIGIT

THE MAGAZINE OF THE ROYAL PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY DIGITAL IMAGING GROUP Issue 107

DIGITAL IMAGING TEAM

CONTENTS

Janet Haines (Chair)

digchair@rps.org

Trevor Litherland (Hon. Secretary) digsecretary@rps.org

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Group events

Trevor Pogson (Hon. Treasurer)

3

Contacts

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From the chair Janet Haines ARPS

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Editorial Gary Beaton

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Being young: portraits of becoming Wolfgang Strassl FRPS

digtreasurer@rps.org

Gary Beaton (DIGIT Editor)

digiteditor@rps.org

Marie-Ange Bouchard (LRPS Study Group) DISupportGroup@rps.org Melanie Chalk (Workshops and DI Online)

digworkshops@rps.org

Sylvie Domergue (International) Fintan Healy (Competition support) Martin Keene (Workshop data analyst) Dennis Knowles Madeleine Lenagh (Membership)

dimembership@rps.org

Deborah Loth (Casting Director)

digcomms@rps.org

Janice Payne (Workshop support) Kevin Payne (T-W-T and eCircle)

dicircles@rps.org

Caroline Petch (Accolade)

10 I must go down to the seas again…

Tom Hill ARPS 16 Flying against the wind Jonathan Webb

diaccolade@rps.org

John Porter (LRPS Study Group) Robin Price (DI Comp Sec)

digcompsec@rps.org

20 Walking softly through the last great forest Donna Feledichuk

Colin Smith (Workshop team) Neill Taylor (Webinars) digevents@rps.org Martin Tomes (T-W-T development and eCircle)

martin@talkwalktalk.org

Sue Vaines (Accolade Editor) Lois Wakeman (Web Content Manager)

26 From Snapshot to Discourse Robin Mudge

digweb@rps.org

30 DIGIT Challenge: Capturing the spirit of an iris Louise Sayers

Rex Waygood (Webinars)

digexpo@rps.org

33 DIGIT Challenge: Abstract art lovers Bob Reynolds ARPS 35 In previous issues

Cover image by Donna Feledichuk Importing PDF into Indesign Select “Show Import Options” when importing and choose “Crop to: Trim” and tick box for “Transparent Background”. This just includes the clear space, no arrows etc.

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© 2026 Apart from storage and viewing in its entirety for personal reference, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the Editor. The Royal Photographic Society, RPS Digital Imaging and the Editor accept no liability for misuse of any of the content or for any breach of copyright by a contributor. The views expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the policies of the Royal Photographic Society or those of RPS Digital Imaging.

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Unless otherwise indicated, all images are from, and copyright of, the authors.

DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

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FROM THE CHAIR Cameras of the mid-1920s were fundamentally mechanical machines.

A photographer operated every step manually: loading film in the dark, setting shutter speed and aperture, focusing through a small viewfinder or loupe on a piece of ground glass, and developing negatives and prints in dark rooms.

This process created a natural slowness. Each frame cost money, effort, and time, imposing discipline and attentiveness. A single photograph carried weight; a commitment of intention. The resulting images, often rendered in grainy black and white, possessed a character shaped by the film stock, lens imperfections, and the photographer’s craft.

Today, digital photography and smartphone cameras, especially the iPhone, inhabit a completely different universe. Instead of film, we have sensors capable of capturing millions of colours and billions of pixels with almost no noise. The iPhone folds a miniature computational photography studio into a glass rectangle: image stabilization, HDR blending, nightmode stacking, and instant post-processing occur in fractions of a second. Where the 1926 photographer had to predict or calculate exposure using skill, the iPhone calculates it automatically, merging multiple images to achieve results impossible with a single frame of film. The device not only captures the moment but interprets it.

The philosophical difference is as striking as the technical one. In the 1920s, photographs were rare artifacts. Today, they are social currency. A photographer in 1926 might return from a day of

shooting with twelve thoughtful exposures. An iPhone user can take hundreds without hesitation, edit them instantly, and share them across the world in seconds. Does this make us less thoughtful of our images? In this busy world do we stop long enough to consider if there might be a better shooting angle, or the light might change if I wait 30 minutes.

Yet despite the differences from the 1920s to today, there is an unexpected continuity. The Leica I of 1925 made photography more accessible, portable, and spontaneous - opening the door to street photography, candid portraits, and a new visual language. The iPhone continues this democratising trajectory, giving nearly anyone the ability to document their world with surprising quality. Both technologies expanded who could make images and how quickly they could be shared, each defining a cultural moment.

If the photographer of 1926 were handed an iPhone, they might marvel at its clarity, speed, and ease - but they would also recognise a familiar impulse: the desire to capture life as it unfolds. The tools have changed almost beyond recognition, but the human instinct to see, preserve, and tell stories through images remains remarkably the same. Would the 1926 photographer spend more time on each shot and get better results with his iPhone? Is the value of a well-considered picture is now lost in the sea of imagery that surrounds us every day?

“There is no such thing as taking too much time, because your soul is in that picture”, photographer Ruth Bernhard.

Janet Haines

EDITORIAL This issue of DIGIT should be reaching you toward the end of January, by which time the holiday season and any New Year resolutions may be becoming just a distant memory.

But I hope that your New Year plans, whether or not embodied within resolutions, include some photographic projects. Should you be lacking inspiration, I am certain that you will find plenty within these pages.

To my mind, the essence of a good portrait is to be able to feel something of the subject. Wolfgang Strassl captures just that in young people that he meets in the street. In complete contrast, Stuart Graham takes photographs of the sea, and perhaps breaking with convention, shoots hand-held; the results are truly beautiful. His friend Tom Hill tells us more.

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Jonathan Webb shows us the ‘big picture’ of art installations that we will normally see only a part of at any one moment. His aerial view presents a different perspective. Donna Feledichuk spends much of her time in the Canadian boreal forest, photographing the wildlife that surrounds her. She shares the secret to gathering stunning images.

Steven Morton takes pleasure in taking out of focus images with a lens design dating from the mid1800s. The resulting abstracts allow the mind to interpret the image and ponder the subject. We wrap up the issue with Challenges, showing just how they created their images, by Louise Sayers and Bob Reynolds.

I wish you, as ever, good reading.

Gary Beaton

DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

BEING YOUNG: PORTRAITS OF BECOMING

BEING YOUNG: PORTRAITS OF BECOMING WOLFGANG STRASSL FRPS

Wolfgang Strassl takes a photographic journey into the vulnerability, potential, and quiet intensity of youth, and considers what their portraits reveal about them, and about him

What does it mean to be young?

It is a time of becoming, when the innocence of childhood is gradually fading while the joys and sorrows of adulthood begin to loom in the distance - visible, but not yet fully realised, understood and experienced. It’s a time of in-betweens, uncertainty and vulnerability, but also one full of hope and promise. My photo essay Being Young - Portraits of Becoming aims to capture fleeting DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

moments from this formative chapter of life.

As a photographer I am often drawn to young people. One of the reasons I find them so interesting is because their lives are still ahead of them. They are still in a phase of life where everything is possible. Young people spark my imagination. I find myself wondering what life will bring them, and what paths their lives might take.

Also, I am always surprised by how young people are so much more open to me when I approach them as a photographer. They’re much more likely to say “Why not?”; they’re still in an experimental stage, willing to be open to new experiences. I’m fascinated by how their openness, their insecurities, and their self-assuredness are visible all at once. In a sense I envy young people. They reflect so much about the human condition, holding all of the potential for life to 5

BEING YOUNG: PORTRAITS OF BECOMING

be experienced within them. When I encounter young people from my perspective today, I find myself reflecting upon my own youth, and how I once looked at life.

My photographic journey toward portraiture has been a long and winding road.

In the beginning, I initially shied away from portraiture, as I was unsure how to approach people.

Instead, I started by photographing urban environments and other living spaces, interested in how 6

wider social systems and places determine the characteristics and conditions of human existence and experience. Eventually, I moved on to photographing such environments populated by groups of people, but with no special interest on the individual.

It was only when I started to work up the courage to make my first portraits of individuals in the context of photo stories about such environments, I realised that I am now in a totally different ball game from all the photography

I have been doing before. It was now not only me taking a picture of something and either getting it right or wrong. Portraying human beings, I found myself in a much more complex situation.

In a sense, I felt like I was playing the role of both film director and cinematographer simultaneously, working with actors who were playing the role of being themselves.

All my portraits are the result of chance encounters. Although DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

BEING YOUNG: PORTRAITS OF BECOMING

I actively sought out such encounters, I always found them by chance. In this sense, it always felt like a stroke of luck for me to meet these people and get their permission to make their portrait.

I find the fact that I have not met them before and I don’t know anything about them, is of benefit to me. I am thus not preoccupied by what I know, I am only interested in what I see at that moment, and how it sparks my own imagination, which effectively puts me in the DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

same position as the eventual viewer of the portrait.

When I first approach someone, my aim is to build a kind of relationship, even if it will be just for a few minutes - to enter into a conversation of sorts, even if it may, at least in part, be a silent one.

I am attracted to people who spark my imagination about who they are, and that they may be open and willing to engage in this conversation with me, not necessarily in words, but simply by

just being who they are, and I am trying to make them understand, also not necessarily in words, that they are being truly seen by me for who they are and that they don’t need to perform or pretend, just be there, be present.

Once they have agreed to have their picture taken, quite often their first question is: What do I have to do? When I tell them: You don’t have to do anything. Just stay as you are, and let’s also stay where we are, I can often sense that this comes as a surprise, but 7

BEING YOUNG: PORTRAITS OF BECOMING more importantly as a great relief to them.

In terms of surroundings, when I encounter these people, it is at a certain time, and they are in a specific place. Since they are occupying this space for a particular reason - often a personal one - this place can also be interpreted as a reflection of their state of mind, at least for that moment in time.

The environment is one they have chosen for themselves, and it is thus part of their identity when I was drawn towards them. So, if at all possible, I will remain at the place we met, when making the portrait. I also feel that the people I photograph appreciate that they can stay as they are not only mentally, but also physically.

In the best case of such a photographic conversation and collaboration people respond openly and reveal something which feels honest and sincere. That’s when something magical happens their personality emits and expands far beyond their initial appearance, and they begin to shine.

I think the camera can be a magic tool which facilitates and records this transformation. Different to a human counterpart, it is by itself non-judgmental and thus nonthreatening.

When I myself have eye contact with the lens of a camera, I feel that I can still be completely myself, which I find impossible when having direct eye contact with another person, particularly a stranger. That’s why sometimes I don’t maintain eye contact with another person for long or avoid it altogether, in order not to lose myself.

With this in mind, my hope is that my camera is able to create portraits of people who also feel completely themselves and still maintain eye contact with the lens of my camera and thus eventually with the viewers of the portrait, while the viewers can equally have eye contact with the person in the portrait as long as they are seeing it.

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That’s how portraits may have the potential to create a connection between two strangers, although a very indirect one, which is nevertheless more immediate, intense and unguarded than those often experienced in reality. By creating distance between the viewer and the subject, a portrait is actually and ironically allowing and enabling a profound kind of intimacy to build between them.

all. I am not trying to provide any answers or sense of certainty about them. My photographs simply capture what the subjects were willing to show me in a particular moment, and what I was willing to see. After all it’s just their visual appearance at a split second when I pressed the button, because I felt this is the moment they are reaching out to me, but I am not even sure if this wasn’t just my imagination.

Of course, I want my portraits to be as honest and authentic as possible. But it is also important to acknowledge that these portraits do not tell the whole or only truth about their subjects, or my encounters with them. I would even go so far as to ask whether they capture or convey the character of the people I have portrayed at

Collectively, these portraits probably say much more about me than my subjects - after all, I am the one who has chosen and approached them, because I was drawn towards them and their visual appearance has impressed and inspired me. It has sparked my imagination how their personality might reveal itself and evolve in DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

BEING YOUNG: PORTRAITS OF BECOMING

front of the camera. I am the one who pressed the button at those moments that resonate with me, when I sense that we are at the same wavelength, like I am tuning into who they are. Of course, for each photographer these moments will look different. What I respond to might not be what someone else is looking for. That’s what gives these portraits my own voice, my own identity. In effect, they are becoming self-portraits in a certain sense, as much as they are portraits of others.

allows me to express my insights and impressions in ways that I am unable to do with words or otherwise.

Since I am not very good with words anyway, I usually don’t have much to say about my photography and tend to let my pictures speak for themselves. They should not require user instructions. Thus, by my standards and to my surprise, this has turned out to be an unexpectedly long text.l

Whatever the case, my hope is that they are intriguing, stimulating and mysterious enough that the viewers will stay with them and explore what they themselves are able and willing to see, recognise and understand about who these young people truly are.

I have discovered over time that photography helps me to connect with the world around me, and to better understand what I sense, feel and experience in ways that exceed my own tendencies towards rational analysis. Furthermore, it DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

More about Wolfgang See more of Wolfgang’s work on his website at wolfgangstrassl.com.

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I MUST GO DOWN TO THE SEAS AGAIN…

Lost Souls

I MUST GO DOWN TO THE SEAS AGAIN… TOM HILL ARPS

Stuart Graham choreographs an intimate dance with the sea, art, philosophy, and the pursuit of sublime simplicity

The first two lines of John Masefield’s famous poem Sea Fever express their author’s obsession for the oceans: I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by…

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In the case of Stuart Graham, Devon-based photographer, educator, artist and keen amateur philosopher; that second line could be re-written: And all I ask is a Canon 5DS and a pair of dry wellies - although

that reworking loses quite a bit of Masefield’s subtle romanticism!

For at least the last six years, Stuart has held an almost obsessive compulsion to represent the sea using the medium of photography.

Indeed, Simon Hill, RPS President, DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

I MUST GO DOWN TO THE SEAS AGAIN…

New Year’s Day

recently described his work as: ‘Amongst the most sublime seascapes I’ve ever seen…’

Moreover, Stuart has almost redefined the descriptions of the word and concept of ‘photography’ (certainly in his world) via his own highly specialised method of working. Watching Stuart take pictures is like observing Occam’s razor slicing out a new reality of image making. It’s the simplicity of method combined with the planning behind it that is truly masterful.

DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

Stuart uses a Canon EOS 5DS, neutral density (ND) filters and super-wide lenses combined with long exposures - but crucially - no tripod. His production method might appear to the casual observer as someone perhaps to be avoided on a beach. He’ll be splashing through the incoming waves in wellies, dangling an expensive camera at knee height just inches from the water. At first sight, you might make a mental note not to be sitting next to that same guy on your bus home!

But nothing could be further from the truth, there’s an exceptionally precise method to the apparent madness.

A Geordie abroad Stuart was born to a solid workingclass family in Wallsend, Newcastle Upon Tyne, in 1964. His first interest in photography was awakened when his elder brother showed him his new camera - a Zenith E. After warning Stuey not to drop the hallowed equipment, his brother allowed him to hold it and look 11

I MUST GO DOWN TO THE SEAS AGAIN…

Twisting Tide

through the viewfinder. He recalls the moment vividly:

being taken on as a printer for their black and white work.

“I can still picture him [Stuart’s brother], as I clumsily focused on his face. That was it - the moment which decided my future. I knew right then that I wanted to become a professional photographer.”

His career since then has covered most branches of photography, both as a printer and photographer. From cruise-ship ‘smudger’ throughout the late 1980s, to wedding and corporate portraiture, then proprietor of a prestigious ‘Venture Studios’ franchise in Plymouth, Stuart has owned and maintained several photography businesses. During that time, he has trained about 30 people to become professional photographers.

Leaving school at 17, Stuart persuaded a local commercial studio to let him hang around, in return for sweeping their floor and making tea. Eventually he was allowed to assist with setting up cameras and lights, before finally 12

For the last 20 years, Stuart’s life has been in South Devon. He abides quietly (rather like Big Lebowski’s ‘The Dude’) in Paignton, nestling in a modest apartment fewer than a hundred metres from the beach. His roommate ‘Gazza’, a murderous miniature panther of a jet-black cat, remains as head of security, rodent controller, and chief computer-keyboard sleeper.

There’s a moose loose…

Whenever Gazza allows access to the computer keyboard, Stuart processes his images via Adobe DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

I MUST GO DOWN TO THE SEAS AGAIN…

No Time to Lose

Lightroom in a simple and effective method that often takes only a few minutes.

His machine is self-built and exceptionally powerful. It’s faster than Gazza chasing after a mouse, or ‘moose’, as Stuey pronounces it. With its 64Gb of RAM, when first turned on, it makes a deep humming sound as if something were emanating from the bowels of the earth; you can imagine the streetlights outside his apartment dimming momentarily.

DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

Stuart says that if he won the lottery, he’d build and equip a fully functional colour darkroom with EP2 print processing (a Kreonite machine) and shoot everything on film. But to do that he’d have to buy a lottery ticket, and he prefers to spend his money on proper Yorkshire Tea and digestive biscuits from M&S. As regards the digital processing aspect of his work, Stuart says: “I just use Lightroom on the computer in the same way I’d treat a physical print in a darkroom.

Instead of aligning the baseboard to ensure my horizons are straight, I use the ‘straighten’ tool. Rather than burning in a highlight with a piece of card with a hole in it, I use the burn tool. Likewise, the dodge tool.

In short, I only do it on the computer if I could do it in a physical darkroom. There’s no cloning or carrying-on with curves. I reckon to get at least 90% of the image creation correct in the camera.

Given the method of capture, it’s refining that process that I feel really defines the epitome of my work.”

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I MUST GO DOWN TO THE SEAS AGAIN…

Metropolis

In terms of Stuart’s rationale for his compulsion to create these seascapes, he says that he finds the process extremely liberating and good for the soul: “Someone once asked me why I make all these seascapes, and I had to think for a minute. I guess it’s because for years I always had to take photographs to a brief; but now I can please myself and just make images that are pleasing to me.”

It’s all in a name Another aspect of Stuart’s work is the interesting titles that he assigns 14

to his images. He mainly gives these nomenclatures as to how the final image makes him feel after final processing. Sometimes he might have an earworm whilst sitting on the computer, consequently an image might be titled according to a line from a Dire Straits song (a band with proud Geordie roots) or whatever.

Stuart’s conceptual thoughts also affect the naming of images. Lost Souls shows a rough sea where the boiling power of the surf, even when only a few inches deep at the beach, is not a force to be disrespected. If

the waves are furious here, what are they like miles out in the Atlantic Ocean? Countless vessels have been lost to the power of the seas, and Lost Souls reminds us that it can swallow humans in seconds.

After all, the sea never gives up its dead.

Then there’s No Time to Lose perhaps reiterating the urgency of the fact that an incoming tide waits for no man, neither for King Canute nor the unfortunate cockle pickers who were drowned in Morecambe Bay in February 2004.

DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

I MUST GO DOWN TO THE SEAS AGAIN… I asked Stuart about the earworm thing, and wondered if he was listening to U2’s New Year’s Day while he was processing that sonamed image. In his lovely Geordie twang, he replied: “Divvn’t be daft! Howay man! It’s called New Year’s Dee ‘coz it was taken on the forst of January…”

Deep thinking On aesthetics and philosophy, Stuart is something of a deep thinker. He is as interested in quantum theory, The Multiverse and particle physics as he is in cats and photography. He likes to think that he knows in his bones when an image is a real winner: “The ever-changing sky, wind, and, of course, tide means you have control over almost nothing. You need the perfect balance of sheer luck and hard-won skill.

Somebody once described some of my pictures as a form of fine art. I think they were being over generous, and perhaps overthinking the definition of my output. Primarily I’m a photographer using a relatively simple but well-rehearsed and practiced workflow.

I mean, after all, what is ‘fine art’?

It’s too complex a question. As far as I’m concerned, I’m reminded of a quote I read somewhere, and I can’t remember who it was, but it stuck with me - ‘I feel that my images are abstract and not a representation of reality. Rather, it’s reality filtered through my senses’.

And that’s important, as art is at its highest when it’s not a precise depiction of reality, because then it wouldn’t take the viewer elsewhere as they looked at the work. My stuff is certainly about more than what was actually going on at the time and I think that’s art enhanced by the craft of photography.

I really enjoy the mix of meticulous planning and, sometimes, the beautiful chaos of the moment.

When those instances collide, you can almost split the atom of creativity and you know you’ve got DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

a thermonuclear blast of a photo!

That’s the bit that makes the soaked feet and my suffering of freezing cold winds all worthwhile.”

The technical bits For those of a technical mindset, Stuart describes his modus operandi thus: “I stopped using a tripod when I realised that to get the real sense of movement of the sea, the tide and the sky, that I had to move the camera and effectively ‘pan’ the punctum of the image. But simple lateral panning on a tripod didn’t work because the tripod would have to get soaked in salt water and it is, by nature, ‘fixed’. I tried using fixed position exposures with ND filters of up to three minutes at a time, to get those John Blakemore-esque ‘misty seascape’ looks but then I thought - this isn’t what’s really going on, I need proper movement and I need to get much closer to the surf.

So now I use 20-year-old Sigma lenses on a Canon 5D full-frame sensor SLR. They are cheap but of excellent quality, and it doesn’t worry me too much if they get constantly splashed with salt water.

The inherent depth of field means that I don’t have to worry about focusing (again, my face would need to be in the seawater anyway) so I simply hand-hold the camera a few centimetres above the waves, always in portrait format, in front of what I consider to be the ‘centrifugal centre’ of the picture that I previsualise.

The movement I create is just by following the exact spot I’m looking at laterally, maybe even it’s just a little seashell or a scrap of seaweed, but then also I’ll pull the camera up vertically towards the end of the exposure to enhance the feeling of depth.

I use ND filters, but crucially they sit in a little filter drawer behind the rear element of the lens. This means the filters can’t get splashed and you can cut a postage-stamp sized one out of a sheet of gel - so the cost per filter is very affordable.”

Stuart is always mindful of the fact that the human brain perceives the world through the eyes in a sequence of approximately 1/100th of a second snapshots, so he has found that a one or two second exposure creates an image one might describe as a ‘flowing still’ from a video.

Crucially, Stuart never takes pictures on blue-skied sunny days.

The clouds must always be darkly foreboding or colourfully tinged near sunset. Every image he makes is always within the same hundred or so metres of beach, where a nearby rocky outcrop sends the surf flowing in different directions, all dependent on wind and tide.

Spilling the beans Part of Stuart’s self-employed business is selling his prints and giving one-to-one, in person, zoom or group tutorials. So, his ‘secret sauce’ isn’t that closely guarded; he’ll spill the beans for filthy lucre faster than an FBI informant!

Consequently, he will be arranging to host detailed tutorials online for RPS members soon. Watch this space for details.

Stuart’s prints and personal oneto-one private tutorials are also available; prints are in a variety of formats, finishes and sizes. Visit stugrahamphotography.co.uk. l

Tom Hill ARPS is a semi-retired photographer and copywriter living in the Scottish Borders of the UK. He currently writes for CameraCraft magazine and has a history of written and photographic publication in The Guardian, The British Journal of Photography and numerous others. Tom and Stuart have been friends since the mid 1980s when they worked together as cruise-ship photographers in Florida, the Caribbean and Mexico.

Amazingly, they both lived to tell the tale…

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FLYING AGAINST THE WIND

FLYING AGAINST THE WIND

The Longleat maze

JONATHAN WEBB

While drones dominate the skies, one photographer sticks to small aircraft, chasing light, detail, and the thrill of discovery - often at 1,000 feet and 100 miles per hour

I am a bit of a fossil, a sort of photographic Archaeopteryx.

While the rest of the aerial photography community is using drones, I am still bouncing around the sky in small aeroplanes. Old school aerial photographers like me are a bit of an endangered species and its unlikely anyone will do it this way in the future.

There is nothing wrong with drones, many of my photographs could be taken either way, however I just like being up there, exploring the environment from above. There is also nothing like a bit of mortal danger to enhance artistic creativity and although I plan my flights meticulously, a surprising number 16

of my images are things I stumbled on while up there.

Shooting from an aeroplane is quite different to shooting from a drone and requires a great deal more practice. The aircraft is moving at around 100 miles per hour and many subjects need to be shot at a very precise angle. Henri CartierBresson talks about the Decisive Moment. In aerial photography that moment is a fraction of a second.

Even half a second can make the difference between a winner and an also-ran image.

One of the strange things is the easiest type of photograph from a drone, the vertical image, is actually the hardest from an aircraft. I do

most of my work from Cessnas which are small, high wing aircraft, and to take a vertical image we turn the aircraft on its side while turning sharply. This does mean taking the photograph while under a significant g-load.

Also, we cannot hold the aircraft in this position for too long as otherwise it will stall and stop flying, which is generally a bad thing. The usual approach is to judge carefully where to start the turn and flip the aircraft into a steep bank at just the right point.

There are also other ways of doing it. I have a friend who flies in an a low wing motor glider and the disadvantage of the wing being DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

FLYING AGAINST THE WIND

Sultan the Pit Pony

on the bottom is overcome by the simple expedient of turning the aircraft upside down!

One advantage of shooting from real aircraft is that it does allow a whole variety of different lenses to be carried. The maximum wide angle lens is limited by not wanting to get bits of aeroplane in the photo. In the aircraft I fly that equates to 21mm, and my Zeiss 21mm is my faithful companion, and one of my three favourite lenses. There is no limit to how long a lens might be, however the longer the lens the more difficult it is to handle. The requirement to avoid movement blur in the photographs means a fast lens is essential. My longest lens is a Canon 300mm f/2.8, which is ideal for photographing a single building or structure from our usual height of about 1000 feet. In order to capture a smaller subject I use a 2x lens extender making it 600mm, however this is quite a handful in the air. Just finding the small things to photograph from that height is quite a challenge.

DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

I remember once flying along a road trying to find a blue plaque on a house in a road full of similar houses. We found it in the end but it was tricky. The Plan B in that situation would have been simply to photograph all the houses then find the right one on the PC afterwards.

More tricky are some of the archaeology subjects such as Bronze Age burial mounds which are quite small, typically a couple of meters across and often surrounded by trees. They take quite a bit of finding even though I have them marked on my moving map GPS system before we take off.

Weather is a factor in all photography. The landscape photographer must study the weather to find the type he or she is looking for. The drone photographer must do the same but additionally factor in the wind speed to ensure that it is possible to fly. Both have the luxury that when they arrive at their photographic location they can wait for the weather to be just right.

Unfortunately, in traditional aerial

photography we cannot wait too long because we would run out of fuel, which in aeroplanes results in lots of forms to be filled in.

Additionally, if the aircraft is costing a couple of hundred pounds an hour, the desire to wait has to be balanced with the desire not to go bankrupt. While dark and moody landscape photographs with a shaft of light piercing the clouds are wonderful, the low chance of finding such a situation in the air means we generally fly when it is sunny with few clouds. We do frequently wait a while for clouds to move off our subject and as we can often see several subjects from a single vantage point we can often shoot one in sunshine while another is under cloud and then swap over.

Weather is more than just a factor in the beauty of the landscape, it is also a safety factor. Strong winds are not so much of an issue while up in the air but they can make take-offs and landings a bit hairy.

We generally fly with wind below 30 knots or 35mph. I did once fly with a chap in a 40 knot wind which 17

FLYING AGAINST THE WIND

Brick Train

was most interesting as we landed almost vertically like a helicopter.

Wind is also a factor which must not be forgotten when calculating fuel consumption. If you are flying at 60 knots into a 30 knot wind you are going to take twice as long and use twice the fuel as if there were no wind. I have a black belt in cowardice and thus keep all our flights well within the aircraft’s fuel endurance time.

Now a little information on the images I have selected for this article. I have called the selection Verbotene Kunst, which is German for forbidden art. This needs a little explanation. Some 20 years ago I met a young German lady who wanted to practise her English language skills. Unfortunately she didn’t get to practise them as much as hoped and instead taught me German. We have been together ever since and for the past 20 years I have divided my time between Britain and Germany, including quite a bit of aerial photography over there.

All went well until last year when the German High Court decided that freedom of panorama did not apply to aerial photographs. The court case revolved around a book about the Ruhr area which included some aerial photographs of large outdoor artworks. The court 18

decided that it was perfectly legal to photograph these from the front or the back, from left or right and even below but for some mystical reason not from above. The result of that was that in 2024 I deleted more of my photographs than I published.

That got me thinking how lucky we are in the UK that our freedoms of panorama are firmly set out in law. Section 62 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 specifically states that in the UK we are free to photograph buildings, and ‘sculptures, models for buildings and works of artistic craftsmanship, if permanently situated in a public place or in premises open to the public’.

In relation to the specific art of aerial photography, this freedom has been confirmed all the way to the House of Lords in the case of Bernstein of Leigh v Skyviews and General Ltd. Sorry to waffle on about the boring subject of law but without a legal basis no shutter button can be pressed, and we in the UK enjoy much more freedom than many other places. Lots of countries impose restrictions, famous ones include not being allowed to professionally photograph the Eiffel Tower at night, or the Atomium in Belgium, and this article is illustrated with a small selection of photographs

which would not be allowed in some other countries.

The photographs I have chosen are: Sultan the Pit Pony in South Wales, UK. At 200m long, Sultan the Pit Pony is the UK’s largest figure sculpture. To give you an idea of the scale, there is somebody sitting in the horse’s nostril in the photograph. Designed by artist Mick Petts, the sculpture is located at Parc Penallta, Glamorgan, Wales.

I felt the photograph was best achieved with a near vertical image and being shot from our usual 1000 to 1500 feet it was done with my Canon 85mm lens. I’m a bit unusual in that I nearly always shoot with prime lenses rather than zooms as they are much sharper and autofocus works better in the challenging conditions of an aeroplane. The shot did require the aircraft to be placed fairly accurately both laterally and vertically. In my work the aircraft is the zoom and after three decades I am well practised in judging the correct position for each of my lenses.

Next up is the Brick Train by David March in Darlington County Durham, England. The Brick train was built in 1997 and depicts the world’s fastest steam locomotive Mallard. Mallard was designed by Sir Nigel Gresley and set a world DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

FLYING AGAINST THE WIND

The Angel of the North

speed record of 126mph in 1938.

The sculpture depicting it is 29m long and required 185,000 bricks to build. The photograph was taken with my Canon 300mm lens and required a shutter speed of 1000th of a second to keep it sharp.

I thought that the Statue of Vulcan on Sheffield Town Hall’s clock tower in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, made an amusing picture when juxtaposed with people in the street below. I wonder if they are aware of the streaker above them! The statue was created by Italian sculptor Mario Raggi and I shot it using the 300mm lens with a x2 converter making a focal length of 600mm. The resulting image was then cropped somewhat as when flying over Sheffield we are quite high up.

Last but not least, one of my alltime favourite photographs The Angel of the North in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. The Angel was built in 1998 to a design by Sir Antony Gormley and measures 20m by 54m. Normally I am less keen on photographs shot into sun but this image was blessed with great luck.

At the foot of the statue is a lady in white with arms outstretched DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

Statue of Vulcan on Sheffield Town Hall’s clock tower

mimicking the angel and posing for a photograph, just not mine.

It is often tiny details which make the photograph. The image was shot on my 300mm lens and at the time of shooting I could not see the lady, but only saw her when I downloaded the images to my PC. Serendipity often plays a part in all our photography.l

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WALKING SOFTLY THROUGH THE LAST GREAT FOREST

WALKING SOFTLY THROUGH THE LAST GREAT FOREST DONNA FELEDICHUK

Donna Feledichuk’s reflections from the boreal forest

It is a cold, windy morning, the kind that wakes every inch of you.

I walk quietly through the forest, the sun not yet risen. My mukluks, made by my friend and Cree Elder Ruby, whisper against the fallen needles. The first time she handed them to me, she said, “These will help you walk softly.” And they do. They have carried me through hundreds of kilometres of boreal forest, letting me move quietly and respectfully in a way that feels right for this land. Every stitch reminds 20

me of relationship: to the people who have walked this forest far longer than me, to the animals whose lives I photograph, and to the land itself.

As a photographer, walking softly becomes more than a courtesy. It becomes a technique. The boreal is a place of low filtered light, especially before sunrise, and even the smallest sound travels. If you move loudly or carelessly, the forest simply folds itself back in and you do not get the chance to see it

open again. So the quiet steps are fieldcraft.

Deep in the heart of the boreal, I come to a clearing. At first glance, there is nothing here. Nothing moves. Nothing speaks. To most people, this clearing would look empty. I settle at its edge among the trees providing a natural windbreak. I place down my camera, unroll the small yoga mat I have been carrying, and sit with my feet stretched out in front of me.

Then I wait.

DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

WALKING SOFTLY THROUGH THE LAST GREAT FOREST

Waiting is a skill all its own, one that photography taught me long before I ever realised it was teaching me. Out here, the best images do not come from chasing wildlife. They come from being still long enough that the forest forgets you are there. My mat keeps me low to the ground, where I can photograph at the eye level of the animals I hope to see.

Being low changes everything: the composition, the intimacy, the way the story reads in the final frame.

their summers here. Millions of mammals call it home. Sitting alone in the stillness, listening, watching, breathing with the land, I feel the Cree teaching ‘we are all connected’ come alive. I am connected to place, to its past, and to its future. I want to stay lost in this vast wilderness forever, and yet each moment in it feels vividly alive.

That is the power of this forest.

Time in the forest slips away. Ten minutes or two hours, it is hard to tell. But eventually, the clearing comes alive. I hear the soft rustle of leaves as a snowshoe hare, its feet already turning white for winter, forages nearby. Overhead, a squirrel making its way down the trunk toward its stash of acorns spots me, natters its disapproval, and disappears back into the canopy.

As a photographer, I pay attention to how the light slowly shifts, pooling in small patches, creeping across moss, lifting the first colours of the day from darkness. Boreal light moves in subtle increments, and you learn to notice those tiny cues. It is rarely dramatic, but it is full of possibility. Low light also means slower shutter speeds, so I brace my elbows on my knees and breathe in sync with the trees. Here, technique is less about gear and more about finding stillness inside yourself.

This is my happy place, the boreal forest, the last great forest on Earth. Billions of birds spend

The sun begins to rise. Suddenly, I hear loud movement in the bush to my right, branches cracking,

DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

leaves breaking under weight.

Then she steps out: a cow moose entering the clearing. She takes a few cautious steps, lifts her long nose to test the air, and, reassured, begins to graze on the tall grasses.

Frost clings to the edges of her coat, shimmering as the morning light grows. When she pauses, her breath hangs in the cool air.

My camera rests on my knees. I flip out the viewfinder, using the tilted screen to watch her so I do not startle her with movement, and take a few quiet frames. Shooting from a low seated position not only keeps me unobtrusive, it creates an image that feels grounded in her world rather than looking down into it. In this light, I underexpose slightly to protect the frosted highlights, knowing the shadows can be lifted later.

When she slips back into the trees, the forest carries on with its quiet routines. Songbirds, not yet begun their migration, practise their early morning choruses. Squirrels begin 21

WALKING SOFTLY THROUGH THE LAST GREAT FOREST

their daily arguments. Sunlight melts the last of the frost.

I stand, roll up my mat, tuck it under my arm, and follow a trail I have walked for decades. My mukluks keep my steps silent, my presence mostly unnoticed. The forest accepts me the way an old friend does, not with fanfare, but with familiarity. As a photographer, that familiarity is everything, knowing where the animals travel, where the light tends to fall first, where water sits still enough to mirror a duck’s reflection.

After a while, I reach another clearing, tall grasses opening toward a small pond fed by a creek that runs into a larger lake. It has been some time since I was last here, and I see the beavers have been busy. A new lodge is taking shape, their winter preparations already underway.

I approach slowly. Ducks gather in large numbers on the still water, forming groups as they prepare for 22

their long flight south, some grebes scattered amongst them. Wildlife here rarely encounters humans, and their reactions are simple: curiosity or caution. Ducks are always cautious and grebes more curious.

These are not habituated city park birds. Getting close enough for a photograph is a challenge. So I move the only way that works out here, slow, deliberate, intentional.

I spot a patch of tall grass on the far right side of the pond and move toward it. When I am only a few feet from the water’s edge and still unseen, I set down my mat.

Kneeling, I part the last few grasses so I can see the pond.

And then, once again, I wait.

This is the heart of my technique; patience layered over patience.

Wildlife photography in the boreal is rarely fast or predictable. It rewards those willing to stay still long enough that the scene continues as though you are not there.

Warm sunlight finally reaches over the trees. The ducks and grebes feast on freshwater shrimp and aquatic plants. Occasionally, a small group swims close enough for me to capture a few photos before drifting away. A red tailed hawk lands in a nearby tree and is gone almost as quickly as it arrived.

Ducks come and go. Across the water, a coyote trots into the opening, its gait unhurried, passing through without pause. Deer move in and out of the clearing. The beavers remain tucked in their home, saving their activity for sunset.

These are not dramatic moments, but they are the moments I love, the quiet truth of animals living without an audience. As photographers, we often chase the spectacular. But in the boreal, the real story lives in the spaces between: a duck tipping up to feed, a ripple spreading across still water, a coyote slipping back into the shadows. u 22 DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

WALKING SOFTLY THROUGH THE LAST GREAT FOREST

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WALKING SOFTLY THROUGH THE LAST GREAT FOREST

There are no words for the peace I feel in these moments. The boreal forest is, to me, the last great forest on Earth. There is a deep serenity here, a feeling of belonging. But alongside that peace sits worry.

Over more than fifty years of my life, I have watched oceans acidify, rainforests shrink, and our planet warm. I see the subtle shifts daily here in the boreal: snowshoe hares turning white on bare ground, more frequent burn scars, insects creeping into territories they never once touched, the sharp decline of owls and raptors after avian influenza outbreaks.

The forest is absorbing blow after blow, and the uncertainty of its future scares me.

To many in North America, this is just trees and wildlife, something familiar but unconsidered. It does not boast lions or polar bears or whales breaching offshore. But the 24

animals that live here, their lives, their stories, are equally important and deserve to be seen.

This reality struck me sharply during a recent trip to Brazil. There, I witnessed deforestation firsthand, kilometres of land laid bare where rainforest once stood. Only now, as the economic consequences become undeniable, is the country recognising the cost of that destruction. Ecotourism driven by the chance to see jaguars in the Pantanal has ranchers rethinking the clearing of land for cattle. I encountered landowners working to reforest their acres of grazing land to bring the wildlife back, not because they cared about the jaguar and other displaced species, but because tourism is more lucrative than cattle. The motive, unfortunately, is still money, not stewardship.

And I wonder: are we walking the same path here in Canada? Will natural resource development, so central to our economy, push this forest toward collapse in the coming decades? Combined with the accelerating impacts of climate change, the boreal is under pressure. I fear many do not see it.

And when they finally do, it may be too late.

I am out almost every day in this beautiful mix of deciduous and coniferous trees with my camera, not to chase rare moments, but to witness ordinary ones. To tell the stories of the beings who live here, the hare, the moose, the beaver, the ducks, all navigating a changing forest. Each one holds a story worth telling. Each one deserves to be seen.

The boreal is beginning to struggle, and so are the animals within it.

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WALKING SOFTLY THROUGH THE LAST GREAT FOREST

So I lift my lens and document it all; the challenges, the resilience, the quiet triumphs. Every individual in this forest has a story. I hope that by telling them, I can inspire conservation efforts before irreversible change arrives.

I use my lens to witness, to honour, and to hope.

Hope for change.

Hope for protection.

Hope for the last great forest on Earth.l

DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

More about Donna Donna Feledichuk is an award winning wildlife photographer based in northern Alberta, Canada. Her work has been recognised internationally, including winning Nature’s Best Photography Backyard 2025 and taking bronze in the Behaviour Mammals category of the 2025 World Nature Photography Awards. Featured in prestigious publications such as National Geographic (Espanol), Canadian Geographic, and BBC Wildlife. she was named one of Canada’s Top 16 Wildlife Photographers by Influencer Digest+ in 2003.

Rooted in the Boreal Forest, Donna spends hundreds of hours each year in the field, guiding her craft with stillness, cultural respect, and the soft steps of mukluks made for her by a Cree Elder. Her photography focuses on the quiet, often overlooked stories of Boreal wildlife and the vulnerable ecosystems they inhabit, using visual storytelling as a call to protect the last great forest on Earth. Her passion for the forest has led her to becoming a regular conservationist columnist for PhotoWILD magazine.

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FROM SNAPSHOT TO DISCOURSE

Snapshots These are not

FROM SNAPSHOT TO DISCOURSE ROBIN MUDGE

Robin Mudge reflects on his recent experiment with AI and his resulting book These Are Not Snapshots: They Are a Conversation Between Image and AI

This piece expands on ideas I sketched out in the preface to my book, These Are Not Snapshots: They Are a Conversation Between Image and AI. The book pairs a collection of urban photographs with what I’m calling a structured experiment in machine interpretation. I’m using AI not because I’m particularly interested in artificial intelligence itself, but because it lets me look at how photographic meaning gets built, filtered, and maintained.

The whole thing started with something I’d been noticing in galleries and museums. More and more, the text on the wall, the curatorial essays, the wall 26

labels and all that framing seems to do more heavy lifting than the photographs themselves.

Images start to feel like supporting evidence for ideas that have already been articulated in words. You’re often told what something means before you’ve actually looked at it properly.

Photography has always depended on context, obviously, captions, sequencing and where something gets published have always mattered. But the balance feels different now. Sometimes a photograph functions less as something to look at and more as a kind of footnote to an argument.

This becomes especially obvious

when you apply that machinery to images that were never meant to be scrutinised this way.

The photographs in These Are Not Snapshots come from walking around cities with my phone.

They’re mostly things I noticed in passing: weird architectural details, handwritten signs, odd bits of urban geometry, moments when light interestingly hit something. I wasn’t trying to make art or statements. I was just taking pictures quickly, without setting anything up or thinking too hard about where they might end up.

Susan Sontag’s writing about photography has stuck with me, particularly her focus on DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

FROM SNAPSHOT TO DISCOURSE

photography as a way of paying attention rather than extracting meaning. That feels right for what I was doing. Over a few years, this approach built up into a pretty large archive of images that don’t fit easily into categories. They’re not documentary in any traditional sense. They’re not formalist exercises either. They’re just accumulations - observations that hopefully give a viewer a sense of ‘being there’.

The experiment at the heart of These Are Not Snapshots came from a straightforward question: what would happen if these images were run through the kind of interpretation you’d find in a museum? I fed a bunch of them into ChatGPT 4.0 and asked it to write about each one as if it were hanging in a gallery. I didn’t give it any information about where the photos were taken, when, or what I was thinking.

The texts it produced became the first layer of the book. They sound DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

like proper curatorial writing formal analysis, context, references to broader cultural issues.

Sometimes the readings make sense in relation to what’s actually in the photograph. Sometimes they veer off in directions that feel sideways or misaligned. But the language always sounds confident and authoritative.

What struck me wasn’t whether the AI was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but how flexible these interpretive frameworks turned out to be. The system reproduced all the familiar moves of photographic criticism. It showed how easy it is to generate meaning when you’re working in a recognised critical idiom. Getting it accurate matters less than sounding coherent.

For the second phase, which takes up the later part of These Are Not Snapshots, I removed the photographs entirely. I fed those AI-generated texts - without the images - into a different system that generates pictures from

text descriptions. I asked it to create visual representations of the ‘artworks’ described in those curatorial essays.

At this point, the original photograph drops out of the equation. You’ve got a chain that goes from image to interpretation to new image, without any need for the first photograph to stay in the picture. The whole thing runs on language.

The results varied wildly. Some of the generated images resembled aspects of the originals. Others went off in completely different directions. But they all looked plausible. Each one could pass as contemporary photographic or conceptual work. You could imagine any of them in a gallery.

This loop - image, interpretation, regeneration - became the structure of the book. It highlights how much of what we think of as photographic meaning can be produced without the photograph 27

FROM SNAPSHOT TO DISCOURSE

Comparisons between the original shot (left) and the AI generated image (right) from the AI generated textual description 28

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FROM SNAPSHOT TO DISCOURSE

itself. Once you’ve established an interpretive framework, it can keep going, adapting and reproducing, even when the original source has disappeared.

Authorship gets distributed across this system in ways that feel genuinely strange. I take the initial picture without really asserting what it means. The AI assigns meaning. A second AI makes a new image based on that meaning.

Nobody’s authoring the final thing in a conventional sense. It emerges through a series of translations, each one moving further from where it started.

I’m not trying to present AI as some revolutionary force here.

These Are Not Snapshots treats these technologies as diagnostic tools. They speed up processes that already exist in photographic culture and make them visible. They show how images acquire authority and meaning.

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The book isn’t an argument against interpretation. It’s not proposing a better way of doing things. It’s more of a case study that lines up with what the Royal Photographic Society talks about regarding critical engagement and photographic literacy. I’m hoping it prompts people to think about how context works, how explanations shape what we see, and how easily images can be slotted into different interpretive systems.

In the end, These Are Not Snapshots is about looking - human looking, machine looking, and where those two things blur into each other. The photographs, texts, and generated images aren’t conclusions. They’re documentation of a process.

That process, where images cycle through layers of interpretation and get remade along the way, is fundamental to how photography gets made, understood, and valued right now. l

More about Robin Robin studied photography at Plymouth College of Art and Design in the late 1960s which opened the door to a career in photography, film and TV, starting as a medical photographer in London and finishing as a BBC producer. He moved into academic education, becoming Professor of Photography and Film at the American University and later co-director of digital filmmaking at Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts. More recently, back in the UK, he founded the UNSEEN PRESS, a collective for short run and handmade photo zines and books created by emerging and established photographers.

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DIGIT CHALLENGE

CAPTURING THE SPIRIT OF AN IRIS LOUISE SAYERS In this piece I share the process behind creating my photograph of the iris ‘Coral Beauty’, from the morning light in my garden to the post-production that shaped the final image.

The frills and ruffles of the iris bring a soft glamour to my naturalistic garden in the Cévennes hills of Southern France. Their statuesque form contrasts beautifully with the gentle textures of the surrounding grasses, and their bursts of colour are always a welcome addition.

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DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

DIGIT CHALLENGE At the beginning of May this iris blooms in front of an old stone wall. Before sunrise and again at dusk, its pale tones - a frothy white centre surrounded by soft peach flounces - glow with an ethereal light. I wanted to capture the quiet delight that just one bloom can inspire. I photographed it with the light behind the flower in the early morning, just before the sun rose over the ridge. This kept the colours true and avoided harsh highlights.

My camera is a Canon EOS R6, paired with a 100mm macro lens. I kept the aperture wide at f/2.8 and focused on the beard and edge of a ruffle. I also used the lens’s Spherical Aberration Control to introduce softness into the background and blur distractions, letting the iris stand forward (see image 1).

While I liked the purity of the original capture, I wanted to take the image beyond documentation - to create a more impressionistic interpretation that was still true to the natural light and colour. To do this I ‘painted’ onto the photograph in Photoshop, blending the textures of the flower and its surroundings.

I began with a few adjustments in Lightroom, masking the flower so I could work on the background separately. Reducing saturation, highlights and contrast helped prevent the background from competing with the bloom. Once satisfied, I opened the image in Photoshop, duplicated the background layer, and began painting.

Image 1

Using the eyedropper tool, I sampled colours directly from the flower and loaded them into a brush. Setting the brush opacity to around 30% I could build colour gradually, much like layering translucent paint. I applied the colour to the background to create texture, using Kyle’s Special Effects Spatter brushes and Legacy Scattered Wild Flowers brushes, which add organic splatters and natural marks. I layered tones from different parts of the flower to enhance both the background and the petal edges. Where I wanted stronger effects, I brushed over the same area several times; when it felt too heavy, I lightened it with softer hues. I changed the angle of the brush from time to time to make it more natural. Sampling colours from the iris itself kept the palette coherent and natural (see image 2).

Next, I used the Smudge Tool at a low opacity, around 15%, to gently blend some of the brushstrokes. This stage is intuitive rather than exact - a process of moving between painting and smudging, building depth while leaving a few splatters to evoke brushwork.

I then removed the bud of the flower (bottom left) and reduced the colour saturation of the yellows and greens (see image 3).

When the balance felt right between the flower and background, I added a textured overlay (in overlay mode) from a photograph of a painted wall I have at home (see image 4).

DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

Image 2 31

DIGIT CHALLENGE To unite the layers and give the image a luminous quality, echoing the bloom’s softness, I placed a solid white layer on top at 17% using the Soft Light blend mode. I then returned the image to Lightroom for finishing touches - reducing shadows and highlights, lifting the whites, lowering the oranges, and softening saturation for a gentle, cohesive look. Using a mask and the Object Select tool, I desaturated and lightened the stem, so it balanced harmoniously with the flower head.

I often find it difficult to know when enough is enough, so I revisited the image the next day with fresh eyes.

Distance allowed me to refine details I had missed and to lift a couple of darker shadows and play with the colour tones in the image (see final image on previous page).

This workflow brings together photography and art. Each stage balances observation with personal interpretation. I experiment and play, letting intuition lead the way. My aim isn’t just to photograph the iris, but to express its spirit - something both real and dreamlike, a gentle reflection of how it appeared that morning. l

Image 3

Image 4

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DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

DIGIT CHALLENGE

ABSTRACT ART LOVERS BOB REYNOLDS ARPS

This triptych image, produced primarily for print, incorporates three photographs from 108 taken in an hour at the Tate Modern art museum, London, in February 2023.

Taking the photographs The room art exhibit featured is the Sol Lewitt Upside Down, which regrettably no longer exists. The equipment used was a Sony A6500 mirrorless camera with the Zeiss f/4, 16-70mm lens, a favourite combination of mine for street photography, being lightweight and unobtrusive. My objective was to produce ethereal, semi lowkey images showing the artwork and the interest in it by the camera settings, by capturing the movement of people, particularly the feet and legs of those close to me, and incorporating people, some motionless looking at the artwork. I was sitting on the floor against a wall, positioned to include the artwork and as many people as possible. The camera was placed on the floor in front of me, set at single shot. Settings were f/5.6, 4/5 sec, 16mm.

Post-processing work The images were uploaded and processed in Lightroom Classic. With the camera settings remaining unchanged and with the artificial lighting in the room being constant throughout, the photographs, in the main, were of consistent tone and exposure. The subject matter and images produced looked ideal for a triptych.

Thus, the main task was to select three photographs from 108 that contained elements that allowed me to achieve my objective. I was looking for side images with the subject or subjects moving into the picture with one relatively static central one. Each of the three I chose required cropping to concentrate on the main subjects. Minor adjustments were also made to exposure, highlights and clarity. The screenshots below illustrate the crop I made to the image on the left of the tripych.

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DIGIT CHALLENGE Once these adjustments were complete, the three images needed to be formed into a triptych, which I did in Photoshop.

Photoshop I exported the images one at a time to Photoshop. Once in Photoshop I resized each image to the same dimensions.

To create the triptych I needed to rearrange all three images onto a single canvas. To make this easier I used the Window|Arrange tool and selected 3 Up Horizontal layout, to show each image (see below).

The next process was to increase the canvas size on one image to enable the others to be added. I did this using the cropping tool from the lefthand side icons to pull out an area of canvas to the righthand side of this image large enough to incorporate the other two images, ensuring that it was ‘ticked’ to save, as shown below.

I then incorporated the other two images into the newly created canvas. To complete the Photoshop processes the triptych required a border and the spaces between each image to be tidied up.

Only after I had made all of these adjustments and was happy with the final triptych, I flattened the image I then saved to Lightroom and made a few final minor tweaks to contrast and highlights, to produce what I considered to be the final image. l

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DIGIT Magazine 2026 Issue 1

UPCOMING DIGITAL IMAGING EVENTS

IN PREVIOUS ISSUES

Details of all Digital Imaging events are available on its website at rps.org/groups/digital-imaging/

All previous issues are available from the DIGIT Archive at rps.org/di/digit-archive/ DIGIT 104 2025 Issue 2

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Group events Contacts From the chair Janet Haines ARPS Editorial Gary Beaton Pixels and perspectives Edmund Nägele FRPS My journey photographing the night sky Colin Smith LRPS War in Europe Jonathan Vaines Portraits - the human element?

Or the human elephant in the room?

Michael O’Sullivan FRPS Type matters...

Andrew N Gagg FRPS Is AI all bad?

Bob Sanders DIGIT Challenge: It’s Mine Sheila Haycox ARPS DIGIT Challenge: Still-Life ICM Susanna Hoare ARPS In previous issues

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Group events Contacts From the chair Janet Haines Editorial Gary Beaton Earth and sky: landscape and aerial Mieke Boynton Portraits - the human element?

Or the human elephant in the room?

Michael O’Sullivan FRPS Noise reduction in HDR merges Sean Goodhart ARPS Photographing Shetland’s underwater world across the seasons Billy Arthur Don’t say cheese: a guide to photographing children naturally Emma Finch Jasper wildfire Theresa Bradley In previous issues

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Group events Contacts From the chair Janet Haines ARPS Editorial Gary Beaton Foreword Simon Hill CPhot HonFRPS It needs someone to give it scale Yasser Alaa Mobarak Uncanny memories and dreams Michelle Wang LRPS Between borders: a life in translation Paula Regina Corazón LRPS Finding home in Amsterdam through instant photography Luca Arfini I wonder if I could.......?

Steven Munday-Durant ARPS Why stop at the photograph?

Dimitrios Theodorakis How to become a pro photographer without getting lucky Jacob Watson-Howland In previous issues

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