There’s a particular moment in Fes when the medina exhales—when the last threads of morning chill pull back and the day’s rhythm begins to sharpen. The mullah’s calls have dwindled and the sounds of the streets filter above the ancient stone walls. It’s in these quiet, golden moments that the city reveals itself to the patient photographer. Fes is a labyrinth of centuries-old craftsmanship, intricate geometric design, and spirited street life, and wandering its lanes with a camera in hand feels like stepping through a living tapestry.

The Laowa D-Dreamer 10mm f/2.8 is an extraordinary piece of glass. It’s not just another wide-angle lens — it’s ultra-wide, rectilinear, and capable of producing images with impressive sharpness and minimal distortion. Designed for photographers who thrive on creative extremes, this lens offers a truly unique perspective that few others can match.

I’ve just returned from an incredible week-long photographic workshop on the island of Madeira — an extraordinary island off the coast of Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean. Despite its small size the island is host to a phenomenally diverse range of landscape locations. Our small group based ourselves in the quiet coastal town of São Vicente on the northern coastline, an ideal central location that allowed us to reach almost every corner of the island with no more than an hour and a half’s drive. In Madeira, this kind of accessibility is essential — not only because of the diverse range of landscapes on offer, but because the island’s weather changes at a moment’s notice. We spent a fair amount of time learning to interpret the plethora a weather apps, web cams and local advice as to where to go for the best photographic conditions. Needless to say, flexibility and spontaneity are the photographer’s most valuable tools here.

If you’re a photographer, graphic designer or creative professional tired of subscription-models, the recent upgrade of the Affinity suite is not just big news; it’s potentially game-changing. How to get off the Adobe subscription train and onto a more affordable editing platform and workflow is one of the most common questions I get on photographic workshops.

As a result I have long been on the lookout for tools that don’t burden you with monthly fees but still give you serious editing ability. Now, Affinity has taken a bold step — combining its photo editing, vector design and layout-publishing tools into one unified app - just called Affinity - and making it free for everyone.

I consider a photoshoot, particularly a landscape photoshoot a success if I can walk away with a publishable image. That’s one publishable image. Obviously a commercial shoot is different, but the hit rate for out of the park awesomeness is still pretty much on the low end of figures. A really good landscape shoot might offer up a few publishable images, but again, the expectation should never be more than one. 

A large island floats serenely in a rings of sapphire and turquoise. A larger body of green mountains lies some distance away, the mainland I assume as the aircraft banks away and and we see once more nothing but ocean though the starboard window we are sitting next to. A dhow appears with it’s blue sail, cutting towards a shoreline that is again becoming visible as we descend towards the water. The plane flares gently and palm trees whip by as we land on the ridiculously short run and trundle up to a tiny, but still international, airport building. A wave of wet heat washes over us as the stewardess opens the hatch door. Stepping out, a big sign with ‘Welcome to Nosy Be’ can be seen near the entrance to the building. We’re here. 

There’s a stillness to the air, a faint feeling of crisp cold nipping at the skin and fingertips, like a tingling electricity. Silence reigns apart from the whisper of wind as it entices the grass to swish and sway with its breath. The yellow and pale green stalks rustling and leaning out over a vertical and disappearing drop to the waterfalls and rivers far, far, far below. Clouds form and dissipate, curling round the lower hills and their valleys, stretching out and exploring the canyons and forests of the lower mountains. This is the stillness and quiet before the sun peaks it’s burning orange face over the distant horizon in the east. There’s light enough that everything is awash in the magenta and pink glow of pre-dawn. The shadows may be a cool blue, but the sky is starting to ember. Then it appears. A burnt red glows at the top of the taller peaks and ever so gradually washes down the side of the mountains’ tallest heights. Alpine glow paints an extraordinary palette of saturated colour down the flanks of the escarpment. Dawn has come.

A while ago I was reading an interview with a rising landscape photographer whose work was really quite eye-catching. A comment of his grabbed my attention when he quite proudly pointed out that he didn’t even know who Ansel Adams is (quite clearly he did otherwise he wouldn’t have actually known the name to start with). For some reason it irked me and I didn’t really know why. It might have had something to do with a similar comment that photographers place on a pedestal certain other well-known photographers, and if you don’t know and understand their body of work, then you cannot possibly be an artist in your own right.

It’s a generally held truism that portrait photography requires a short telephoto lens to get the best results. We even tend to refer to 85mm lenses as ‘portrait lenses’ and the 50mm as a ‘poor man’s portrait lens on APS-C cameras (coming out to a 75mm focal length equivalent on a Full Frame camera). I strongly suspect that the travel photography out of covers like the National Geographic in the 80s, along with the Time/Life magazines is part of the reason we generally reach for the short telephoto when we photograph people.