The Photography & Video Show is making its return to the NEC in Birmingham next weekend from Saturday March 16 to Tuesday March 19. 

And, to celebrate the biggest imaging event of the season returning to its traditional March slot, the Show has teamed up with Canon to give away an amazing mirrorless camera package: a Canon EOS R6 Mark II with Canon RF 24-105mm f/4-7.1 IS STM lens. A combination that’s worth £3,130!

Canon will be one of over 200 exhibitors currently announced for The Photography & Video Show, covering all aspects of imaging and image making. From mirrorless cameras and DSLRs to action cams and film cameras, lenses and lighting to bags and backdrops, image editing to video post-production.

And that’s not all. There are hundreds of free talks, demonstrations, workshops, and seminars over the four days, featuring some of the biggest and most exciting names in the industry. From Royal photographers to YouTube personalities, BBC journalists to brand ambassadors, there’s an amazing amount of knowledge, wisdom and anecdotes to soak up. 

You can find all the details on , and buy your tickets,  on the official website. To save 20% on your tickets use the code DCWTPS24 before March 14. 

And if you want to be in with a chance of winning that amazing Canon EOS R6 Mark II with RF 24-105mm f/4-7.1 package worth £3,130, you can enter the competition via the link below! Full terms and conditions can be found on the competition page. The prize competition closes at 00:00 on March 20  2024. The winner will be announced on March 21 2024.

The Photography & Video Show is organized by Future Plc, which is the parent company of Digital Camera World. 

Nearly everyone with a foothold in punk rock has some sort of origin story. For photographer Jim Saah, his unlikely path to the music he loved involved a certain cult film.  “I discovered punk rock at, of all places, The Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight showing at a theater in DC,”  Saah tells InsideHook. “They had a DJ, and before the movie started, they played music.”

Young Saah found himself drawn to the music playing at the theater that night: “He was playing a lot of British stuff like The Stranglers and The Buzzcocks and maybe The Sex Pistols. And I thought, What’s this music?”

And so Saah did what countless people before him did: he sought out some local experts. “I went to the record store and asked, ‘Who are these bands?’ The old heads at the record store were great — they were turning me onto stuff and they told me, ‘You know, there’s local punk rock bands too,’” he says.

“My first show was a Minor Threat show,” he adds. “I really got into the scene — the punk scene and the hardcore punk scene.”

Now, a new edition of Saah’s book of photographs, In My Eyes Photographs 1982-1997 is out in the world. Fans of the DC punk scene will not be disappointed — legends like Fugazi, Minor Threat and Nation of Ulysses are in here. (So are the Holy Rollers, who — fun fact — I saw at the second punk show I ever attended.) But this isn’t just a trip through DC musical history; the likes of Wilco, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed are also featured within its pages.

How did Saah go about deciding what to include? He harkened back to an influential conversation when he was assembling the book. “Ian MacKaye said something pretty profound to me when I was going to put the Beastie Boys in the book,” Saah says. “It was a pretty seminal show, playing in Madison Square Garden in the early- or mid-’90s. He said, ‘Why’d you shoot that show?’ I said, ‘It was a job for New Musical Express — they sent me and the writer up to New York to see them.’”

“He said, ‘Oh it was a gig, then?’ and I said it was, and he said, ‘Well I think you should only put photos in this book that you had to take,’” Saah recalls. “I knew exactly what he meant, because I couldn’t miss a show back then. I had to go and I had to take pictures and there was no thought about it. I didn’t even know what I was going to do with the pictures, or if anyone would care about these pictures. Certainly I didn’t think I’d be talking about them 40 years later and selling a book of them — but he was right, and I only put pictures of bands in the book that I loved and that I was compelled to photograph.”

In My Eyes, which takes its title from a Minor Threat song, may be Saah’s first book, but his work has shown up in some earlier documents of the DC scene. “I had a lot of photos in Cynthia Connelly’s Banned in DC and then I did the movie Salad Days with my friend Scott Crawford,” he says. “He put out a book [Spoke: Images and Stories from the 1980s Washington, DC Punk Scene] that was related to the movie where I had a bunch of photos in there. I kind of felt like, well, my stuff’s out there.”

As Saah explains, he and Crawford traveled to a film festival in Buenos Aires where they met the eventual publisher of In My Eyes. “He was really enthusiastic, and it was really DIY, which I like. It’s basically like doing a record deal with Dischord,” he says. The parallels to the DIY scene appealed to Saah, and the book soon followed.

The first edition of In My Eyes was published at a time when the pandemic limited the amount of events that Saah could do for it — and he stresses that he is looking forward to doing more events now that this new version has been published.

“It’s just really nice to just talk to people,” he says. “There are young people that miss the scene or are photographers and say, ‘I’m inspired by your work,’ and then there are people who are around them who say, ‘I’m buying a book to find myself because I was at this Minor Threat show.’”

Saah stresses that the new edition of In My Eyes hasn’t been radically revamped from the first edition. One change has to do with the cover image — not the image itself, but how it’s presented. “It’s the same photo on the cover but it’s a different crop,” Saah says. “I just wanted to be immediately noticeable that it’s the second edition.”

As for why he made that change, it has to do with the overall composition. “It’s that picture of Ian McKaye at Minor Threat’s last show. I always call it, ‘Ian on the Cross.’ It’s not just because his arms are outstretched but the way his head is and stuff — it’s like a very Jesus-like pose. And if you crop it a little bit higher and show the ceiling, there’s a cross in the ceiling, so it mimics what he’s doing.”

One of the striking things about reading In My Eyes is just how many of the artists in it are still going strong. Readers will encounter the likes of Foo Fighters and Stereolab in its pages — to say nothing of the members of countless DC bands who continue making music today. At one point, our conversation turns to Jawbox’s J. Robbins, whose second solo album Basilisk was released last month — and who’s represented here via photos of Jawbox and an interview. Did Saah expect that the artists he was photographing decades ago would have such longevity?

“It’s interesting, because when I think about DC bands, a lot of them put out records after they broke up,” Saah says — citing Minor Threat’s Salad Days single as one high-profile example. “People were young and people were going to college and doing things — and people are always starting new bands. I kind of knew Ian would always make music, and Brendan Canty — all the guys in Fugazi.” 

“I didn’t really think about it,” he adds. “And I definitely didn’t think that Dischord would not only still be around but be very active. I didn’t really think about it but I’m very happy.”

And much like the DIY ethos of his publisher sparked a connection there, Saah also speaks about that same spirit informing his own art. “I learned a lot from the music, the politics of the music and DIY stuff. I put out a fanzine early on, and if it wasn’t for knowing the bands that were making their own records and stuff I never would have thought about putting out my own magazine,” he says. “I would have gone to big magazines and tried to get them to put my stuff out — which they ended up doing when I became a professional photographer — but I got my stuff out there initially by self-publishing fanzines.” It’s stance on art that’s served Saah well over the years — and it’s now led to an essential collection of music photography.

To coincide with International Women’s Day on 8 March, the South London Gallery is opening the exhibition Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest. Activism and photography have long gone hand in hand but this collaborative exhibition, organised with the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), attempts to capture a new chapter in this distinguished history, with a particular focus on feminism across the world. We talk to Sarah Allen, the head of programme at the South London Gallery, and Fiona Rogers, the V&A’s Parasol Foundation curator of women in photography, about the show.

The financier, philanthropist, collector and leader of cultural organisations Jacob Rothschild died last week at the age of 87. We talk to Anna Somers Cocks, the founder of The Art Newspaper, who interviewed Lord Rothschild on numerous occasions, about his impact on the visual arts and heritage.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Adelphi, made in 1967 by Robert Ryman. It is one of around 50 pieces by Ryman in the exhibition The Act of Looking, which opened this week at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. Guillaume Fabius, the co-curator of the show, joins us to discuss the painting.

• Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest, South London Gallery, London, 8 March-9 June
• Robert Ryman: The Act of Looking, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, until 1 July

A wedding photographer at the center of a TikTok storm over her prices says she has faced death threats after revealing she charges $8,500 for her pictures which many have dismissed as “blurry”.

Katie from Southern California, who is @tripp.photo online, posted a video a week ago with the caption, “When someone inquires for wedding photography with a $2K budget and I send back my starting prices of $8.5K.” The video gained a lot of attention (currently on 4.4 million views) with most people expressing astonishment and outrage at the price.

“Hearing your price and then seeing your website… I literally gasped,” wrote one TikTok user in a comment that received 17,000 likes.

Katie’s sometimes blurry aesthetic has drawn the ire of people online with nasty comments spreading to her Instagram page too.

“8K?..for some blurry photos of rings on a table..embarrassing as f***,” writes an Instagram user.

Another TikToker by the name of “Haussdrama” made a video reacting to Katie’s price in which she lambasted the photographer’s work which just served to turbocharge the drama.

The intense backlash prompted Katie of Tripp Photo to make a second video in which she addresses the fallout.

“At the end of the day, saying you don’t like my photos or you won’t pay my prices isn’t inherently offensive,” she writes on TikTok.

“We all have different style preferences, values, and priorities. Harassing my pages saying I deserve to be k?lled, hating on my looks, my voice, my children.

“Fake reviews, inquiries, preaching ‘community over competition’ on your photography page, and then spam commenting hate.

“Grown adults — parents — participating in online bullying. Doing these things says more about you than me. Hurt people try to hurt people.”

It wasn’t all bad comments, Katie also received multiple messages of support from people expressing sympathy for what she was going through.

“The people that paid her prices seem to be very happy with what they received. If you don’t want to pay 8.5k, then don’t pay it and use someone else? These comments are so unnecessary,” writes Kylee Nixon on Instagram.

Wedding Photographer Prices and Blurry Photos

According to The Knot Real Wedding Study, the average cost of a wedding photographer is $2,900 which makes photographers the fourth most expensive vendor or service that couples will splash out on.

And the blurry photo aesthetic is undoubtedly popular right now. In 2022, wedding photographer Asantae Haanstad told PetaPixel, “I think that blurry photos are a great way to provide variety in your gallery and images that you provide to a client. They have become more popular this year and I am consistently having clients request them as they find them unique and beautiful.”

And last month, Michigan wedding photographer Shuhrat Choudhury told PetaPixel that she thinks blurry photos are not just a trend, but a style that is here to stay.

“It’s not just a technique; it’s a creative tool that can elevate the storytelling aspect of your wedding album in breathtaking ways,” she says.

Denise Maxwell returns to the NEC in Birmingham 16 and 17 March to give talks at The Photography & Video Show about how to make money from photography and photographing big events. 

A regular visitor to the show, first as a punter and then as a speaker, Maxwell has enjoyed a successful and rewarding photographic journey. 

Focusing on more than one genre, Maxwell just loves taking photos – and inspiring and teaching others to do the same. 

And she will appear at the Show with a new title – she was recently awarded a Doctor of Arts by the University of Wolverhampton. 

We sat down with Maxwell to discover more about 
her career to date, and to get a taste of her upcoming speaking engagements in March. 

• Standard entry tickets to The Photography & Video Show 2024 start from £14.95 and are valid for any one day of the event, and students and professionals can get in for free. Click here to buy your tickets

See Denise Maxwell at The Photography Show 2024 

• ‘How DO you make money from photography?’ with Dr Denise Maxwell takes place at The Photography & Video Show on 16 and 17 March at 11.50am. 

Tickets cost £10 per person, and are on sale now on the show website. 

• ‘Event photography: Mastering big events through the lens‘ with Dr Denise Maxwell takes place on the Behind the Lens stage on 16 March at 2.15pm. This talk is free. 

Standard entry tickets to 2024 start from £14.95 and are valid for any one day of the event. Click here to buy your tickets. 

Dr Denise Maxwell

The owner and photographer of Lensi Photography for 13 years, Maxwell became a professional photographer after being made redundant from her job in the NHS. She shoots a variety of genres for a wide range of clients and her work has appeared in many different publications. An educator as well as a photographer, Maxwell has spoken at The Photography and Video Show. Born and raised in the Midlands, she was recently awarded a Doctor of Arts by the University of Wolverhampton. 

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This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

When I get into a writing rut, I like to step back and take inspiration from other art forms, each of which has its own conventions as well as—encoded within those very conventions—all kinds of ways to break with convention and do something fun and new. Perhaps because of its ubiquity, or perhaps just because I love looking at pictures, photography is an art form I turn to often, and I find it nearly always helps: Photography allows me to reevaluate my linguistic and narrative choices from a fresh perspective and reframe the central questions of my work. Sometimes the images become so integral to my story that they actually wind up in its pages, as in my new novel The Extinction of Irena Rey. But images are illuminating regardless of whether your reader sees them or not.

Below are some examples of considerations in photography that can be carried over into literature in myriad productive ways:

Format

Different shapes and structures invite different sets of responses from readers, in the same way a square photo on a cellphone screen will be received and evaluated differently from a 20 X 30-inch matte print.

In prose, short chapters might help maintain momentum; long paragraphs might cause your reader to pause and reflect at a pivotal moment they otherwise might have missed. Lots of white space on the page can open up a text, injecting a little fresh air into moments of darkness, or showcasing positive developments in your plot. I would argue that format in prose also includes decisions like whether to write in present or past tense, first or third person—essential, foundational decisions that are often intuitive at first, but that also often eventually require a more considered working out.

In some ways it might seem easier to play with space in poetry, and there is certainly ample room to arrange and rearrange the material of a poem on the page, but words can be arranged and rearranged in a single sentence to generate all kinds of different effects, and creating interesting syntax is one of the most powerful and underutilized techniques in English-language prose.

Change the order in which a thought is conveyed, and you change the thought itself. Start or end a sentence on a strong word to make the reader pay attention. Slightly unnatural syntax can have the same effect—whenever you defamiliarize language, even if only slightly, readers will take note. (You could also think about this in terms of lenses, if you’re old-school, in which case, adopting a strange syntax might be like putting on a fisheye lens.)

Frame
Will your piece be enhanced by a frame, or an additional frame beyond the margins of the page, and what would that mean in your narration? The classic example of a narrative with a frame is One Thousand and One Nights, but there are so many more: Wuthering Heights, The Princess Bride, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Pale Fire.

Style, and maybe more importantly, whose style?
How much should your subject influence your style? For example, if you’re writing about childhood, should you write like a child? Probably not entirely—but maybe a little? Striking a balance here is crucial, and I always try to think thoroughly about how much of a shadow my own authorial voice is casting over my community of characters, their setting, etc. (That shadow can be thematized, too, of course, just as shadowy self-portraits of photographers crop up every so often in great portraits.)

Contrast
Contrast in sentence length, diction, met expectations vs. unmet expectations may help keep the reader on their toes. (Too much may take them out of the story, just as excessive contrast in photography can feel off-putting or overweening or just gratuitously odd.)

Texture
Sometimes used to refer to sound patterns in a poem, like assonance, consonance, alliteration, texture can also refer to the linguistic features of prose that help shape the reader’s understanding of the story by creating an atmosphere that is particular to your vision and your fictional world.

Depth of field (aka “portrait mode”)
Depth of field is also called “the zone of sharpness.” Deciding on your depth of field means deciding how much environmental context you want to give your reader in your story. You can reduce distraction by blurring or omitting the things that aren’t directly related to your subject. Or you can do the reverse: You can celebrate your subject’s whole vast network by depicting as many connections as you can fit into your frame, creating not so much a portrait as a landscape.

Even more to consider
Try thinking about exposure (brightness), saturation (intensity), grain (the reader’s awareness of your words on the page), the vignette option (Do the edges of the image, or the story, or the poetic reflection darken as a way of helping your reader focus on your central characters, themes, movements?), the circular blur option (same as above, but lighter), or any of the edits you can make to your photographs on your phone. How do you translate shifts like this into your prose?

____________________________________

The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft is available now via Bloomsbury.

When she started pursuing her passion, she was not aware that it was a rarity. Anija Jalan, a Kochi native, has been slowly developing her skills by taking pictures while on trips even though she was preserving memories.

When she enrolled on the visual communication course at Maharaja Women’s College, Erode, photography was part of the curriculum and she followed it up with great zeal. Anija eventually joined CM Developers, a construction company in Kochi, and photography was part of her profession as she had to produce brochures and promotional materials.

All these experiences were slowly shaping Anija into a professional photographer. Soon, she turned to wedding photography. Incidentally, her assignments were mostly in Dubai, where women had more scope in the profession, “My assignments in Dubai turned easier as taking the photos of the bride during the wedding ceremony was mostly restricted to women photographers. Apart from brother and father, not many male individuals are allowed near the bride during the solemn ceremony,” Anija says.

However, when she started her own studio and focussed on her vocation in Kerala, she encountered strange responses. “I started facing strange looks and strange queries like, ‘What is this doing amid the bunch of photographers?’. It dented my confidence a bit and I started having second thoughts. But then I decided not to quit.”

When she found that the pictures she took were well received she regained her confidence and cemented her place in the field. She slowly spread her wings too. Anija’s fascination for cinema slowly took her to still photography in movies. “I stopped feeling the cringe of being a woman photographer and continued my job with ease and joy. I faced some sceptics only on a few occasions. But that too vanished after they saw my work,” Anija says.

Anija started still photography in films with Nivin Pauly-starrer ‘Love Action Drama’ and has completed the role in five movies so far. Now she is eyeing donning a director’s hat and becoming a DOP.
The musical documentary, ‘Yosha’, which saw Anija as the scriptwriter, director and DOP was the first step towards the next phase of her professional life. The all-woman crew video song dedicated to women empowerment was released on Women’s Day in 2022 and featured former health minister K K Shailaja, businesswoman Beena Kannan, and actors Lenaa and Sandra Thomas.

At present, she is doing the post-production of her upcoming short film ‘Panjimittayi’. The song ‘Kanatheeram’ rendered by Vineeth Sreenivasan and Ancy Sajeev is already popular on social media. ‘Work hard to achieve the dreams,’ is her sole philosophy.

The McLaughlin twins were at the beginning of a several-months-long publicity tour for their book, Twins on Twins, when they appeared on The Dick Cavett Show in March 1981. They had already launched a highly praised show of pictures from the book at a New York gallery and had been widely interviewed, by the New York Times, Good Housekeeping, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and NBC’s Today Show, among others.

They would conclude the tour a few months later with a joint lecture and slide show at Manhattan’s International Center of Photography, located in a mansion on the upper reaches of Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile, where they were introduced by the organization’s founding director, the photojournalist Cornell Capa.

He had known both twins for years, he said, but now, confronted by them both in the same room, he confessed he had no idea which was which. “I’m completely befuddled,” Capa said. “I can’t make out the difference.” He finally advised the audience that the one in pink was Kathryn, the other was Frances, and that if anyone bought a book that night, they would “get two signatures for the price of one.” Frances tartly chimed in, “But no cut rate on the price.”

At that moment in New York creative circles, twins were regarded as somewhat freakish curiosities.

Yet the high point of the twins’ tour arrived on March 30, 1981, running over into the following night, when they received a full hour of airtime as subjects of a two-part interview hosted by Dick Cavett, the thinking person’s talk show host, whose face, as a New Yorker ad promised, had “launched a thousand quips.” Cavett was known for hosting some of the world’s most revered names in music, politics, and show business, from Groucho Marx and Katharine Hepburn to Bobby Seale, the cofounder of the Black Panthers. Cavett did one two-part interview a week: just before the twins, he devoted it to the African American novelist Toni Morrison, who had recently won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon; just after, to the Italian director Federico Fellini.

Now, as upbeat theme music played, photographs of twins flashed across the screen—twin cheerleaders, twin pianists, twin ballerinas, twin basketball players—until twin Cavetts appeared, a double image produced on the monitor by engineers in the control room. The audience laughed hysterically.

“This is Dick Cavett saying good evening, and don’t touch your TV set, there’s nothing wrong with your picture,” said the host in his flat Midwestern accent. “You’re not having double vision either. You may have deduced by now that you are looking at pictures of twins.”

The camera panned straight to his interview subjects, Frances McLaughlin-Gill and Kathryn McLaughlin Abbe, the twins who had taken the pictures.

Still beautiful at sixty-one, they looked remarkably alike, with the same strongly modeled cheekbones, arched eyebrows, and carefully coiffed shoulder-length blond hairdos—although Frances’s was more of a pageboy, with the ends turned under, and Kathryn’s more of a bob, with the ends flipped up. They were dressed almost identically, too, in pink flowered blouses and tan skirts, differentiated only in that Frances wore a scarf around her neck, while Kathryn wore a vest.

Yet as soon as the conversation began, their dissimilarities became clear. Kathryn smiled and gushed, telling Cavett straightaway, “I like you as twins!” Frances looked politely bored, her eyebrows raised in a slightly haughty fashion, as if echoing the supermodels she had photographed for three decades at Vogue. She only warmed up when Cavett asked which twin jokes they hated most. As Kathryn offered up lots of ideas—“The worst thing you can do is call them ‘twinny’ or make up nicknames” or tell them, “I must be drunk, I’m seeing double!”—Frances tersely said, “Which twin has the Toni?,” a reference to the old home-permanent ad campaign featuring twins, then lapsed back into silence.

Both McLaughlins were among the fairly small group of women to have enjoyed long and successful careers as photographers. Frances had spent thirty years as a photographer for the Condé Nast publishing empire—ten as the only woman among an otherwise all-male top-level staff. Kathryn, after a brief career in fashion, was best known as a photographer of children, with lucrative projects at general-interest magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Parents’.

They were not on the show, however, to discuss their unusual careers. They had been invited to talk about being identical twins, and about their book, for which they had photographed twenty-six pairs of twins and talked to hundreds more about their relationships. Twins such as Samuel and Emmanuel Lussier, who at the age of one hundred were then the world’s oldest identical twins; Fay and Kaye Young, pro basketball players, who had told the McLaughlins how shocked their mother had been by their birth; Peter and Paul Frame, dancers with the New York City Ballet, who spoke of the difficulty of always being seen as the same person, rather than as individuals; and the Rowe and the Richmond twins, who had married one another and lived together in the same house.

“I think if you’re going to go off and marry twins, you set yourself up for quite a bit of attention,” Kathryn said.

“Of course everyone wants to know about the living arrangements,” Frances said to Cavett. “I’d like to know about yours, but you don’t get asked.”

The McLaughlin twins had written their book, Kathryn said, because…nothing had been written that looked at the world from the twins’ perspective.

At that moment in New York creative circles, twins were regarded as somewhat freakish curiosities. The photographer Diane Arbus, whom Frances had photographed several times before Arbus committed suicide in 1971, was now celebrated for her pictures of “social and biological oddities—identical twins, dwarfs, nudists, transvestites, carnival freaks and retarded women,” as Hilton Kramer, the New York Times art critic, had written, on the occasion of her 1972 Museum of Modern Art retrospective; Arbus’s most famous picture depicted a pair of eerie-looking identical girls. The previous year, in Stanley Kubrick’s horror movie The Shining, the central character, played by Jack Nicholson, had experienced a vision of twins as he descended into madness.

But the McLaughlin twins had written their book, Kathryn said, because, while there had been many scientific studies of twins, nothing had been written that looked at the world from the twins’ perspective, on their own terms.

“We’re not scientists—we’re photographers who’ve written a book,” she told Cavett. Their approach, she continued, “is emotional, or really letting the twins speak for themselves.”

“Would you say one is lucky to be a twin?” Cavett asked.

“We think so,” Kathryn said.

Frances disagreed: “Twins are not born by choice.” Most of their subjects had achieved “an equilibrium, where it isn’t completely a burden or completely a pleasure.”

Then the host stepped into more adventurous territory. “Do you know—I blush to even mention this on such a polite program—that there’s a pair of twins who make pornographic films?”

If he thought he’d get a good answer, like the time he’d asked Bette Davis how she’d lost her virginity, he was sadly mistaken.

Both twins looked at him steadily, as though he’d made one of those bad twin jokes they’d heard many times before.

Kathryn politely feigned surprise. “No!”

“Really?” said Frances coolly, as her eyebrows notched somewhat higher. “Men or women?”

Cavett claimed not to recall.

Then Frances stepped in and took control of the interview. “We haven’t talked too much, Dick, about twins in the same career. And as you know, we are both photographers. We decided to become photographers at about the age of eighteen and have never had any other career interest.”

Finally, he asked what they had clearly wanted to discuss all along: How did it begin?

__________________________________

Excerpted from Double Click: Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines by Carol Kino. Copyright © 2024 by Carol Kino. Reprinted with permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Leica’s SL3 – the latest release from the German camera master – is simultaneously novice-friendly and professional, as Nick Hendry discovered firsthand

These days, it can feel like every single moment of our lives is thoroughly documented. Many, if not most, of us enjoy sharing our experiences on social media; some of us even try to convert those shares into a lucrative secondary income.

Even those who have managed to resist the grasp of Zuckerberg et al will want to capture memories and moments for their own enjoyment. Whatever your motivation, quality is key so you will naturally look to equip yourself with the best kit available: step forward Leica, and their brand-new SL3 mirrorless full-frame camera.

As the name would suggest, the SL3 is the third iteration of a Leica range intended to blend the worlds of photography and videography, delivering professional-standard results alongside market-leading ease of use.

Dispensing with the mirrors from DSLR-style cameras has made equipment lighter and processing times quicker, so these cameras are perfect for both people who value portability and people who need high-end results for their work.

As I headed up to The Gleneagles Hotel to experience the new camera myself, I couldn’t help but feel a little underqualified to be testing new kit so clearly built for serious, even full-time professional, users, given my relative lack of knowledge about the finer aspects of photography. As it turned out, the upgrades and advancements made to the SL3 as a result of Leica’s quest to best equip the pros has made it equally suitable for a user as casual as me.

From a technical perspective, the SL3 is pretty powerful. Images can be captured up to 60MP with an ISO range between 50 – 100,000, meaning crisp detail even in low light. Three different auto-focus technologies combine to offer dynamic adjustments which allow excellent capture of moving targets, and a new “animal mode” enhances the potential for amazing nature photography.

Video can be captured up to 8K and will format (if desired) in Apple ProRes, allowing for seamless transition to your Apple products for editing and processing. While all this is certainly impressive, arguably the most practical and desirable improvements are to the user interface and accompanying Leica Fotos app – two factors which made the most difference to my own experience of shooting with it.

I shot with the Leica SL3 for two days as part of a group of journalists invited to have an advance look at the new camera. After a brief but informative presentation we were given our first opportunity to put it through its paces: shooting a display by the on-site falconry team at Gleneagles.

The ease with which I navigated the menus and settings on the touch screen – which boasts razor-sharp clarity to check your images after shooting, and tilts to different positions to act as viewfinder when shooting from awkward angles – were an immediate plus point, enabling me to switch between modes and features almost as quickly as the birds were moving.

The “animal” setting on the autofocus was thoroughly tested here and, while it wasn’t quite quick enough to keep up with a peregrine falcon in flight (to be fair, neither was I) it did easily identify the faces of each bird and grab some spectacular portraits.

Nick Hendry

Nick Hendry

After a few hours spent wandering the estate and experimenting with the different functions it was time for dinner, and an opportunity to take advantage of the low-light capabilities of the SL3. A candlelit dining room is the perfect setting for moody, atmospheric photography and again the camera performed admirably – automations took care of all necessary adjustments and the results turned out beautifully.

Shooting at night has always been a weak area of my photography, so to see such good results as a result of top-end equipment was a refreshing and welcome change.

The next day saw us up bright and early to mount a fleet of Land Rovers and head up into the Perthshire hills for some beautiful views. Sadly the fog across the mountains that morning put paid to that plan, but did offer an opportunity to discover the robust, weatherproof construction of the camera. There was wind, there was rain, it was cold – nothing had even the slightest effect on performance. While we may not have captured the majesty of the panorama which hid behind the cloud we were engulfed by, the greens, browns, and purples of the landscape around us contrasted brilliantly with the hard grey steel of our Defenders, and the SL3 picked all those details up with ease.

As we made our way back down the mountain and headed to the warmth of the hotel I took the opportunity to transfer the images from the camera to my phone before (reluctantly) handing it back. Using the built-in wifi to connect to the new and improved Leica Fotos app took seconds, and the transfer of 1.3GB of images less than a minute. This is another major plus point for both professional photographers working with quick client turnarounds and recreational users excited to get their work up to Instagram, and another example of how the SL3 is equally suitable for either.

Other professional enhancements include the ability to connect to mains power and a timestamp interface to synchronise with other sources of footage, very handy for those who wish to film extended video clips.

The materials and design used for the construction make it equal parts stylish and functional. Every little intricacy of form and function on the SL3 has been crafted after discussion and collaboration with a panel of global photography experts – the result is a camera which will both satisfy their demands and allow casuals like me the chance to feel close to their league.

The Leica Sl3 starts at £5,920. For more information see leica-camera.com.