We’ve teamed up with CEWE to bring you the 60 days of Summer competition where we want to see your best shots over summer and the most impressive entrants will win some incredible prizes.
The 60 days of Summer competition is open to all UK entrants over the age of 18, and we want to see your favourite summer shots right the way through to August 31st. We’ve put five incredible summery photo tips below that you can use as inspiration.
The winner will take home a digital subscription worth £200 including Digital Camera, NPhoto, PhotoPlus and Photography Week magazines, plus you’ll also receive a CEWE product voucher worth £100. There are also £75 and £50 CEWE product vouchers up for grabs for 2nd and 3rd place respectively.
By the way, if you submit your photos to the 60 days of Summer competition, you can also enter the CEWE Photo Award competition at the same time! The CEWE Photo Award has 10 categories: Sport, Landscape, People, Nature, Animals, Travel & Culture, Food & Cooking, Hobby & Leisure, Architecture & technology and Aerial Photos. There’s a huge €250,000 in prizes, with 1st place taking a holiday worth €15,000, €7,500 worth of photography equipment, €2500 in CEWE products and an award.
Plus, for every photo submitted, CEWE donates €0.10 to global charity SOS Children’s Villages, supporting disadvantaged families across the world. Click here for more information on the CEWE Photo Award 2023. Enter now!
Experiment with fast action
Dancing In The Waves by Jo Payne (60 days of Summer)
Action shots can look fantastically bright and colourful in the strong summer sun, whether you’re trying to catch a bird in flight or a snap of your children playing. Bright sun on a clear summer day makes it ideal to use a fast shutter speed to freeze the action, open your lens aperture all the way to and boost the ISO until you get a shutter speed of around 1/2000 sec to freeze the moment still.
Alternatively, you can experiment with slower shutter speeds to add a bit of experimental motion. Lower your ISO to 100 and increase the aperture to around f/16 or f/22, aiming for a shutter speed of 1/30 sec. This is easier to achieve on overcast days when the light isn’t so strong, though you can also attach a neutral density filter to block out the light if needed.
Whether you go fast or slow be sure to use the continuous autofocus mode to continually track your moving subject to make sure they come out pin-sharp. Switch on any image stabilisation and use your camera’s fastest burst mode to give you a better chance of catching the exact moment.
Try some summer presets
Peaceful by Frances Woolnough (60 days of Summer)
Whatever post-production software you choose to edit your photos with there will likely be a way to save and load presets. Presets allow you to apply length time-consuming edits to your shots rapidly in just a single click. Whether you create your own or download a set of presets they can be an absolute game-changer. Why not create a batch of summer inspired presets with warmer tones, reduced contrast and extra flare.
In Lightroom Classic CC after you’ve imported your photos head over to the Develop module and you’ll find the presets panel on the left. Here you’ll find some pre-loaded presets, such as Creative: Warm Contrast, Travel: TR09 work well for giving your shots a summery feel. You can also edit your shot to your heart’s content and then click the Plus icon in the Presets panel and choose Create Preset to save your own settings so you can quickly apply them to a batch of images in the future.
CEWE recently teamed up with blogger Kelsey in London to create a set of free downloadable Lightroom presets. Visit the page here and you can get started on sprucing up your summer snapshots!
Play with a prism
Glass prisms come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and don’t cost the earth, with cheap ones online costing less than a tenner. Holding a prism close to your camera lens is a great way to add psychedelic reflections, boost colours and get creative with your compositions. They’re brilliant for everything from landscapes to portraits, opening up amazing opportunities and creating beautiful lo-fi summer shots with heaps of saturation and flare.
Take some time to perfect the position of your prism and get the reflection exactly how you want it to appear in the frame. Also open your lens’ aperture as wide as it will go and hold the prism close to the front element of the lens so that it’s easier to blur the glass prism and get just the quirky reflection in your shot.
Have a go at street photography
Summery London by Jennifer Luke (60 days of Summer)
Summer is a great time to get out and about and explore a city, whether that’s in your hometown or venturing to a big city for a day trip to see the sights. Be sure to take your camera with you as in addition to taking photos of all the sights you’ll be able to take some brilliant street shots too.
A wide-angle lens like a 28mm or 35mm on a full-frame camera is ideal for wider contextual shots, though it’s worth packing a telephoto lens too so you can take street portraits a little further away without being noticed for a more candid style. If you come across a strong scene be sure to frame up on it and then patiently wait for somebody to walk through it, or a car or motorbike or cyclist to go past and then take your picture so that your photo has a strong focal point.
A good tip is to use the vari-angle LCD screen if your camera has one and hold it at hip height so that you’re looking down and not at your subject as this will also help you remain incognito and take candid fly-on-the-wall style shots.
Take your camera EVERYWHERE
Barn Owl Hunting by Martin Pople (60 days of Summer)
There’s a saying that goes ‘the best camera is the one you have with you’ and we couldn’t agree more. Try to remember to take your main camera with you wherever you end up this summer as you don’t know when a photographic opportunity or great shot may present itself.
Pack a travel-light bag with only your core essential camera kit, perhaps a camera body with a single lens attached as you’re much more likely to take this with you on an impromptu adventure than a big heavy rucksack full of all your camera kit and lenses. However, if you do forget to take your camera don’t worry, smartphone cameras are getting better every year and you can still take some amazing shots with them if you’re in a bind.
Now it's time to submit your shots!
We want you to enter your best summer shots to be in with a chance of winning a digital subscription to Digital Camera, NPhoto, PhotoPlus and Photography Week magazines, plus a CEWE product voucher worth £100. There are also £75 and £50 CEWE product vouchers up for grabs for 2nd and 3rd place.
From action shots to prism portraits and street photos to spur of the moment summer snaps, we want to see your best summer photos. Enter for your chance to win some top prizes before the closing deadline 31st August 2022. Good luck! Enter now!
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