I'm running an evening printing masterclass with Carmarthen Camera Centre on Friday 20th November 2026 at Zion Chapel, Carmarthen. Three hours, only 15 places, and you can bring your own images to print.
I was joined on Sunday Night Live by my friend Vincent Versace, and if you caught him the first time round you’ll know what to expect; it’s an open, honest conversation that ends up being incredibly motivating without either of us really trying. Plenty of you asked to have him back, so here’s the full chat along with some of the things that have stuck with me since.
I started by asking Vincent whether photographers should pick a niche, because looking through his work for the promo there’s portraits, wildlife, still life and everything in between. His answer was that if you want to master something you should master all of it, and he told a story about a friend from grad school who learned to play almost every instrument in the orchestra because he wanted to be a conductor, and the symphony was his instrument.
Vincent shoots his landscapes like portraits and his portraits like landscapes, and he puts it this way: if you only do one thing, that thing becomes a groove, then a rut, then a hole, then a grave, and then you’re wondering why nobody’s hiring you anymore.
That landed with me this week. I’ve gone full circle back to Canon, and I was out on Sunday morning with my friend Ben photographing birds for the very first time. I was like a kid in a sweet shop, and I genuinely felt like I was doing portraits of the birds. Vincent’s response was simple; a portrait shows the best of a person or a thing, so why should a bird or a flower be any different?
Vincent got hooked at seven, watching his uncle, a wedding photographer, print a picture in the darkroom. He sold his first photograph at nine and shot his first wedding at sixteen, and his rule hasn’t changed since: if it looks cool, take a picture of it.
He was teaching a workshop in Maine the week we spoke, and he told me he wasn’t going to tell his students that autumn colour is one of the hardest things to photograph, because if they don’t know it’s hard they won’t make it hard. He reckons he’s shot more bad photographs than my entire audience put together, but he just doesn’t show them, and that’s where his line “from fertiliser, flowers grow” comes from. You have to shoot an awful lot of rubbish to get to the gems.
The bit I keep coming back to is letting the picture take you rather than you taking the picture. If you’re busy working out what it is in the moment, the moment’s gone.
On the technical side, Vincent believes every decision about a photograph happens at the moment of capture, and the more you understand about editing, the better those decisions get. However, the aim is for all that knowledge to sit in your unconscious mind so you’re not juggling it while you shoot. He knows how to focus manually and how to expose, but he hands all of it to the camera because it can track an eye faster than he ever could, which frees him up to pay attention to what’s happening in front of him.
He also made the point that the word amateur comes from the Latin for doing something simply for the love of it, and that’s where your head should be. He’d far rather be an amateur than an expert, and his childhood joke book definition of an expert had me laughing; “ex” is a has-been and a “spurt” is a drip under pressure.
Vincent thinks photography is the only art form where owning the instrument makes you a practitioner; nobody buys a cello and calls themselves a cellist. He doesn’t call himself an artist either. To him, art is something other people accuse your work of being, and until then it’s expression, a postcard from the vacation of his life.
I’ve always struggled with calling myself an artist, so it was good to hear someone put it that way.
I also asked him about saying “make a picture” rather than “take a picture”, because when I first heard it years ago I thought it sounded pretentious, but my view’s changed. The way Vincent sees it, the lens is his brush, the sensor is the canvas, the file is the sheet music and the final image is the symphony. Pictures don’t come out of the camera finished, and as he put it, the boon of digital is that you have total control, and the bane of digital is that you have total control.
We lost Jay Maisel back in August. I was lucky enough to meet Jay a few times at the conferences Vincent and I were teaching at in the States, but the two of them were close friends for 37 years, ever since they ended up sitting next to each other on a panel.
Vincent described his most perfect day as a photographer, spent with Jay in New York. It started with cigars at half eight in the morning, and at one point Jay stood next to a rubbish bin, looking from the bin to Vincent and back again, while Vincent walked past it three times thinking it was just a bin. Back at Jay’s building, Jay showed him a frame of blurred colour, shadow and geometric shapes, and it was that bin.
Later, sitting in Jay’s kitchen on the sixth floor with the Empire State Building in the window at sunset, a white “I ♥ NY” bag floated up and hovered in the frame, moving from spot to spot as if it were asking where they wanted it. Both cameras were five floors down. They called it the cyber chrome that got away, a picture taken with your mind, and it was a running joke between them for 20 years.
When I asked what Jay saw that the rest of us don’t, Vincent said he was always childlike and had the ability to slow down to the speed of life. Jay trained as a painter under Josef Albers at Yale, and for him gesture came before everything. That’s also Vincent’s take on black and white; it works when the colour gets in the way of the gesture, rather than being about contrast for its own sake.
Jay’s mantras still come into Vincent’s head when he’s shooting. Be taken by the picture. Photography is unrequited love, and Jay’s own line was that he fell in love a thousand times a day, usually for 1/125th of a second. Fill the frame and own every millimetre of it; Jay never cropped. He treated light like a solid object that the subject interrupts, and he’d take a line of washing in beautiful light over the Taj Mahal in poor light every time.
About ten years ago Vincent was ready to walk away from photography altogether, and Jay told him that if he’d already shot that tree, he should shoot it again, because he’d see it differently. Vincent has photographed the Golden Gate Bridge for over 40 years, and while plenty of those pictures are clichés, plenty of them are completely unique because he kept going back. In his words, mastery is the variation of repetition over time.
Asked whether he’d want to be starting out now, Vincent gave the same advice he’s given for 20 years: consider a career in plumbing. If you can’t do anything else, though, keep the love going, and if it stops making you happy, find the joy again or step away and come back when you can.
His biggest sorrow for people coming up today is that there are no heroes anymore, just influencers. He grew up studying the greats and living and breathing Jay’s work, whereas now we scroll past images so fast we never let any of them take us. For Vincent, the power of a still photograph is that it freezes the moment that took the photographer, and AI images feel sad to him because there’s no feeling in them.
I’d been thinking about the guy who vibe coded his own version of the Adobe apps, and it made me realise that the future isn’t really the editing software, because that will always change; it’s the craft. Vincent agreed, and he’s not anti-AI either. He uses the AI remove tools because they do a better job of cleaning up an image, and he’s used generative tools to rescue a couple of soft film scans, but he doesn’t make AI pictures. When I asked whether people writing prompts are photographers, he said no; he thinks they’re authors.
Last week took me up to Manchester for the next leg of the Wex Summer Roadshow, and what a great couple of days it turned out to be.
I travelled up the day before so I could arrive fresh rather than rolling in as the shutters were going up, which is always the better way to do it when the store is a few hours away.
Good company for the journey too, but more on that shortly.
Manchester is a great store as well. There's a lot going on in there, plenty of space, and a real buzz about the place from the moment the doors opened.
I have to give a mention to Guy, the store manager, who was just so incredibly welcoming from the off. The whole team were brilliant, friendly and dynamic and genuinely engaging with everybody who came through the door.
Photo by Ben Kapur
It's one of those things you notice when you visit a lot of different places. You can always see how the person leading a team influences the team itself, and Manchester is a really good example of that. Great atmosphere, great people.
As with the other roadshow dates, I spent the day on the shopfloor doing what I always do, which is classic portraits with minimal kit. Nothing that needs a studio or half a van to transport.
Here's what I took along this time:
the Westcott X-Drop Pro background system
my vintage grey backdrop
the Westcott FJ400 II
the Westcott X-T1M multi-brand remote trigger
my Fuji
That vintage grey backdrop gets a lot of attention wherever I take it, and Manchester was no different. Loads of people came over to ask about it, which is always great to see, because it's such a big part of the look and yet it's the least technical thing in the bag.
What struck me at Manchester was how many people came over specifically to ask how I do the portraits. Not just what I use, but how it all fits together and why it looks the way it does. So we shot quite a few portraits across the day, and I'm really grateful to everyone who was kind enough to stand or sit in front of my camera for me.
I even edited a handful of them and emailed them across afterwards, which is always a nice way to round things off. There's something about handing somebody a finished portrait rather than just a snap on the back of a screen.
The thing that got the biggest reaction, as it has done at every stop, is the TTL to manual function on the X-T1M trigger.
It works like this. You take one shot in TTL and let the camera and flash sort the exposure out between them. With the Fuji, if you've got face detection and eye focus switched on, that's largely where it's metering from, so it's exposing for the skin, which is exactly what you want for a portrait. Have a quick look, make any small adjustment you fancy, then hold down the group A button on the trigger. It flips over into manual and remembers the power it was using in TTL.
That's it. One shot to get you there, and from that point on every frame is the same consistent exposure, shot after shot. No light meter, no guessing and chimping your way towards it.
For anyone who's been put off by the idea of manual flash, it's a lovely way in; you get the consistency of manual without having to do the maths first. It was great fun showing people how it worked and watching the penny drop.
I travelled up with Ben Kapur, who lives locally to me and is filming the majority of the roadshow dates and producing the content.
Ben's an incredible videographer. He shoots for some seriously high end clients, and the speed he turns work around at is something else. He's also a photographer, but it's the video work that really makes you sit up.
One evening he sat me down and showed me how he works in DaVinci Resolve, and I think that's now going to be my video editor of choice. The speed of it and the functionality on offer were enough to convince me on the spot.
The other highlight was getting to meet up with my great friend Dave Jagger, who I've known for a good number of years now through photography.
We got to spend some proper quality time together during the day and then headed out in the evening as well. It was very much overdue, and it was lovely to just sit and catch up properly rather than the usual quick hello at a trade show. Those days are worth the drive on their own.
Then it was the drive back home the following day, tired but with that good kind of tired you get after a day where everything just worked.
The roadshow rolls on, and here's where I'll be for the remaining dates:
Milton Keynes, 14th August
Nottingham, 15th August
Norwich, 21st August
Belfast, 3rd September
Glasgow, 11th and 12th September
Photo by Ben Kapur
If you're anywhere near one of those, do come along and say hello. Entry is free, and you'll find me on the shopfloor throughout the day with the backdrop up and the light on, so there's no need to book anything or wait for a set time slot. Just wander over.
And if you fancy being in front of the camera, bring it on!
Here’s the ( LINK )
Hopefully see you there,
Glyn
The Photography Show returns to the Birmingham, NEC for 2026 running from Saturday 14th March thru Tuesday 17th March, and I’ll be there for the duration.
This year Adobe USA have asked me to host their CAPTURE, EDIT, PRINT area on their stand, which is where I’ll be taking attendees hands on through portraits shoots, where they can capture images themselves, that can then be edited on the stand printed by Canon on Hahnemühle Paper.
Really looking forward to this using the Westcott L-120B Continuous lighting, modifiers and backgrounds on 2 separate sets ups.
Also, on the Monday 16th @ 1pm, I’ll be on the Rocky Nook Publishers Stand signing copies of my latest book, How to Print
If you’re coming along to the show, please do stop by and say hi.
Hopefully see you then,
Glyn
At the South West Photo Show in Exeter I sat down with Pete Rawlinson of London Camera Exchange for this interview. We talked about my 39-45 Portraits Project, the series honouring Second World War veterans through timeless portraiture, and the stories and inspiration behind it. Pete also asked about the way photography is changing, and I shared how I've embraced AI editing tools to help my creative process while still staying true to my own style.
Spread over 5 days running from 11th - 15th November, this Virtual Summit includes 40 classes from 23 instructors, of which I’m increddibly excited to say I am one.
I’ll be presenting 2 classes, namely …
Combining OLD and NEW: Mastering Selections and Cut Outs in 2024
Oldies BUT Goldies: Photoshop Techniaues that stand the test of time
As with previous Virtual Summits, you can GRAB A FREE PASS and then be able to watch every single class for 48 hours from the time it was released during the week. There’s also the option grab an EARLY BIRD VIP ACCESS PASS for $99 (increases to $159 on November 11th - Day 1 of the Summit)
Use the button link below for information on both passes …
To celebrate the launch of the Photoshop Virtual Summit 6, I hosted a LIVE Broadcast on my YouTube and Facebook Channels going through a few Photoshop techniques for FIXING SELECTIONS but also talking about the Summit and bringing in the Founder / Creator, Dave Cross who very kindly gave some time to answer questions.
If you missed it, the recording is below but if you want to see the LIVE chat from the Broadcast, you can watch it over on my YouTube Channel ( HERE )
This is the recording of a live broadcast where I share three Photoshop techniques for fixing tricky selections, and I'm joined by Dave Cross, Photoshop educator and the founder and creator of the Photoshop Virtual Summit, for a special announcement: the Photoshop Virtual Summit 6. The summit was spread over five days, from 11th to 15th November, with 40 classes from 23 instructors, and I was incredibly excited to be one of them. I presented two classes: Combining Old and New: Mastering Selections and Cut Outs in 2024, and Oldies but Goldies: Photoshop Techniques that Stand the Test of Time. As with previous summits, a free pass meant you could watch every class for 48 hours from the time it was released during the week.
This past weekend I had the absolute homnour of having been asked to officially open a Landscape Photography Exhibition by Photographer Nigel Thomas in Kidwelly, West Wales ; an exhibtion that Nigel has worked on to help raise awareness of Mental Health …
“I am so grateful that photography, landscape photography in particualr, has become such an important element in my life. I have found a profound sense of peace and purpose. My journey into landscape photography qas not just a creative pursuit, but a therapeutic escape from the depths of severe depression and anxiety”
I can honestly say that I’ll NEVER forget this!
Throughout my career in this creative industry I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have presented at functions around the world. I’ve had some amazing experiences and made some amazing friends … and today I add to that!
A stunning body of work that has been instrumental in his recovery and my god, what a story he has to tell and is just so damn brave to do so.
It was an emotional rollercoaster of a day but it’s a ride I wouldn’t have missed.
Truly honoured. Truly blessed.
I was invited to be part of Westcott Wednesday, hosted by B&H Photo Video in their Event Space, and this is the recording of that live broadcast. As I'd been using constant light more and more when taking portraits, I was asked to talk about my experience of moving away from traditional flash, and how and why I feel it's made such a positive impact on my portraits, not just for me but also for the person being photographed. I go through the constant light I'm using and how I'm using it, along with tips on how I take portraits, and hopefully you'll see how well constant light works alongside them. It had become the cornerstone of my portrait work, and it brought a new level of creativity and enthusiasm to my photography.
So here’s a date for the diary …
In conjunction with Westcott and B&H Photo and Video, on the 15th May @ 3pm EDT (8pm UK) I'll be on "Westcott Wednesday" going through the WHY, WHAT and HOW of using Constant Lighting when taking portraits.
Thid will be the latest installment of the regular Westcott Wednesday series hosted by B&H in which I’ll be, as the description says …
Join us for this presentation as Photographer Glyn Dewis takes us through a journey shifting from traditional flash to constant lighting in portraiture. With a mix of image examples and behind the scenes, Glyn will explain how constant lighting has become the cornerstone of his portrait work, injecting a newfound level of creativity and enthusiasm into his photography.
“At first, using constant light almost felt like cheating but I’ve since completely changed my mind because aside from being under no illusion of the results I get and the ease of setting up, more than anything it enables me to concentrate even more on the person in front of my camera and the concept we’re working on.”
Oh and this event is FREE , will last about 1 hour and will be over on the B&H Event Page on YouTube ( LINK )
This is the recording of a live broadcast where I chat with concert photographer Scott Diussa and discover his process, his kit and his tips and tricks for photographing live music and events, including some of the biggest names in the industry, and all with limited time and space. Scott also shares some of his Lightroom editing techniques for bringing out the best in images taken in challenging lighting conditions, which is useful well beyond the concert hall.
Scott Diussa’s Link Tree: imagesrock.com
KelbyOne Lightroom Conference: bit.ly/lrconf2024
Royal Photographic Society Workshop: bit.ly/rps-editing
© Glyn Dewis 2026
