August Recommended Reading: Award-Winning Street Photos, New Adobe Plugin Features, and Cinematic Tips from The Odyssey
Photography has the power to document the world as it is and imagine what it could be.
This month’s recommended reading explores that range, from award-winning street photography and a visual history of Indigenous photographers to inventive conceptual work. You’ll also find the latest developments in editing technology, celebrate the life and legacy of an influential photographer, and head behind the scenes to see how a specially modified camera helped bring a blockbuster film to life.
Winners Announced for the 2026 LensCulture Street Photography Awards
The winners of the 2026 LensCulture Street Photography Awards showcase the countless moments in everyday human life that make it extraordinary, from chance encounters and quiet dramas to kind gestures, grit, and unexpected tenderness. The 41 photographers hail from 23 countries across five continents, demonstrating the universality of person-to-person interaction and connection.
Read more: lensculture.com/photo-competitions/street-photography-awards/winners
A Photographer Built This Bamboo Forest from Plastic Drinking Straws
Hungarian photographer Benedek Lampert’s latest collection ‘The Nature We Replaced’ harnesses the power of photography to tell a story of environmental activism. Using mini plastic action figures, Lampert stages nature scenes built with the materials that are destroying them–such as a sea turtle swimming in a wave of nets, polar bears standing on an icecap of tarp, and a panda in a forest of drinking-straw bamboo. Lampert’s conceptual miniature photographs are a powerful exploration of the relationship between humans and the natural world.
Read more: dpreview.com/articles/a-photographer-built-this-bamboo-forest-from-plastic-drinking-straws/
An Indigenous Photographic History of America in Pictures
Spanning generations and multiple Indigenous societies and nations, the photography book In Light and Shadow by Brian Adams and Sarah Stacke traces the visual importance of Indigenous photographers. Representing work in different genres, it presents more than 250 images and was accompanied by an exhibition at Obscura Gallery in August of 2026. The pieces explore resilience and resistance across mediums such as wet-plate imagery, multimedia collage, and more.
Adobe’s New ChatGPT Plugin Lets You Batch-Edit Photos Without Opening Photoshop
Photographers looking for a new batch-editing workflow can now do so from inside a ChatGPT window. The chatbot feature now incorporates 70+ tools like Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, and Firefly into a single plugin that works across ChatGPT Work and Codex. Adobe has released tools for Claude and Microsoft Copilot, with Slack and Google Gemini versions on the way.
Read more: diyphotography.net/adobe-chatgpt-plugin-lets-you-batch-edit-photos-without-opening-photoshop/
Jay Maisel, Whose ‘Light, Color, Gesture’ Philosophy Shaped Generations, Dies at 95
Jay Maisel, the influential American photographer and educator whose images reshaped the visual language of advertising, editorial and street photography, passed away on August 24, 2026, at age 95. With more than 70 years of photography and teaching, Maisel was instrumental in our current understanding of light, color and human gesture. While you may recognize his most famous image for Miles Davis’s 1959 album Kind of Blue, Maisel is best known for his approach that calls creatives to pay closer attention to the world.
Read more: dpreview.com/news/jay-maisel-iconic-photographer-dies-95/
Christopher Nolan Modified a Pentax 6×7 Medium Format Camera for The Odyssey Movie
The format of Christopher Nolan’s films is arguably just as formidable and vast as the narratives themselves. Supporting the director’s affinity for 15-perf 65mm/70mm IMAX large-format film, a modified Pentax 6×7 medium-format still camera frequently appears on Nolan sets to act as a viewfinder. For films such as The Odyssey, the camera was fitted with an IMAX mount so the IMAX lenses could be attached–giving a nearly exact match to the 15-perf frame. This kind of setup allows the filmmaker to check framing, lens choice, and composition without activating the full production setup.
Whether you’re discovering new photographers, considering how technology could change your workflow, or finding inspiration in the creative approaches of industry greats, there’s always something new to explore in photography. We hope this month’s collection encourages you to stay curious, look at the world from a different perspective, and keep finding new possibilities for your own work.