Steve Litchfield

Thirty years ago, searching the Internet was more a case of finding a web site you knew about by looking for it in Yahoo! - then a manually curated hierarchical directory, with categories and sub-categories. Twenty years ago, the first decent search engines had appeared, led by Google (to 'Google' something became a verb), with minimal page furniture, no bloat, no adverts. Just search matches that were accurate and relevant, fed by a few keywords that you typed in. Yahoo's directories were still used by many, plus DMOZ, started by the people now behind the likes of the Firefox browser. Ten years ago, searching the Internet was still search-engine-driven, though with adverts and sponsored panels here and there. Monetisation was beginning to happen. The start of a slippery slope? In 2025, a simple Google search will now typically get you a full page of 'sponsored results', made to look exactly like search results and thus capturing most peoples' clicks. To those w...

Simple enough, you'd think. The moon lights up our skies most nights (cloud and location permitting) and it's always tempting to snap the atmosphere, especially hoping to capture some of the detail that our eyes naturally perceive. Except that it's almost impossible. While our eyes are incredible at adjusting to different light levels and at resolving detail in a small area, phone cameras not so much. The moon at night is vastly, hugely, brighter than the black scene around it, meaning that focussing on and adjusting exposure for it is tricky indeed. Go on, try it for yourself with your phone's camera. However, armed with a phone camera with a decent telephoto and some top tips, there's no reason why you can't get close to what I shot here, yesterday on an iPhone 17 Pro Max: Whereas your first attempts to snap the moon will no doubt have been a small white blob on a vast black background. That's OK, you just need some top tips. Shoot in the daytime!  Yes, un...