To each his own, and there is no accounting for taste – as the saying goes. Some years I have been to the photo awards or painting awards at the National Portrait Gallery and wondered how they let some of the entries through the door.

This year the paintings for the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2026 are very good, in my opinion of course. You can see them for yourself by clicking this link to the gallery. Click through to the Visitors’ Choice gallery to see them.

I too liked several of the visitors’ choice nominees – Useless, Part II, 2024 by Karin Neijenhuis, Diane, 2025 by Martin Jessup, Mummy needs a break, 2026 by Hannah George, and Another Day, 2026 by Sarah Quick.

It’s this last one that I really liked. From a distance it looks like rough brushwork around the edges of his arms. But get into it and the colours of the skin and the way there are blended is adorable.

I’ve linked to the image file, so if you click this image it will bring it up larger.

About The Painting

Another Day By Sarah Quick Oil on canvas, 2026
Sarah Quick’s portrait of her husband, Mark, is atypical in its composition and yet highly familiar. The artist built up the image through several layers of oil paint, while using a photograph for reference. This portrait encapsulates a period that was particularly stressful in the couple’s lives – switching between long work hours and parenting at home without additional support. ‘We don’t get to spend much time together and this was the five-minute interlude before the switch.’

Sarah Quick (b.1979) undertook a BA (Hons) degree in fine art at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick, Canada. Her work has been seen in the Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Open Exhibition 2025, the Sir William Orpen Prize Shortlist 2025 and Lapis Lazuli at the Hamilton Gallery, Sligo, Ireland, 2024.

Info

The photo of the visitor looking at the paintings was shot on a Fuji X100F at an aperture of f4.0, shutter speed of 1/55th of a second and, ISO 800.

The close-up of the painting was shot on an iPhone 16.

It’s a few months now since I started using DxO PureRaw and as I said before, I think it does a good job.

If you like your current photo editor, then you can use PureRaw as a pre-processor to fix noise, sharpness, and lens flaws, and then export a clean DNG file to the editor of your choice, whether that is Lightroom, Photoshop, Capture One, or whatever.

PureRAW is a subset of DxO PhotoLab, meaning that if you like DxO Photolab then use it for your entire workflow, from RAW processing to exposure, to colour grading, and preparation of the file in a format suitable for printing.

And now comes in interesting quirk. Some people like Affinity processor. It’s not my favourite, but it has one advantage and this that since Canva bought it, it is free to use.

And now DxO PhotoLab 10.1 adds a one-click export to Affinity, One click sends the fully developed image into a native Affinity file for retouching and whatever.

The photo below is from a Sony RX100 Mk III. A camera with a 1″ sensor pre-processed in DxO PureRaw and then exported to Photoshop.

Yes, this The Francis Crick Institute, a building named after Francis Crick of Crick and Watson, the discoverers of the DNA double helix.

If you are in St Pancras station on the ground floor, facing the ticket barriers, and you turn to your left and exit the station then you will see the Francis Crick Institute across the road.

Most of the interior of the building is given over to labs, but there is an exhibition on the ground floor which is free and which explores early DNA and what light that sheds on understanding what we were and how we got here.

Most early DNA is recovered from teeth or from the little bone in the middle ear because those bones are hard and resist disintegration, and the segments of DNA within them are the most suitable for investigation.

The ancient DNA is only broken strands, and so it is part of the work of the Institute to recombine the strands to build a picture of our ancestors.

Why The Building Is So Named

You may wonder why the Institute is named after Crick and not Watson?

It is partly because it is a British institution located in London, and Crick was a British scientist, whereas Watson was American.

And partly it is because of embarrassment over remarks that Watson made in a 2007 interview with The Sunday Times. He is reported to have said that from his own observations with employees, black people are not as intelligent as some other groups.

Of course, intelligence measured by IQ tests is, supposedly, blind to colour or ethnic grouping.

And yes, the evidence is clear that some groups do better on standard intelligence tests.

But here is the interesting piece of data.

The Flynn effect shows that average scores across all demographic groups have risen substantially since the tests were first given and that this shift has happened too quickly to be genetic.

The argument from that is that changing environments, schooling, and technology influence test performance. And if that is true, then genetics does not rule.

From my own observations I say that whatever IQ tests across different groups show or do not show is beside the point in important ways. Intelligence does not equate to value, or to the depth of a person’s humanity.

I guess Watson was too much the scientist and not enough of an observer.

And then – how big was his sample group?

And that is not to forget that Rosalind Franklin was the British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer whose work led to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, and that her work was used without her permission and without her knowledge, and she was not credited when Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins won the 1962 Nobel Prize.

Franklin died in 1958, and by the time the wrong was recognised years later it was too late to ‘put the record straight’ publicly because Nobel Prize rules can only be awarded to living persons.

Personally, I would give her the prize today, and add her name retrospectively to that of the other three recipients.

And if you have not heard of Maurice Wilkins, he worked with Franklin to capture the image of DNA that was the key that sent Crick and Watson on the trail.

But he fell out with Franklin, and somehow she was excluded from contact with Crick and Watson. Crick knew what Franklin’s contribution was, though, so he doesn’t come out of this very well either.

This was this morning and I was on my way along Oxford Street when I came across a Salvation Army band playing outside John Lewis department store.

Then they were crossing to the SA church on the other side of the road.

The look on his face is because they are crossing against the lights. There wasn’t much traffic, and soon there won’t be any because the Lord Mayor is pedestrianising this section of Oxford Street. Taxi drivers hate him and no one knows how buses are going to negotiate the route on the parallel street.