Editorial

From a rare big cat once thought extinct, to breathtaking images captured by remote cameras deep in the Congo rainforest, and footage from a trail camera left inside a grizzly bear den for ten years, trail cameras recorded some truly remarkable images in 2025.

Now for the fifth year in a row, PetaPixel has gathered its team together to gaze into the future and see the facts, the truths, that will come to pass in the camera industry in 2026. As always, we are prepared to be very wrong.

When Kodak re-released Kodacolor in 100 and 200 ISO variations a few months ago (which is probably just Kodak Color Plus in a new box), the film community got very excited. Now that dust has settled and I am not hearing a lot about the film much these days, but that should change. This film rocks.

Your favorite holiday tradition is back! Yes, it is time for our annual Best and Worst camera gear roundup. Jordan and I get together to battle it out with some not-so-friendly challenges, drink more than we probably should, and reminisce about the last year’s gear releases.

This year we saw some really outstanding cameras come to market. In fact, somehow, 2025 was even more packed than last year. Yet now as the dust settles and we are winding down, I am regularly seeing complaints that the Sony a7 V and the Canon R6 Mark III -- two of the year's most impressive cameras -- have "gotten boring." Excuse me, what?

Earlier this year, 7Artisans announced the Floral Bloom Art Cine Lens series, with the first being a 37mm T2.9 for PL mount only. It sounded interesting, so we agreed to check it out. We appreciate the effort and applaud the company for trying something new, but unfortunately, this lens is terrible.

We made a promise to our viewers: Show us your support for the Petapixel YouTube channel by helping us reach certain subscriber milestones, and we will carry out some "challenges" for your entertainment.

Every year, PetaPixel recognizes the top cameras, lenses, and photography accessories in The PetaPixel Awards. Selections are voted on by the PetaPixel staff and while final awards will be announced next week, we are happy to share our nominees in each of the categories today.

The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo, which lands on Netflix this week, opens with a line implying Nick Ut is a liar: "What you do know is what you didn’t take." But is that really true? I've always thought the inverse makes more sense.

Earlier this week, Arri announced that it would be closing two facilities, both of which were focused on lighting production. Seeing Arri significantly reduce or outright exit the lighting industry makes a lot of sense if it wants to get acquired.

The "MP" in Leica MP stands for "Mechanical Perfection." That’s a big claim that I decided to put to the test with a roll of Leica’s brand new Monopan 50 and a trip to the English Cotswolds.

Last week, Vogue France published a short snippet from an interview where Jisoo -- an incredibly popular member of the K-pop group Blackpink -- talks about her love of the Fujifilm X-Pro3. Describing the photos it takes as "cinematic" and "atmospheric," she also touches on another angle of why she and her friends like it: how it looks.

Sean Murray, the founder of Hello Games, was once one of the most derided figures in video gaming. In 2016, he and his studio released No Man's Sky, a game that was so disappointing at launch that it was jokingly called "One Man's Lie." Nine years later, and Murray has earned that respect back by delivering the game he originally promised -- and more.

Earlier this year when the Canon C50 was announced, I saw a significant amount of chatter online about how well-designed and well-priced it was for the average content creator. I wanted to agree, but thought it lacked two major features that those content creators were going to miss: in-body image stabilization and an electronic viewfinder.

This past week, Adobe added several new features to Lightroom Classic that are powered by AI. My knee-jerk reaction to any new AI feature is immediate skepticism, but after looking at the updates, the additions all look like welcome improvements.

Sigma is a premier optics manufacturer. That is not just an opinion, it is becoming an unassailable fact. In the last several years, Sigma has cemented its reputation as one of the top optical manufacturers in the world. It is, therefore, becoming impossible to ignore that its lenses are not available on Z-mount.

The top 200 photographers requested by Midjourney users have been exclusively revealed to PetaPixel -- and it's a world-famous, still active photographer that tops the list.

Actress Diane Keaton passed away over the weekend, and although she was best known for appearing in The Godfather and Woody Allen movies, she also had a keen eye for photography.

Author Patricia Cornwell has this week released her latest forensic crime thriller Sharp Force. Another nail-biting installment of the adventures of Dr. Kay Scarpetta. But the story of how I captured the photo on the front cover is just as tense.

When Nikon added the gold ring to the lens mount of its 28-135mm f/4 PZ earlier this year, I was ecstatic. Finally, Nikon was leaning into its brand color. I was saddened to learn it would only do this on select products moving forward. That got me thinking: every brand is leaning away from color when they should be leaning into it. For a tool designed to create art, the camera tends to be dreadfully boring.

This week, Sigma announced that it would be absorbing the additional 5% cost of the newest US tariff on Japanese goods. When bigger, far more established companies like Canon have already said they plan to increase prices and cut costs in response, it's important to understand why Sigma was able to take the action it did while its contemporaries likely cannot.

Yesterday, I shared a deep-dive into the Nikkor 105mm f/2.5 lens made by my friend Gordon Laing. As I was putting that piece together, a thought that has been flitting in and out of my consciousness for the last several months resurfaced: "wait, why hasn't Nikon remade this lens?"

Last week, B&H hosted its second Bild Expo at the Javits Center in New York City. After years of attending the Photo Plus expo and seeing its rapid decline, I had questions about the viability of a show in New York City. Whatever expectations I might have had, they were absolutely shattered by what I saw there.

Late last year when Fujifilm announced that it was putting the sensor found in its GFX 100 II into a cinema camera, I was not clear on the value proposition. While huge, the slow sensor didn't feel suited to movie-making. After spending some time with the camera yesterday, however, I'm starting to see the vision.

Users pushing the limits of ChatGPT’s powerful new AI image model have uncovered yet another astonishing -- and slightly unnerving -- ability: it can pinpoint the location of photographs.