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.
This time last week, I had never appeared on a podcast before; now I've been on two. And it's all thanks to The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo, a documentary questioning Nick Ut's authorship of Napalm Girl that recently landed on Netflix.
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.
I recently installed iOS 26 on my iPhone. I'm slow, I know, but as I was swiping past my Photos widget, I noticed that one of my photos was in 3D. The image wiggled around as I moved my phone in my hand. "What the hell," I thought.
Google has released a more advanced version of its Nano Banana AI image model, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to spot the difference between real and AI-generated photos.
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.
Google has a new feature that allows users to find out whether an image is AI-generated or not -- a much-needed tool in a world of AI slop.
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 year, when Nikon announced the Z6 III, it did not accompany it with a Z7 camera like it had the two previous times the series had been announced. At the time, I argued there wasn't really a need for it, but now a year later, I'm changing my tune.
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.
Annie Leibovitz has once again been attracting plenty of criticism this week after her photos of actor Timothée Chalamet graced the pages of Vogue magazine's December edition. But is any of it justified? PetaPixel writers have their say.
It's very strange to watch a movie in 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratios. As photographers, those are kind of our aspect ratios, while Hollywood's have traditionally been the ultra-wide 2.39:1. But rules are made to be broken.
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.
Photographers know the difficulties of having to crop an image to a specific aspect ratio, and social media users are using this conundrum for a trend that is not exactly new.
Far be it from me to criticize one of my fellow PetaPixel writers, but I feel it necessary to counter Bimal Nepal's recent "Stop Making Digital Look Like Film" op-ed.
Canon unveiled the EOS C50 this morning and the new RF mount-equipped full-frame cinema camera, Canon's smallest and lightest Cinema EOS series camera to date, seems like it could be the awaited successor to the Canon EOS R5 C hybrid camera. But is it? Let's see how the two cameras face off.
The camera isn’t dying: it’s disappearing, not into nothing, but into something smaller, smarter, and always connected. For more …
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.
Insta360 and DJI are swirling toward one another like two ends of a growing hurricane. As the Insta360-incubated Antigravity drone brand prepares for launch on one end, DJI introduced its first 360-degree camera on the other.
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?"
When Sony announced the a7CR in August 2023 alongside the a7C II, the compact high-res a7CR flew a bit under the radar. With the shock announcement of the highly anticipated RX1R III fixed-lens premium compact camera, the a7CR is getting more attention, and it's well deserved.
Annie Leibovitz has been catching heat this week for her Anne Hathaway photo shoot for Vogue magazine. But what do the PetaPixel writers think?
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.
Two weeks ago, enterprise software developer Digimarc released a Chrome extension that could verify and display image provenance for photos or designs embedded with C2PA Content Credentials. After two weeks of testing, PetaPixel found it to be mostly useless, but that's only because the C2PA rollout has been so disjointed.
Wedding photography is a complicated business and depending on the job, things can get messy -- especially if there's more than one wedding party present at the location.
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.
Earlier this week, PetaPixel made an egregious mistake: we unintentionally showed an embargoed Sony product in a video review of a separate product. We then accidentally published the video review for that embargoed product hours before the embargo lifted. Neither was intentional or done with malice. That said, we know it harms our peers, so we want to explain what happened.
Google launched its new AI video model Veo 3 this week and people have already created incredibly impressive synthetic videos from it.
After a photographer provoked the ire of Denzel Washington on the Cannes Red Carpet, many criticized the photographer. But the truth is that kind of environment is a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog world and because I have experienced it, I understand the photographer's perspective.
Last week, the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) announced its annual Journalism Awards which includes the Photo of the Year (which is called the Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage) and the winning image is probably not the one anyone expected.
A photo of two young men sitting at a table smoking cigarettes and drinking beer as a young woman stands nearby has exploded on X (formerly Twitter) this week, but why?
Social media is buzzing with footage of a rumbling fireball that lit up the sky over Mexico City around 3 AM Wednesday.
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.
ChatGPT's powerful new AI image generator continues to make waves as people keep finding creative ways to use it. The latest trend? Users are turning their dogs into humans.
Atomos, the brand that made a name for itself with its external monitors and HDMI recorders, is significantly diversifying its product catalog in what appears to be an attempt to see what it can release that will be its next successful offering.
OM System isn't willing to sacrifice the performance of its computational photography features in order to increase the resolution of its sensors. That strategy leverages one of the company's competitive advantages, but it also very well makes it difficult for its cameras to appeal to any photographer.
Zeiss unveiled its heavily teased Otus lenses for full-frame mirrorless cameras, revealing not only the expected Otus ML 50mm f/1.4 but a longer Otus ML 85mm f/1.4. Let's look closer at the two new premium manual focus primes for E, RF, and Z-mount cameras.
Today Sigma announced the BF, the company's latest camera that makes a series of wild, unexpected design choices. Sigma calls it "radically simple" and for the first time in a while, a company's marketing language isn't overselling the product.
In today’s world of photography, camera models come at us thick and fast. Some brands seem to update cameras yearly; for others, it’s two or three years between new models. However, there are always the odd ones out, and this is definitely the category in which Ricoh and its formidable GR III series fall. Despite being a runaway success for the brand, even the most loyal users now wonder when a successor will appear.
While Adobe's Firefly text-to-video generator leaves a lot to be desired, a secondary application of the technology is currently in the beta version of Premiere Pro. Called Generative Extend, it allows video editors to extend a clip by up to two seconds and does a surprisingly good job at it.
Adobe today launched its competitor to OpenAI's Sora, a text-to-video AI generator that Adobe is positioning as a possible alternative to licensing stock footage. It costs at least $10 per month with the "best value" option at $30 per month, but it's nowhere near good enough to warrant either price.
Meeting my friend in the corner of a traditional English pub, he slides the goods over to me on top of the table. "Here you go mate, I don't know if it will work. But good luck."
