Just as Tolkien did in "The Lord of the Rings," photographers encompass cultural, historical, and personal viewpoints in their work. However, as in that book, a complex interaction exists between the photographer's intent and the viewer's interpretation of the image.
Early morning. Black t-shirt, dark blazer. I’m dragging heavy bags down from my apartment just outside Stockholm, heading to a taxi waiting outside. In twenty minutes, I’ll be at Stockholm Waterfront, where three intense days of shooting are about to begin. And I love it.
A major new biography explores the life of Edith Tudor Hart, a pioneer photographer in 1930s London who became a Soviet secret agent and had a hand in the history of the notorious "Cambridge Five."
Now, my not-so-piping-hot take is more nuanced, but I still stand by that statement in the title. Because while stunning skies are what drew me to landscape photography, they’ve also held back my development and growth.
As much as I think that landscape photography is a lone pursuit, it often conflicts with the need for feedback about our work. Learning to take photos is one thing but learning to interact with others, to find connections and build a creative network is often overlooked, but just as vital.
Is it foolish to buy a camera with 40-plus megapixels? Photographers are still pushing for higher megapixel count, but that may be too many.
The 1994 genocide in Rwanda was one of the most intimate and large-scale acts of violence of the 20th century. In just 100 days, between 800,000 and one million people were killed, mainly Tutsis but also Hutus. Perpetrators were neighbors, teachers, church leaders, even family members, who attacked face-to-face with machetes, clubs, and spears.
Upstart British photography company Alfie Cameras is launching its next camera, the Alfie Boxx, in just a few weeks. The upcoming camera is an all-in-one analog camera experience, enabling photographers to capture and develop photos right in the camera itself.
Photography has always had a weakness for metrics, but dynamic range has taken on a peculiar authority in the digital era. It is treated not just as a specification, but as a verdict. Cameras are ranked, dismissed, or praised based on differences of less than a stop, as if such a number alone could determine the quality of an image.
For more than a decade, commercial photographer and retoucher John Barnard has worked across high-end campaigns for brands including Nike, Apple, Restoration Hardware, and Pottery Barn. But after 15 years in the industry, what ultimately pushed him to build his own software wasn’t a creative breakthrough or a business pivot. It was a broken tethering connection on set.
Spring often brings a shift in how photographers move. There's more travel, more location work, and a renewed focus on portability. With that comes the need for camera bags that match different shooting styles, whether that’s lightweight everyday carry or fully protected transport for larger, pricier kits.
Every so often, Hasselblad takes to its YouTube channel to showcase a legendary product from its distant past. The latest classic camera to get the modern video treatment is an absolute beauty, the Hasselblad 500 EL/M "20 Years in Space" edition. Released way back in 1982, it is arguably Hasselblad's coolest camera ever.
Meta has threatened to shut down Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp in New Mexico amid a child safety court battle, as state prosecutors push for fundamental changes to the company’s social media platforms.
Trail cameras captured incredibly rare footage of cougar kittens in Minnesota -- the first confirmed evidence in more than a century that cougars are reproducing in the state.
They fly above us unseen -- some are taking photos of outer space -- but the intense network of satellites that orbit Earth in perfect coordination could collapse in just a couple of days, according to a new study.
Here's the thing with photography: you can take a mundane photo and think, 'Why did I take that?' But years later, that same photo is a fascinating artifact from a bygone era.
During a Q1 earnings call on Wednesday, Meta revealed it lost 20 million users across its family of apps.
Second View is a newly-developed app that turns an iPhone into an all-in-one assistant device for analog photographers. Not only does it include mainstay functions like a light meter and exposure timers, but it also includes a LiDAR distance scale, parallax correction, and film stock reciprocity correction.
A new documentary follows photographers and scientists deep into Florida’s most remote swamps in search of answers to one of botany’s most enduring questions: what pollinates the elusive ghost orchid. Long considered one of North America’s rarest and least understood flowers, the species has resisted decades of study, with its reproduction largely undocumented in the wild.
Vanguard, known for its photography gear, including tripods and backpacks, has announced some new bags specifically for photographers with compact cameras.
TIME Magazine has published its annual 100 most influential companies list and Fujifilm was named as a "pioneer" by the storied publication. Not only did it make the list of 100 most influential companies, it was also a 2026 Industry Leader in the Hardware sector.
MAC Group and MPEX Distribution have joined forces to form Godox USA, a new enterprise that unifies all of Godox's products under MAC Group's umbrella.
This week, Canon published a Service Notice to its websites urging photographers not to use lithium or lithium-ion batteries in its Speedlites, battery packs, and macro twin light products, surprising many that this was suddenly an issue. The thing is, it's not sudden at all, and almost every manufacturer cautions against it.
The best camera features generally go to top flagships for good reason, but mid-range brands like Tecno always try to punch above their weight. The Tecno Camon 50 Ultra may be a phone you’ve never heard of, yet its camera system is varied enough to stand out.
Last December, photographer and designer Xiao Liu announced Rewindpix, a digital, screen-free compact camera designed to offer an analog experience. It launched on Kickstarter earlier this month, and with 11 days left in the campaign, it has shattered its funding goal by over $870,000.
The Wikimedia Foundation has announced the winners of the 16th edition of the Wiki Loves Monuments photo competition -- with three of the top five entries hailing from Iran.
Instagram is widening its efforts to prioritize original creators with a new algorithm update that directly targets accounts built on reposted content, not just in Reels but now across photos and carousel posts as well.
The Nikon Z system needed a new kit lens. The 24-120mm f/4 is one of the best lenses I’ve ever used, but it isn't exactly affordable and is understandably beyond the budget of many beginner photographers. The 24-50mm is a decent optic, but it has a slow aperture range and a limited focal range for general-purpose photography. Even the Nikon 24-200mm and Tamron 25-200mm is a bit too expensive for a beginner.
Two young photographers in the U.K. have been allowed to capture the final of a soccer competition after initially being barred because of their age.
Two photographers spent an exhilarating couple of months at a wildlife conservancy in Kenya, capturing photos of lions, leopards, and many other animals in their natural habitat.
Taking good care of camera gear is something constantly playing on a photographer's mind, and the latest protective wraps from Spinn are designed to put minds at ease.
Ask any working photographer what the one thing that they cannot fix in post is, and the answer will almost always be the same: light. It's easy to clean up skin, tweak color and contrast, and even swap skies or extend backgrounds. Still, bad light has historically meant a costly reshoot, hours of painstaking compositing, or the quiet disappointment of delivering something a client doesn't like. Stockholm-based startup Vividon is looking to change that, and today it has opened early access to its AI relighting plugin for Adobe Photoshop.
When Photokina collapsed in 2020, it was a major blow to the photography industry, adding to the sense of dread that the whole market was coming tumbling down. But now, after multiple years of growth, Japan's CP+ Show is living proof that photography is not just surviving: it's thriving.
Thypoch's interesting Eureka 28mm f/2.8 lens announced last November is now available, providing photographers with a retro-inspired, charming pancake prime.
EvrApp has introduced EvrBridge, stylized "evrBridge," a new Windows application designed to automate one of post-production’s more persistent workflow challenges: extracting and organizing camera metadata for use inside DaVinci Resolve. The app marks the company’s first native Windows solution built around its established metadata processing pipeline.
Nearly all tripods have one thing in common, they stand on the ground (or a floor). While there are some exceptions, like the GorillaPod, they are small and aren't built for full-size professional camera systems. A new Kickstarter product, Viperpod, rethinks the tripod from the ground up, and says "no thank you" to traditional use cases.
Blackmagic Design has released DaVinci Resolve 21 Beta 2, a quick follow-up to its recently introduced public beta. The update arrives less than a month after the initial announcement and focuses largely on stability, bug fixes, and refinements, particularly in the new photo editing tools.
This week on The PetaPixel Podcast, we're giving away a new Canon G7X Mark III 30th Anniversary Limited Edition camera thanks to our friends at B&H Photo! And since we have our minds on compact point and shoots, we got to thinking... what cameras like the G7X would we like to see make a comeback?
An incredible photo archive showing the sad decline of a long-forgotten town shot by Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones has been digitized and uploaded by the University of California (UC).
Just over a week after Google added AI-powered "beautification" tools to Google Photos, the company is showing off yet another addition. This time it's a wardrobe feature that will let people virtually try on different outfits in Google Photos on Android later this summer.
Hasselblad unveiled the 70 finalists of Hasselblad Masters 2026, the company's first Masters competition since 2023. It didn't take long for controversy to emerge, including allegations that a finalist used generative AI to create one of their images.
Meta was charged by European Union (EU) regulators with breaching landmark tech rules after failing to prevent children under 13 from accessing Instagram and Facebook.
Harrowing footage shows a foil surfer being pursued by a great white shark for miles along the California coast.
The year is 1969, legendary rock and roll band The Velvet Underground is playing at a Vietnam War protest in Texas. It sounds like an iconic moment. The only problem? Back then, people didn't care all that much about The Velvet Underground.
Among all the large smartphone manufacturers, Apple has so far been the most cautious in introducing AI-powered photo editing tools -- but perhaps not for much longer.
Formula 1 is rolling back into the United States this weekend and keen photographers attending the Miami Grand Prix might want to read the small print.
The Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards has unveiled the Sterna People's Choice Award winner for the 2025 competition. Photographer Alison Tuck from the United Kingdom earned top honors for her hilarious portrait of a gannet getting a face full of grass and weeds.
With these products from ProMaster, a brand known for designing photography gear for every creator, you’ll be ready to spring into action when the weather is warmer. From a supremely lightweight and compact tripod to new straps to sport your camera in style, premium filters for flawless images, Rugged SD cards made to withstand the elements, and a shoulder bag to safely store it all while you’re on the move, this list has everything you need for a spring refresh.
Adobe has introduced a major expansion of its AI-powered creative ecosystem, integrating the Adobe for creativity connector for Anthropic’s Claude alongside a public beta of Firefly AI Assistant. The updates mark a broader push toward agentic workflows, in which creative tools are orchestrated via natural-language prompts across multiple applications.
Hasselblad has announced the 70 finalists of its prestigious Hasselblad Masters 2026 competition, highlighting exceptional photos across seven categories.
