The Top Five Photography Trends of 2026
AI culling, editing, and retouching company Aftershoot has identified what it believes are the top five photography trends for 2026.
Jeremy Gray is an award-winning landscape and nature photographer. Over the last decade, he has written extensively for many of the leading online publications in the photography industry. He has a passion for writing in-depth camera and lens reviews, educational content, and discussing the latest news from the photography world.
AI culling, editing, and retouching company Aftershoot has identified what it believes are the top five photography trends for 2026.
Photography competitions arise in all sorts of places, including sometimes very unexpected ones. Portuguese wine maker Dow's recently announced the winners of its 2025 Black and White Photography Competition that challenged photographers to capture people's dedication and patience, which Dow's says is a common thread that connects both black and white photography and winemaking.
As January nears its end, Fujifilm published its annual New Year Greeting video today, offering a recap of its 2025, discussing the GFX Challenge Grant Program, and, in news sure to excite Fujifilm photographers, teasing what's coming for Fujifilm. The company is even considering an upcoming fan vote to determine which X Mount lenses it should develop.
Alongside being an aerospace engineering student, Tyler Staub and his brother, Calvin, also started a drone service company to capture aerial media for local businesses. Now you can add "inventor" to Tyler's list of accomplishments, as he has built a new adapter, the aptly named Dronebal, to turn a DJI Mini 4 Pro drone into an easy-to-use, high-quality handheld camera.
Yodobashi Camera shared its top 20 best-selling compact digital cameras of 2025. Fujifilm not only had the best-selling model, the X100VI, but numbers five and 11 on the list as well. However, the company with the most compact cameras on the list was Canon.
Website builder Wix has announced a new AI-powered website builder, Wix Harmony, that promises to combine human creativity and AI tools to "reinvent website creation."
Reports published yesterday suggest that smartphone maker OnePlus is shutting down. The company has responded to the rumors, though different markets have expressed varying degrees of denial about OnePlus' demise.
Legendary sports photographer Peter Read Miller passed away earlier this month in his sleep at his Manhattan Beach, California, home. Miller was 78 years old. Miller is one of the most accomplished and prolific sports photographers in history, with his photos gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated over 100 times during his long career.
ProGrade Digital, maker of memory cards, storage, and workflow solutions for photographers and other creatives, has entered into a Space Act agreement with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to support the agency's Artemis Moon missions with ProGrade Digital CFexpress Type B cards and readers.
The latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro has arrived, boasting a bevy of new AI-powered features, though it's no longer called Premiere Pro. Adobe Premiere 26, sans the "Pro" in the name, is fundamentally still the same nonlinear video editing (NLE) app, albeit with a bunch of new tools.
Emmy Award-winning cinematographer Bob Poole loves elephants. He not only loves elephants but is also a world-leading expert in filming them. Filming elephants is surprisingly challenging, and Poole uses every tool in his arsenal to capture their magic in a safe, respectful way.
The Fujifilm GFX Eterna 55, Fujifilm's first digital camera built explicitly for professional filmmaking, is now IMAX-certified.
Photojournalist John Abernathy was tackled by ICE agents in Minneapolis last week and his last-ditch effort to save his camera was successful thanks to fellow photographer Pierre Lavie, who captured Abernathy's camera-saving toss in a now-viral image. Lavie's powerful portrait reflects the importance of photojournalism, captures the risks photographers face in the field, and, to the benefit of Leica, shows how rugged the company's cameras are.
Japanese retail analyst BCN+R has published its annual BCN Awards, detailing the best-selling photography brands across the majority of Japanese electronics and camera stores. There are some surprising results this year, although the major players have remained consistent.
WhiteWall is now a founding partner for the photography app, Irys, that celebrated photographer Alan Schaller launched last year. The app celebrates the art of photography over algorithms and prioritizes personal connection over virality. Irys is all about photography, and WhiteWall shares its mission.
Sigma has been on an f/1.2 kick of late, releasing great lenses like the excellent Sigma 35mm f/1.2 DG Art II and 50mm f/1.2 DG DN Art. The company is celebrating its f/1.2 excellence with a new Power of F1.2 Photo Contest.
Sunspot 4341 erupted yesterday afternoon, producing a super-powerful X-class solar flare that lasted for hours. The resulting radiation hit Earth's atmosphere, even causing a temporary radio blackout at short wavelengths. However, of much more interest to photographers is the solar flare's Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) that is headed toward Earth now. It may trigger a G4-class geomagnetic storm, which could, in turn, deliver incredible auroras as far south as California and even Alabama in the United States.
Google's recently released Veo 3.1 AI video generation model has received a significant new update, promising even better, more realistic AI-generated video.
Building upon the 105-megapixel Sony IMX927 square global shutter image sensor unveiled in September, Sony Semiconductor Solutions has announced two sibling sensors, the IMX928 and IMX929, offering fewer megapixels across smaller sensors. However, the promises of exceptional speed remain the same across the entire series.
Photographer and YouTube creator Mathieu Stern loves vintage lenses. He also loves vintage analog photo booths. So Stern set out to find out exactly which lenses are used in old-school film photo booths so he could recreate the exact look at home. It was much harder than one might think.
There has been speculation that the Fujifilm X-H2S might be on its last legs, but Fujifilm tells PetaPixel the camera remains an active product for the company.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the Sony a7 V topped Map Camera's monthly sales charts for December, the new mid-range full-frame mirrorless camera's debut month.
Viltrox has launched NexusFocus F1, the world's first PL-E autofocus control system, enabling AI-powered autofocus when using manual PL cinema lenses on Sony E-mount cameras. With vintage glass all the rage these days, this new adapter could be a massive deal for modern filmmakers.
The British Journal of Photography and JCDecaux UK have unveiled the winning photos of the Portrait of Britain Vol. 8 competition. The competition's 100 winning portraits, selected from 200 shortlisted images, will appear on digital screens nationwide in the United Kingdom and be featured in a photo book.
Evoto has had a tough week. While the AI photo editing software company was on hand at Imaging USA 2026 in Nashville, a major photographic industry conference full of working professionals, news broke that the company was testing an AI Headshot Generator that promised to help users save on studio costs by bypassing professional headshot photography services altogether. The move has been criticized as tone-deaf, and Evoto quickly scrambled to try to undo the damage.
In trademark Thypoch style, the company's new Ksana 21mm f/3.5 M-Mount lens promises to channel a vintage spirit and deliver photos rich with character and warmth. The new lens promises the classic imaging of beloved 1970s-era lenses.
One of the late landscape and nature photographer John Fielder's most famous photos captured in Colorado will be featured on the upcoming Colorado Statehood Stamp, released by the U.S. Postal Service to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Colorado becoming a state. It is a fitting honor for Fielder's legacy, who Colorado's governor calls, "Colorado's Photographer."
Software company Cyme released Peakto 2.6 today, the latest version of its AI-powered photo and visual media management tool for macOS.
Fujifilm North America Corporation has announced the instax mini Link+, a new smartphone printer that sports a sleeker, more buttoned-up design and works alongside an updated mobile app.
In National Geographics new series, "Pole to Pole With Will Smith," viewers follow Smith and world-renowned experts on an adventure across the globe, starting at the South Pole and concluding in the season finale at the North Pole with stops in the Amazon, the Pacific, Himalayas, and Kalahari Desert along the way. PetaPixel chatted with Tom Williams, executive producer of "Pole to Pole," about the series and how it was filmed.
DxO Labs has released 326 new modules for its photo editing applications, including support for the latest gear from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Hasselblad, Leica, and more. The additions bring the total number of camera and lens combinations supported in DxO's software to over 110,000.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope used its sophisticated aperture mechanism to capture unprecedented images of the heart of the Circinus Galaxy, providing astronomers with data unlike anything previously obtained and completely upending the understanding of super-bright infrared regions surrounding supermassive black holes.
In a shock move, Apple has unveiled Creator Studio, a new collection of the company's most powerful creative apps, including Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, and more.
A Chinese design account, PerceBound, shared a clever 3D-printed Fujifilm camera-themed battery and memory card case. It's a silly, but great idea.
The DJI Osmo Nano is a clever, compact modern action camera with cutting-edge features. But what if it looked and acted less like a modern action camera and more like a classic waist level-viewfinder Hasselblad camera? For some reason, there's a 3D-printed shooting kit that answers that very question.
There is now even more proof that the Sony a7 V, despite polarized reception, is selling very well.
SG-image is a relatively new Chinese lens company making a wide range of lenses, including autofocus and manual lenses for photography and video across many different camera systems and lens mounts. The company's latest, a 75mm f/1.2 prime, is designed for Fujifilm GFX and Hasselblad XCD-series medium-format cameras.
Japanese retail analyst BCN+R has shared the top 10 best-selling interchangeable-lens mirrorless cameras of 2025, and Canon and Sony traded spots in the top five.
Digital photography is wonderful. It has positively impacted my life from the second I picked up my first camera, a Nikon D80. However, the other side of that coin of accessibility and convenience and nearly infinite image-capture capabilities is a seemingly impenetrable pile of image files, including RAWs, JPEGs, and even videos, over almost 20 years. Finding what I'm looking for in my massive library has always been a nightmare. But it doesn't have to be, thanks to Excire Search 2026.
"Programmer by day, photographer by weekend" Cristian Băluță could not find the precise camera he wanted in the market, so he made it himself. Băluță expertly took the internal components from the Panasonic Lumix G9 II Micro Four Thirds camera and put them inside a Leica M replica body he made. It was a labor of love, and while the photographer admits the result isn't necessarily the dream camera he imagined, the project is incredible.
New photos of one of the world's largest icebergs show it has turned bright blue, which, despite its beauty, is not good news for the once-great "megaberg."
China is one of the world's biggest photography markets, even besting the Americas in terms of camera and lens sales earlier this year. However, China's rich photographic history is not well known in the West, something American photographer Ben Fraternale, who runs the excellent photography YouTube channel "In An Instant," hopes to change through his new three-part documentary series, "Inside China."
The Viltrox AF 56mm f/1.2 Pro lens announced last September is now available for Nikon Z mount mirrorless cameras. The APS-C portrait prime delivers an 85mm equivalent focal length and fast f/1.2 aperture, promising good sharpness and beautiful bokeh.
The deadline to enter the annual 2026 World Press Photo Contest is quickly approaching. Photographers have until January 17 to submit their photos.
The Hasselblad X2D II 100C is the company's best demonstration yet of how medium format photography doesn't have to come with compromises. Gone are the days of huge, heavy cameras, sluggish and unreliable autofocus, and an obtuse user experience. The X2D II 100C delivers the exceptional image quality photographers expect from medium format and represents the mature roadmap of the company to stand out in the medium format camera industry.
Viltrox has again taken to Reddit to discuss some of its future lenses, this time revealing that its promised 50mm f/1.2 LAB and 85mm f/1.2 LAB lenses will arrive this year.
Nikon Corporation held a groundbreaking ceremony on January 7 to celebrate construction starting on two new buildings to strengthen Nikon's Japanese optical production and development capabilities.
It's 2026, and Canon has been making full-frame EOS R-series mirrorless cameras since 2018. That has not stopped Chinese lens company Meike from releasing a new 85mm f/1.8 Mark II lens for Canon EF-mount DSLR cameras, which seems strange at first glance, but is actually a clever way to bypass Canon's restrictions on third-party full-frame RF lenses with autofocus.
Think Tank's redesigned Shape Shifter 25L and 37L backpacks promises to better serve photographers whether they are working in the field, transporting gear from shoot to shoot, or traveling afar. Think Tank specifically targets the backpack at fast-moving photojournalists, but it is built for all photographers who need to carry a lot of gear safely and access it quickly.
A new NASA timelapse was two and a half decades in the making. What makes the timelapse of the Kepler Supernova Remnant even more spectacular is that it wasn't captured on Earth, but in space. The supernova remnant is a whopping 17,000 light-years away from Earth, or over 99 quadrillion miles.