Earlier this year, students enrolled The University of Texas at Austin's School of Journalism and Media (in the Moody College of Communication) were encouraged to apply for a six-month mentorship with a Canon Explorer of Light. Leila Saidane's won that competition and recently completed her mentorship with photographer Natalie Keyssar.
On Friday, Microsoft confirmed it had discontinued the Surface Studio 2+, the company's all-in-one desktop computer. This computer failed not because it wasn't a good idea -- it was a brilliant idea on paper -- but because it was so poorly executed on all fronts.
Despite being ahead of its time, the Pentax K-1 (and its Mark II upgrade) was a camera system that promised so much yet appears to have run out of road. Born seemingly from an R&D department whose chains had been freed, the engineers went wild, strayed off-script, and produced a camera full of innovation. Fast forward to 2024, and a lack of lens support paired with no upgraded models in over six years leaves Pentax owners in an unwanted state of limbo where even the most loyal customers are now compelled to look elsewhere.
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.
Last week, FilmNeverDie announced that its Kickstarter-backed Nana 35mm film camera was available for purchase worldwide. PetaPixel readers pointed out that the press materials that accompanied that announcement were incomplete and worth greater scrutiny. We agreed.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday offered many deals for photographers looking to upgrade their equipment while saving a few dollars in the process. Typically, this online promotion on steroids allows brands and camera store chains to push stock that has been on the shelves for a couple of years and is likely to be superseded by newer models over the coming months. However, there are a few models that buck typical trends.
Foldable smartphones aren’t a total novelty anymore now that various brands make them, but they’re still far from being ubiquitous in people’s hands. There are various reasons to consider one, but how they can affect mobile photography helps make them more interesting.
"My goal with this book is simple: I want you to understand how to communicate an idea that resonates with the person who views the image," Ted Forbes, author of "Visually Speaking" and the face behind The Art of Photography YouTube channel writes.
A security firm has released a deepfake detection tool as a useful aid to determine whether a piece of content is AI-generated or not.
In just the last year and a half, Apple launched Final Cut on iPad and Final Cut Camera, updated Final Cut Pro to a new version for the first time in 13 years, and moved to purchase Pixelmator. As Adobe's public perception continues to struggle, Apple is making moves to take advantage.
Artificial intelligence (AI) might be running into a cul-de-sac thanks to data shortages and technological constraints, according to a report from Bloomberg.
In 2018, I was happily flying my DJI Mavic 2 Pro above a waterfall in Maui. Next to me, struggling to even get his GoPro Karma off the ground, another photographer eventually gave up. The Karma failed because it just couldn't get the basics right. Sony's Airpeak suffered the same fate.
Early this week, I pulled a colleague into a video chat and shared my screen with him, asking if he was familiar with Apple Photos. He said yes, and proceeded to let me continue. That was when I told him what he was looking at wasn't Apple Photos.
On Friday, Pixelmator surprised with the announcement that it had signed the paperwork required to be acquired by Apple. If it passes regulatory approval, Apple will suddenly own a set of software that directly competes with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.
This morning, multiple blogs and YouTube channels published their reviews of the new Viltrox 135mm f/1.8 Lab lens for Sony E-mount cameras. PetaPixel has a unit in hand but chose not to review it because of an issue Viltrox made us aware of.
Earlier this month, the star of the new Wicked movie Cynthia Erivo shared that she was livid with a fan-edited film poster that more closely resembled the poster for the popular Broadway musical show of the same name.
Over the weekend, Meta's official Threads account posted a series of AI-generated images of major cities with the Northern Lights overhead along with the line, "You missed the northern lights IRL, so you made your own with MetaAI." It's a stark reminder of the contempt Meta, and much of big tech, have for artists.
Yesterday, Moment announced the SuperCage: a smartphone cage system with integrated USB-C and an SD card port. That might lead some mobile filmmakers to believe they can use their existing memory cards to take advantage of the iPhone's ProRes Log capture, but as PetaPixel has written before, it's not that simple.
While browsing Reddit yesterday, I came across a gorgeous photo of Earth that had been downloaded from the NOAA's GOES-East orbital satellite. Looking more closely, I realized the NOAA was uploading a new, 470-megapixel photo every 10 minutes.
At PetaPixel, we've been covering generative AI advancements pretty heavily over the last two years for two major reasons. One, the technology is becoming inextricably linked to the software we use to edit photos, and two, it simultaneously represents an existential threat to the art of photography.
The iPhone 15 Pro series and the new iPhone 16 Pro series offer really gorgeous video capture capability, especially thanks to the addition of ProRes Log. The standard video capture suffers from oversharpening, but the log footage doesn't. But the log footage takes up a lot of storage, which means some creators might be tempted to use SD cards.
Earlier this week, Lexar announced a new SD 8.0 card that promised read speeds up to 1,700 MB/s and write speeds up to 1,000 MB/s, which is leaps and bounds faster than the all-metal SDXC cards it announced alongside them. As great as that sounds, this card is not fully compatible with anything and that speed will never be fully realized.
Point-and-shoot cameras are having a moment right now, but many now-popular models have been long forgotten by manufacturers. Cameras are selling with high markups on eBay and used marketplaces, and the latest generation of pocketable compact models from 2019 are widely sold out.
Last week, Blackmagic announced DaVinci Resolve 19, an upgrade to the popular video editing software that added over 100 new features. It's just the latest example of how the editor has become so reliable and feature-complete that it can't be ignored, even by direct competitors.
People are turning to ChatGPT to rate their Instagram profiles but asking the AI chatbot to be as mean as possible.
Since digital image editing tools like Adobe Photoshop hit the scene in the late 1980s, there have been heightened concerns about whether photos can be trusted. This long-time worry has become an increasingly common refrain among artificial intelligence's most ardent defenders, but it doesn't serve as a sound defense against criticisms of AI.
There is a widely held belief that AI images pose a danger to society. The technology is able to create fake images that can pass as genuine creating opportunities for bad actors to spread misinformation.
Pretty much as expected, Google leaned hard on the AI capabilities of the Pixel 9 series as selling points over major hardware improvements (a nice new design notwithstanding), but its implementation of these -- especially the generative AI additions -- lacks anything close to the proper levels of disclosure they needs.
Last week, Google updated its agreement with "Team Pixel" members to stipulate that they weren't allowed to support any other smartphone brand or else risk ejection from the platform. Because many in that program considered themselves reviewers, it exposed a major disconnect between how many perceived themselves versus how Google perceived them.
This week, PetaPixel published a podcast where the entire premise was simply posing questions provided by photographers to Adobe. But just the act of publicizing those answers immediately turned some viewers off, showing a huge number need to see action, not words -- if anything at all will work at this point.