Features

You can pick up a NASCAR disposable camera for less than $10, but that hasn't stopped motorsports photographer Jamey Price from shooting a series of compelling images on them.

I saved the best for last. Sigma had a truly remarkable year, launching a beautiful new camera and a diverse, large array of incredible lenses. There's a very good reason Sigma was PetaPixel's Photo Company of the Year for a second straight year. The company even rebranded! There's a lot to cover, so let's get right to it.

2025 has marked the passing of several influential photographers whose momentous work helped shape the visual history of the world.

Firework displays are few and far between, making it hard to practice photographing them. Fortunately for Benjamin Sunkyong Kim, he lives in New York and every Friday night from July to September there is a fireworks display at Coney Island.

This year, Leica celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Leica I, the first 35mm camera. That alone makes it an excellent year for the legendary German company, but it was also jam-packed with new cameras, lenses, and, as always, special edition product launches.

Not long after President Richard Nixon signed the act creating the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the EPA launched a 50-state effort to document pollution. Photographers hired by the federal government took more than 80,000 images.

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.

Photographer Chris Gorman tells PetaPixel that drones are the “biggest game changer since the advent of digital.” And it’s difficult to argue with his portfolio of pictures taken in the past 12 months.

I know the title says "Grading Ricoh Pentax," but spoiler alert, Pentax didn't release anything new this year, and even discontinued a camera in Japan. 2025 was all about Ricoh and the long-awaited GR IV premium compact camera.

This one will be short and sweet, as Tamron released just two lenses this year. This output is not far off the three lenses the company launched in 2024 and matches Tamron's pair of new lenses in 2023.

While Panasonic ignored Micro Four Thirds in 2025, OM System thankfully didn't. And that's a good thing, too, because it's OM's entire business. OM System didn't entirely allay my fears about Micro Four Thirds's ultimate fate, but at least the company did release some nice products this year.

2025 was an excellent year for Panasonic's full-frame Lumix S system and an eerily quiet one for Micro Four Thirds. The year was headlined by the Lumix S1 II, a dynamite full-frame hybrid camera, and the S1R II, the long-awaited high-res update.

When Sigma announced its new cinema lens series earlier this year, that may have been the first time that some heard the word "Aizu." Aizu, the shortened form of Aizuwakamatsu, refers to a region in Fukushima, in northern Honshu, Japan, where Sigma is based. This region and its people are so important to the core of what makes Sigma special that it only makes sense to name a lens series after it.

Fujifilm is going to be very difficult to grade this year, not because the company didn't do anything, but because it delivered such an eclectic mix of products, ranging from fun but bad to good but boring. Fujifilm always does things a bit differently, but this year was especially odd.

Sony has long been the top dog in the full-frame mirrorless camera space, but the gap has closed dramatically in recent years. Did Sony do enough to stave off the competition in 2025?

Photographer Ari Rabin-Havt has always wanted to get a picture from inside a shark's mouth, looking out.

Nikon's 2024 acquisition of RED bore its first major fruit this year, but the RED-infused Nikon ZR is far from the only great product the legendary Japanese company released in 2025. Nikon launched three cameras and five lenses, nearly all of which proved impressive.

This was a busy year for Canon, highlighted by a very good video camera in the Canon EOS C50 and an even better hybrid camera in the EOS R6 Mark III, PetaPixel's Camera of the Year. But Canon's 2025 included much more than just these two cameras, so let's take a deeper dive into Canon's year, how it transformed the EOS R landscape, and how it sets the stage for more excellence from Canon in 2026 and beyond.

A wedding photographer’s images gained widespread attention after a passer-by -- who turned out to be a popular influencer -- lent his Aston Martin for a couple's photo shoot in the Scottish Highlands.

After an uncharacteristically prolific 2024, Hasselblad slowed down in 2025 in terms of quantity but reached new heights when it comes to quality.

After spending all day skateboarding in the desert Sun, photographer Travis Burke was surprisingly stressed. Why? He had the shot of his dreams to capture.

The cinematographer behind the hit Netflix movie Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery has revealed how he used lighting to give the film a rich, gothic look that changes with every scene.

Photographer Peter Turnley arrived in Paris in 1975 aged 20. Since then he has thrown himself into the City of Light, documenting its comings and goings on his trusty Leicas.

No club scene anywhere else in the world can match Berlin for its mystique, magnetism, and music. The city draws in creatives from all over -- including photographer Chris Noltekuhmann, who has spent the past two and a half years taking portraits of ravers moments after they left the venue.

A photographer has captured not one but two rare forms of lightning, which he compares to the famous scene from Independence Day when the alien mothership destroys the White House.

A new book Dear Marilyn: The Unseen Letters and Photographs reveals a collection of long-lost photographs of Marilyn Monroe and explores the photographer behind some of her most iconic images.

The Italian coffee brand Lavazza hired street photographer Alex Webb to shoot its 2026 calendar, using his colorful aesthetic to capture the essence of life in Italy.

A photographer has captured a series of exquisite images of foxes in snow to highlight each of their personalities and to show they don't deserve their "sly" and "cunning" labels.

Late in 2021, Jack Smith opened the first of two carefully wrapped boxes filled with old photographic slides that had been sitting in his parents' garage for his entire life. What he found was astonishing: his grandfather’s archive of 80,000 images taken across decades and 40 countries.

At the end of each year, TIME selects its Top 100 photos of the year. As always, the 2025 edition is replete with superb photography, ranging from split-second action shots of important news events to powerful photos from longer-term projects, the collection is a compelling visual reminder of the major events of 2025 and, perhaps as importantly, photography's power in telling the world's most important stories.

After returning from a six-month voyage to space, astronaut and enthusiastic photographer Don Pettit has plenty of photos to go through. While Pettit has photographed plenty of celestial objects, he often trains his lens on his home planet below -- and recently shared a photo of one of Earth's most sacred sites.

The winners of the 2025 International Wedding Photographer of the Year Awards (IWPOTY) have been announced, with U.K. photographer David Scholes awarded the Grand Winner title for his
humorous and beautifully composed capture of a young wedding guest peering curiously at the wedding cake.