For the past several months, the photography community has been subjected to the strangest series of product launches that we've ever seen. I use the word "launches" very loosely, because two-thirds of those products have yet to actually "launch."
"I was scared to hire a photographer for my wedding," says the sister of Reagan Simmons Hancock in the harrowing Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct. It's not surprising. Her sister was murdered by her wedding photographer.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) loosened restrictions on some Chinese-made drones this week, although only those that count as "toy drones" and only those that exist within a preposterously narrow definition of what counts as a "toy drone."
Earlier this week, I published a "review" of sorts of the Nikon S3 rangefinder, which I believe to be one of the most beautiful cameras ever made. Through that experience, though, I was reminded of Nikon's vintage glass, and once again baffled by how the company hasn't remade them.
We were sitting on a train between neighborhoods in Osaka, Japan, when Chris Niccolls turned to me. "I'm thinking of buying a new camera," he said. I was shocked. Chris, who has a different camera in hand every week because of his job as a reviewer, actually wanted to own one. "I want something small."
Lomography's latest release, a pair of new colorways for its popular Sprocket Rocket 35mm panoramic film camera, is a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation. One of the new colorways is beautiful and understated, while the other is super ugly. The fun part is that some readers may not know which of the two colorways is the ugly one.
There has been chatter about Sony making its own medium format camera system for about as long as Sony has made image sensors for other brands' medium format cameras. Sony's recent reveal of the 65mm-format Rialto 65 image sensor block for Venice 2 cinema cameras has only strengthened these rumors. However, the speculation is pipe dreaming, at best.
On June 9, Chief Judge for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Mary H. Murguia issued an Order in the case of Jeffery B. Sedlik v. Katherine von Drachenberg, aka Kat Von D, et. al. granting an en banc rehearing by the full court.
The Osmo Pocket 4P is starting to get more visible online as DJI is putting it into the hands of reviewers and content creators this week. That said, most of this camera is still a mystery -- and that's the way DJI wants it.
As Instagram user mrphotographerguy showed in a Reel with the aid of his friend, Alexander Nikolis, zoom lenses do some interesting things with camera ports, and more importantly, the inside of a camera.
For several summers, I have taught drone photography in Iceland’s highlands under permits issued by the country’s nature conservation agency. I applied on time, followed every condition, and never received a complaint from a ranger, another visitor, or the agency itself.
Most photographers I know are in constant motion. New cities, new continents, new visual problems to solve. There's truth in it. Unfamiliarity forces you to look. Familiarity gives you permission to stop. But there's another, less-discussed school of practice that works in the opposite direction: stay. Return. Go back to the same streets until the strangeness burns away and something else appears in its place.
There's a new dynamic range champ, the Sony a7R VI.
After over 7,100 Kickstarter backers pledged over $2.4 million for Peak Design's new Travel Line bags, the four new travel-friendly, adventure-ready bags are now available for direct retail purchase.
Vintage-inspired, retro-styled cheap digital cameras are everywhere these days. The new Leaf Camera is yet another affordable digital camera trying to be the next Kodak PixPro.
The world of photography is currently navigating a crisis of authenticity. AI-generated images are now indistinguishable from photographs. Judges and audiences alike can’t tell the difference. Even experts are getting it wrong.
When it comes to Android phones, Samsung is among the first to come up in conversation. The company built part of that cachet on the camera performance of its flagship Galaxy S series, but has long since abdicated the role of setting the pace for mobile camera hardware.
Yesterday, PetaPixel shared that a fully AI-generated film titled "Dreams of Violets" had been accepted into the Tribeca Film Festival. For some reason, there are people who insist this is the future of films. If that is the case, then congratulations: I hate movies.
The world-famous Tribeca Film Festival starts next week and will feature a "live action" feature-length film entirely AI-generated, a world's first.
The Belfast Photo Festival is still over a week from starting in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but it has already instigated serious outrage among photographers. The Belfast Photo Festival will include a major interactive public exhibition that invites visitors to pick up a hammer and destroy "obsolete" cameras, and not everyone is on board.
Low-budget horror movies aren't for everyone. But it's difficult to ignore Obsession, which just raked in over $30 million in ticket sales over the Memorial Day weekend, taking it to $80 million worldwide. Not bad for a film that was made for just $1 million.
Canon's recent video-first and hybrid cameras, the EOS C50, EOS R6 Mark III, and brand-new EOS R6 V, are a perfect example of what I consider Canon's biggest EOS R System mistake. These products are segmented in extremely annoying ways.
As Japanese retail analyst BCN+R described earlier this year, DJI had a massive market share in the video camera market in 2025. The Chinese tech company's dominance has only strengthened so far in 2026.
As soon as I learned about the exciting and excellent new Sony a7R VI and got my hands on it a few weeks ago, I knew exactly what people would be asking once they learned about the camera's new, faster stacked sensor and 30 FPS burst shooting rates. Why would any photographer choose the Sony a1 II over the a7R VI? And I was right. I heard this question at least a dozen times at Sony's a7R VI event in New York City without any prompting whatsoever.
Sony unveiled the Xperia VIII smartphone this week, boasting photographer-focused upgrades and improvements. American buyers, who are yet again missing out on the latest Xperia, may have felt a little left out. Looking at the phone's new AI Camera Assistant with Xperia Intelligence and its terrible results, perhaps U.S. buyers aren't missing out on much at all.
In a world where photography software companies don't always give photography or photographers the respect they deserve, VSCO has committed to the importance of photography.
The media award season -- a time for applause -- also highlights an irony of the fast-changing marketplace: the winners could be gone.
Another day, another Wi-Fi camera hack. "A million" network-connected baby monitors and security cameras were visible to hackers, exposing many households to extreme privacy violations and security concerns.
Last week, President Donald Trump and the U.S. Department of War launched a new website to publish unsealed photos and videos related to unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). Of the 161 files released so far, the most attention-grabbing ones are from NASA's Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Last year, a client came to me with a straightforward brief: they needed a full lookbook for their new clothing line. But there was a catch. “We don’t want a shoot,” they said. “Just take our phone photos and make them look professional with AI.” I could have said no. Instead, I said yes -- and it changed how I think about my entire career.
There's a dubious rumor circulating about OM System launching an OM-3 Monochrome camera in 2026. While there are plenty of reasons to doubt the rumor, there are even more reasons why an OM-3 Monochrome is actually a really good idea.
Yet another photo contest has attracted significant attention in the online photography community for all the wrong reasons. The winning photo in the National Wildlife Federation's (NWF) recent Garden for Wildlife Photo Contest was disqualified following public outcry. However, the NWF and photographers disagree on why the winning photo violated competition rules.
After my dad passed away a couple of years ago, I inherited his Nikon F and FTn cameras which jump started a resurgence for the love of photography in me. Now with a binder full of negatives (and positives) and an SSD of scans, it felt weird just leaving them there. That's not where photos belong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In his review of the new Oppo Find X9 Ultra, famous tech YouTuber and enthusiastic photographer Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) not only evaluates Oppo's latest slab phone, but he also waxes poetic about mobile photography and smartphone cameras in general, arguing that no matter how good phones get, they won't replace dedicated cameras for hardcore photographers. He's right, and it's refreshing to hear someone in the broader tech space say so.
You might not know what the word "provenance" means but you probably are familiar with the problem it can cause. You take an amazing photo, it goes viral on social media, but no one knows who took it. There is no provenance trail to link back to the creator.
I’ve looked at thousands of black and white photographs over the years -- both my own and those of others -- and I’ve noticed something that nobody talks about enough.
Panasonic's most exciting news this week was definitely the new Lumix S 40mm f/2 lens, but there's also some news surrounding arguably the perfect camera to use with the new Lumix S 40mm f/2 prime, the Lumix S9. There's yet another new color for the Lumix S9, and slightly to my chagrin, it's the best one yet, at least in my view.
Canon, Nikon, and Sony raised prices during the tariff period, citing increased costs. Now that the Supreme Court has invalidated the IEEPA tariffs and US Customs has opened a refund process for at least some affected importers, the photography community deserves transparency about whether companies will seek refunds and, if they do, whether any portion will flow back to customers who paid higher prices.
As the global population of photographers swells, so do their digital libraries, leaving everyone with the same question: where and how to share their best work. Flickr was among the first online communities designed to address that dilemma, and it remains one of the best. Some demand sweeping overhauls or argue the price isn't justified.
Alongside importing and selling many foreign products, Japanese company Saeda also makes some things itself, including under its internal "BECKS" and "Be" brands. Through the former, Saeda has just announced a new digital camera, the Becks B-Quest BQ1, and it is an interesting mixed bag of style and specs.
Canon's latest patent applications in Japan outline three very interesting, exciting lenses. The patents describe 130mm f/1.8, 300mm f/2.8, and 500mm f/5.6 prime lenses. The usual disclaimer applies: just because a company files patent applications for products does not mean it will ever actually make them. That said, if Canon did make them, the EOS R system would be decidedly stronger.
NASA's historic Artemis II mission delivered many absolutely spectacular photos and inspired a new generation of people to love space exploration. It also provided a fresh opportunity to explore the often confusing, disjointed landscape that is NASA's photo publishing system.
