Opinion

Ricoh seemingly made the significant announcement that it would cease the mass production of digital cameras (which includes the Pentax brand), shifting instead to a direct-to-market model. For now, it only affects its business in Japan, although the ramifications could affect its business more widely. What does this mean for Ricoh (and Pentax) and their future?

Camera resolution in the early 2000s was a space race to the biggest and best. Nikon ushered in the beginning of the end -- with the release of the 36-megapixel era-defining D800 -- to what became the resolution doldrums.

Photography is a tech-heavy job. Camera companies do a great job of hyping up new gear and creating a fear of missing out. However, very few professionals that I know actually go and splurge on the latest and greatest equipment.

Ritz Gear is currently offering a brand new SD Express memory card that it promises boasts up to 820 MB/s read and 500 MB/s write speeds for $300. In real-world use cases, it will never come close to these promises and it says so right on the box.

Manufacturing silicon is patently not required in order to make cameras -- anyone can put together a pinhole model -- however, the wider point is more pertinent. To be a competitive, global, manufacturer, do you need to make the sensors that actually go into camera bodies?

Henri Cartier-Bresson is famously credited with the saying, "Your First 10,000 photos are your worst." Looking back at his first photos, photographer Gordon Laing tends to agree.

It goes without saying that anything that is valuable is eminently stealable. If there's a market for consumer goods, then there's a market for stolen consumer goods.

There are 365 ways to waste your time being busy instead of doing useful work. One of those is the popular concept of a 365 photo project. Let’s dive in and see why it is one of the best ways to waste your time.

In spite of my great fondness for my Fujifilm cameras, I have some constructive criticism. My biggest pet peeve with Fuji is their frustrating lack of consistency among bodies. It drives me a little nuts when switching between my Fujifilm bodies that are different models.

In many art practices, a new method or process does not usually automatically override the old one. You can still use berries and charcoal to paint a cave wall, paint on a canvas, or put pencil to paper. These do not become irrelevant just because a Wacom tablet can be used to make a digital illustration or a VR for a 3D painting.

Nikon unveiled the Z9 back in October to a world desperate for updates about their new top shelf model after months of teasers. This was eagerly awaited, not least to see how it compared to Sony's blockbuster Alpha 1 and because it beat Canon to the proverbial flagship punch.

Everyone on the internet has an opinion and many of them are not exactly productive or supportive. This is even more prevalent in the photography community and in a ten-minute video from Miguel Quiles, he discusses five of the most common "negative" opinions that need to be stopped if creatives want to elevate their craft to the next level.

There are many debates about ethics in photography. One such debate is around making money on photos that show human suffering. It could be appropriate, but there are a few caveats you should consider before selling such work.

EuroWeekly News – based in Malaga, Spain and published by Michel and Steven Euesden – represents itself as the leading English language newspaper in Spain, with six editions and a circulation of over a half a million copies. What they seem less obvious about promulgating is that they also apparently feel entitled to exploit the work of independent visual artists.

Being a professional photographer is often a flashy “seemingly easy” career in which anyone with a camera and a lens can succeed. But why then do so many fail? Having talked to many successful photographers, I’ve noticed certain patterns that they all share.

Remember those halcyon film days? You mailed off that little black cartridge in an envelope and then about a week later negatives and prints were magically returned. With the rise of digital, the inkjet printer promised instant gratification at low per print prices. What could possibly go wrong?

The process of crafting great imagery is something I have been studying for years. One of the undertakings in this riveting pursuit was to study hundreds of great images from many photographers.

Successful professionals -- that is, people who make most of their living as photographers -- have a kind of global view of their career. They behave as though marketing and contract negotiations and digital workflow are all just as important as composition and lighting.

As a 20-year old concert photographer, one of the questions that I get the most is: “How did you manage to land a touring job so quickly and at a young age?” Here are a few tips that I used when navigating my way into the concert photography industry.

Microsoft's first Surface Duo looked promising, but loud complaints about poor photo quality, bugs, and old hardware saw it flop in sales. The Surface Duo 2 directly addresses all the complaints, but the device may be too flawed to fix.

In the corner of my living room lives my piano, a cat tree, and an unassuming black Billingham camera bag containing a film and digital body. The thing that connects the three is that they’re all static objects.

Razer today announced the Enki gaming chair and while the term "gamer" comes with a lot of baggage that will make many immediately ignore it, this one looks promising whether or not you enjoy video games. I mean, we all need to sit, right?

Photographers and editors regularly get overlooked when it comes to a wide range of products. Computers, accessories, you name it, we usually end up buying something originally made for someone else. Never has this been more the case than with our chairs.

In ways much like the chicken and the egg, it is tough to distinguish which came first, my love of photography, or my obsession with optics.

Lighting as a thought process is fundamentally easy to apply to schemata. Water is not.

I recently brought the new iPhone 13 Pro to historic Savannah, Georgia, to shoot an entire new episode of my YouTube Photowalks travel photography series.

The “purple mountain majesties” which Katharine Lee Bates reflected on when writing the words of America the Beautiful, would likely be unrecognizable to her today.

While the broad strokes of what is wanted on a camera usually revolve around the imaging fundamentals -- resolution, ISO performance, AF, et cetera -- there are some functions of camera design that have a significant impact on creating that often can be overlooked. The aspect that I want to discuss today is that of balance.

Canon has spent the last five months hyping up its new sports camera and if there is anything to take away from it now that the R3 has been fully announced, it is that Canon has done a remarkable job closing the technology gap with Sony.

Live music and the resumption of public schools have become a flashpoint (1, 2) in the battle about masks and vaccines in the public sector. My son is homeschooled so I cannot speak to that, but I can speak about live music.

The overall measure of success for any photographer will likely be at least partially attributable to the effectiveness with which they are able to edit their own work.

A few of you may remember, but most might have missed it entirely: Around 2018, the mobile social networking app Vero experienced short-lived hype. Within a day the user numbers exploded from about 150,000 to over 3 million.

The photos on your iPhone will no longer be private to just you in the fall. The photos are still yours, but Apple’s artificial intelligence is going to be looking through them constantly.

Back when I was taking pictures just for the fun of it, I never once thought to optimize my preparation. There was no preparation -- no shot list, no scouting, no mood board. That all changed when making pictures became my job and my livelihood.

Among the most important concepts learned when beginning to ride a motorcycle is that of target fixation. This attentional phenomenon occurs when an individual becomes so focused upon an observed object (whether it is a target or hazard) that they inadvertently increase their risk of colliding with it.

The Digital Age has well and truly established itself and has transformed the photography industry in ways that seemed impossible just a few decades ago. Over the last several years, analog photography has been put on life support, only keeping a pulse thanks to a determined community of film lovers.

From my beginning days in photography, roughly 1969, I had the ambition to travel and make photographs. Somehow, I felt a great satisfaction in producing photographic art that came from within.

As reported recently here on Petapixel, the FAA has rolled out a new testing program for recreational UAV (a.k.a., drone) users, created to “provide education and testing for recreational flyers on important safety and regulatory information.” As with many government-mandated programs, it provides neither education nor safety.