Raw vs. JPEG at the Grand Canyon: What Four Cameras Actually Showed

Choosing between raw and JPEG isn't just a technical preference; it directly affects how much you can recover and reshape an image in post. This helpful video tests this in a setting where the stakes are real: a Grand Canyon sunset, shot across four current-generation camera bodies.

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Submit Your Best Long Exposure Shots

Welcome to the June Critique the Community!  For this contest/critique, we are doing another abstract theme that should allow more photographers to enter. For this month we want to see your best photograph that feature "Motion Blur".

5 Sony APS-C Lenses Worth Shooting With Right Now

Choosing the right lens for a Sony APS-C camera is genuinely difficult right now, because the options have multiplied fast and the differences between them aren't always obvious. Curtis Padley has been shooting Sony APS-C for six years and has run through enough glass to have strong, experience-backed opinions about what actually works.

The Most Underappreciated Trend in Lens Design Right Now

For roughly two decades, the standard zoom lens started at 24mm. Before that, it started at 28mm or even 35mm. The 24-70mm f/2.8 became the default in the early 2000s and stayed there so long that the starting focal length became invisible. 24mm was simply where a standard zoom began, and nobody questioned it because there was nothing to question.

We Review Thypoch Latest Compact M Mount Lens: The Ksana 35mm F/2 Asph

Following my recent speculation about M-mount lenses being the next big thing, the M-mount ecosystem has seen some truly exciting developments lately. Even in such a niche and crowded market, we are still getting frequent releases from companies like Thypoch. And after all the good releases, they still manage to surprise us every now and then to give us a reason to pick their lens.

Who Are the Unique Voices in Street Photography Today?

Street photography has become so codified that much of it now looks like photographers photographing other photographs. That sentence might sound unfair, perhaps even provocative. After all, we are living through a golden age of technical accessibility. Cameras have never been better, books are everywhere, and great work from every continent is just a swipe away. Knowledge that once took decades to acquire is now available in a 20-minute YouTube video. In the first years of the 2000s, we did not have anywhere near the access to information that we have today.

Chasing the Light: Tips for Dramatic Landscapes

Let's talk about a few careful composition choices I made at sunrise in a quiver tree forest of Namibia, and how good ambient light helped to make the landscape photography shoot successful.

The Leica D-Lux 8 After 18 Months and 3,000 Shots

The Leica D-Lux 8 sits in an unusual spot: a Micro Four Thirds compact with a fixed zoom lens, priced like a premium tool, marketed as something you actually carry. After nearly 19 months and close to 3,000 images, Peter Fritz has moved well past first impressions, and his conclusions are more nuanced than the usual early review.

When People Become Props in Street Photography

Street photography still speaks about people, encounter, and human communication in the moment. Much of the practice already uses people differently. People become form, scale, color, silhouette, and rhythm inside the frame. Has the photographer begun to use people as compositional material?

Focus and Sharpness in Landscape Photography: What Actually Works in the Field

Sharpness is one of the first things many photographers judge in a landscape image, but it is also one of the areas that caused me the most frustration when I was starting out. I used to come home convinced that I had captured strong images, only to load them onto a larger screen and realize the foreground was soft or the distant detail was not as sharp as I thought it would be. At the time, I blamed gear more than technique. I assumed my camera or lens was holding me back, when in reality the biggest issue was my process in the field.

PMI's New 'Vanishing Fog' Makes Adding Smoke Easier Than Ever

 I used to think all fog machine liquid was the same. Never once had I considered that a new fog formula could be far better than what I've been using for decades. PMI's Vanishing Formula Kit has changed my opinion, and today I test it against three of the most popular portable fog systems on the market. 

Which Is Right for You? Canon's R6 Lineup Compared: Mark II vs. Mark III vs. R6 V

The Canon EOS R6 used to be a simple recommendation. You wanted a full frame hybrid that did a little of everything well without costing as much as the R5, so you bought the R6, and that was the end of the conversation. That clarity is gone. The line has split into three very different cameras that happen to share a name, and choosing between them now means knowing what kind of shooter you actually are. The good news is that once you sort that out, the right answer becomes obvious, because Canon has aimed each of these bodies at a genuinely different person.

Fujifilm X100VI vs. Panasonic Lumix LX10: Which Compact Is Actually Better for Travel?

Choosing a compact travel camera is harder than it looks, especially when two solid options sit at very different price points with very different sensor sizes, lenses, and feature sets. The Fujifilm X100VI and the Panasonic Lumix LX10 both pitch themselves as small, capable everyday cameras, but they take genuinely different approaches to getting there.

The Portrait Photography Trick That Makes Landscape Shots Stand Out

Landscape photography is one of the most crowded genres in the medium, and standing out gets harder as cameras make technically competent images easier to produce. Ben Harvey argues the answer isn't more gear or better locations; it's rethinking how you use depth of field in a genre that almost never does.

The Quiet Argument Against Photographing Everything

There is a reflex most photographers know well. Something happens, a light shifts, a child laughs, a stranger's face catches the sun, and before the moment has fully registered, the camera is already up. The hand moves faster than the thought. 

Hit Rate in Landscape Photography: Why Most Shoots Don’t Work, and Why That’s Normal

There is a moment I've become very familiar with over the years. It usually happens on the drive home, just after I've packed the camera away and the light has long since faded.

It's that quiet realization that nothing from the day will make it into a final image.

No keeper. No portfolio shot. Nothing to process.

For a long time, I treated those days as failures. I would mentally replay decisions I made in the field, question timing, and sometimes even question whether I had missed something obvious. It felt like the effort should have guaranteed a result.

Over time, though, that way of thinking changed completely. Not because I started getting better images more often, but because I started to understand what hit rate actually means in landscape photography, and more importantly, what it doesn't mean.

Why You Should Embrace the Natural Rhythm of Your Photography

When we think about seasons in photography, our minds usually jump to the literal shifts throughout the year. We imagine the specific light of a spring morning or the way autumn color transforms a familiar trail. But we spend so much time obsessing over the conditions outside that we often overlook the shifting climate within our own creative process.