An everyday camera comes down to a short list of things you actually care about: size, weight, how much it hurts if it gets stolen, and whether the files are fun to edit. Most gear roundups skip the honest part and just tell you what to buy.

In 2014, I was at Photokina in Cologne, Germany, which at the time was still one of those wonderfully overwhelming events where it seemed like the entire photography industry had temporarily relocated into a handful of enormous convention halls. I was there speaking on stages for DJI, Adobe, Fujifilm, and doing the usual Photokina routine: presentations, meetings, running into old friends, talking about photography for twelve hours straight, and consuming the quantity of coffee necessary to make all of that seem like a reasonable thing to do.

It’s that time again to sit back and dream about a one-size-fits-all camera that doesn’t actually exist, but really should.

At 5:29:45 in the morning on July 16, 1945, in a stretch of New Mexico desert the Spanish called the Jornada del Muerto, the sky turned brighter than the noon sun. Aimed at that flash, tucked into steel-and-lead bunkers and buried instrument boxes ringing a 100-foot tower, sat roughly fifty cameras. Most of the cameras were unmanned and triggered automatically, although Brixner personally occupied a tracking-camera position at North 10,000. Every one had been focused, loaded, and left in the dark hours earlier, wired to fire on a countdown, because no human eye could be trusted to catch what was about to happen and no photographer could survive standing close enough to try. The world has entered the nuclear age.

Walking into a wedding as the only person handling both photo and video is a gamble that hinges entirely on the light waiting for you. The decision to add a highlight film wasn't made in advance; it was made on arrival, after the conditions turned out to be forgiving enough to pull it off.

A medium format camera with a 100-megapixel sensor rarely gets described as fast, yet one specific change has turned a slow studio-style body into something you can shoot reactively on the street. The gap between "beautiful but sluggish" and "reliable in daily use" often comes down to a single feature.

Fourteen years separate two versions of the same photo, and watching one turn into the other is a quick lesson in how editing taste changes over time. Revisiting old work with newer tools shows you exactly how far your eye has traveled, and it surfaces habits you didn't know you had.

August might be the worst month of the year to point a camera at the landscape, and if you shoot nature the way most people do, the woods in late summer can feel like a dead end. The trick that separates a productive session from a frustrating one has less to do with what you shoot and more to do with what you refuse to shoot.

A federal appeals court has now made it clear that the First Amendment protects people who record publicly visible portions of a police station while standing on a public sidewalk. But the man whose arrest produced that ruling still cannot recover damages from the officers who arrested him.

The Sony a7 V is back at the top of Japan's best-selling camera list for July 2026, extending a run that has kept it near or at No. 1 for most of its first seven months on sale. The bigger story sits below it, where a Nikon full-frame body has climbed into fourth and one of Canon's newest cameras is nowhere to be found.

In 2022, a camera on the floor of the Izu-Ogasawara Trench off Japan, 8,336 meters down, filmed a small translucent snailfish drifting through its beam. No fish had ever been filmed so far down. No sunlight has ever reached that trench, and the light that does exist down there, the faint blue flicker of bioluminescence, is nothing like the broad-spectrum white the camera carries. When the lights came on, they almost certainly gave that fish a kind of light it had never seen. A great deal of deep-sea photography works this way: the scene has no sunlight of its own, so the camera has to bring it.

Buying memory cards used to be a simple decision: match the slot, pick a speed class, done. That's no longer the case, and not just because of price. Every memory purchase has become a longer-term investment rather than a one-off consumable buy, and getting that decision right matters more than ever. But what does this mean if you're thinking of upgrading your camera, for example, shooting on a Nikon DSLR with an aging XQD slot now, but with a mirrorless upgrade already on your mind? If, like me, you're in that position, the card you buy now needs to outlast the camera it's going into.

Street photography looks like a hobby about cameras and light, but the habits it builds bleed into how you move through the rest of your day. Watch strangers long enough and you start noticing patterns in yourself, not just in the frame.

A constant f/2.0 aperture across a full zoom range used to sound like a fantasy. Sony now offers it in a body smaller than the Canon equivalent, and the results push the limits of what a standard zoom can do.

Researchers in Germany have shown that an ordinary Wi-Fi network can pick a specific person out of a crowd with near-perfect accuracy, no camera involved. In a test with 197 people, the system recognized individuals in seconds, from different angles, no matter how they walked.

Insta360 is developing two mirrorless cameras at the same time, and its CEO says one of them will have a shape you have never thought of before. He also says that camera could change the way we take pictures, moving past the old routine of framing, focusing, and pressing the shutter.

Brightin Star launched a solid brass manual focus 28mm f/2.8 pancake lens last year, painted in gloss black lacquer. My first impression when I saw the publicity photos wasn’t its incredibly small size. It should have been, but I was distracted somewhat by that high-gloss black lacquer with gold and red engraving. It looked a little garish. That aside, a tiny, stealthy lens is what we street and travel photographers love, so I eventually decided I should test it out.

The FX2 has been one of Sony’s most discussed cameras since its launch. So today, I got my hands on one and decided to take it for a spin.

In October 2017, a silver plate about the size of a paperback sold at Sotheby's in New York for $360,500. It is the earliest surviving photograph of anyone who has ever been President of the United States, and the man staring out of it had been out of the office for fourteen years by the time the lens cap came off. The question of who was photographed first is messier than a single plate suggests, and every leading candidate carries an asterisk.

Modern cameras can produce a stunning image in minutes, which makes the darkroom look like a relic worth skipping. That assumption deserves a second look, because the skills a darkroom demands carry straight back into the field, whether you shoot film, digital, or both.

Light shapes every landscape photo you take, whether the sun is blazing or hidden behind heavy cloud. Getting a handle on how it falls on your subject is the difference between a flat frame and one with real depth.

The Micro Four Thirds crowd doubles your depth of field on every shot, and depending on what you shoot, that either ruins the image or saves it. That single trade-off decides whether this system belongs in your bag or stays on the shelf.

Photoshop's newest blemish tool doesn't just erase spots. It removes them while keeping the skin texture underneath exactly as it was, which is the part that has tripped up automatic retouching for years.

Imagine trying to photograph a moon the size of a fist while flying past it at 45,000 miles per hour, using a camera you cannot see through, cannot focus by hand, and cannot even talk to in real time. Every instruction you send takes hours to arrive. By the time you learn whether a shot worked, the target is long gone, and there is no second pass. That was the daily reality for the people who ran the cameras on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

For those who like long exposures, a variable ND filter is often not the best choice. If you're filming, the variable ND is a must-have. It allows full control of the exposure. Unless your camera has a built-in ND filter, the Haida X in 1 filter set can be a great choice. I took a closer look.