Sharing photography online often follows a predictable pattern. A photographer posts an image to a group or forum, and then the comments start to roll in. Mixed in with the generic "great shot!" remarks, there are always a few that offer constructive criticism. Even in highly respectful photography communities, well-regarded professionals will jump in to offer their notes completely unprompted. We have built an ecosystem where the default response to art is an immediate attempt to improve it. 

On June 19, 1878, a thoroughbred named Sallie Gardner ran down a track in Palo Alto and broke twelve threads stretched across her path with her chest. Each thread fired a camera. When the plates came out of the darkroom, they answered a question that painters, sculptors, and horsemen had argued about for centuries.

A St. Louis public television station has lost access to more than 50 terabytes of its own archive after the cloud vendor holding the files apparently went out of business. The material spans about 70 years of programming, and it is now sitting inside a Denver data center that so far has refused to hand it back.

Nearly every camera and lens Nikon was expected to ship in 2026 is reportedly running late, according to a consensus drawn from several independent tipsters. Much of what was penciled in for this year may now be sliding toward 2027.

More than one in five people set their phone or camera down in a public place and step away to photograph or film themselves. That is the headline finding of new consumer research from a UK insurer, and it lands at a moment when street theft of devices is a serious problem.

Kodak returned to a profit in the second quarter of 2026, with revenue of $311 million and net income of $17 million, up from a $26 million loss a year earlier. The company's film and specialty-chemicals unit grew 40 percent, faster than any other part of the business.

On July 6, 1989, physicists at the University of Minnesota aimed a low-light video camera at a distant thunderstorm to test the equipment and accidentally caught the first image of what is now called a red sprite, a burst of lightning firing upward toward space. That first frame was black and white and only proved the flashes were real; their crimson color would not be captured on camera until the mid-1990s. For most of the previous century, pilots who reported those flashes were told they had imagined them. Some of the atmosphere's most photogenic events are exactly that rare, that brief, and until recently that easy to dismiss.

When Curiosity looked across Gale Crater and captured a portrait of "Miraflores," it wasn't simply documenting another rock on Mars. It was photographing a landscape shaped by erosion—a roughly 20-foot sand-capped butte that survived while the surrounding rock slowly disappeared.

There's an advantage to a small camera that doesn't call attention to itself: you can become the gray man. Not invisible or undercover; not some photographic ninja.

You've pitched camp at the perfect spot, gear unloaded, base set for the next few days. And now you're waiting — for the fog to lift, the light to change, or an elusive animal to step into frame. Modern adventures in the wild are no longer just about chasing beautiful locations; there's an expectation to stay connected, keep every battery topped up, edit on location, and bring a few home comforts with you for when the light isn't cooperating. And honestly, why shouldn't that include a hot meal and a movie on your laptop while you wait for the clouds to part? We put the BLUETTI Elite 300 through its paces to see just how well it holds up to this kind of outdoor creative pursuit.

The Sony 100-400mm f/5.6-f/8 costs $850, roughly a fifth of the price of the pricier 100-400mm f/4.5, and that number tells you almost everything about the tradeoffs waiting inside. Whether you shoot wildlife, travel light, or just want the long end covered without emptying your bank account, the question is what those savings actually cost you in the field.

A new free channel on Roku plays AI-generated movies, shows, and shorts around the clock, with AI-generated ads slotted between them. It is called Fairground AI Creator TV, and it runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

A new open-source typeface called ShieldFont looks like ordinary text when you read it, but hands AI scrapers a corrupted version of the same page. It swaps out select words in a site's source code so bots collect subtly wrong sentences while you see the real thing.

A Wisconsin woman was stopped by police with guns drawn twice in one week after an automated license plate camera wrongly linked her car to a Milwaukee homicide. Milwaukee police say the alert should have been deleted days earlier, but a staffer never cleared it.

You stood at the canyon rim at sunset, took in the glowing sky and the shadowed rock below in a single glance, and pressed the shutter certain you had it. The file came back with a white sky or a black cliff, never both. Your eyes were not lying and your camera was not broken; the two simply do not measure light the same way, and the gap between them is large enough to explain almost every disappointing landscape you have ever shot.

You press the shutter once. A raw file can contain more than one admissible photograph, and the camera shows you only the version it chose.

Plenty of photographers hang on to Canon's old EF f/1.2 primes because they swear those lenses render people in a way modern glass can't touch. That belief gets tested directly on a portrait shoot, with EF classics adapted to a current RF body and shot side by side against their RF replacements.

The Leica M lineup split into two camps you can hold side by side, and one of them ditches the optical rangefinder that has defined the M for seventy years. The Leica M EV1 trades the mechanical viewfinder for a built-in EVF, and it now sits as the entry point into the M11 generation after Leica discontinued the standard M11.

Insta360 has announced the X6, the newest flagship in its X series of 360 cameras. The camera goes on sale today, starting at $669.99 for the standard bundle. The company says the launch coincides with its tenth year making 360 cameras.

The masking upgrade in Lightroom Classic 15.5 lets you feather and reshape AI masks after you create them, which turns rough selections into precise, believable edits. That single change addresses one of the oldest complaints about automatic masks: they grab too much, too little, or leave a telltale glow around your subject.

Most photographers assume a flagship body is the price of entry for paid client work, but a full studio fashion shoot on mid-range Nikon gear tells a different story. The gap between "professional" and "affordable" has narrowed enough that your lighting and lens choices now carry the weight your camera body once did.

Backlighting a subject at the beach solves a problem that trips up plenty of people shooting in bright sun: harsh shadows, squinting eyes, and a washed-out sky. Put the sun behind your subject, add your own light to the front, and the whole scene falls into place.

I’ve done separate review articles on both the Nikon ZR and the Laowa Sunlight 2x Full Frame Anamorphic Zooms in the past. Today, I thought it might be helpful to talk less specs and more process after using the combination on my latest film.

The first picture of a black hole was not taken with a camera, and no single telescope ever saw it. It is a reconstruction, assembled from petabytes of radio data recorded at seven observatories scattered around the globe, then flown across the planet on hard drives. Even the famous orange glow is a decision: the color was assigned by scientists to show brightness, because the radiation itself is invisible to your eyes.

A blueprint for learning photography that 340,000 people watched has aged in a way its own creator didn't expect, and three stages of it now point beginners in the wrong direction. The reason is AI, which arrived between the original video and this update and quietly changed what's worth practicing.