I recently wrote about why we should stop accepting standard "constructive criticism" on our photos. Instead, solicit feedback that actually helps you grow as a photographer. But most of us don’t know how to ask for anything better. We never learned how to ask. So how do you get more meaningful input on your work? Ask for a critique. 

Everything creative takes longer than you plan, your photos will get worse before they get better, and you will miss shots that were never yours to keep. These are the uncomfortable facts most people skip when they hand out photography advice, and accepting them early saves years of frustration.

Sony sells a 50mm f/1.2 but has held off on an 85mm f/1.2 for its full frame mirrorless system, and now a third party has stepped in with autofocus and a price that undercuts Sony's own 85mm f/1.4 G Master II. The Sigma 85mm f/1.2 DG DN Art lands as the first autofocus 85mm f/1.2 for Sony E and the first 85mm f/1.2 ever for L-mount.

Autumn brings shorter crowds, softer light, and sunrise times you can actually reach without setting three alarms. The hard part is knowing where to point the camera in the first place, especially when time is short.

A single medium format film shot cost about 470 times what the same scene cost on a digital camera. That kind of math should end the film-versus-digital debate outright, and yet the photos taken on film still mean more to the person who shot them. This is the tension every hybrid shooter runs into once digital quality stops being the question.

The earliest surviving camera photograph of any continent is a grainy rooftop view that Nicéphore Niépce recorded in the Burgundy countryside in 1826 or 1827, and burning it onto a sheet of pewter took at least many hours of daylight and possibly several days. Every other landmass had to wait.

Today, I wanted to take a break from discussing the cameras that capture our images and look at one of the tools used to make those images better. Let’s have a look at the Peak Design Travel Tripod. 

The Fujifilm X-M5 and X-E5 look like siblings, but the price gap between them runs about $1,000 and the experience of shooting each one splits along lines you might not expect. Deciding between an $800 body and one that often sells closer to $1,800 forces a question every buyer eventually faces: how much are premium build and resolution actually worth to you?

Shooting film is one thing. Developing and scanning it yourself, hundreds of miles from home, inside a van with blackout blinds and a couple of red lights, is a different level of commitment.

Photoshop's beta build now includes a Refine Edge feature that cleans up the messy fringing left behind when you cut a subject out of one background and drop them onto another. Every click costs 20 generative credits, so the value depends on whether the result beats what you can do by hand.

Forced to sell every camera and lens and shoot a single focal length forever, plenty of street shooters would reach for 35mm because it handles almost anything. There's a strong case that the wider 28mm produces more interesting pictures, and the reasoning has less to do with sharpness and more to do with truth.

Apple has introduced the iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone, pairing a 5.4 in outer display with a 7.6 in folding inner display.

In December 2007, three small cardboard boxes reached the International Center of Photography in New York holding 126 rolls of 35mm film and roughly 4,500 negatives that had been missing since 1939.

Apple has announced the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, introducing a new 48 MP Fusion Main camera with variable aperture, expanded manual camera controls, new image-authenticity features, and additional photo and video tools. The phones also introduce the A20 Pro chip, a redesigned thermal system, longer battery life, and iOS 27 with Apple Intelligence and Siri AI. 

Whether you do photography as a hobby or professionally, there are a lot of tools and accessories that make what we do easier, more convenient, or even more foolproof. Sometimes even the simplest tools can be instrumental in how we achieve our shots or, on the other hand, something equally important: how we take care of our camera gear.

Sigma just released an 85mm f/1.2 DG Art for L-mount and Sony E-mount, and it lands at £1,299 in the UK or $1,599 in the US. That price sits well under Canon's and Nikon's mirrorless 85mm f/1.2 options, and the Sigma is smaller and lighter than both.

Packing a single lens for a long trip means giving up options you might miss, and the Sigma 20-60mm f/2.8-4 makes that gamble easier to justify. The range covers wide landscapes, tight architecture, and portraits without a bag full of glass.

SIRUI has officially announced the launch of the Saturn V2 Full Frame Anamorphic Lens Series, representing a significant update to its popular Saturn anamorphic system.

Photoshop's beta 27.11 introduces Enhance Edge, an AI feature that promises to erase the halos that show up when you drop a masked subject onto a contrasting background. Hair cutouts have frustrated retouchers for decades, and any tool that claims to solve them deserves a hard look before you trust it on real work.

A 1-inch, 50-megapixel sensor, 8K open gate, and slow motion running past 900 frames per second sit on one side. A smaller sensor, a faster lens, and a $260 lower price sit on the other. That gap is the whole story, and deciding which camera wins depends less on the spec sheet than you'd expect.

OM Digital Solutions has announced the OM SYSTEM PEN, a new Micro Four Thirds interchangeable-lens camera built around a 20.4-megapixel Live MOS sensor, TruePic IX processor, 5-axis in-body image stabilization, and a compact rangefinder-style body.

Ricoh is ending production of its current Pentax K-series digital SLRs and starting work on a brand-new line built on what it calls an entirely new concept. The move retires the existing lineup while the company tries to reinvent what a DSLR can be.

Sigma is adding an interesting new option to its full frame mirrorless standard zoom lineup: a lens that combines a 20mm wide angle starting point with a compact, lightweight design. The idea was to create a versatile zoom that can stay on the camera most of the time, reducing the need to carry multiple lenses or constantly stop to change them.

Every camera mount has one lens that makes the rest of the lineup look overpriced. It is rarely the flashiest piece of glass in the catalog, and it is almost never the one the marketing pushes hardest.

Certain pieces of photographic equipment make you rethink the way you photograph, and for me, the Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 DG DN OS Sports lens was one of those lenses. I should probably start by admitting that wildlife photography isn't really my usual territory.