The Camera Lost on Mount Everest in 1924, and the Photograph It Might Still Hold

Somewhere on or below Everest's northern side, perhaps buried in snow, rock, or moving ice, there may be a camera the size of a bar of soap. If it is ever found, and if the film inside survived, it could answer a question that has hung over mountaineering for 100 years: did George Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine stand on the summit of Everest in 1924, three decades before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay?

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We want to see your images that have barely been edited at all

Welcome to the August installment of the Critique the Community!  This month's critique theme is going to be "Minimally Edited Photos," and we want to see your best photographs that have hardly been edited at all.

The ‘Student’ Legend: Why the Pentax K1000 Still Commands Respect

There is no camera more synonymous with "learning" than the Pentax K1000. For nearly 50 years, it has been arguably the best-known student film camera ever made. But in 2026, it's time to stop looking at the K1000 as a "beginner" camera and start appreciating it as a masterclass in "three-dial" simplicity. It does exactly three things: shutter speed, aperture, and focus. In an era of "feature creep" and menu bloat, that simplicity is a professional asset.

One Lighthouse, Eight Ways: How to Squeeze Every Shot Out of a Single Location

A lighthouse surrounded by a field of yellow flowers at its peak is the kind of alignment that happens once in decades, and one landscape shooter spent an entire week working it from every angle he could find. The blue sky, the red-and-white tower, and the yellow field give you three primary colors sitting together, which is close to ideal for anyone who wants saturated, punchy landscape work.

Why Amateurs Post 100 Photos and Pros Post 15

An art director at Nike once told a photographer that the reason he got hired was because his website had very few images, and every single one looked incredible. That single piece of advice about restraint sits at the center of how strong portfolios get built.

A $329 Lens That Punches Above Its Price on APS-C

A telephoto lens that weighs 325 g, holds corner-to-corner sharpness wide open, and sells for $329 sets a high bar for anyone shooting portraits on APS-C. The Viltrox 75mm f/1.8 Evo is the first APS-C lens in the Evo lineup, arriving alongside a 90mm f/2.2 sibling.

Why Golden Hour Might Be Quietly Wrecking Your Photos

Golden hour gets treated as the one condition worth shooting in, yet the same warm, angled, flattering light that makes photos look easy can also flatten your instincts and hide your subject. Leaning on it too hard limits the range of colors, moments, and conditions you learn to handle.

The Photograph That Proved Einstein Right: The 1919 Eclipse Plates

For about five minutes on May 29, 1919, the Moon blotted out the Sun over an island in the Gulf of Guinea and a hard-baked plain in northern Brazil, and two teams of astronomers pointed their cameras at a patch of sky no one could normally see. They were not photographing the eclipse for its beauty. They were trying to measure whether a handful of stars had moved.

Thinking About Trying Film Photography? Here Are 5 Tips

For the past couple of years, I've found myself reaching for film cameras more often. Not because they're better than digital—they’re not. For the analog look then? No, I believe you can get a film look with digital, if you know your way around an editing app. It’s really because they remind me why I fell in love with photography in the first place.

The Camera That Refused to Change for Seven Decades

The Leica M has stayed in production for over 70 years, and the rangefinder inside a 2026 model works almost exactly like the one Leica shipped in 1954. That kind of stubbornness runs against every other camera company, all of which abandoned the rangefinder for SLRs, then mirrorless.

Set a Goal That Has Nothing to Do With Photos, Get Better Photos

Every serious hobby eventually turns into a chore, and photography is no different. When you've come home empty-handed four or five outings in a row, the little voice telling you to quit gets loud, and beating it takes more than better planning.

Darth Vader Showed Up at a San Diego City Council Meeting to 'Support' Flock Cameras

A man in a full Darth Vader costume walked up to the microphone at a San Diego city council committee meeting and delivered a sarcastic endorsement of the Flock surveillance camera network. His identity was never revealed, and the council simply called out "Darth Vader?" before he took the podium in a black helmet and cape.

How Weather Satellites Photograph a Hurricane: Inside the Cameras That Watch Storms Form

When a hurricane spins up over the Atlantic, the most frequent, most continuous pictures of it come from a camera parked 22,236 miles above the equator. That camera is the Advanced Baseline Imager, the primary instrument on NOAA's GOES-R series of weather satellites, and it works nothing like the one in your bag. It never racks focus, it has no shutter in the conventional sense, and what it delivers is not really a photograph. It is a stack of measurements that gets rebuilt into an image on the ground.

Giving Bigger Camera Energy: We Review the Insta360 X6

Many photographers have felt the need to produce content in order to become more visible online and, consequently, to more potential clients. If you haven’t tried using a 360 camera, it can be the easiest solution for capturing behind-the-scenes footage.

The Best Photo Culling Software in 2026: How Narrative Keeps the Story in Your Hands

The best culling software is the one that gets you to your picks faster without deciding for you. Narrative sorts a shoot by scene, ranks every frame for focus and expression, and shows you why it ranked things the way it did, so the final call stays yours. That last part is what separates it from tools that hand you a finished selection and ask you to trust it.

Four Shutter Speed Zones That Fix Noisy, Blurry Wildlife Shots

Most wildlife shooters pick a shutter speed out of habit, then wonder why their still owl on a branch came out at ISO 12,800 and full of noise. The number you dial in shapes sharpness, emotion, and the amount of grain you'll fight later, and knowing why you choose it matters more than memorizing a chart.

The Case for Building Photography Around Projects

Most photographers hit a stretch where the work stops exciting them, direction disappears, and the whole thing starts to feel like a chore. Those flat periods are often what push you toward something new, if you know where to look.

How to Work a Massive Crowd With a Single 16-55mm

A rare eclipse pulled roughly 10,000 people onto a hill in West London, and one photographer showed up with nothing but a hunch and a single lens. Events like this force quick decisions about gear, light, and how you move through a dense crowd, and the choices carry over to any assignment where you can't predict the scene.

Why 40mm Keeps Winning the Everyday Carry Debate

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.

Every Great Photograph Starts With a Crazy Idea

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.

This Is My Perfect Cinema Camera

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.

Fifty Cameras in the Dark: How the First Atomic Bomb Was Photographed

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.