Every new camera announcement still promises a reason to upgrade, yet plenty of people are shooting the same bodies they bought years ago and feel no pull to move on. If you shoot landscapes or buildings on a hobby budget, whether new gear still earns its price decides how you spend the next few thousand dollars.
If you shoot APS-C and want a bright telephoto zoom, your options have been thin, and on most mounts they haven't existed at all. Sigma's new 50-120mm f/2.8 arrives for Fujifilm X, Sony E, and Canon RF at a size and price that make it a realistic addition to a small kit.
Laowa's two new Aksen Ultra Macro APO lenses cover everything from life size to 10 times life size. At that scale, depth of field shrinks to a sliver, light drops off as you zoom, and the gear around the lens decides as much about the result as the glass does.
I love exploring photography in all its forms, and that extends to novelty cameras. When I saw the Godox C100, which looks like it belongs in the 1990s, I had to try it as a new way of making images. It has no rear screen, so you can't perfect your composition, and you can't check a shot after you take it either.
An f/2.8 telephoto zoom is usually the heaviest lens in an APS-C bag, and the Sigma 50-120mm f/2.8 DC OS Contemporary is built to change that. If you shoot Fujifilm, Sony, or Canon crop bodies, a stabilized fast zoom at this size fills a spot that has mostly gone to much bigger glass.
If you've ever packed a camera for a bike ride, you know the body is rarely the heavy part, since a couple of lenses with any reach can fill a bag faster than the camera itself. The OM System OM-3 and the Micro Four Thirds format offer one answer to that weight problem, and a long ride along the Northumberland coast puts that answer to a practical test.
Canon and Nikon shooters have had autofocus 85mm f/1.2 lenses for years, while anyone on Sony E-mount or L-mount has had to settle for f/1.4 or give up autofocus entirely. The new Sigma 85mm f/1.2 DG Art changes that, and it asks a fair question of anyone who already owns a good f/1.4 portrait lens.
Sigma has announced a Nikon Z mount version of its 16-300mm f/3.5-6.7 DC OS Contemporary, an all-in-one zoom for APS-C mirrorless cameras with an approximately 18.8x zoom ratio, going on sale November 5 for $769.
Sigma has announced the The 50-120mm f/2.8 DC OS Contemporary, a stabilized telephoto zoom for APS-C mirrorless cameras that covers roughly 75-180mm in full frame terms at a constant f/2.8 and goes on sale October 22 for $799 in Sony E, Fujifilm X, and Canon RF mounts.
I’ve been playing with Tamron’s new ultra-wide 12-20mm zoom for a couple of months now. When I first peeled away the plastic wrap and held it, I thought, “Wow, very compact and light.” My next thought was that the glossy finish looked surprisingly smudged straight out of the box. I checked the marketing materials and found that this is part of Tamron’s new “Toned Profile Next” design language.
The NEEWER Q120 is a new compact 120Ws battery-powered strobe that's packed with features, but the most impressive thing about it might be the price. It sells for $159.99 at B&H ($219.99 list), while its two direct competitors, the Godox AD100Pro II and the Profoto A2, cost $299 and $895.
A dedicated compact camera now has to justify itself against a phone that already lives in your pocket and shoots surprisingly good telephoto images. The Lumix L10 makes its case with a retro body, an eye-level viewfinder, and a Micro Four Thirds sensor, and whether that combination earns a place next to your phone is a fair question.
Sony's RX1R III puts a 61-megapixel full frame sensor and a fixed 35mm f/2 lens into a body small enough to carry everywhere, and it costs more than most professional mirrorless cameras. A few weeks of testing can tell you how a camera like that performs, but only a year of weddings, family trips, and every season of Pacific Northwest weather shows what it's like to live with.
Canon now sells two compact full frame video cameras built around the same 32.5-megapixel 7K sensor, and $1,200 to $1,400 separates them, depending on whether the C50 is on sale. When the image coming off that sensor is nearly identical, your decision rests on heat, audio, stabilization, and how each camera behaves on an actual job.
Tamron has announced a Nikon Z mount version of its 20-40mm f/2.8 Di III VXD, a compact fast-aperture standard zoom for full frame mirrorless cameras that weighs 13.4 oz (380 g) and goes on sale October 22 for $729.
Today, let’s have a look at the pint-sized Sirui VP-1 Vision Prime 15mm T1.6.
Sigma now makes 10 lenses for APS-C mirrorless cameras, priced from $344 to $919, and the primes and zooms overlap more than the spec sheets suggest. If you shoot on a crop sensor, this lineup is one of the few places you can build a complete kit of small, sharp glass without paying full frame prices.
The Canon EOS R8 Mark II, Sony a7C II, Nikon Z5IIC, and Panasonic Lumix S9 are each the smallest and cheapest full frame body their maker sells right now, and they don't all solve the same problem.
The Leica Q3 43 puts a 60-megapixel sensor behind a single fixed 43mm lens, so you commit to one focal length and lean on the sensor to cover everything else. If you shoot paid work, the harder question is whether a camera like that can serve as a backup or second body next to an interchangeable-lens system you already trust.
Peak Design built the Everyday Backpack around fast access, real organization, and protection for whatever you're carrying. The Everyday Backpack line is already award-winning, and the newly revamped V3 improves on that solid foundation. Style, security, and day-to-day usability all show up here alongside gear protection and room to expand.
The Fujifilm XF 18mm f/2 R came out in 2012, which makes it one of the oldest lenses still in Fujifilm's lineup and an easy one to dismiss next to newer glass. If you shoot street or family life on an X-series body, knowing whether a 14-year-old design can keep up with a 40-megapixel sensor decides whether you save money or spend a lot more on a newer wide prime.
Most cameras sold a decade ago still take perfectly good pictures, yet it's easy to assume the gear you own now is the main reason your recent photos look the way they do. A budget Micro Four Thirds setup is one of the cheapest ways to test that assumption, since older bodies and kit zooms sell used for a fraction of what current pro gear costs.
SmallRig is well known for its video-related accessories. Everyone knows about cages and all that comes with them. Perhaps also about the tripods and video lights. Now SmallRig has added a backpack to its ever-increasing product line. I’ve been using it for some time now. These are my findings.
Sony now has four lenses that can get you to 600mm or beyond for birds, and two of them weigh around 1 kg while costing less than many full frame bodies. Once teleconverters come into play, those lenses overlap in focal length, so the choice comes down to how much weight, money, and light each route to the same reach will cost you.
The Brightin Star 50mm f/2 Tri-Sight is a manual-focus lens that puts three different optical personalities behind one turning ring, so you can switch between a clean normal lens and two softer, bubblier looks without changing glass.
Sony now makes a G Master 400mm lens that weighs under a kilogram, which puts a super-telephoto in the same carrying class as a standard 70-200mm zoom. If you shoot motorsport, wildlife, or field sports without a monopod, that weight changes how long you can stay out and how freely you can move.
A shelf full of older camera bodies brings its own kind of guilt: they still work, they still make good pictures, and they almost never leave the house. Choosing whether to keep shooting a camera like the Fujifilm X-H1 or sell it for something faster affects your wallet, your hit rate, and how much you enjoy the time you spend shooting.
Viltrox's AF 16mm f/1.8 is now available for L-mount, bringing a bright ultra-wide with a small info screen on its barrel to Panasonic, Leica, and Sigma bodies at a list price of $580. If you shoot night skies, tight interiors, or dim venues, a fast autofocus 16mm at that price gives you another way to gather light without leaning so hard on ISO.
When this tripod came out years ago, so many of us wanted it to the point that a lot of us forced it to be useful in situations where it wasn’t the best fit. Now that we’ve seen the brand’s other tripod offerings, where it fits best is more obvious.
The Nikon ZR puts RED's raw video format, 32-bit float audio, and a 4-inch screen into a body with no viewfinder, so most of the conversation around it stays on codecs and cinema workflows. If you shoot both stills and video, the more useful question is whether it's a camera you'd pick up on a day when there's nothing to film.
Nikon now has three autofocus f/1.2 primes for its Z mount, a 35mm, a 50mm, and an 85mm, and each one weighs more than a kilogram. If you shoot for yourself instead of for clients, you have to decide whether any of them earns a place in a bag you actually carry every day.
A camera strap is just a camera strap. Right? Peak Design changed that with a Kickstarter back in 2014, and having only undergone one or two subtle changes over the years, it still sets the standard.
Laowa's ACRIS 35mm f/2.8 1X Macro APO reaches 1:1 magnification at a focal length that keeps the background, the sky, and the setting in the frame while your subject fills the foreground. Wide angle macro is a small niche, and the lenses built for it often ask you to accept unusual compromises in exchange for that perspective.
A 75mm f/1.4 is a short telephoto that isolates a subject without forcing you to back across the room, and the Thypoch Simera 75mm f/1.4 brings that focal length to Leica M mount in an all-metal body. Because it's a manual focus rangefinder lens, plenty of people will adapt it to mirrorless cameras, which raises fair questions about how much performance survives the trip.
A 600mm prime that weighs about 1 kg and costs $3,698 reads like a list of compromises, and Sony's new 600mm f/6.3 asks you to give up aperture in exchange for a lens you can carry without a second thought. If you shoot birds or wildlife handheld, the gap between a lens you can hold for five minutes and one you can hold all morning decides how many chances you actually get.
If you’ve ever been out exploring a place, especially one that has a lot of interesting subjects, you would know how having an organized and efficient bag can impact your output. These new accessories for the WANDRD ROGUE bags offer to take the user experience to a whole new level.
Sony's a7 V is the general-purpose body in its full frame lineup, yet it now carries a 33-megapixel sensor and uncropped 4K at 60p, which puts pressure on the pricier models above it. If you shoot weddings, events, or a mix of stills and video, the question is how much paid work a base model can carry before you need something more specialized.
Today, I’ll give you my initial hands-on impressions of Nikon’s new entry-level mirrorless camera, the Z5IIC.
Modern cameras are so good now that they pretty much do all the work for you. Focusing is instant, you get large, detailed files with incredible dynamic range, and the camera has the ability to correct many optical shortcomings of the lens attached in-camera, resulting in technically polished images. How predictable. And boring.
Native 85mm f/1.8 lenses from the major camera makers commonly run several hundred dollars, and that cost keeps a dedicated portrait lens out of a lot of starter kits. The TTArtisan AF 85mm f/1.8 Neo lands far below that range with full autofocus on full frame mirrorless bodies, which makes it fair to ask how much gets cut to reach that price.
Having a comfortable and well-lit workstation is something that can vastly improve your time working at your desk, and while many of us spend hours every day working at a computer, lighting is probably something that most of us don't give a huge amount of thought to.
Canon has released a wave of new RF primes since the RF 35mm f/1.8 Macro IS STM arrived, including a fast 35mm in its VCM line and an inexpensive 45mm f/1.2. That raises a fair question about whether the older, cheaper lens still deserves to be the first one you put on an RF body.
Panasonic's Lumix L10 puts a Micro Four Thirds sensor and a fixed zoom into a body small enough for a jacket pocket, and it sells for $1,500. A fixed-lens camera at that price asks you to give up a lot of flexibility, so how it holds up after months of daily use tells you more than a launch-week impression can.
An f/2.8 zoom usually costs more, weighs more, and takes up more room in your bag than its f/4 counterpart, and the price gap between the two versions of the same focal range can run to hundreds of dollars. A wrong choice in either direction tends to end the same way, with a second purchase or an expensive lens that keeps getting left at home.
Ask whether the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 or the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1100 makes better prints, and you'll get answers about gamut volume, D-max, and how many centuries pigment inks last. Those figures steer where hundreds or thousands of dollars go, yet they say surprisingly little about how a print looks once it's framed and hanging.
Fisheye lenses have usually forced a choice between a circular image and a frame-filling one. Sony's FE 8-14mm f/3.5 G does both in one small zoom for $1,600, so deciding to buy it comes down to how often you'd actually use a lens this specialized.
Compact fixed-lens cameras have been getting more and more popular in recent years, and the Leica Q series holds a spot at the top of that category. While the Q3 is already more than a couple of years old, there are some updates to the camera that make it more enticing.
Whenever I've photographed weddings, world events, landscapes, or anything else, it's not been uncommon for other photographers to come up and start a chat about gear. And as someone who's worked for a major camera company and taught photography for almost two decades, I've always been happy to engage in talks about megapixels, autofocus, and dynamic range.
Classic camera design keeps showing up on new releases, but the vintage look in your photos comes from the glass, not the body. Cheap, older lenses can deliver a character that no retro-styled body will fake for you.
Tilt a 600mm lens by a tenth of a degree, a movement too small to feel, and the image it projects slides about a millimeter across the sensor. Nearly every stabilizer in a modern still camera exists to cancel that millimeter while the shutter is open, either by shoving a piece of glass sideways or by flying the entire sensor on magnets.