I love Nikon cameras. I've been using them since I bought a secondhand EL2 in 1984. I've owned more Nikon cameras than I care to remember, and just last month, I acquired an F from 1972. So this isn't an anti-Nikon article, nor am I arguing that Nikon makes bad cameras. Quite the opposite. I’m a bit of a fanboy, if I’m completely honest.
At $168, the Viltrox AF 20mm f/2.8 Air is likely one of the cheapest full-frame 20mm autofocus lenses on the market. L-mount shooters now have it as an option, part of a batch of four affordable Viltrox primes arriving for the system this week.
Nikon built a full frame camera without a viewfinder, added automatic scene modes for the first time on a full frame body, and aimed the whole thing squarely at people leaving their phones behind. The Nikon Z5IIC strips away features many shooters assume are essential, and the result raises a real question about how much camera you actually need.
Nikon has announced the Z5IIC, a smaller, viewfinder-less version of its Z5II full frame mirrorless camera built around the rear screen, available for preorder now at $1,399.95 body only and shipping in mid-October.
DJI just gave the 360 camera market something to catch up to. Building on more than 12 years of imaging expertise, the Osmo 360 II delivers new capabilities rooted in a shared lineage from previous generations of DJI's creative camera technology, from the Osmo 360 to the Avata 360.
The short side of a full frame sensor is a silent-movie measurement. Cinema's full aperture ran about 24.89mm across the strip, from one row of perforations to the other, and when Oskar Barnack turned that film on its side in a workshop at Ernst Leitz in Wetzlar, that number became the height of a still photograph.
For a long time, I considered myself a manual focus purist—not because manual glass should strictly be used manually, but because there simply wasn't a way for me to autofocus it with my existing systems. It really isn't much of an issue; with constant practice, gauging distance and nailing critical focus can become second nature.
A $199 fifty that outresolves a Panasonic 50mm at double the price and half the weight is the kind of result that reshuffles a whole lens lineup. That is exactly what happened when the Viltrox AF 50mm f/2 landed on L-mount this week.
Buying a Leica M11, struggling with it, and selling it within a couple of months is a cycle plenty of shooters know well. The rangefinder demands patience most digital cameras have trained out of you, and that gap between wanting the camera and actually using it is where the frustration lives.
A 50mm at f/4 has a physically larger opening than an 18mm at f/1.8, yet the wider-angle lens is the faster of the two. That contradiction sits at the center of how apertures actually behave once you start swapping focal lengths.
Digitizing film at home has always been a fiddly, annoying, time-consuming process, so discovering a system that makes it simpler has been a breath of fresh air.
The VALOI easy35 v2 is a system that simplifies the process of digitizing slides and negatives at home using your existing digital camera.
The Canon R8 Mark II adds in-body stabilization, the single feature its predecessor left out, and packages it into a 24.2-megapixel full frame body aimed at people making their first jump up from crop sensors. That one change reshapes who this camera is for.
Limits can do more for your photography than any spec sheet, and a manual-focus rangefinder forces those limits on you in a way autofocus never will. That tension sits at the heart of one photographer's decision to bring a Leica to a job it had no business being at.
The long-awaited expansion of the Viltrox Air series lenses has finally arrived for L-Mount users. Marketed on the promise of "Lightweight & Masterful Image Quality," the Air series has already built a solid reputation in the photography community.
Since the inception of the L-Mount Alliance, there has been a gap in the market for affordable ultra-wide angle lenses. With the available options, you could either purchase an affordable lens that completely lacked autofocus or invest in an autofocus lens that was decidedly not cheap. The launch of the Viltrox AF 14mm f/4 for L-Mount drastically changes that landscape.
Viltrox has announced four full frame autofocus primes for L-mount, the AF 14mm f/4 Air L, AF 20mm f/2.8 Air L, AF 40mm f/2.5 Air L, and AF 50mm f/2 Air L, all of which go on sale today at prices from $168 to $199. The heaviest of the four weighs 205 g.
The Ricoh GR IV earns constant recommendations as the everyday-carry camera, small enough to slip into a pocket, with an APS-C sensor packed into a body most compacts can't match. After roughly five months of real use, that pocket promise turned out to be the exact spot where things fell apart.
The Mac mini with M5 Pro chews through 4K footage and reads from its SSD in an instant, from a silver box 5 inches square that never once became audible on my desk. It is the fastest small desktop Apple has built, and for photo and video work, it is the best value in the entire Mac lineup.
Underexposing to save your highlights sounds like the safe move, but it drags your entire image down with it. Darker files, harder tracking, more editing, and photos you don't enjoy looking at all come from overcorrecting a problem that has a much better fix.
When it comes to wireless microphones, there are already some very strong options available, so when a new system comes along, it needs to offer something more than simply being another wireless microphone.
The hardest part of landscape photography is leaving the house at all, especially when the light looks unpromising and the tide is coming in. Talking yourself into an evening shoot is where a lot of good pictures live or die.
Since Apple's keynote I have made two videos about the iPhone 18 Pro's new variable aperture lens, and in both of them I made predictions about how it would actually perform. Both phones are now sitting on my desk. I shot the same scenes on the 17 Pro and the 18 Pro, indoors and outdoors, at every aperture the new lens offers, then pulled all of it into Lightroom and zoomed to 400 percent.
A couple of months back, Panasonic kindly allowed me to take the new Panasonic LUMIX L10 to the Italian Dolomites, with the rather simple brief of finding out what it was like as a travel companion. I wasn’t traveling with the L10 alone. Alongside it was my Nikon Z 8.
The Fujifilm XC 13-33mm f/3.5-6.3 OIS carries a $400 retail price and a reputation as a forgiving first lens for people stepping up from a phone. Whether that price holds up against everything else you could buy is the real question, and the answer isn't flattering.
Sony now offers a 600mm super telephoto that weighs under a kilogram and costs $3,699, roughly $10,000 less than the f/4 version most shooters assumed they'd never afford. Reach at this length used to mean hauling a lens over 3 kilograms and paying five figures, so a lightweight option that keeps G Master image quality changes the math for anyone weight-constrained in the field.
Panasonic sells two 50mm lenses for L-mount, and one costs five times the other for just two-thirds of a stop more light. That kind of price gap forces a decision, and the cheaper option turns out to be surprisingly good.
In March 1967, Canon researchers pulled the company's first synthetic fluorite crystals out of an electric furnace. Two years later, those crystals shipped inside a camera lens, the FL-F300mm f/5.6, which went on sale in May 1969 with two elements of grown calcium fluoride sitting where glass would normally be.
Most full frame zooms start at 24mm, but this one opens at 20mm and weighs less than a pound. That extra width changes what a single travel lens can cover, and it forces a real decision about reach.
Experimental film photography rarely gets a fair shake because most of the ideas floating around live in old technical manuals or die in a single frustrated attempt. Testing them yourself takes time, cheap filters, and a willingness to waste a few rolls to learn something you can actually use.
The 1/125 on your shutter dial is a rounding error that stuck. The scale it sits on halves at every step, which puts that rung at 1/128, and 1/128 is an ugly number to stamp into metal. Your camera is full of settings like that: numbers and buttons whose shape was fixed by brass, gears, and gelatin, and that crossed into digital without anyone stopping to re-derive them.
Four days ago I put out a very nerdy video about the variable aperture lens in the new iPhone 18 Pro, and it has since become the most watched thing I have made all year. I did not see that coming. What I really did not see coming was the comment section.
Five years of hesitation, one impulse purchase, and the result confirmed every doubt. The Tamron 35-150mm f/2-2.8 delivers some of the sharpest image quality you can put on a Sony body, and that alone makes it a lens worth understanding before spending the money.
Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pro, and the headline camera feature this year is a physical variable aperture on the main camera. I have been shooting professionally for 20 years, and I sat through that entire section of the keynote thinking the same thing over and over: this does not make any sense. Why would anyone want or need a variable aperture on a phone?
Apple just had a gigantic keynote. New iPhones, new AirPods, new Apple Watches, and the one everybody was waiting on, a folding iPhone. I sat through the entire hour and a half and took detailed notes, and I came out of it more curious than convinced.
Laptops have finally gotten fast enough to be true desktop replacements. The one problem is that no laptop can connect to everything on your desk. A MacBook might only give you two or three USB-C ports, so you are going to need a dock.
An ultra wide full frame prime that weighs just 142 g and stays sharp wide open is a rare find, and the Lumix 20mm f/2.5 pulls it off. If you shoot travel, vlog, or simply want a kit that doesn't weigh you down, a lens this compact changes what fits in your bag.
Your Fujifilm camera ships with defaults that can quietly sabotage your photos, from blurry low-light shots to white balance that shifts without your say-so. Most of these settings sit hidden in menus you rarely open, which is why so many owners never realize anything is wrong until they review the files.
Canon has filed a patent for a 70-135mm f/2 zoom lens for full frame cameras, an internal-zoom design with a fixed front group that reads like a direct answer to the Sony FE 50-150mm f/2 GM that went on sale last year.
Apple Reference Image is a camera mode on the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max that signs the captured pixel data inside the sensor, then turns that signed data into a second, cryptographically signed copy of your photo that anyone can verify as authentic and not revoked. You keep shooting the normal photo.
Pelican has long been a name associated with gear transport and protection. I personally remember customizing their foam inserts to fit my camera gear and lenses as I transported them in their hard cases across the country and the world.
The Fujifilm X100VI carries a fixed 23mm lens, a leaf shutter, and a 40-megapixel sensor in a body small enough to live in your hand all day. Deciding whether that fixed-lens design suits how you shoot comes down to a single tradeoff most buyers wrestle with.
Sony's new a7R VI packs a 66.8-megapixel sensor and lands $3,000 cheaper than the flagship a1 II, which forces an awkward question for anyone weighing a hybrid body. When a camera two-thirds the price does most of what your top-tier setup does, the math starts to sting.
Canon has announced the EOS R8 Mark II, a 24.2-megapixel full frame mirrorless camera that adds 5-axis in-body image stabilization while retaining up to 40 fps electronic-shutter shooting. The camera is expected to ship in late October for an estimated $1,899 body-only price.
Today, Canon announced a new full frame body added to the EOS lineup, the Canon EOS R8 Mark II camera. And I got my hands on one for an early look.
Sigma just put a 20-60mm zoom against a rattlesnake at sunrise in the Sonoran Desert, and the lens walked away as the star. A 20mm wide end, a variable f/2.8-4 aperture, and a body compact enough to forget on a hot desert climb make this a different kind of everyday zoom.
Shooting wildlife from the passenger seat of a car usually means wrestling with a massive lens that takes up half of the cab. I recently took a slow cruise through the Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive to put two new, unreleased Sony GM lenses to that very test.
The first full frame DSLR ever made didn't come from Canon, Nikon, or Sony. It came from Contax, a nearly century-old brand tied to Zeiss glass, and the camera that earned that title may also be the one that ended the company for good.
Fujifilm has announced the instax Pal 2 digital camera and instax Link WIDE 2 smartphone printer, updating the Pal with an optical viewfinder and adding a new Photo Mixer collage feature to the WIDE printer.
Viltrox released three APS-C lenses for Fujifilm in silver, the 9mm f/2.8, the 15mm f/1.7, and the 25mm f/1.7, and each one fills a focal length and aperture gap that Fujifilm's own lineup leaves open. The mix of speed, sharpness, and a light body makes these worth a serious look if you shoot street or travel.
You shoot a conference in a dim ballroom, your shutter speed drops too low, and every frame comes back with a little motion blur. The fix costs real money, and the choice between a faster lens and a better camera body decides how you spend it.