Artificial intelligence has quickly become part of the workflow for many photographers. From culling thousands of images to automating complex edits, there's now a tool for almost every part of the process. But not all AI is built for the same job.
Most working photographers have a portfolio problem. The problem is not that the work is bad. The work is usually fine. The problem is that there is too much of it. Portfolios that should have 12 to 18 images contain 40 or 50 or 80. Websites that should load three galleries fast contain eight galleries that load slowly.
Hunter S. Thompson is certainly one of my references — not because he ever cared about photography, but because he understood something most photographers avoid.
Most photographers put the camera away when it rains, but I believe this is a huge mistake. I've found that some of my best photos are made when it's raining, and I make the effort to embrace it. Let's talk about why.
Discover the art of minimalism in landscape photography and learn how the deliberate removal of distractions can elevate your images. Join me as I share insights from my recent trip to Namibia, highlighting the beauty and purpose behind each frame.
Nearly everyone has a smartphone in today's world. They have come so far, and the technology inside them is extremely impressive. When you think back 20 years ago, they had a small screen and could only be used to make calls. Now, you can use them for pretty much everything: to call people, to listen to music, use them as GPS to get around, and in a lot of cases as a camera.
The photography business has a strange relationship with specialization. Almost every working photographer starts as a generalist. The first few years of paid work are a scramble: weddings on weekends, headshots during the week, a real estate gig when a friend asks for a favor, some product work to pay for a lens upgrade, maybe a few corporate events when the calendar is thin.
When Olympus sold its imaging division to Japan Industrial Partners on January 1, 2021, the new company was called OM Digital Solutions. The OM SYSTEM product brand arrived later, announced in October 2021 as the name the company would put on its cameras going forward. Most of the photography press wrote the obituary in advance of either event. The division had been unprofitable for years.
It seems everybody is retiring their gimbals. Every time I look at social media, I hear people talking about: does anybody use a gimbal anymore? Or you'll see videos where people are talking about gear they regret buying, and a gimbal is usually on that list.
There's a strange misconception in street photography: that more is more. More chaos. More layers. More subjects. More "decisive moments."
But what if the real power lies somewhere else entirely? What if the strongest images are the ones that almost don't exist? And what if the format itself is the first, decisive cut?
The Fujifilm X100VI has been supply-constrained for more than two years. The camera launched in February 2024, and as of April 2026, availability remains spotty: Fujifilm's own US shop typically shows it as "Notify Me" rather than in stock, and major retailers list the camera as temporarily out of stock with rolling expected availability windows rather than steady inventory.
If you produce short-form video for clients or your own brand, take a second and count the number of apps, browser tabs, and subscription logins sitting between the moment you have an idea and the moment you hit publish. There's the scriptwriting tool (or a blank doc you've been staring at for twenty minutes). The generation or editing platform.
I sold my Mamiya 645AFD, and I regret it every time I think about it, which is more often than I would like to admit. The film got too expensive, and the scanning costs added up, and I told myself the rational thing to do was to let it go and put the money toward something more practical. I was right about the math. I was wrong about everything else.
Somewhere around 2010, camera design stopped mattering to the photography industry. The DSLR era had produced bodies defined by ergonomics rather than aesthetics, and the first mirrorless wave carried forward the same logic. Cameras were tools, tools looked like tools, and any photographer who cared about how a camera looked was suspected of being a poseur.
After three decades as a professional filmmaker and photographer, I have learned a lot of things. Most of them, I learned the hard way.
So, in today's article I'm going to give you five lessons I've learned over the course of a long career when it comes to what really matters, and what doesn't, when it comes to buying gear.
Photography has a spending problem, and it starts early. The moment you get serious enough to move past the kit lens and the auto mode, the industry opens a firehose of recommendations pointed directly at your wallet.
The 85mm prime is the rare lens that almost every working portrait photographer owns, eventually. It is the focal length that does the most flattering work on faces, the easiest one to recommend to a portrait beginner, and the lens most photographers reach for when they want to make a person look the way they want to be seen.
Let's get this out of the way: this is not nostalgia.
I'm not trying to "bring back" anything, especially a smartphone. I'm not interested in retro aesthetics for the sake of it. And I'm definitely not here to argue that older technology is somehow superior.
Wildlife photography is often associated with iconic species such as lions on the savannah, elephants crossing golden plains, or bears roaming in areas like Yellowstone National Park. These adventures are extraordinary, but they are also expensive and not always accessible to beginner photographers.
The Pentax K-3 Mark III was officially discontinued in Japan in January 2025. The Monochrome variant has been more complicated: B&H's original black Monochrome listing is now marked "No Longer Available," though it points buyers to a current matte-black Monochrome listing still shown as in stock.
There is a thing Leica does that no other camera manufacturer is willing to do, and it is the thing that makes Leica interesting even to photographers who will never own one. Leica refuses to pretend to be what it is not.
Most photography now lives online. In the feed, in algorithms, in a constant stream of images. This is where the idea of what a photographer is supposed to need gets formed. Cheap did not become better. It became sufficient.
When Nikon announced the Z9 in late 2021, the camera was treated by most of the photography press as Nikon's "we are still here" moment. The brand had spent the early mirrorless years getting beaten in feature comparisons by Sony, criticized for slow autofocus updates, and described in obituary-adjacent language by gear reviewers who had decided Sony had won the format war.
The article emphasizes the importance of slowing down and reconnecting with the joy of photography by creating a series of images of simple things that we admire. Let's look at photos of a remote Namibian railway station that show the beauty of decay and history through intentional composition.
A while back I was very focused on having complex lighting for my editorial work. I would often create precise setups with many light sources. Yet, as time went on, my setups became simpler. So much so that my recent editorial for Numéro was done with only one light. Here is how.