Every photosite on your camera's sensor is colorblind. A 61-megapixel full frame sensor is a grid of roughly 61 million tiny light meters, and each one reports a single number: how much light it collected during the exposure. It records the brightness and nothing about the color. Left alone, your sensor would only ever hand you a grayscale image.
You write a prompt. Adobe edits your photo accordingly. The AI Assisted Editor, released August 31, 2026, as part of Photoshop 27.10, lets you edit images simply by describing what you want in plain English. Just type what you want, and the AI figures it out. You'll find out what happened when I let it loose on my Milky Way photos.
One company photographs roughly 30 million children a year. Not over a decade. In a single school year. A kid sits on a stool, a stranger says "chin down, eyes up here," a strobe fires, and the whole thing is over in the time it takes to sneeze. Multiply that by tens of millions and you have the largest sustained portrait operation the world has ever run.
On May 30, 2013, Sun-Times Media laid off 28 photographers and photo editors across the Chicago Sun-Times and its suburban papers, including John H. White, who had won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography.
Fstoppers has partnered with 5DayDeal to offer the best photography deal of 2026. The bundle is filled with education, software, and tools from a wide variety leaders in the photography industry. The product list is fantastic.
Some of the most important photographic archives ever assembled are gone, and a small number of historians have spent their careers trying to get them back. One of those hunts had a storybook ending. In December 2007, three weathered cardboard boxes reached New York's International Center of Photography, carrying roughly 4,500 Spanish Civil War negatives that had been missing since 1939.
In a darkened room at Imperial College in London in the late 1920s, ten people looked at a small split circle of light, about the width of a thumbnail held at arm's length. Half the circle carried a single wavelength; the other half carried a mixture of red, green, and blue lamps the subject could turn up and down until the two halves fused into one uniform patch.
Hand a phone to a group of teenagers in Osaka and start counting. You will rarely reach three before the first two fingers go up beside a chin, while the same camera pointed at strangers in Moscow gets a level, unsmiling gaze that an American would read as hostility and a Russian would read as basic composure.
In early 1972, a Kansas State University professor named Nasir Ahmed sent the National Science Foundation a proposal to study a cosine transform built out of Chebyshev polynomials.
I want to start by defending the thing this article might look like it is against. Static posing in wedding and portrait photography is the backbone of every couples session I shoot. The five foundations I teach are all static positions, and they are static for good reasons. They are fast. They are repeatable. They are flattering on almost everybody.
A 24mm lens at f/8 has an opening 3.00 mm across. A 600mm lens at f/8 has one 75 mm across, 25 times wider, and it draws a diffraction pattern on the sky 25 times finer. Both land a blur spot on your sensor exactly 10.7 microns wide.
As part of its ongoing efforts to make photo editing as quick and easy as possible, Adobe is introducing Prompt to Edit in Lightroom. This feature lets you restore an old photograph by selecting one of Adobe’s example prompts or creating your own prompt. You can sharpen out-of-focus images, colorize black-and-white photographs, and adjust the color of photos with a dramatic color cast.
In 1896, a woman settled into a chair in front of the fireplace in her Washington, D.C. studio, hiked her petticoats above the ankle, crossed her legs like a man, and aimed her own camera at herself. One hand held a lit cigarette. The other cradled a stein of beer.
At a fashionable beach resort in the 1890s, a posted notice reportedly warned bathers about a brand-new menace with blunt words: "PEOPLE ARE FORBIDDEN TO USE THEIR KODAKS ON THE BEACH." Around the same stretch of years, hand cameras were barred for a time from the Washington Monument.
In March 1942, the Acme photo agency sent a photographer to Naval Air Station Alameda for a story about what women should and should not wear around machinery. On March 24, he made a frame of a 20-year-old machine shop worker bent over a lathe, her hair tied back in a polka-dot bandanna.
Photography has worked without a camera and without shooting. Generative images test what is left after that.
You spend twenty years building a photographic archive, then train a generative model on it. The model begins producing images that look unmistakably like your work. Are those images photography?
The Fstoppers community is brimming with creative vision and talent. Every day, we comb through your work, looking for images to feature as the Photo of the Day or simply to admire your creativity and technical prowess.
On April 3, 2013, one company turned off the lights in more than 2,000 portrait studios in a single day. CPI Corp. ran the Sears Portrait Studios and the PictureMe studios tucked inside Walmart, and when it collapsed it took the mottled blue backdrop, the laser-beam background, and the sheet of wallet-size prints down with it.
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.
A batch of packaging board made at a mill on the Wabash River on August 6, 1945 came out radioactive, and the X-ray film stacked against it fogged after roughly two weeks in the box. A physicist at Eastman Kodak worked backward from those spots to a bomb test about 1,000 miles away in the New Mexico desert. He then sat on the finding for four years before publishing it.
The most famous face of the Great Depression belonged to a woman who wished the picture had never been taken. Florence Owens Thompson sat for Dorothea Lange for about ten minutes in a California pea field in March 1936, said almost nothing, and never earned a cent from the portrait that turned her into a national symbol. For most of the next 47 years, she resented it.
On October 5, 1986, the New York Times published the closest thing to an honest tally the milk carton campaign produced. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children knew of 107 children located because somebody recognized a picture of them, at least four of those from a milk carton.
Threads of Time is an exploration of legacy and lens. It is a collaborative project between kesi artist Jingwei and photographer Jing Huang, presented at the Leica Gallery in Amsterdam. I went along to see how this collaboration was woven together in a gallery setting.
Every year around late summer, my inbox and DMs start filling up with some version of the same question: "What actually happens at Sony Kando?"
The teal peaks and orange haze of the "Cosmic Cliffs," the Carina Nebula image that helped introduce the James Webb Space Telescope to the world in July 2022, do not exist. Not those colors, anyway. Almost none of the light Webb recorded is light your eye can see, and every filter used for that particular image sits in the infrared.