For roughly two decades, the standard zoom lens started at 24mm. Before that, it started at 28mm or even 35mm. The 24-70mm f/2.8 became the default in the early 2000s and stayed there so long that the starting focal length became invisible. 24mm was simply where a standard zoom began, and nobody questioned it because there was nothing to question.
Landscape photography is one of the most crowded genres in the medium, and standing out gets harder as cameras make technically competent images easier to produce. Ben Harvey argues the answer isn't more gear or better locations; it's rethinking how you use depth of field in a genre that almost never does.
The Leica D-Lux 8 sits in an unusual spot: a Micro Four Thirds compact with a fixed zoom lens, priced like a premium tool, marketed as something you actually carry. After nearly 19 months and close to 3,000 images, Peter Fritz has moved well past first impressions, and his conclusions are more nuanced than the usual early review.
Choosing a compact travel camera is harder than it looks, especially when two solid options sit at very different price points with very different sensor sizes, lenses, and feature sets. The Fujifilm X100VI and the Panasonic Lumix LX10 both pitch themselves as small, capable everyday cameras, but they take genuinely different approaches to getting there.
A new camera presents you with hundreds of settings, and the manuals that explain them are written as if you already understand the vocabulary. You do not need to learn all of it. You need to understand about ten settings well, because those ten control almost everything about how your photographs turn out. Here is what each one does, in plain language, without the jargon that makes photography sound harder than it is.
Choosing between raw and JPEG isn't just a technical preference; it directly affects how much you can recover and reshape an image in post. This helpful video tests this in a setting where the stakes are real: a Grand Canyon sunset, shot across four current-generation camera bodies.
There is a moment I've become very familiar with over the years. It usually happens on the drive home, just after I've packed the camera away and the light has long since faded.
It's that quiet realization that nothing from the day will make it into a final image.
No keeper. No portfolio shot. Nothing to process.
For a long time, I treated those days as failures. I would mentally replay decisions I made in the field, question timing, and sometimes even question whether I had missed something obvious. It felt like the effort should have guaranteed a result.
Over time, though, that way of thinking changed completely. Not because I started getting better images more often, but because I started to understand what hit rate actually means in landscape photography, and more importantly, what it doesn't mean.
Sharpness is one of the first things many photographers judge in a landscape image, but it is also one of the areas that caused me the most frustration when I was starting out. I used to come home convinced that I had captured strong images, only to load them onto a larger screen and realize the foreground was soft or the distant detail was not as sharp as I thought it would be. At the time, I blamed gear more than technique. I assumed my camera or lens was holding me back, when in reality the biggest issue was my process in the field.
Lightroom's masking tools are the single biggest gap between a flat edit and one that looks professionally dialed in. Most people skip them entirely, and their edits suffer for it.
Street photography has become so codified that much of it now looks like photographers photographing other photographs. That sentence might sound unfair, perhaps even provocative. After all, we are living through a golden age of technical accessibility. Cameras have never been better, books are everywhere, and great work from every continent is just a swipe away. Knowledge that once took decades to acquire is now available in a 20-minute YouTube video. In the first years of the 2000s, we did not have anywhere near the access to information that we have today.
Buying a compact camera when you already own a full frame setup sounds like a step backward. The Canon PowerShot V1 makes a surprisingly strong case that it isn't.
The Canon EOS R6 used to be a simple recommendation. You wanted a full frame hybrid that did a little of everything well without costing as much as the R5, so you bought the R6, and that was the end of the conversation. That clarity is gone. The line has split into three very different cameras that happen to share a name, and choosing between them now means knowing what kind of shooter you actually are. The good news is that once you sort that out, the right answer becomes obvious, because Canon has aimed each of these bodies at a genuinely different person.
Street photography still speaks about people, encounter, and human communication in the moment. Much of the practice already uses people differently. People become form, scale, color, silhouette, and rhythm inside the frame. Has the photographer begun to use people as compositional material?
On June 1, 2026, GoPro filed a document with the Securities and Exchange Commission that no company ever wants to file. Its auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, had attached a going-concern warning to GoPro's 2025 accounts, the formal accounting language for substantial doubt that a business can survive the next twelve months.
Choosing the right lens for a Sony APS-C camera is genuinely difficult right now, because the options have multiplied fast and the differences between them aren't always obvious. Curtis Padley has been shooting Sony APS-C for six years and has run through enough glass to have strong, experience-backed opinions about what actually works.
The Canon V1 and Panasonic Lumix L10 are two of the most interesting cameras in recent memory, and not because they're pushing sensor size upward. They're doing the opposite, and making a case that a Four Thirds sensor might be exactly what most people actually need right now.
The Nikon Z f launched in October 2023, and the camera market has shifted considerably since then. New options from Nikon and other brands have changed what you're giving up when you choose that retro body.
Photoshop's Camera Raw filter is genuinely one of the most underused tools for color grading, and most people treat it like a raw file converter rather than a full editing engine. If you've been doing your color work purely in curves or Hue/Saturation, you're leaving a lot of control on the table.
Let's talk about a few careful composition choices I made at sunrise in a quiver tree forest of Namibia, and how good ambient light helped to make the landscape photography shoot successful.
Fujifilm has released five generations of X-Trans sensors, and the conventional wisdom says newer is better. Jason Row challenges that assumption head-on, having personally owned cameras with every X-Trans generation from the original through X-Trans 5.
Following my recent speculation about M-mount lenses being the next big thing, the M-mount ecosystem has seen some truly exciting developments lately. Even in such a niche and crowded market, we are still getting frequent releases from companies like Thypoch. And after all the good releases, they still manage to surprise us every now and then to give us a reason to pick their lens.
When we think about seasons in photography, our minds usually jump to the literal shifts throughout the year. We imagine the specific light of a spring morning or the way autumn color transforms a familiar trail. But we spend so much time obsessing over the conditions outside that we often overlook the shifting climate within our own creative process.
Blurry shots, cluttered frames, and flat edits are among the most common issues that show up in landscape photography workshops, and they persist even among people who've watched dozens of tutorials.
Shooting in Fiordland National Park, New Zealand, is a test of patience, adaptability, and a willingness to get soaked. Shainblum's time there produced some striking results across two very different focal lengths, and the decisions he made in the field are worth paying attention to.
Midsummer is the season most landscape-focused shooters dread. From June through September, everything turns the same flat shade of green, and broad scenes start to feel repetitive and lifeless.