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.
Golden hour and blue hour can make almost any street corner look like a finished photograph, and that polish can hide whether anything is actually happening in the frame. If most of your keepers come from warm evening light or city glow after sunset, the gray months ahead are a good test of what you can find without that help.
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.
Reflections in shop windows and glass doors are among the most common things you'll try to clean up in post, and Adobe's latest Lightroom update promises to make its one-click fix more reliable. When that tool still misses, a newer generative feature in Lightroom can take over, as long as you control what it changes.
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.
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.
Flat window light or a harsh shadow across a face used to mean a reshoot or an evening of dodging and burning. Photoshop's new Relight feature, currently in the beta, lets you reposition, soften, and recolor the light in a finished image with a handful of sliders.
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.
A wide angle lens pointed at a mountain range can make the peaks look small and far away, which is the opposite of what most people expect when they carry one into big terrain. Getting around that problem by getting close to something in front of you and building the frame back toward the peak is what turns a flat record of a view into an image that pulls the eye through it.
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.
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.
Adobe now meters many of Photoshop's AI tools against a monthly pool of generative credits, so knowing which features draw from that pool directly affects how freely you can edit. Many of the program's most useful time-savers have nothing to do with AI at all, and they sit on panels you already open every day.
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.