Fstoppers

To paraphrase a favorite pair of authors of mine: once is never, twice is always. Not sure where the third and fourth times something goes wrong rates. 

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Adobe announced on June 25 that it has agreed to acquire Topaz Labs, the Dallas company whose denoising, sharpening, and upscaling tools quietly became part of how a huge number of photographers finish their work. Neither side put a number on the deal. Closing is targeted for the back half of 2026, assuming regulators sign off. Adobe says Topaz CEO Eric Yang will stay on, the standalone apps will keep running, and the underlying models will eventually flow into Firefly, Firefly Services, and Creative Cloud apps. 

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Why fix what isn't broken? Well, Viltrox seems to have a good subtle reason as to why it did with the 35mm f/1.2 LAB (N) that photographers might appreciate. 

Last year, Viltrox launched one of its most unique lenses, and it was received with a lot of positive reactions. The Viltrox 35mm f/1.2 LAB is a straightforward large-aperture prime that came in a large and relatively bulky form. However, with that came the optics that became the standard of the Viltrox LAB series that could perform even in significantly low-light situations.

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The MacBook Neo sits at the bottom of Apple's MacBook lineup, and that single fact shapes everything about it. At its price point, it goes up against laptops that routinely disappoint, which makes what Apple has pulled off here genuinely worth paying attention to. 

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Camera Raw 18.4 just shipped with three masking features that Lightroom still doesn't have, and one of them has been on photographers' wish lists for over a decade. 

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Shooting landscapes solo sounds peaceful in theory, but for many people it's genuinely difficult at first, especially if you've spent most of your life surrounded by others. Ian Worth spent nearly two decades earning a living with a camera, and even he found the transition jarring. 

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The Leica SL3-P sits in an interesting position: a 45-megapixel hybrid that Leica designed to land between the speed-focused SL3-S and the resolution-heavy SL3, and the question of whether it actually pulls that off has real stakes if you're considering dropping serious money on any of the three. 

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Earlier in 2026, a 15-year-old named Jack Crockford won his category at the British Wildlife Photography Awards 2026 with a frozen instant of a Eurasian hobby snatching prey out of the air, a shot that demands timing most photographers spend years failing to develop. He did it with an aging professional DSLR and a long telephoto lens, not one of the artificial-intelligence-driven mirrorless bodies that dominate every camera advertisement this year. On its own, that is a charming footnote. The problem is that it is not on its own. 

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There's this idea going around that the newest cameras, with the latest sensor or faster processor, will give you the best image quality. I say to that, what absolute twaddle! (They wouldn't let me use the "B" word). 

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A new Leica camera always attracts attention. And while the M line is the brand's most famous line, there are many devotees of the SL system, which is a more contemporary system akin to cameras offered by Nikon, Canon, and Sony. Today, Leica announced the newest iteration, the SL3-P, a 44-megapixel camera designed for both speed and performance. 

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There are moments when the street offers nothing back. No gesture, no alignment, no interruption — just space, air, a sky that refuses to hold anything except itself, a line cutting across almost by accident, a billboard drifting at the edge already dissolving into irrelevance.  

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The Canon RF 20-50mm f/4L IS USM PZ is a lens built around a specific kind of shooter: someone who wants wide angle coverage, reliable stabilization, and smooth power zoom control, all in one relatively compact package. At $1,400, it sits in territory where performance has to justify the price tag. 

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Finding a fast, versatile zoom for APS-C mirrorless that doesn't cost as much as a full frame body is genuinely difficult. The Tamron 17-70mm f/2.8 sits in a spot where very few lenses compete. 

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Shooting a wedding with one camera is a gamble. One malfunction, one missed moment, and there's no recovering it. That's the core reason most working wedding photographers carry two camera bodies, but the backup argument is only part of the story. 

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Fog doesn't wait. When it rolls in at dawn and burns off by mid-morning, the window for shooting is measured in minutes, and whether you get the shot comes down to what you did the night before. 

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Harlowe has just launched the Rocket Air, a brand-new tripod that is bundled with a fluid head, providing a wonderfully light solution for hybrid shooters. The fluid head has a leveling adjustment, so for me, this makes it the perfect travel tripod for photography. If I want to shoot some video too, the fluid head has very good dampening to absorb external vibrations and resist rapid, jerky movements. 

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Thypoch has been slowly making a name for itself in the industry and is no stranger today to creating modern manual lenses that pay homage to classic lenses—starting with the Simera, Eureka, and now the Ksana. The 21mm f/3.5 Asph is Thypoch's first entry in the new "Ksana" series, designed to be an ultra-light and compact everyday lens with vintage rendering. If you must know, the name Ksana comes from the Sanskrit word Kṣaṇa (क्षण /ˈksɑːnə/), representing the eastern concept of the "instant" or the duration of a sudden enlightenment.

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In photography, there's always a tension between control and immediacy. On one side, you have post-production, refinement, and the ability to shape an image long after it's been captured. On the other, there's the raw act of photographing in real time, where decisions are irreversible.

"Dogma 11" sits firmly in the second camp.

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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.  

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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Amazon Prime Day is approaching. Every year at this time, those looking to buy new equipment mark these days—June 23 to 26 this year—on their calendars, as it is often one of the few times a year to bring home a long-desired camera at a price significantly lower than usual.

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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. 

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