Cameras and Photography

PetaPixel’s Chris Niccolls and Jordan Drake are once again recapping the year’s best and worst cameras over made-up drinking games. This is my favorite annual camera nerd tradition, and it’s now running 10 years (and three YouTube channels).

No spoilers, but I’m here to say the Nikon Zf was shunned — and after 10 years Chris’s excellent hair is aging better than his alcohol tolerance.

Sony has an upcoming gridline tool for its Alpha cameras that seems helpful for commercial photographers. But unlike free firmware updates, this one will cost $149 when it launches in March — just to add four custom grid overlays to their cameras.

It seems nifty for pros doing school pictures, but dang, I don’t look forward to more paywalled camera features that squeeze pros.

This noise is the price you’ll pay for the uncropped 4K 120fps shots of the Sony A9 III’s global shutter that’s supposed to fix the distortion caused by the usual rolling shutter. (Well, really the price is $5,999)

Okay, so you don’t actually have to hear the sound of an early PC crashing — there’s no mechanical shutter. But this is an awful noise, and I love that it’s there.

Time has published its top 100 picks from professional photojournalists that document real-world events from 2023, alongside a message warning that ethical photojournalism has become “more important than ever” to combat the rapid rise in AI-generated imagery.

We’ve included some notable photos below, but you can check out the full compilation on Time’s website.

The company tested baking a cryptographic “digital signature” into photos taken by its cameras to set them apart from AI-generated or otherwise faked images. Sony says the feature will come to cameras like the Alpha 9 III via a firmware update in Spring 2024.

GoPro announced a new Premium Plus subscription during its quarterly earnings call Tuesday, while CFO Brian McGee teased three new cameras coming in 2024. The $99-a-year tier includes “increased cloud storage for any camera” plus a new Quik desktop app (on macOS this month, Windows next summer) with Hypersmooth Pro stabilization built-in.

What is HyperSmooth Pro? I have no clue. GoPro already has separate stabilization software called ReelSteady that’s popular with FPV pilots. Maybe it’s just a new name?

Google’s Magic Editor is already capable of mind-bending photo retouching, but occasionally it’ll refuse to do certain edits. When this happens, it displays a vague message about violating Google’s AI terms.

It seems Google will soon be clearer about why Magic Editor sometimes abandons a task. Android Authority spotted strings in the Google Photos app about the tool being unable to manipulate “photos of ID cards, receipts, images with personally identifiable information, human faces, and body parts.”

The site also found clues that Magic Editor could allow custom generative text prompts, giving users even more creative freedom. Because after all, what is a photo?

Over on MKBHD’s The Studio, David Imel talked about the Leica M11-P. Or, more accurately, he used it to talk about Content Credentials, which the $9,000-plus camera attaches to photos as they’re taken so they can be verified through Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI).

It’s a good look at CAI and its potential benefits to the media using the first-ever camera to participate in an initiative intended to help onlookers identify real-world images in a sea of AI-generated ones.

Sure, it looks cool, but what can you do with a mini Game Boy Camera? Vjeran and I hit the streets of San Francisco to capture a few landmarks. Want one? The DIY design is ready if you’ve got fine soldering skills!

A retail listing spotted by WinFuture’s Roland Quandt has given us an early look at an upcoming model in DJI’s lineup of Osmo Pocket handheld cameras. If accurate, the listing suggests it’s slightly bigger and heavier, with a higher capacity battery. But most interesting is its larger 2-inch screen, which can apparently rotate between portrait and landscape.

Google Photos on the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro is changing the way it handles RAW files: they’re now stored in the main photos view rather than a separate folder. They’ll be backed up along with your JPEGs, and those big files will eat up your account storage fast. You’ll want to shoot RAW with discretion or turn off automatic backup altogether.

If you’ve got a bit of nostalgia for the old days of photography, or you really love classic film cameras but usually prefer to shoot digital, the newly announced Nikon ZF mirrorless camera may be for you.

Our own Becca Farsace got to spend a couple hours with the new vintage-style Nikon, and you can check out her thoughts on the latest episode of Full Frame.

Becca goes all elastic to show off the Max Mod 2. It’s a $100 interchangeable lens that’s the most exciting part of the $400 GoPro Hero 12 Black — because it adds a 177-degree field of view.