The Milk Carton Kids: What Actually Happened to the Photographs That Haunted the 1980s
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. The National Child Safety Council's own estimate of cartons then in circulation was two billion to three and a half billion, down from a peak it put at three to five billion.
Leica x Lexar: Inside the Threads of Time Exhibition
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.
Four Months With the Lumix L10 and Its Fixed Zoom Lens
Panasonic's Lumix L10 puts a Micro Four Thirds sensor and a fixed zoom into a body small enough for a jacket pocket, and it sells for $1,500. A fixed-lens camera at that price asks you to give up a lot of flexibility, so how it holds up after months of daily use tells you more than a launch-week impression can.
What Really Happens at Sony's Invite-Only Kando Trip
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?"
It's a fair thing to wonder. From the outside, Kando looks like a mystery box. A few hundred creators disappear to some beautiful corner of the country for a few days, flood everyone's feeds with incredible work, and then go quiet. There are no badges for sale. There's no public schedule. If you weren't invited, you're left watching from the outside, trying to figure out what the whole thing even is.
When Is an f/2.8 Zoom Worth the Extra Weight?
An f/2.8 zoom usually costs more, weighs more, and takes up more room in your bag than its f/4 counterpart, and the price gap between the two versions of the same focal range can run to hundreds of dollars. A wrong choice in either direction tends to end the same way, with a second purchase or an expensive lens that keeps getting left at home.
What Print Quality Actually Means When You Choose a Printer
Ask whether the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 or the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1100 makes better prints, and you'll get answers about gamut volume, D-max, and how many centuries pigment inks last. Those figures steer where hundreds or thousands of dollars go, yet they say surprisingly little about how a print looks once it's framed and hanging.
One Sony Lens That Shoots Both Circular and Full Frame Fisheye
Fisheye lenses have usually forced a choice between a circular image and a frame-filling one. Sony's FE 8-14mm f/3.5 G does both in one small zoom for $1,600, so deciding to buy it comes down to how often you'd actually use a lens this specialized.
How the James Webb Telescope Images Get Their Colors: The Honest Answer to 'Is It Real?'
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. The moment you understand why, the picture gets more impressive rather than less.
3 Features That Just Made The Leica Q3 More Enticing: An Experiential Review
Compact fixed-lens cameras have been getting more and more popular in recent years, and the Leica Q series holds a spot at the top of that category. While the Q3 is already more than a couple of years old, there are some updates to the camera that make it more enticing.
How to Actually Shoot a 50mm Lens on the Street
The 50mm is the lens most people buy first because it's the cheapest prime in the catalog, and plenty of them spend the first few months shooting it wide open just to see the background melt. Fewer people learn to see at that focal length, and the habits that work at 28mm or 35mm tend to fall apart once you move to something tighter.
The Specs Photographers Used to Sweat Don’t Matter Anymore
Whenever I've photographed weddings, world events, landscapes, or anything else, it's not been uncommon for other photographers to come up and start a chat about gear. And as someone who's worked for a major camera company and taught photography for almost two decades, I've always been happy to engage in talks about megapixels, autofocus, and dynamic range.
But then the other day, when photographing the 9/11 Tribute in Light in New York City, it happened, and it hit me: I don't really think about this stuff anymore. I haven't for a long time.
Three Old Canon EF Lenses, One Used 6D, and a Search for Character
Classic camera design keeps showing up on new releases, but the vintage look in your photos comes from the glass, not the body. Cheap, older lenses can deliver a character that no retro-styled body will fake for you.
Two Ways AI Could Come for Wedding Photography
Wedding photography has always seemed safe from AI, since someone still has to stand in the room with a camera when the vows happen. That assumption gets shakier every year as editing, culling, marketing, and even business planning shift onto software anyone can pick up for the price of a cheap subscription.
A Classic Photoshop Workflow Versus Adobe's New AI Tools
Photoshop has picked up a run of new AI features and reworked adjustment layers over the past year, and each one arrives with the promise of a faster, simpler workflow. When a tool you use every day changes how it behaves, you need to know whether the new version saves you time or costs you image quality, responsiveness, and generative credits.
Why Brands Buy Images From People You Don’t Consider Photographers
User-generated visual content is steadily pushing photographers and videographers out of commercial work. It's easy to dismiss its creators as amateurs and cheap labor, but brands aren't choosing them by accident, and ignoring the shift won't slow it down. The only real question is how to adapt.
How Image Stabilization Physically Works: Magnets, Gyros, and Floating Glass
Tilt a 600mm lens by a tenth of a degree, a movement too small to feel, and the image it projects slides about a millimeter across the sensor. Nearly every stabilizer in a modern still camera exists to cancel that millimeter while the shutter is open, either by shoving a piece of glass sideways or by flying the entire sensor on magnets. How each one does that explains why the stop counts printed on the box are so hard to compare.
Why Exposure Isn’t a Setting: It’s a Decision
One issue in the photography community has always lingered, and only tenured photographers seem to grasp it: exposure is a decision, not a setting.
The Composition Habit That Fixes Cluttered Street Photos
You keep taking pictures of anything that catches your eye, and back home they look off without any obvious reason why. Crowds pile up, harsh sun bites, and the frame reads as noise instead of a subject.
Nikon Has Forgotten the Photographer
I love Nikon cameras. I've been using them since I bought a secondhand EL2 in 1984. I've owned more Nikon cameras than I care to remember, and just last month, I acquired an F from 1972. So this isn't an anti-Nikon article, nor am I arguing that Nikon makes bad cameras. Quite the opposite. I’m a bit of a fanboy, if I’m completely honest.
Nikon makes some of the best cameras in the world. But there’s something that has been bothering me for a while: I think Nikon has forgotten about the photographer.
What Contact Sheets Reveal About How You Actually Shoot
Henri Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment" shaped how you think about photography more than almost any other idea, yet plenty of newer shooters read it backward. That misreading quietly stunts a skill that separates strong photographers from average ones: knowing how to pick the right image out of a pile.