FStoppers

Peak Design's Travel Tripod is probably one of the most talked-about tripods on this site, and opinions have been polarized. Since the brand has expanded its tripod lineup with three new Pro models, it's clearly important that we see their differences and optimal use cases.

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You've noticed that tripods come with two basic kinds of locks: twist locks and lever locks. They're quite different. Which should you purchase? I'll tell you my experiences and observations.

The Robus RC-5570 has high-quality twist locks.

I generally like twist locks, or collar locks, but I feel that you have to really go out of your way to make sure that they are locked down because occasionally, if you are not careful, they can slip.

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Ask a room full of people to name the best portrait lens, and most will point to something like the Canon RF 85mm f/1.2L USM, with its reputation for sharpness, flattering perspective on faces, and heavy background blur. If you're about to spend serious money on portrait glass, ask whether that reputation fits the rooms you work in and the apertures you actually use.

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Any modern digital camera has thousands of settings and more features than most individual photographers will ever use. But there are some settings that photographers of all genres can benefit from using. One of the most overused terms in photography is "game-changing." It seems like every time a new piece of gear is announced, whether it's a camera, lens, strobe, modifier, tripod, or lens cloth, someone is out there to tell you why you need it and why it's going to revolutionize your photography. Spoiler alert—it's not! And you probably already know that.

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DxO has been busy lately, updating its collection of apps, giving them new capabilities and gently using AI to keep the photographer in control while making editing easier.

Today, DxO is announcing ViewPoint 6, the latest version of its software for correcting geometry, perspective, and distortion. Version 6 brings AI masks to ReShape Fusion, the tool for adjusting the components of a scene from within the frame. Photographers can now concentrate a geometric correction on a single element of the scene instead of applying it across the whole picture.

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The Canon EOS R6 Mark III sits in the middle of Canon's mirrorless lineup, yet its feature list now overlaps with both the higher-resolution R5 Mark II and Canon's Cinema EOS bodies. If you shoot stills and video for a living, that overlap decides how many bodies you buy, carry, and maintain.

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Picking a camera system for video locks you into a mount, a lens lineup, and a manufacturer's release schedule for years, and the features a brand ships early tend to shape how you work long after the purchase. Panasonic's Lumix bodies rarely dominate filmmaking gear talk, even though several capabilities now drawing attention elsewhere have lived inside them for a long time.

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At $400, the Panasonic Lumix S 40mm f/2 is one of the least expensive ways to put an official autofocus prime on an L-mount body. A 40mm sits between the standard 35mm and 50mm choices, and a lens this small and cheap has a good chance of becoming the one that never leaves your camera.

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A judge in Hartford wanted to know how the computer had made a set of plaster teeth semi-transparent so they could be laid over an autopsy photograph of a murdered woman's breast. "Judge, you got me," the state's forensic odontologist answered. "I don't know how they do it, but they do it," he said, and then, "I think we really need an engineer."

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There’s a special role that affordable lenses play in the grand scheme of things, especially those that don’t compromise too much on optics. This new lens, while smaller than most of its kind, is sure to open many doors.

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The Sony FE 24-50mm f/2.8 G and FE 20-70mm f/4 G both promise a smaller standard zoom, and each one asks you to give up something different to get there. If you carry a camera into the mountains for hours at a time, the choice between extra width, extra reach, and an extra stop of light shapes nearly every frame you bring home.

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Most people start landscape photography already believing a few things: you need a wide angle lens, a tripod goes everywhere with you, and a strong portfolio might eventually pay for itself. Those beliefs decide what you buy, where you travel, and how you judge your own progress, and several of them don't hold up once you've spent real time in the field.

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Adapting a vintage lens to a mirrorless body gets you inexpensive, well-built glass with a look modern optics rarely have, and it also brings purple fringing, darkened corners, and lines that bow at the edges. Every one of those flaws can be pushed around in Lightroom, so each one becomes a decision about how much of the old lens you keep in the final file.

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You arrive somewhere beautiful, raise the camera, and every frame comes back looking like a postcard someone else already took. Too much to look at can stall your composition faster than too little, and the fix often starts with seeing less of the scene through a viewfinder, a long lens, or an in-camera crop mode.

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Canon rates the EOS R6 Mark III at up to 8.5 stops of stabilization at the center of the frame and 7.5 stops at the periphery, depending on the lens. The footnote under that number says it was measured under the CIPA 2024 standard with an RF 24-105mm F2.8 L IS USM Z at 105mm. The footnote leaves out that the camera was bolted to a vibrating platform roughly two meters from a printed chart, in a room held near 23 degrees Celsius, and that the rating comes from at least 200 frames shot at every shutter speed in the test.

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Inflatable LED lights are one of those ideas that sound gimmicky. A soft, glowing tube you inflate like a pool toy, then use to light a portrait or paint with color in the dark. It's the kind of gadget that could easily be all novelty and no substance. I wanted to answer a simple question for myself: do these things actually deliver usable results, or are they just a throwaway item destined for the back of a drawer? I tested the Neewer GC30C Inflatable LED Light to find out. 

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Most fall edits in Lightroom go the same way: you open a frame full of yellow leaves, push vibrance and saturation, and end up with something that looks worse than what came out of the camera. Warm hues clip and smear fast, and a heavy hand turns a glowing tree into a flat neon blob.

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Most of your time with a camera happens under ordinary skies at ordinary places, yet the landscape images that get the most attention online are blazing sunsets over famous viewpoints. That gap shapes what you think a successful outing looks like, and it can make the scenes you actually encounter feel like second best.

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Fisheye lenses for medium format have been close to nonexistent, so if you shoot a Fujifilm GFX or Hasselblad body and want that look, you've usually had to adapt glass that doesn't cover the sensor properly. AstrHori's new 8mm fisheye goes after that gap with a circular image and a field of view wider than a full hemisphere.

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For decades, a photography career seemed to hinge on one or two pictures, the frames that appeared in every magazine profile and forum thread until they became shorthand for the person who made them. If you've ever wondered whether your own work needs that kind of breakout image, your answer affects how you shoot, how you edit, and how you share everything else.

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