PHOTOGRAPHY NEWS

The final photograph of Oscar Wilde — taken hours after his death in 1900 — sold at Bonhams for $375,000, about 7,400% over estimate. Here’s what actually makes a historic photograph priceless.

Nikon’s ‘Trade Up to ZR and Save’ program (May 25–July 5, 2026) adds a trade-in bonus toward the ZR cinema camera and $100–$300 toward NIKKOR Z lenses. Here’s who should cash in — and why stills shooters should buy the Z6 III instead.

Leaked images of a Viltrox AF 26mm f/2.8 pancake for Sony full-frame E-mount have surfaced — a compact street prime, with an L-mount version to follow. Here’s what’s actually known versus still unconfirmed.

The FAA has banned drones within 3 nautical miles of every U.S. World Cup 2026 stadium on match days, with fines up to $100,000. Here’s what aerial photographers need to know — the venues, the rules, and how to stay legal.

“Dreams of Violets,” a 75-minute docudrama made entirely with AI, premieres at Tribeca on June 10 — the first AI live-action feature to do so. Here’s why the festival nod matters, and what “no camera” filmmaking means for photographers eyeing video and documentary work.

The HOVERAir AQUA is the first self-flying camera that takes off from and lands on water — IP67, 4K100, $1,299. It fills the GoPro-on-water gap for solo watersports, but US buyers can’t get it yet. Here’s why, plus the alternatives you can buy today.

Xiaomi’s 17T Pro packs Leica cameras, a 5x periscope and a flagship chip from €899 — but you can’t buy it in the US. What the cameras really deliver, how it compares to the 17 Ultra, whether to import it, and the alternatives you can buy here.

Acer is launching three Calman-verified ProDesigner editing monitors through June 2026 — a 6K touchscreen flagship, a 144Hz 4K, and a $249 portable OLED, all B&H Photo exclusives in the US.

Viltrox, the budget-lens specialist, just launched the Vintage Z1 Pro — a retro-styled compact flash with TTL and 1/8000s HSS for Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Fujifilm, starting at $59.99.

A gallery showed a $10,000 AI-colorized ‘Moonrise’ without Ansel Adams’ trust’s consent. Here’s the copyright and publicity-rights reality every photographer should understand.

Brightin Star just shipped the first autofocus 12mm prime ever made for Sony E-mount — $659.99 pre-order. Sony’s nearest AF alternative is the 14mm f/1.8 GM at $1,598.

Venus Optics has shipped the first fisheye zoom with constant f/2.8 — and the first designed natively for Sony E, Nikon Z, Canon RF, Canon EF-M, Fujifilm X, L-Mount, and Micro Four Thirds — at $399 across the board.

OpenAI just adopted C2PA and SynthID, launched a public Verify tool, and joined the same authenticity standard Canon shipped to Reuters newsrooms eight days earlier. Hardware signs real photos at capture; software watermarks AI fakes — and for the first time, both ends of the stack are talking to each other.

Leica has quietly dissolved the team that had been working on its long-rumored medium format mirrorless camera since 2022. S-division staff have been reassigned to SL and M-mount projects, lining up with Blackstone’s reported €1B sale of its Leica stake. Here’s what that means for Fujifilm GFX and Hasselblad X2D buyers — and for the format itself.

GoPro confirmed Tuesday that its board of directors has authorized a formal strategic review, appointing financial advisors to evaluate options that could include a sale

Insta360 posted a one-line tease on X — “Going back, all the way back” with a film reel emoji and a May 14 date. No RSS pickup yet. What the company might be resurrecting, ranked by likelihood.

Lexar’s D70E packs 2TB into a cable-free thumb-drive metal body for 00, with USB-C peaks of 2,000/1,800 MB/s — fast enough on paper to outpace most premium portable SSDs. But the thumb-drive form factor isn’t a working drive: here’s where the D70E actually fits in a photographer’s storage chain.

NASA released 12,217 raw Artemis II photos on May 3, 2026 — shot on Nikon D5 SLRs, a Nikon Z9 modified as the Handheld Universal Lunar Camera, and iPhone 17. The Z9 came back from cislunar space with no detectable sensor radiation damage, validating the rig for Artemis III’s lunar surface missions.

Topaz Labs shipped six new AI models on April 28 — Wonder 3, Denoise Max, Super Focus 3, High Fidelity 3, Starlight 2.5, Astra 2. The bigger story is NeuroStream, Topaz’s new VRAM-compression tech that cuts memory usage by up to 95% and brings pro AI to consumer hardware.

American Airlines capped power banks at 2 per passenger, each under 100 Wh, effective May 1. Camera batteries are mostly fine; here’s what photographers, drone pilots, and video shooters need to know before their next flight.

Sigma’s radical-minimalist BF just earned a perfect 100 from the Red Dot jury — the third Best of the Best in Sigma camera history, and the clearest signal yet that design-first cameras are a real buying category.

Canon Rumors revised the EOS R6 V spec leak: the camera will ship with active cooling, not passive vents only as the original April 19 leak suggested. The May 13 launch is locked, kit lens is the new RF 20-50mm f/4L IS USM PZ, and the cinema-first ergonomics + 32.5MP / 7K RAW pipeline put the R6 V squarely in C50 territory.

Apple is running a four-part iPhone camera upgrade plan over three generations — variable aperture on the iPhone 18 Pro in 2026, a 200MP main sensor on the iPhone 19 Pro in 2027, and a 200MP periscope telephoto with gimbal-style ultrawide stabilization on the iPhone 20 Pro in 2028. Here’s what each upgrade means for mobile photographers — and why the Galaxy S26 Ultra already beat Apple to 200MP.

DJI told a US federal court that the FCC’s Covered-List designation will cost it $1.5 billion in 2026 alone — $700M from authorizations set aside for 14 existing products, plus $860M from 25 new launches blocked from the US market. Here’s which photographer and filmmaker gear is already caught, what’s at risk next, and whether DJI’s Ninth Circuit appeal changes anything.