Experimenting with “recipes” that build on Fujifilm’s “Film Simulations” to change the look of your JPEGs – subtly or not so much – has long been a tradition among a certain set of the company’s users. However, actually getting the recipes to your camera has historically been a bit of a pain, requiring you to manually adjust several parameters and save them to a custom profile that you can later recall. Recent cameras from Fujifilm have somewhat improved the experience with a dedicated recipe system, but it’s still a lot of manual data entry.

This month, though, two apps have promised to solve that problem. One from a major player in the Fujifilm recipes field, the other from a scrappy upstart. For both, recipe syncing is only available for iOS devices (there currently isn’t even an Android version of the latter), but are signs of exciting things to come.

Fuji X Weekly

Mitchell Clark

The first is the Fuji X Weekly app, which is an extension of the popular website that hosts many community created recipes. The app has been around for a while, letting you browse and save recipes that you’d then have to manually enter in on your camera. Now, though, it’s able to download recipes, and then sync them to your camera via a standard called Picture Transfer Protocol. You can do this using the hundreds of recipes in the site’s repository, or with custom ones you’ve entered yourself. 

The process is relatively simple, as it is for the rest of the apps we’ll cover today. You put your camera in USB Raw Conv. / Backup Restore mode, then connect it to your phone with a USB cable. From there, the app should be able to send your selected recipe to whichever custom slot you choose, though the first time you go through this process, you may need to give the app system-level permission to talk to an attached camera. Then, you can select the custom setting mode from your camera (which, in my testing, helpfully already had the name of the recipe in the name field) and start shooting.

Mitchell Clark

While the app is free to use, there is a $20/year subscription that unlocks a few extra features. That list now includes the ability to sync sets of recipes to your camera, rather than having to do them one at a time. Say, for example, you have five recipes you use around town every day, and six that you like to have access to while traveling. Paid members could switch between the two with a press of a button.

FujiShare

Mitchell Clark

A newcomer to the scene is an app called FujiShare, which Reddit user Rude_Shoulder_2895 posted about on the FujifilmX subreddit. They said they built the app to make it easier to load sets of recipes to their X100V. It also aims to give you more information about the example photos used for a recipe, to make it easier to distinguish how much of the aesthetic is down to the camera settings, the recipe and the scene. The app also has tools built in to let you load a JPEG from a Fujifilm camera and save the recipe that was used to make it, and to apply frame effects to your photo, making it look like it’s matted or on a film reel.

FujiShare is a sleek app with a modern UI, and it’s undeniably nice to scroll through the recipes on offer, though there seem to be far fewer than on Fuji X Weekly. Otherwise, the actual process of syncing your recipes is much the same as it is using the other app, though users can post packs of recipes as well, letting you just save an entire set of recipes at once, before sending it off to your camera. On that note, FujiShare’s ability to send over multiple recipes at once currently isn’t pay-gated.

Mitchell

The FujiShare app is currently in public beta, and being distributed through Apple’s TestFlight system, which will take a bit of setup if you haven’t used it before. The beta is free, but it’s unclear what, if any, monetization scheme the app will use when it launches.

Is this new?

Mitchell Clark

One thing worth noting about these apps is that they don’t appear to be the first to come up with the idea. About a year ago, the team behind the FujiStyle app announced a very similar feature, letting you sync recipes to your camera’s custom settings slots via USB. It works very similarly to the other apps and, perhaps most excitingly, I’ve confirmed it works with Android. (I did, however, have to dive into the phone’s developer settings to get it working; your mileage will vary depending on what version of the OS you have.) Unlike the other apps, it doesn’t appear to support syncing sets of recipes at a time, but I bet I could sync seven recipes using the app faster than I could input one on the camera manually.

The caveats

Since these apps all seem to use a similar system to sync recipes, they share a lot of the same warnings and asterisks. The biggest one is made explicit by Fuji X Weekly. In the blog post announcing the feature, Ritchie Roesch says: “While there’s not a lot that can go wrong with PTP, there is a minor chance of adverse affects, especially if not handled carefully by the developers.” While Roesch says they tested many ways that things could go wrong, and built several safeguards into the app, there is still a risk. 

“Very importantly, connecting your camera to any unofficial, unlicensed, unsupported program may void your camera’s manufacturer warranty,” Roesch says. “Fujifilm confirmed this with me. I tried very hard to obtain a license from Fujifilm so that it wouldn’t risk voiding your warranty, but ultimately that didn’t work out.”

The app also makes this clear when you first go to use the feature, making it clear that you’re doing so at your own risk. While the other apps don’t make the warning as explicit, they come with similar warnings, so it’s probably a good idea to approach all of them with a sense of caution.

It’s also worth noting that these apps aren’t universally compatible. They should work with cameras newer than the X-T3 and X-T30, but those cameras and anything older don’t support the system that these apps use to transfer recipes. Likewise, if you have an older iPhone with a Lightning port, it may not be as simple as using a Lightning-to-USB-C cable; Fuji X Weekly reports those won’t work, but that adapters may. 

Finally, there’s the fact that the recipe-transfer feature is only available on iOS for Fuji X Weekly, and the FujiShare app currently only exists for iOS. Both developers have said they’re working on version for Android, but the timetables are to be determined. That’s unfortunate for Android users in the short term, as it means they have fewer options. Hopefully that situation will improve soon, but in the meantime, the FujiStyle app is there to serve Android users in the meantime.

Summary

Among the DPReview staff, there were two reactions to the news of these apps. The first was “this is great, why hasn’t Fujifilm built this into its own app yet?” The second was “Please don’t ask them to complicate things, I just want the app to transfer pictures reliably, nothing more.” While that reaction is understandable, I also suspect there’s been some pressure on Fujifilm to integrate this kind of feature into XApp. Recipes are a relatively well-known part of its brand identity, and other companies, like Panasonic and Nikon, have beaten it to the punch, building systems that allow users to download community-created color profiles to their cameras using an app (and Ricoh has made mention of doing something similar, too). 

Perhaps the existence of these third party options could take some of that pressure off, letting Fujifilm focus on reliability and compatibility. Or perhaps it’ll build it into XApp at some point in the future and, to borrow a phrase from the Apple developer community, Sherlock these apps. Either way, at the moment Fujifilm users have options they didn’t before.

If you’ve ever held a small card of 24 colored squares up to your subject, you’ve used a piece of imaging history that just hit a milestone birthday. The ColorChecker (also called the Macbeth chart if you’ve been around a while) is turning 50, and Calibrite has marked the occasion with a virtual museum for the little chart that helps photographers keep colors accurate. 

The anniversary hub for the occasion includes a timeline from the founding of the Macbeth Artificial Daylight Company to today, along with fun facts about the card and some of its famous uses. It also breaks down the purpose behind each of the 24 patches and features a quiz to test your knowledge of each color. 

The small chart debuted in a 1976 paper, “A Color-Rendition Chart,” by C.S. McCamy, H. Marcus and J.G. Davidson, written while Macbeth was a division of Kollmorgen. The idea was simple but clever: each patch was locked to a spectral reflectance value instead of a printed ink mix, so the card could be measured, reproduced and trusted across different materials and lighting conditions. 

Calibrite

When photography went digital, the ColorChecker came along for the ride. Shoot a Raw file with one in the frame, then feed it into Adobe Lightroom or DxO PhotoLab, and you get a custom camera profile that pulls your colors closer to how the scene actually looked. The ColorChecker Digital SG, though, saw an expansion of color, jumping to 140 squares that include the original 24 colors, a 17-step grayscale for fine tonal control, and 14 dedicated skin-tone patches.

The card has changed hands a few times: Gretag, GretagMacbeth and X-Rite all owned it before Calibrite took over. It’s also changed in size. The original measured roughly 13 by 9 inches, with proportions that closely match a 35mm film frame, and it now comes in a range of sizes, including one barely bigger than a postage stamp for macro subjects. But the patch layout and spectral targets have stayed consistent enough that profiles built around the standard remain interchangeable. Fifty years on, and photographers still reach for this tool for the same reason they always did.

Fujifilm is strengthening its ties with Google, taking a larger part in the company’s photo printing service. The company announced that it’s taking a “leading” role when it comes to operating and supporting the Google Photos Print Store in the US.

This takes the form of a co-branded store built directly into the Google Photos interface. Once you navigate to the Print Store and select a product to order, you’ll be prompted to connect your Google account to Fujifilm’s services*. From there, Fujifilm will take care of payment, printing, shipping and customer support. Fujifilm also says there are “plans to roll out new features, new products and a more robust user experience.” 

You’ve long been able to get printed products directly from the Google Photos app – I personally have a book I made with the service in 2017 – but the company says this expanded partnership will give users “more ways than ever before to print their memories, including an expanded range of print formats, frames, décor, and gift items, going well beyond the offerings of the previous platform.”

There’s a very good chance that, if you bought prints from Google Photos prior to this announcement, Fujifilm or its equipment were involved in some way. The company is a major player when it comes to photo printing for both consumers and industrial clients. Last year, the company identified “growth in the number of images taken and printing needs due to smartphone proliferation” as one of its key opportunities for mid-to-long-term growth.

While this announcement seems like it’s probably a bigger deal for Fujifilm and Google, rather than the people actually printing their photos, we always appreciate people having better and easier access to printing their photos. While it used to be a vital part of the process, it’s an easy one to forget nowadays, especially if you’re part of the younger generations who have grown up with purely digital photography. It’ll be exciting to see if this partnership makes printing smartphone photos that bit more attractive to the people who may use it to see their images rendered in ink on paper for the first time.

* While Fujifilm’s press release says the platform “began rolling out to Google Photos users in the U.S. at the end of August 2026,” it seems that’s still in progress. When I tried it on September 1st, I ended up in the old Google Photos payment flow. 

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DxO has announced PhotoLab 10, the latest version of its subscription-free Raw editor. The new iteration of the app offers more advanced masking tools, a new color grading wheel, automatic sensor dust removal and direct connectivity to Affinity, all under the company’s perpetual license. 

Most of the updates revolve around masking changes. That includes the addition of Depth Masks, which it previously released as part of Nik Collection 9 earlier this year. DxO says the feature uses AI to build a detailed depth map from any Raw file, based on distance from the camera, even without embedded depth data. It allows photographers to independently target the foreground, midground or background for more precise editing. 

DxO

DxO is also expanding some of PhotoLab’s existing AI-based masking tools. The company says that the AI Masks tool can now identify every person in a scene and allows photographers to create a single mask for all people, combine only selected people into one mask or create individual masks for every person. For even more control, the tool even allows photographers to select individual features of people, such as eyes, hair and lips. 

Users can now also select individual features such as eyebrows, eyes (as a whole or breaking out the iris, pupil and whites), teeth, facial hair, face skin and lips from the list of selectable AI Mask categories. It should offer even more fine-tuned control while retouching portraits. The masking updates also include an expanded U Point toolkit, DxO’s approach to creating local adjustments based on the color and luminosity of a sampled point. Users now have access to a brush-based Control Brush and elliptical Control Points alongside the existing circular ones. 

DxO

PhotoLab 10 adds more than masking changes. DxO has brought over the color grading wheel introduced with Nik Collection 9, which puts shadows, midtones, highlights and global color on a single wheel. It’s tone-based grading, distinct from the hue-targeted color wheel that remains in the app. It also added an AI-powered sensor dust removal tool that automatically removes sensor spots on Raw files. Lastly, there is now a new export option for Affinity, Canva’s now-free professional image editing software, so photographers can send images directly to that platform for additional editing. 

PhotoLab 10 is available starting today for macOS and Windows. A new license costs $250, while upgrades from PhotoLab 8 or 9 are $130. A 30-day free trial is available on DxO’s site.

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Xiaomi has announced the Poco F9 Ultra and the F9 Pro, the latest entries in its series of phones that aim to undercut the pricing of traditional flagship models while offering similar specifications. This time around, the company has included a battery with a massive 8050mAh capacity on the Ultra, and a main camera that can shoot images at up to 200MP on both phones.

That main camera is one of three: the phones also include telephoto and ultrawide options. On the Ultra, the former features a “5x” 120mm equiv. F3 optically stabilized lens and a 50MP sensor. Its ultrawide is a slightly-narrower-than-typical 0.7x 17mm equiv. F2.4 lens, also with a 50MP sensor. Xiaomi doesn’t specify the sizes of these sensors, but they seem to be unchanged from the ones found in the Poco F8 Ultra, which used a Type 1/2.76 (20.4mm²) one for its telephoto and Type 1/2.88 (18.6mm²) for its ultrawide, according to GSMArena. The F9 Pro, meanwhile, has a 50MP 2.5x telephoto camera and an 8MP ultrawide option, again seemingly unchanged from its predecessor.

Xiaomi

The main event, though, is the 200MP wide-angle camera shared by the two models. It has a 24mm equiv. F1.7 stabilized lens. By default, it bins all that resolution down to 12.5MP or 50MP, depending on a setting, but you can access its full resolution via a dedicated mode in the camera app. The pictures take a few seconds to process, and won’t have the HDR effect that you get from the phone’s normal modes, but can show much more detail when shot in ideal conditions; the camera reminds you that the mode works best when there’s plenty of light, for reasons that are obvious if you understand how quad bayer sensors work.

Again, Xiaomi hasn’t said what size sensor its main camera uses, beyond claiming that it uses “2μm 16-in-1 Super Pixels.” That figure shouldn’t be taken literally, though, because to fit 200MP worth of 2μm pixels, you’d need the area of a full frame sensor, which it certainly isn’t. It’s more likely that it’s describing the binned quad bayer pixels, which would put the sensor somewhere around a Type 1/1.56 (50mm²). That would also explain why the company hasn’t advertised the size, when it did for the Poco F8 Ultra, which used a larger Type 1/1.31 (72mm²) sensor for its main camera. We’ve reached out to Xiaomi to ask for specifics, and will update this story if we hear back.

Of course, with flagship cameras the sensor specs aren’t everything, as phones make heavy use of computational photography, stacking multiple frames together. You can see our sample gallery shot using the Poco F9 Ultra below.

Beyond the cameras, the Poco F9 phones have relatively high-end specs. The Ultra uses the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, while the Pro uses the slightly cut-down “V” variant of that system on a chip. Both feature displays capable of going up to 185Hz, and producing 10,000 nits peak brightness, though the latter figure is only over a 1% region of the screen. More realistic is the 4500 nit peak brightness figure, attainable in a window covering 25% of the display. The Ultra’s display is 6.9″, while the Pro’s is 6.59″.

Both phones have relatively large batteries for their size, thanks to the company’s use of silicon-carbon battery chemistry. The Ultra is rated for 8050mAh, while the Pro is 6330mAh. Whichever one you go with, you can recharge it quickly with the correct equipment; they both have 100W wired and 50W wireless charging. What’s more, they can be used to charge other devices that don’t have the same stamina, with 27W of reverse wired charging and 22.5W of reverse wireless charging.

Finally, the phones feature “Sound by Bose” co-branding. On the Ultra, this means stereo speakers combined with a subwoofer that lives alongside the camera modules on the plateau (though the Pro misses out on that feature). Based on the few songs I listened to, it indeed produces pretty impressive bass for a phone. If you go above around 75% volume you’re liable to hear some peaking, but for personal listening that’ll be plenty loud. 

The F9 Ultra comes in “dark cherry” or black, while the Pro is available in black, white or “aurora green,” with the latter literally glowing in the dark after being exposed to light. The Ultra is available with 256GB of storage and 12GB of RAM for $799 / €1,099, or you can upgrade to 16GB of memory with 512GB  or 1TB of storage for $949 / €1199 and $1199 / €1399, respectively. The Pro, meanwhile, starts at €903 for a version of 12GB RAM and 256GB of storage. The launch is global, but, as is typical for Xiaomi phones, excludes the US.

Xiaomi

Xiaomi Poco F9 Ultra

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Sigma has announced three new entries to its “Aizu Prime” series of cinema lenses: a 21mm, 100mm and 125mm. Like the rest of the lenses in the series, they’re fast at T1.3, and designed for “large format” cameras, with a 46.3mm image circle that could cover the film in a VistaVision camera or the sensor of an Arri Alexa LF Open Gate. (In photography terms, they’re a touch larger than full frame, which has a 43.3mm diagonal.)

The new lenses take the matched series wider and longer than before. Last year, Sigma launched the Aizu Prime brand with eight lenses, ranging from 25mm to 75mm. It also promised that, eventually, there would be 12 lenses in the series. Today’s announcement brings the total up to 11, with only an 18mm option not yet released.

Sigma

Sigma says the lens’ optical formulas, like the rest of the Aizu Primes, are “developed exclusively for cinema applications,” with an eye towards being sharp, while still retaining character, and having minimal focus breathing and distortion. Sigma also designed them to match the other lenses in the series, sharing similar color, contrast and flare characteristics, sizes and weights (though the 100mm and 125mm are a touch heavier than the rest at 2.2Kg versus 1.6 or 1.7Kg). That’s an important consideration on a busy film set; you don’t want to have to rebalance your gimbal or reset your follow focus and iris control wheels each time you change a lens.

None of this comes cheap, though, as the three new lenses will cost $9799 each, which is a bit of a jump up from the $8300 the rest of the entries in the series cost. That may be a function of their slightly more exotic focal lengths. They’ll be available for PL or Sony E-mount starting in November.

Zack Snyder has directed movies about a lot of things: superheroes, space, ancient Greeks, owls, you name it. With his next film, it seems like we can add photography to that list.

According to the synopsis, the movie, called The Last Photograph, is about a former DEA agent teaming up with a “washed-up junkie war photographer” to try and find his niece and nephew after their parents were murdered. The trailer (and the title) imply that photography will play some role in the story. There are scenes showing a darkroom, photos being taken at a crime scene, a slow-motion shot of a camera exploding, and several moody frames of someone raising a rangefinder to their eye, presumably witnessing horrors off-screen.

Speaking of: we’ll put the trailer below, but heed the warning in the first few seconds. It’s graphic in pretty much every way it can be, including an exceptional amount of violence. Even if you’re fine with that, it’s probably not something to watch at work.

Of course, being a camera site, we were interested in what cameras the characters were using on-screen, especially since Zack Snyder is a known photography buff (he’s reportedly the cinematographer for the movie, too, as he was on 2021’s Army of the Dead, which he shot almost entirely at F0.95 using rehoused vintage optics*). From what we can tell, the photographer character uses Yashica rangefinder – probably an Electro 35CC from the early 70s, based on the markings – and what looks like a Leica M10 Monochrom, a camera Snyder is demonstrably familiar with.

The Yashica isn’t a stranger to the silver screen, either; Andrew Garfield used one in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man (back when Spider-Man movies featured the version of Peter Parker who works as a photographer). While the brand wasn’t really known as a go-to for photojournalists, it also wouldn’t be that surprising to hear of a war photographer using a film rangefinder with a fixed 35mm F1.8 lens.

We don’t see a ton of movies about photography, so it’s interesting to be getting a movie from a big-name director that seems to at least feature the art form as an important part of the story. The last film we got like that was Alex Garland’s Civil War, which focused mostly on the role of reporting and war photography (much to people’s surprise, given that it was released during a contentious US election and was set against the backdrop of a fictional second civil war in the country).

Zack Snyder, via TIFF

According to The Hollywood Reporter, it may be a while before we get to see The Last Photograph. It’s set to premiere on September 13 at TIFF (the Toronto International Film Festival), but no one has bought distribution rights to it yet. The film is apparently a passion project for Snyder, who has been kicking the idea around since the mid-2000s. While it certainly seems like it’ll be an intense watch, I’m excited for whenever I do get to see it. In part because of the photography aspect, but also because the cinematography in it looks gorgeous, and it’s always interesting to see a Hollywood director take a big artistic swing.

* The effect is… strange. At times it works and provides a unique aesthetic, at others it borders on distracting. I actually didn’t know about the creative choice when I started watching the movie, but pretty early into it I turned to a friend and said something along the lines of “what is going on with this cinematography?”

Mistakes are part of life as a photographer or videographer. I’ve messed up too many times to count, forgetting to pack an extra battery, showing up to a shoot with a full memory card and botching my settings badly enough that the images were unusable.

Most of those just cost me lost photographs or some added stress. But sometimes a mistake leads somewhere better than the plan. While attending Sony’s Kando event, where Sony invited me along with fellow press and other image-makers, I asked six photographers and videographers about a mistake they’re glad they made. Here’s what they said.

These conversations happened on the fly at the event, so most of the creatives didn’t have the specific image handy. The photos below are from their portfolios, with the exception of Nancy Borowick and Jabin Botsford.

Sarina Soriano

Sarina Soriano (@sarinasoriano_)is a senior producer and director of photography (DP) for the San Francisco 49ers, where she’s a nine-time regional Emmy winner and was the first woman in the role, as well as one of the first Latina cinematographers in the NFL.

Her mistake was a setting she didn’t intend to be shooting at. “A mistake that I made that ended up actually turning out well was that I put a high shutter on one of my videos, but was able to really slow it down in DaVinci, and it looked absolutely epic,” she said.

Nate Luebbe

Nate Luebbe (@nateinthewild) is a landscape, wildlife and adventure photographer and a member of Sony’s Alpha Imaging Collective, with a portfolio built around grizzlies, northern lights and remote wilderness.

Luebbe’s mistake was accidentally using too slow a shutter speed for wildlife, which ended up being a visual tool that he likes utilizing. “Every now and then, a little bit of motion blur can tell a good story about an animal that’s moving fast,” he said.

He pointed to an image he took in Katmai National Park as an example of where the approach works: shooting the bears at the top of the falls in low light, he kept his shutter slow rather than pushing his ISO. “I ended up getting some motion on the water, but the bears were standing still. It looks kind of cool, and you can still see what’s going on. It added a little more depth to it.”

Nancy Borowick

Nancy Borowick

Nancy Borowick (@nancyborowick) is a documentary photographer, author and Sony Artisan of Imagery who has worked regularly with The New York Times since 2013 and whose work often centers on health and relationships.

Borowick’s mistake was a missing caption. Early in her career, she was photographing the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, which she describes as “the most fun in the entire world,” she said. When prepping to send images to her editor, she realized one frame’s caption was incomplete. “I had asked the name of the dog, because we were at a dog show, but I never asked the name of the human, and I felt like that was important to have,” she said.

So she went looking online. “All the champion dogs have these Facebook pages, naturally,” she said, and the dog’s page led her to its owner, who, as it happened, was also named Nancy.

Two hours of messaging later, they were friends. That turned into permission to photograph the woman, her wife and their pack of golden retrievers at home, which has now become a long-term project called Part of the Pack, a series dedicated to photographing the relationship between dogs and those who breed, own and show them. “Caption information is so important, especially getting it right,” Borowick said, “but on occasion, mistakes lead to happy accidents and long-term projects.”

Jabin Botsford

Jabin Botsford is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who spent 11 years on staff at The Washington Post covering politics, breaking news and, since 2014, Donald Trump.

Botsford’s mistake was a moment of missed focus. In 2020, he was in the Rose Garden for one of many Trump press conferences, this one running well past its expected length. “While the rest of my colleagues were just filing and hiding in the shade, I went around the side and shot all these photos with a 400mm,” he said. He noticed a fly circling the president and fired off a long burst. In one frame, his autofocus locked onto the fly rather than Trump, right when the insect flew in front of Trump’s open mouth. “It looked kind of like it was coming out of his mouth,” he said.

Dani Hamm

An example of Hamm’s high-key work, not the original frame that she mentioned.

Dani Hamm (@danigoinghamm) is an adventure, wildlife and nature photographer. Her portfolio is filled with stunning portraits of animals, from tiny birds to massive buffalo. 

When I asked about a mistake that turned out for the better, she instantly had an answer: “Overexposing an image and it ending up being a really cool high-key photo.” The blown-out background stripped away context and left just the animal, and she now creates high-key images on purpose.

Allison Anderson

Allison Anderson (@photoallison) is a travel and lifestyle photographer, videographer and Sony Alpha Ambassador who documents her solo trips all over the world.

Anderson’s mistake took a decade to pay off. Very early on in her photography path, she shot everything as JPEGs, mostly because she didn’t like how much space Raw files took up on cards and hard drives. Then she took a trip to Italy. “When I got home, I went to import all my photos, and I realized that somehow the camera had gotten set to shooting in Raw. And I was so annoyed because the file sizes were enormous,” she said.

She dumped them on a hard drive and forgot about them. “Ten years later, I went back, and I went through the hard drive again, and everything I’d shot at that time was mostly in JPEG except for this one trip that was all in Raw.” Because of that, she was able to edit the file, and one of those images is now printed large and hanging over her fireplace.

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We’re celebrating Save Your Photos Month in September with a new type of photo-taking mini-challenge. We’d love for you to participate to show off your photography.

Save Your Photos Month is all about treasuring life’s moments and experiences captured in your photography, whether they are mundane, magical or melancholic. Expect this mini-challenge to support this idea throughout the month as we reveal daily challenge updates.

Here’s how it will work

Every 48-hours this September, we’ll announce a new photo theme. Your challenge: shoot and upload a matching photo to our community album before the period ends. At the end of the month, we’ll feature our favorite photos in a front-page DPReview spotlight.

The photo album we create at the start of the mini-challenge will be the same one you use for submitting each period’s themed photo. As soon as we announce the update for the new period, submissions will no longer be possible. Think of it as an advent calendar of sorts, where we reveal the next period’s theme every 48-hours.

We will reveal the next theme at 8pm PDT / 3 am UTC, 48-hours after the prior one (see schedule below).

Steps to share your photos

• Stand by for the 48-hour’s announcement here on this post (see the schedule below).
• Take a photo that supports the theme. It must be taken during that period.
• Upload that photo to the shared album with at least a one-sentence caption. Feel free to write more if you have a story to tell.
• Feel free to announce your photo upload and discuss the mini-challenge below (but please only share the actual photo in the album).

Notice: If you are a new forum member, you need TWO normal posts before you can upload photos to the album.

That’s it!

To share your photos outside of the forums and on social media, be sure to use the hashtag #SaveYourPhotosMonth. DPReview has an Instagram channel you can mention as well (thank you).

Daily theme reveals

Watch here daily at 7 pm PDT / 3 am UTC to see the next 48-hour’s theme announced.

We’ve already revealed the opening theme, so you can prepare to upload once the album opens on that morning:

• September 1: What’s on your dinner plate
• 3: Something interesting on or around the outside of your home
• 5: When the light hits just right (indoor photo of an amazing lighting and shadow scene)
• To continue…

We’re excited to see your photos, so get ready for Tuesday’s mini-challenge kick-off. Have fun!

Last week, Canon was kind enough to give me the opportunity to attended a Formula Drift event, featuring a high-horsepower competition and a car show with a lot of really interesting vehicles. The shooting experience was highly informative for some upcoming reviews – stay tuned – and I came away with several pictures that I’m really proud of. But I also got something I didn’t expect: a renewed hope for the future of photography.

As a lifelong photographer and someone whose job is writing about cameras, it’s been a bit easy to fret over the future of the artform. Sales of dedicated cameras are recovering, sure, but they’re still far from what they once were. And while phone photography is just as legitimate, the culture at large treats it as cheap and disposable. Even the most meaningful, carefully considered and composed image becomes another piece of content to look at for half a second while scrolling Instagram.

But walking through the car show in the evening, I found myself surrounded by people with cameras, ranging from DSLR kits that could’ve been purchased at Costco to serious pro photography and video rigs. And while the latter were typically used by professionals and content creators (or people hopeful to join those ranks), plenty of others were people who just really liked cars, and who wanted to take cool photos of them to share with their fellow enthusiasts.

I asked one person walking around with a camera what they were taking photos for, and they said it was basically for their personal enjoyment adding with a laugh that they also post to their 200 followers on Instagram. That’s righteous; as someone who’s successfully turned their hobby into a job, I wish I could occasionally just shoot photos for the love of the game like they were.

Mitchell Clark

Even photographing the Formula Drift event itself, the trend held. Several of the people I talked to in the official media pit had started with a love of drift racing, which eventually turned into using photography or video to tell the story of it. Folks there were just as excited about who was winning as they were about the amazing shots they got. That kind of passion is infectious, and they had a lot to teach me. When you start doing photography within a niche, you have a much deeper understanding of what that subculture values, and can push at the edges in a way that a generalist photographer won’t know to.

I suspect there’s actually a pretty strong tie between camera and car culture, and I know that many hobbies have this effect. People will get into something entirely unrelated, want to share it, and discover that the mediums of photo and video are great ways to do it. There’s a storied history of actors, athletes and musicians (yes, including Taylor Swift) picking up photography, and my coworker Abby Ferguson has talked to several photographers with a similar journey in her Behind the Photo series. In it, she showcases people creating amazing work, some of whom started out as VFX artists, cellists or divers. Not everyone who gets into photography tangentially will think of themselves as a photographer, but if they’re out there taking pictures, what else should we call them?

Mitchell Clark

I’ll admit that sometimes it’s easy to get a bit high-and-mighty about photography as an artform, as someone who started doing it for its own sake. This person bought an EOS R5C to take photos? Don’t they know there are so many better options? Those Gen Alpha kids are getting into compacts? Don’t they know about all the downsides, and are they even learning the fundamentals?

Whenever I catch myself thinking things like that, I try to take a step back because that attitude is deeply unhelpful. I should be glad whenever anyone picks up a camera and tries to learn it, and realize that shaming people for not knowing everything – even if they’ve been doing it for decades – is going to hurt the medium, not help it.

So snap on. Whether you’re the most dyed-in-the-wool, capital P Photographer, or whether you just picked up a camera to try and show your friends your latest skateboard trick, finished knitting project, favorite car, or anything else. We’re all doing the same thing here: trying to capture the world as we see it, and share that vision with others.

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We live in the USB era. Almost everything that connects to our computer these days goes through an interface so ubiquitous that the word “universal” appears in its name – the Universal Serial Bus. USB has been a godsend in many ways, replacing all manner of connectors encountered in earlier technologies.

Simple, right? Well, not so much.

The problem with USB-C

Standards are great. Except when they’re not. USB-C, introduced in 2014, is the closest thing we have to “one plug to rule them all.” The problem is that despite supporting a wide range of standards, all USB-C cables look pretty much the same. A cable that supports the latest and greatest technology can look identical to a dumb charging cable. 

And, as if things weren’t complicated enough, ThunderBolt has used the same-shaped connector since ThunderBolt 3, despite being vastly more capable than standard USB.

Which is why I recently found myself staring into the abyss – in this case, a drawer in my office – trying to figure out which of the dozen or so USB-C cables in front of me was the right one to use with an SSD. I doubt I’m alone in this, and I suspect most photographers or content creators have a similar drawer or box full of cables. That’s the exact problem a Mac app called WhatCable is built to solve.

Mitchell Clark

Hoping for the best, I grabbed a cable that looked new, plugged it in, and got on with finding the photos I needed. It seemed to work, so I didn’t stop to check whether I was actually getting the fastest speed the SSD could support. 

Sound familiar?

WhatCable to the rescue

I tried WhatCable on my MacBook Pro and was immediately hooked. While it’s not specifically designed for photographers or content creators, it solves a very real problem for anyone who manages lots of SSDs and card readers: ensuring the cables you use deliver maximum performance. Because if they don’t, you’re going to spend a lot more time waiting around while files transfer.

When you plug a USB device into your Mac, WhatCable will tell you everything you need to know about the cable: the generation of USB the cable supports, the speed the connected device is running at, its power delivery capabilities, and, if available, details like the manufacturer and whether it has an e-marker chip (more on that in a bit).

To my surprise, the cable I’d grabbed for my SSD not only supported its native USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) speed, but was actually a USB4 cable capable of up to 40 Gbps. I’d ordered some of these faster cables, thinking they’d be future-proof for a while, but since there’s no visual way to tell them apart from my older ones, I’d had no idea which was which.

Analyzing the cable connecting my MacBook Pro to my Dell display is even more revealing, and gives a sense of how much detail WhatCable can report, including specifics about the built-in USB hub. You can see the details in the screenshot below.

Elsewhere, the results ran the other way. When I plugged in a Samsung T7 SSD with yet another USB-C cable – short, and similar to the ones that ship in the box with many portable drives – WhatCable informed me that it could only manage USB 2.0 speeds. My guess is that it’s actually a charging cable that came with some other device.

WhatCable also includes widgets for the macOS desktop, letting you see at a glance what speed all your connected devices are running at; clicking one takes you straight to that device’s report in the app. You can also park WhatCable in the menu bar for one-click access to all your USB info.

Suspicious cables

USB cables include an e-marker, a microchip embedded in the connector that acts as a kind of ID card and safety controller. It reports information such as how much power the cable can deliver, its data transfer rates, and its video capabilities, which helps your computer negotiate speed and power at levels that are safe for the connected device.

WhatCable checks whether a cable’s e-marker claims are consistent with USB-IF certification data and flags cables whose reported specs look implausible. The company’s product page describes this trust-checking feature in detail, noting that it can help surface mislabeled or counterfeit cables – a real concern when buying inexpensive cables online.

System requirements and download

WhatCable requires a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later) and running MacOS Sonoma or later. The free version is open source under the MIT license, promises no ads or tracking, and doesn’t report any analytics or telemetry back to the developer. It’s also available in 19 languages, making it broadly accessible. It can be downloaded directly from the developer.

For real nerds, there’s WhatCable Pro, which adds features like the ability to name individual cables and track their performance history, live power metering, display diagnostics, Thunderbolt link analysis, and more. It’s a one-time purchase of £9.99 (about $14) and covers up to two Macs.

So next time you find yourself staring into that abyss, not knowing which cable to grab, you know what to do. One warning: WhatCable is addictive. I found myself testing every USB-C cable in the house, and most of the DPReview staff succumbed to the same temptation after I shared it in our Slack channel. You’ve been warned.

WhatCable Pro — USB-C cable diagnostic app by Bitmoor

• $14 at WhatCable

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