Sigma has announced an ambitious series of super-bright cinema lenses, due later this year, raising at least the possibility of some of the designs making their way across to the photo space.
The Aizu Prime series of cinema lenses all cover a 46.3mm diagonal, making them suitable for use on "large-format" cinema cameras such as the Arri Alexa LF, slightly larger than what photographers would think of as 'full-frame.'
The series will include twelve lenses covering the 18mm to 125mm focal lengths, starting with eight lenses in the 25-75mm range. All the lenses will have T1.3 maximum apertures.
However, while it's plausible that some of these designs could be adapted to sit alongside the company's 35mm F1.2 and 50mm F1.2 Art photographic lenses, sadly, Sigma says all the lenses "feature an optical system developed exclusively for cinema applications." They are also priced at $8300 each.
The eight initial lenses will each be available in either PL or Sony E mounts, with choice of distance scales marked using metric measurements or feet. All eight lenses feature gears focus and iris control, have similar dimensions and share the same 95mm front diameter.
Alongside the Aizu Prime line, Sigma has also announced a 28-45mm T2 cine zoom, based on the optical formula of its 28-45mm F1.8 DG Art lens and a 28-105mm T3 zoom, derived from the 28-105mm F2.8 DG Art. Both lenses retain their autofocus functions, in contrast to the Aizu primes, which are manual focus lenses.
Sigma Corporation Announces Aizu Prime Line, the World’s First Cinema Lens Line to Feature T1.3 Across All Focal Lengths
Brilliant at T1.3: Forging new expressions. Here begins a new benchmark for filmmaking.
Ronkonkoma, New York - SIGMA Corporation of America, the US subsidiary of SIGMA Corporation (CEO: Kazuto Yamaki. Headquarters: Asao-ku, Kawasaki-shi, Kanagawa, Japan) is introducing the Aizu Prime Line―the world's first lineup 1 of large-format cinema lenses to achieve an aperture value of T1.3 across all focal lengths.
The lineup combines modern sharpness with an organic and naturally soft look, bringing rich texture and depth to visuals.
Boasting unparalleled brightness, refined expression, and reliable performance, the Aizu Prime Line embodies the proven technology and quality of “Made in Aizu, Japan” establishing the new standard.
The lineup of 12 lenses features a consistent T1.3 aperture across the full range from 18mm to 125mm. The initial release includes 8 lenses with focal lengths from 25mm to 75mm, covering core cinematic production needs.
1. As of June 2025, by Sigma.
KEY FEATURES
Expressive power for profound beauty
A consistent T1.3 across all focal lengths
The T1.3 aperture enables exceptionally shallow depth of field and graceful bokeh, seamlessly separating the subject while preserving a natural sense of depth and dimensionality. This refined visual language draws the viewer into the frame with a subtle yet powerful presence.
Optical design for the demands of cinema
All lenses in the Aizu Prime lineup feature an optical system developed exclusively for cinema applications. While maintaining modern sharpness, they avoid rigid or harsh depictions—delivering a natural, organic look. They provide quiet elegance and depth to the image, with distortion and focus breathing carefully minimized to ensure visual consistency, even in dynamic scenes.
Huge perspective range coverage
The Aizu Prime Line is designed as a system to cover a wide range of focal lengths from 18mm to 125mm. Initially, 8 core lenses ranging from 25mm to 75mm are being released, followed by 18mm and 21mm wide-angle lenses, and 100mm and 125mm telephoto lenses. This comprehensive system, covering from ultra-wide-angle to telephoto, is adaptable to diverse scenes and compositions.
Completely consistent look
Consistency of color balance, contrast, and flare characteristics ensures seamless integration between scenes, bringing a high level of harmony to the entire visual narrative across the lineup from 18mm to 125mm.
∅46.3mm image circle
The large ∅46.3mm image circle ensures full coverage not only for full-frame and Super 35 formats, but also for the latest large-format cameras such as the ARRI ALEXA LF Open Gate and VistaVision. This capability enables uncompromised filmmaking across a diverse range of projects.
High-impact close-up expression
The short minimum focusing distance enables striking close-up shots. By getting closer to the subject, the Aizu Prime lenses create visual tension and dramatic effects, adding impactful depth to the imagery.
Compact. Precise. Reliable.
A compact design that unleashes creativity
Despite being built for large-format coverage and featuring an ultra-fast T1.3 aperture, the Aizu Prime lenses remain remarkably lightweight. This rare balance of exceptional speed and mobility offers the flexibility and creative freedom demanded by modern productions—from dolly and Steadicam to gimbal and handheld operation.
Precise operation and durability
The Aizu Prime lenses offer precise control, exceptional durability, and ease of maintenance. Despite its compact housing, it delivers unwavering reliability in demanding shooting environments. Every mechanical detail—from the wide focus rotation angle to the equal-pitch aperture ring—embodies the engineering expertise cultivated through the Sigma High Speed Prime series.
Supports ZEISS eXtended Data
The Aizu Prime lenses support ZEISS eXtended Data, offering real-time lens metadata during shooting. It also enables the export of distortion and shading correction data, streamlining workflows for VFX productions.
Photo: Pascal Le Segretain / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images
George E. Smith, one of the co-inventors of the CCD sensor, passed away on May 28th at his home in Waretown, New Jersey. The Washington Post reports that his death was confirmed by his son, Carson Smith, but that no cause was provided.
Dr. Smith was a Bell Labs researcher in 1969 when he and his colleague, Willard S. Boyle, sketched an idea on a blackboard that would eventually become the first digital image sensor. The Charge-Coupled Device, or CCD, was the first digital sensor that provided usefully good results, yet was affordable enough to put in consumer products. The first vision for CCD application was a video phone, dubbed the PicturePhone, but the project was killed as it wasn't seen as commercially viable, and Bell Labs wanted profit in the short term.
After its patent registration in 1974, the CCD sensor formed the basis of early digital cameras and sparked the digital imaging revolution. Smith and Boyle's work was so influential that they won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009. "Digital photography has become an irreplaceable tool in many fields of research," says the 2009 Nobel Prize press release. "The CCD has provided new possibilities to visualize the previously unseen. It has given us crystal clear images of distant places in our universe as well as the depths of the oceans."
While we appreciate the technology for what it did for photography, it impacted virtually every aspect of life
While we appreciate the technology for what it did for photography, it impacted virtually every aspect of life, as the Nobel Committee explained in its physics prize announcement. Smith and Boyle shared the prize with Charles K. Kao, who was recognized for his work with fiber-optic cables. "Taken together, these inventions may have had a greater impact on humanity than any others in the last half-century," said H. Frederick Dylla, director of the American Institute of Physics, to The Washington Post in 2009. It's been a critical tool for astronomy, undersea exploration and image-guided surgeries.
On the camera front, Eastman Kodak used the sensor in a prototype digital camera in 1975, which was as big as a shoebox and used cassette tapes to store about 30 images. Following that prototype, the CCD sensor was widely used in consumer cameras from the mid-90s to the early 2010s.
The CCD sensor works by reading from the edge of the sensor, one pixel at a time, with the charge cascading from one pixel to the next. CCDs require a lot of power for fast readout, though. Unfortunately, consumer batteries at the time lacked that power, so live view in compacts was slow and laggy. Naturally, the development of digital imaging sensors continued, and the CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) sensor, which enabled faster readout, became the dominant choice in digital cameras.
CCDs are no longer used in mainstream digital cameras, but they are still used in scientific and other specialized applications, such as deep space photography. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera, the world's largest camera, uses 189 individual 41 x 40mm 16.4MP CCD sensors. Smith's legacy lives on, continuing to drive innovation and leading to discoveries.
Front runners of the 2025 Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards
The Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards are revealing some of the best entries so far in the 2025 contest. Over a thousand entries have already been received from around the world. The contest was founded in 2015 by professional photographers Paul Joynson-Hicks MBE and Tom Sullam to focus on "the lighter side of wildlife photography" and to help promote conservation with humor.
In line with its mission, the Comedy Wildlife Awards support a conservation organization each year. This year's partner is the Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN), a UK charity that supports conservation leaders working in their home countries throughout the Global South. The charity has been funding conservation for over 30 years, helping more than 220 conservationists in 80 countries.
The popular competition is still open for submissions through June 30, so there's still time to submit if you have your own funny wildlife captures. There are nine different categories, including Alex Walker’s Serian Mammals Category, Spectrum Photo Birds Category, Fish and Other Aquatic Species, Nikon Young Photographer, Nikon Junior Category and more. It's free to enter, and winners will earn prizes like a safari in the Maasai Mara in Kenya for the top prize, a Nikon Z50II with 16-50mm VR kit for the Junior Category winner and a Nikon Z6II with 24-120mm kit for the Young Photographer Category winner. All category winners will receive a ThinkTank bag. You can learn more and submit your images at the contest website.
Go away
Photographer: Annette Kirby
Title: Go away
Animal: White Tailed Sea Eagle
Location of image: Hokkaido, Japan
Description: This was taken in Japan where I was observing a White-Tailed Sea Eagle putting their fish in a hole and protecting it. This one had a fish and saw another Eagle coming in to try and steal it.
Go give it a try!
Photographer: Bhargava Srivari
Title: Go give it a try!
Animal: Lion
Location of image: Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya
Description: The image shows Lion siblings at play, where one of the siblings seems to pushing the other one to do stuff that annoys their mom. Lions aren't natural climbers, so it looks like one sibling is encouraging the other to do something naughty!
I hate Ikea
Photographer: Brian Hempstead
Title: I hate Ikea
Animal: Common Myna Nest Build
Location of image: Kruger NP South Africa
Description: Photo taken at Kruger NP South Africa outside Skukuza Camp on Lower Sabie Rd at Sunset Dam in October and November during a self driving birding trip around National Parks of South Africa
Laugh like no-one is watching
Photographer: Emma Parker
Title: Laugh like no-one is watching
Animal: Blue Spotted Mudskipper
Location of image: Western Australia
Description: Two joyful mudskippers look they are having the best time in the mud - I just wish I knew what the joke was! Mud is fun
Happy deer
Photographer: Jeremy Duvekot
Title: Happy deer
Animal: Roedeer
Location of image: The Netherlands
Description: This roedeer was yofull running around and suddenly coming my way. Had only 1 chance and nailed it.
Aaaaaww Mum!
Photographer: Mark Meth-Cohn
Title: Aaaaaww Mum!
Animal: Gorilla
Location of image: Rwanda
Description: Caring Gorilla mum giving her infant a big sloppy kiss!
Queueing for the polar plunge
Photographer: Martin Schmid
Title: Queueing for the polar plunge
Animal: Gentoo Penguins
Location of image: Neumayer Channel, Antarctica
Description: A really spontaneous shot from an expedition ship in Antarctica. Those gentoo penguins seemed to orderly wait in queue to finally jump into the sea. Taken in January 2025.
Commandeer
Photographer: Rachelle Mackintosh
Title: Commandeer
Animal: Galapagos marine iguana and lava lizard
Location of image: Fernandina Island, Galapagos Islands, Ecuador
Description: A lava lizard takes charge of a Galapagos marine iguana and sets off on a ride. Judging by the iguana's possessed eyes, lava lizard may have taken over its soul, too. These two silly billies were hanging out with a big bunch of marine iguanas on a rocky beach. Photographed handheld on Fernandina Island in the Galapagos Islands in Oct 2023.
Waving Dragon
Photographer: Trevor Rix
Title: Waving Dragon
Animal: Gippsland Waterdragon
Location of image: Murrumbidgee River near Canberra, ACT, Australia
Description: Wandering along the Murrumbidgee River we spotted a few lizards sc urrying under the rocks looking for lunch, next thing this junior Gippsland Waterdragon popped up and gave us a friendly wave.
The wig
Photographer: Yann Chauvette
Title: The wig
Animal: Greater One-Horned Rhino
Location of image: Chitwan National Park, Nepal
Description: A Greater One-Horned Rhino feasting on aquatic fine dining, diving underwater and getting back up with a new wig made out of his delicious meal.
Although Lenovo is a well-known brand, it is not typically associated with cameras. While that likely won't be changing any time soon, the company has announced a compact camera, as Yanko Design reports. The Lenovo C55 promises vlogging-focused features at a very low price, though we've not been able to confirm all the specs.
The Lenovo C55 looks like a classic compact with a glossy, white plastic shell. It's small, measuring 112 x 71.5 x 34.5mm (4.4 x 2.8 x 1.3") and weighing only 190g (6.7oz), making it a pocketable device. There are suggestions it's built around a very small Type 1/3 (∼4.9 x 3.7mm) smartphone sensor, around half the size of those historically used in most point-and-shoots.
It features a 2.8" LCD screen on the back and, like many point-and-shoots, lacks a viewfinder. A mode dial on top allows for easy switching between various modes, including photo mode, continuous shooting, loop recording, time-lapse, slow-motion, video and more.
Image: Lenovo
The C55 can record 4K video and offers electronic image stabilization. One of the most helpful features is a built-in ring light, so you don't have to fuss with separate lights when recording vlogs.
Beyond that, though, the information is a little muddy. The press images from Lenovo mention 18x digital zoom, but the lens's focal length isn't specified, so it isn't clear what that 18x zoom will get you and whether it's including any cropping to get to that number. There's also supposedly a front and rear camera, though there aren't any specific details on those, and the images of the camera don't appear to have a camera on the back. There does appear to be a mirror on the front to aid with self-recorded videos and photos.
Image: Lenovo
Things get especially confusing regarding the sensor. Multiple websites report, including Notebook Check, that the camera is built around a 64MP Sony CMOS Type 1/3 image sensor. Sony's semiconductor division doesn't list a sensor with those specs on its site, but its site typically only lists a small number of the sensors offered to the industry. The Lenovo press images also don't mention a specific megapixel count or sensor size; they only include a Sony-branded sensor graphic with text that, when translated, says "professional sensor."
It's also unclear whether this is truly a Lenovo-made device or simply one that bears the Lenovo badge through licensing. The camera is only available in China. It comes in two variants: a 64GB version and a 128GB version, which cost CNY 499 ($69) and CNY 559 ($78), respectively. Many similarly priced cameras from unfamiliar brands are available on Amazon, but it is interesting to see Lenovo building out (or licensing) its name in the camera realm.
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Fujifilm's X100VI seems destined to perpetually dangle just out of reach.
Photo: Richard Butler
Fujifilm's X100VI remains hard to get hold of, over a year after its launch. Demand significantly outstripped supply and the company has been struggling to catch up, despite talk of trying to increase production capacity.
So, if you're fed up of waiting for an X100VI to become available, and don't want to line the pockets of scalpers on eBay, what are your options?
Why do you want an X100?
The word unique has been devalued by misuse, but I'd argue the X100 series offers a genuinely unique combination of style and capability. Some users won't care that it's a beautiful-looking camera, others won't care about working to squeeze out every last drop of potential image quality, but the X100 series appeals to both groups and many people in between.
So, before you can pick an alternative, it's worth being honest with yourself about what aspects of it appeal to you. If it's purely the desire for a small camera with good image quality, then there might be other options. If it's the classic aesthetics, you'll find the task harder. And if it's a bit of both, you might be better off waiting until they become available.
Which compact cameras can I get, instead of an X100VI?
The Ricoh GR IIIx can be a substitute for some of the things the X100VI does, in an even more convenient package, but they're hard to get hold of, too.
Photo: Carey Rose
2025 seems to be the year of cameras being unavailable, even prior to talk of tariffs and trade wars. Models such as the Ricoh GR IIIx or Canon G7 X III, that can, in their own ways, offer some of the X100VI's 'high image quality in a small body' appeal, have also become hard to source. In both cases, their manufacturers insist they're still in production, and yet...
What are the mirrorless alternatives to the X100VI?
Compounding matters, the small, rangefinder-style mirrorless cameras we used to suggest as ersatz X100 stand-ins seem to have fallen out of fashion. Canon has abandoned its EOS M system, so the EF-M 22mm F2 lens doesn't have a contemporary body to mount on. All of Panasonic's GX models are looking distinctly dated and, while OM System still makes a PEN camera, the E-P7 is only sold in certain markets.
An OM-5 with a 17mm F1.8 gets you some of the retro charm (albeit a call-back to a very different style of camera). You pay an image quality cost for the move to a smaller sensor, with very good image stabilization potentially making up for some of that if your subject allows the use of longer shutter speeds.
Even with a small lens, the Sony a7C II leaves you quite a long way from the X100VI's size, price or experience.
Photo: Richard Butler
You can recreate much of the X100's technical capability with a Sony a6700, but there aren't any particularly compact circa 35mm equiv lenses to pair with it. A Sony a7C II with a 35mm F2.8 is another option but you're drifiting further and further away from the idea of a good-looking, enjoyable or compact camera at that point, and your expenditure risks spiralling.
Should I get an older X100 model instead?
Going back one generation to the X100V (left) sees you lose the X100VI's image stabilization and 40MP sensor, but go back further and you lose the newer design, movable screen and a further generation of responsiveness, so we wouldn't advise venturing beyond the X100F (right).
Photo: Dan Bracaglia
The continued shortage of X100VIs makes the previous models tempting, instead. The series has developed iteratively over fifteen years and six models, with appreciable improvements each time. The X100V is still a very nice camera, even if it misses out on the VI's higher resolution sensor and image stabilization. The problem is that their popularity also surged towards the end of their product life, so their second-hand prices can be as off-putting as those of the VI.
The X100F was the fourth-generation X100 and taking this further step back in time sees you move to an earlier lens design, less streamlined body and fixed rear screen, along with the performance drop you'd reasonably expect of an eight-year-old camera. It could still be a reasonable option, but it's only worth taking if you can get it at a significant discount compared with the X100VI's list price, which is an unlikely prospect at present. We wouldn't recommend going back any further in the series than that.
Sadly – and even more so than when we tried to address this question with the X100V – there really isn't a great alternative to the Fujifilm X100VI. It's an excellent camera and one for which there are precious few plausible substitutes, and those that there are are also in short supply.
We'd generally suggest putting in your order with a trusted retailer and waiting for Fujifilm to address the backlog
If you can find a Ricoh GR IIIx, it's definitely worth a look, but beyond that we'd generally suggest putting in your order with a trusted retailer and waiting for Fujifilm to address the backlog. Unless there's some important and unrepeatable event (a significant vacation or family event, for instance) imminent, we'd advise against paying the ludicrous markups some resellers are charging.
Partly because, while we gave it a Gold award as a camera costing $1599, its lustre dims if you have to pay hundreds of dollars over that price. But mainly because we wouldn't recommend that anyone help to line the pockets of people who only bought them solely to profiteer. Because they're part of the reason you can't get an X100VI.
Jupiter’s ice-covered ocean moon Europa floats above the planet’s Great Red Spot in this 1979 image from Voyager 1. This is a mosaic of several images in orange and violet filters. The scene is about 22,000 miles across.
I’m both an amateur and professional photographer. As an amateur, my photography is a source of great enjoyment, but nothing special. But my professional photographic work is more interesting. As a member of several large teams of planetary scientists and engineers, I get to photograph other worlds, from up close.
The cameras we use cost millions of dollars and are attached to some of NASA’s robotic interplanetary spacecraft, which take them to amazing places. But photography is photography, and the fundamentals of how we capture the interaction between light and matter to generate images are the same. I’m surprised how often the two kinds of photography overlap.
"But photography is photography."
We explore the worlds of our solar system using spacecraft bristling with many tools – magnetometers, mass spectrometers, radar, and so on. But cameras provide the most accessible information on the worlds we explore and are incredibly versatile in the range of phenomena they can capture. It’s rare for a spacecraft to head out to the planets without cameras of some kind.
Planetary Photoshoots
Our first visit to a new world is usually a flyby, using a spacecraft that doesn’t even slow down as it passes its target but grabs what images and other data it can in the precious few minutes or hours when it’s close by.
Every detail is planned months or years beforehand and rigorously tested before being uplinked to the spacecraft for execution. The flybys themselves are then a matter of watching and waiting, hoping everything goes smoothly, and excitedly pouncing on the new data when it hits the ground.
Some of the science team for the Lucy asteroid mission, at the moment we got our first look at images from the Lucy cameras that showed a moon, unknown until then, orbiting the asteroid Dinkinesh. The gobsmacked author is seated, center, in the blue t-shirt.
Image: Stuart J. Robbins.
That first picture of Dinkinesh and its moon Selam (left), from Lucy’s low-resolution tracking camera, is responsible for the reaction above. Much better pictures (right), from our long-lens LORRI camera were downlinked a couple of hours later. Dinkinesh is about 0.4 miles across.
Later, if we can, we return with spacecraft that carry the big rocket engines and fuel needed to get into orbit for an extended stay, often spending years in detailed exploration or even landing and roving for a much closer look.
Cameras
NASA was, by necessity, an early adopter of digital camera technology. The first close-up pictures of Mars, taken by Mariner 4 in 1965, were obtained with an analog vidicon camera, but were digitized (200 x 200 pixels, 6-bit) for transmission back to Earth at a blistering 8 bits per second.
This technology (upgraded to 800 x 800 pixels and 8 bits) was used until the late 1970s, and the Voyager mission’s astonishing images of the outer gas giant planets and their moons, and that final, famous, “pale blue dot” look-back image of the Earth, were all digitized vidicon images.
The first interplanetary photograph, of the Martian horizon, was taken on July 14th, 1965. The actual image is on the right. The scene is about 300 miles across. On the left is the first rendering of the image, made by an impatient engineer by hand-coloring pasted strips of printouts of the data numbers.
But starting in the 1980s, long before they were adapted to consumer cameras, solid-state CCD detectors became the norm, bringing greatly increased sensitivity and image quality. Camera designs tend to be conservative, though, because reliability is an overriding concern when the nearest repair facility is a billion miles away, and the tried and true often beats the innovative.
CMOS detectors, originally developed for NASA use, are now becoming common, but we chose a 1 Megapixel CCD detector for the LORRI telephoto camera included on our asteroid mission, Lucy, which launched in 2021. The format may be small and the technology old-fashioned, but we’d flown the LORRI camera before, on the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and we knew that it would work.
Pluto, photographed in approximate natural color (left) and enhanced color that includes near-infrared data (right) by the New Horizons spacecraft on July 14th, 2015 (coincidentally, 50 years to the day after that first Mars image). Pluto’s diameter is 1,470 miles.
New Horizons MVIC, 0.60 sec, f8.7 Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Alex Parker
For larger format images, we often use long, skinny, “pushbroom” arrays. A scan mirror, or the entire spacecraft, moves to sweep the array across the target while the array is read out in lockstep with the scene motion. Pushbroom has the advantage over large framing arrays in that the detector is much more compact, and it’s also easy to incorporate color by using a series of parallel arrays, each with its own color filter, which scan over the target in turn.
Because maximizing detail is paramount, focal lengths tend to be long, and most planetary cameras are really telescopes. MVIC is the “wide angle” camera on New Horizons, but has a field of view of just 5.7 degrees (350 mm equivalent focal length), while its narrow-angle traveling companion, LORRI, has a 0.29-degree field (7000 mm equiv. focal length). Focal lengths are limited both by camera weight and by how steadily the spacecraft can track the target for the necessary exposure times.
Color
The simplest planetary cameras, like the New Horizons and Lucy LORRI cameras, are monochrome. For color, scanning with a set of linear pushbroom arrays, each with a different-colored overlying filter, is often used, as mentioned above. Other cameras obtain color images with Bayer-type filter arrays or filter wheels that step through the wavelengths in turn, as in the Voyager image of Jupiter and Europa above.
"When the nearest repair facility is a billion miles away, the tried and true often beats the innovative."
Matching human color vision is usually less of a priority than choosing the most scientifically diagnostic wavelengths; the New Horizons MVIC camera carries blue and red filters, but not green, and has two near-infrared filters, one tuned to a wavelength (0.89 microns) that is strongly absorbed by the frozen methane that’s abundant on Pluto’s surface.
Reconstructing “natural color” images from the resulting data can thus be tricky and somewhat subjective. But the aim is generally to show real variations in the color of the scene, whether or not they correspond precisely to what the eye would see, as well as to produce something aesthetically pleasing. Including wavelengths beyond human vision increases color contrasts and reveals patterns that the eye would miss, as with the Pluto example above.
Sometimes, color saturation is cranked up to bring out subtle features. We try to label released images to make these distinctions clear, though the provisos often get lost when the images are reproduced.
Color image releases of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, 2250 miles in diameter, from Voyager in 1979 (left), Galileo in 1997 (middle) and Juno in 2023 (right), illustrate the vagaries of representing planetary colors. Colors vary due to the different sets of color filters used and the preferences of the image processors. Voyager, in particular, missed the red color of the huge oval ring of volcanic fallout surrounding the Pele volcano (lower-right center, left image and lower-left, center image), because Voyager’s vidicon detector was blind to red light. Spot-the-difference fans can enjoy finding the changes wrought by volcanic activity between the Voyager image and the Galileo image, which cover much of the same terrain.
Left: Voyager ISS NAC, 0.49 sec (orange), 0.36 sec (blue and violet), f8.5 (NASA/JPL)
Right: Juno Junocam, red, green, blue filters, f3.2 (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt)
Lighting
All interplanetary photography is outdoor photography, and the sun is our primary light source. We have one variable that earth-bound photographers don’t need to worry about, which is the varying brightness of the sun depending on our distance from it.
"All interplanetary photography is outdoor photography."
Pluto, which the New Horizons spacecraft flew past in 2015, was then 33 times further from the Sun than the Earth is, and sunlight was 1000 times weaker, something like the illumination in a cozy terrestrial restaurant. This effect is predictable, and our camera focal ratios and exposure times are designed to handle it.
New Horizons’ MVIC camera had no trouble obtaining those color images of Pluto in that dim light. But in 2007, when New Horizons flew past Jupiter en route to Pluto, and we were six times closer to the sun, and the sun was forty times brighter, MVIC was hopelessly overexposed, and we didn’t get any decent color pictures of Jupiter.
Part of the bizarre surface of Europa, seen by the Galileo Jupiter orbiter, under high sun (left) and looking very different in a closer image mosaic of the region in the yellow square, taken with oblique illumination (right). The yellow square is about 220 miles across. The left-hand image shows compression artifacts, a consequence of Galileo’s broken main antenna, which required severely compressing images for downlink at very low rates through its backup antenna.
With the sun as our primary light source, we don’t have the luxury of repositioning it to our liking. But like any landscape photographer, we can control the lighting by choosing the timing and viewpoint for our images.
As on Earth, long shadows provide the most dramatic landscapes, highlighting subtleties in topography that would be washed out with the sun overhead. So low sun is best for understanding the lie of the land, while high sun is best for capturing brightness and color variations that give clues to what the surface is made of.
The night side of Saturn’s distant moon Iapetus (912-mile diameter) photographed in Saturn-light. The spacecraft rotated to track Iapetus during the exposure, streaking out the images of background stars.
Cassini ISS NAC, 82 sec, f10.5 Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Space being black, our sources of indirect light are limited, and space lighting tends to be direct and harsh. But sometimes, we can use indirect lighting to see where direct sunlight can’t reach.
Sunlit topography can reflect light into nearby shadowed regions; a NASA camera called ShadowCam on the Korean KPLO lunar orbiter exploits this indirect light to look for signs of ice in frigid lunar polar crater bottoms that never see direct sunlight.
Other nearby worlds can also provide indirect illumination, just as Earthshine illuminates the dark side of the crescent moon. Our best images of some parts of Saturn’s moon Iapetus were obtained, with very long exposures, using Saturn-shine. Saturn’s enormous rings provide dramatic indirect lighting on Saturn’s night side, which I’ve always found particularly beautiful, providing a soft light rarely seen in space scenes.
Ring-shine illuminates the night side of Saturn, as seen from Voyager 1 in 1980. Saturn’s shadow cuts across the rings on the left. The scene is about 50,000 miles across.
Saturn-shine illuminates the night side of Saturn’s active moon Enceladus. Jets and curtains of ice particles, erupted from geyser-like fissures in Enceladus’ south pole, rise up out of Enceladus’ shadow to catch the direct sunlight. The scene is about 250 miles across.
We’re rarely doing this for art’s sake; our goals are utilitarian, pursuing the best possible combination of detail and coverage to understand our targets. Considering where we are and what we’re looking at, though, the results are often stunning. And we still make aesthetic choices when choosing which images, or parts of images, to highlight for early public release.
Creative cropping. A parting shot of Pluto from New Horizons (left), and the most spectacular part of the image (right), which we chose for early public release. We would have loved to take this picture in color, but couldn’t spare the time to store the additional color data. Pluto’s diameter is 1470 miles, and the enlargement on the right is 230 miles across.
New Horizons MVIC, 0.40 sec, f8.7 Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Cassini ISS NAC, 1/12th sec, f10.5 Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Occasionally, when the timeline is relaxed and we have resources to spare, we have the luxury of planning photos primarily for their aesthetic appeal. The Cassini Saturn orbiter took many images during its 13 years in Saturn orbit that were designed primarily to capture dramatic alignments of Saturn, its moons, or rings.
When New Horizons flew past Jupiter in 2007, we enlisted the help of amateur space enthusiasts to help us compose some of these scenic shots, including this alignment of the ice-covered ocean moon Europa with Io, its volcanic sibling.
Jovian moons Europa (left) and Io (right), imaged by New Horizons shortly after flying by Jupiter on the way to Pluto. The night side of Io is illuminated by Jupiter. Three volcanic eruptions, one with the red glow of incandescent lava at its center, can be seen on Io. This image is a composite of a high-resolution monochrome image from the LORRI camera with color from the lower-resolution MVIC camera. The diameters of Europa and Io are 1940 and 2260 miles, respectively.
New Horizons LORRI, 1/12th sec, f12.6; New Horizons MVIC, 0.6 sec, f8.7 Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Exposure
Like all photographers, we think a lot about exposures. Aperture is fixed by the camera system – all our subjects are at infinity, and we always shoot wide-open. For exposure times, the usual trades apply; we don’t want to blow our highlights, but we want to minimize noise and retain shadow detail.
We also want to minimize motion blur and camera shake, so the motion in the scene, and the steadiness of our platform, are important. The Cassini spacecraft that took the above long-exposure Iapetus image was spectacularly steady, other craft are less so.
"Like all photographers, we think a lot about exposures... we don’t want to blow our highlights, but we want to minimize noise and retain shadow detail."
But we have some unique challenges. First, we can’t make adjustments on the fly – shutter lag is a big deal when your camera is up to several light-hours away, and with flyby missions, our subjects would be long gone before we could tweak our exposures. And we rarely use auto exposure, mostly because of its unpredictability.
Second, we often don’t know how bright our targets are going to be if we’ve never seen them up close before. So we often fall back on the old photographer’s standby of exposure bracketing, or we increase dynamic range by taking a bunch of short exposures and stacking them later.
Exposure challenges. Left: The Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth, severely underexposed to limit smear, given the feeble sunlight at 42x the Earth’s distance from the sun. Noise was reduced in the final product (below) by combining nine of these individual images. Arrokoth is 22 miles long.
New Horizons LORRI, 1/40th sec. f12.6 Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Right: The asteroid Dinkinesh, with blown highlights in the center of the image. Exposure choice here was a deliberate gamble, as we had to choose a single exposure for a long sequence of images with varying lighting. We chose to risk overexposure when the sun was behind us, as in this image, in order to optimize exposures in the rest of the images (including the image of Dinkinesh and Selam above), where Dinkinesh was fainter. Arrokoth and Dinkinesh are made of stuff with similar intrinsic brightness, but Dinkinesh is 20x closer to the sun, and sunlight is 400x brighter. Dinkinesh is about 0.4 miles across.
Lucy LORRI, 1/500th sec. f12.6 Image: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL
The final processed closest Arrokoth image (left and right), flanking an earlier image (center) taken in a similar way from a different angle, from greater distance. The images are arranged so Arrokoth can be viewed in stereo, either via parallel viewing (left and center) or cross-eyed viewing (center and right).
Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Summary
The adventure of planetary exploration continues. I’ve focused on U.S. missions here, which currently face serious budget threats. But this is now an international effort, with players including Europe, Japan, China, India, and several smaller nations. In addition to a fleet of spacecraft currently exploring Mars, spacecraft are currently on their way to Mercury, several asteroids, and Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede, with launches planned soon to the Martian moons, and Saturn’s moon Titan. All of them carry cameras, and hold the promise of amazing photographic opportunities to come.
Additional notes:
Spaceflight is plagued with acronyms, and I haven’t attempted to spell them out here. For explanations and much more detail, follow the included links for the various cameras. The raw image data are generally available for download from the NASA Planetary Data System- see, for example this excellent search tool for outer planet images. Extensive processing of the raw data, often done by enthusiastic amateurs, is used to create many of the images here, but they remain true to the original data. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me in the comments.
John Spencer is a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. A member of the science teams for NASA missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, and the Trojan asteroids, he has led the science planning for several planetary flybys. His earthbound photography includes documenting the excitement of planetary encounters, including the New Horizons encounter with Pluto.
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The default lens mount option is ARRI PL mount with optional interchangeable mounts available for Sony E, Canon EF, Canon RF, Nikon Z, and Leica L-mount.
For people in many western states, summer is synonymous with rodeo. Above, a rider sits on her horse after failing to rope a calf at the Flathead River Rodeo in Polson, Montana, part of the Indian National Finals rodeo circuit.
Photo: Dale Baskin
The theme for our June Editors' photo challenge is 'Chasing Summer'.
With summer just around the corner, we want to see photos that evoke the spirit of summer fun and adventure. Whether it's jumping into cold water on a hot day, melting ice cream, or epic road trips, we want to see what 'Chasing Summer' looks like through your lens. Our favorites will be featured on the DPReview homepage later this month.
This challenge is open to photos taken at any time.
Photos can be submitted between Sunday, June 8, and Saturday, June 14 (GMT).
Important: Images MUST include a title and a caption of at least 25 words to be eligible. We need to be able to share the story behind your photo. We will consider both photos and captions when selecting our winners, so make sure to tell us that story!
Visit the challenge page to read the full rules and to submit your photos for consideration as soon as the challenge opens.
E8M8888 reports that Fujifilm could announce two new cameras at the upcoming X Summit in Shanghai:
"I was a little surprised to receive the news that Fujifilm is going to release two new products. Fujifilm has registered FF250001 and FF250003 on the Bluetooth official website in the past two days. It should be noted that the Bluetooth Association only registers information about products that are about to be released (within 3 weeks) or after they are released."
One of the rumored models is the previously reported Fujifilm X-E5.
Here is the full list of unreleased Fuji camera models:
For people in many western states, summer is synonymous with rodeo. Above, a rider sits on her horse after failing to rope a calf at the Flathead River Rodeo in Polson, Montana, part of the Indian National Finals rodeo circuit.
Photo: Dale Baskin
The theme for our June Editors' photo challenge is 'Chasing Summer'.
With summer just around the corner, we want to see photos that evoke the spirit of summer fun and adventure. Whether it's jumping into cold water on a hot day, melting ice cream, or epic road trips, we want to see what 'Chasing Summer' looks like through your lens. Our favorites will be featured on the DPReview homepage later this month.
This challenge is open to photos taken at any time.
Photos can be submitted between Sunday, June 8, and Saturday, June 14 (GMT).
Important: Images MUST include a title and a caption of at least 25 words to be eligible. We need to be able to share the story behind your photo. We will consider both photos and captions when selecting our winners, so make sure to tell us that story!
Visit the challenge page to read the full rules and to submit your photos for consideration as soon as the challenge opens.
The details of the previously reported Hasselblad X2D II medium format camera leaked online from the recent FCC filing - the confidentiality request was for 180 days starting from 12/02/2024. I posted the first leaked pictures in March of this year. Here is a quick recap on what to expect:
The HASSELBLADTM HB722 is Hasselblad’s next generation mirrorless medium format digital camera with a large 100-megapixel CMOS sensor that boasts 16-bit colour depth and a dynamic range of 15 stops. The camera features a 5-axis 8-stop in-body image stabilization (IBIS) and face detection. Hasselblad Natural Colour Solution (HNCS) technology is integrated into the camera’s system, delivering superb, true-to-life tones that match what the human eye sees. The HB722 offers more storage with a built-in 1TB SSD and users can expand the capacity further with a CFexpress Card Type B. With access to a vast range of high-quality lenses including XCD, HC, HCD, XPan, and V System, the creative possibilities with the HB722 are endless.
Connexion
