photography

Your iPhone takes technically better photos than the X100VI in a parking garage at midnight. That’s not the point.

The X100VI is a fixed-lens, 40MP compact with a leaf shutter, a built-in ND filter, and film simulations that have nothing to do with Instagram presets and everything to do with how Fujifilm thinks about color. It does one thing: it makes you think before you shoot.

That matters. The phone killed the bad photo — you get sharp, well-exposed frames in conditions that would have destroyed film. But it also killed the intention behind the photo. You shoot everything because shooting costs nothing. You end up with 80,000 images and no photographs.

The X100VI slows that down. Fixed focal length means you move your feet. The EVF means you put the camera to your eye instead of holding it at arm’s length. The aperture ring and shutter dial mean you made a decision before the shutter fired. You come home with thirty frames instead of three hundred, and most of the thirty are worth keeping.

It’s also small enough to actually have with you — jacket pocket, travel bag, no lens swap, no bag of gear. That’s the real argument for a compact: the best camera is the one that shows up.

If you’re considering one, I have mine linked on the gear page.

GoPro’s problem is not that the cameras stopped being good. The problem is that good cameras became a terrible moat.

Mitchell Clark, writing for DPReview, on GoPro’s latest filing:

In it, the company says that new market forces “raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” citing “unprecedented increases and volatility in memory costs” that have seen price increases of up to 115%.

That is a brutal sentence for the company that basically defined the action camera. It also reads like the bill finally arriving for a decade of hardware reality.

GoPro built the category, then watched the category flatten. Phones got good enough for casual adventure. DJI got serious. Insta360 made the weird stuff fun. Meanwhile, GoPro kept needing people to buy another little black rectangle because this year’s little black rectangle was incrementally better than last year’s.

The filing points at memory costs, debt pressure, lower sales, and a 23% layoff. All true. But the sharper diagnosis is simpler: GoPro is a brand with cultural memory and commodity economics. That is a bad combination. People remember the helmet-cam era. Suppliers still want cash.

The most telling escape hatch is defense and aerospace. When consumer hardware runs out of margin, it goes looking for buyers who can tolerate ugly prices and procurement paperwork. The adventure camera becomes infrastructure. The vibes were never going to service the debt.

Jeremy Gray, for PetaPixel: VSCO is running a campaign built around a letter from CEO Eric Wittman that pushes back against the idea that generated images make the photographer obsolete.

“Your eye, the way you see the world, can’t be generated. It can’t be prompted. It’s irreplaceable.”

The letter names the pressures: platforms that bury original work in reels, brands that would rather skip the shoot and generate the image instead, and the steady drumbeat telling working photographers to give up. VSCO’s answer is blunt: real work made by real people has never mattered more.

They’ve also shipped AI features in their own product. The distinction they’re drawing is that the tools can handle the drudgery; the eye that decides what matters in the frame cannot be faked later.

The campaign pairs photographers working in both digital and film, documenting each other. It’s not a rejection of technology. It’s a reminder that the part worth paying for — or looking at twice — is the one decision no prompt can outsource.

No one but you is behind the lens.