The EF 40mm f/2.8 STM is Canon’s pancake lens — 23mm long, 130 grams, and optically decent enough that photographers have been underestimating it for over a decade. On a mirrorless body via adapter, it pairs with something older than autofocus: zone focusing, the technique of pre-setting focus distance and shooting without confirming focus at all. The method is simple. Set the lens to manual focus via the adapter’s control ring or the camera’s MF button.

There is a gap in your RF lens lineup that many of us feel every time we head out for a shoot. We have stunning short telephoto primes like the RF 135mm f/1.8, and we have superb long telephoto zooms like the RF 70–200mm f/2.8. But what’s missing is a dedicated 200mm prime — a compact, lightweight, and sharp RF 200mm f/2.8 L that delivers the magic of prime rendering without the bulk or cost of the f/2 super-telephoto.

There’s a strange little lie that clings to photography like static: that better photos come only with better money. Magazines repeat it, YouTubers spin it into endless reviews, camera companies sell it with polished language about “innovation” and “pro.” And quietly, almost without noticing, photographers begin to believe it. They wait to start until they’ve saved for the new release. They feel embarrassed about their modest kit. They scroll through spec sheets like lottery tickets, convinced the next model will unlock their vision.

Most people don’t think of a Canon R100 and a cheap Chinese manual 50mm as a setup worth discussing in the same breath as Henri Cartier-Bresson. But standing in front of this tiny camera, the absurdly fast TTArtisan lens flaring a little at the edges like a half-remembered summer glare, you suddenly realise something: Bresson didn’t care about gear the way the internet does. He cared about reaction time, about intent, about walking the streets ready to trip a shutter at the exact moment life blinked.

There’s always this hum in the background of photography, a sort of collective whisper that if you just had slightly better gear, your images would suddenly unlock some new plane of beauty. A faster lens, a cleaner sensor, a body with buttons that feel carved to your thumb’s destiny — as if the only thing standing between you and greatness is one more purchase. The hum is loud because it’s profitable.

The Camera & Imaging Products Association published its full 2025 shipment figures in February 2026, completing the picture of a year defined by two diverging trends: crop-sensor lenses gaining ground in units while full-frame glass quietly contracted, and an industry-wide lens-to-body ratio that hit the lowest point in CIPA’s recorded history. The Crop Lens Revival The most consequential shift in the 2025 data is the performance gap between sensor formats. Lenses for APS-C and smaller sensors rose approximately 9 percent in units and 21 percent in value through the final reporting period, while lenses for full-frame and larger formats declined around 4 to 5 percent in units and 6 to 7 percent in value.

The 2026 NAB Show closed in Las Vegas this week after drawing more than 58,000 registered attendees, with photography and videography gear among the central draws on a show floor that spanned the equivalent of nearly eight soccer fields. Canon, Sony, and Blackmagic Design were among the major imaging brands exhibiting alongside Adobe, Ross, Google Cloud, and AWS — a lineup that reflects how thoroughly software and cloud infrastructure have merged with the physical camera and production hardware space.

The Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM is older than the camera it is mounted on by more than three decades, and the pairing still produces the cleanest subject isolation this system can deliver at the price. Adapted to the R100 through the EF-EOS R adapter, the lens lands on an APS-C sensor with a 1.6x crop factor, which pushes the effective field of view to roughly 136mm. That reframing matters. The optical characteristics remain those of an 85mm — the same depth of field at a given distance, the same rendering of out-of-focus light — but the tighter angle of view forces the photographer further from the subject, and the compressed perspective does the rest of the work.

SIRUI picked up a Best of Show award at NAB 2026 for its Vision Prime T1.4 Full-Frame Cine Lens Series and used the occasion to announce significant expansions to both the Vision Prime and IronStar families, filling out focal length ranges that previously left gaps at the wide and telephoto ends. The Vision Prime series launched with 24mm, 35mm, and 50mm primes. Three new focal lengths now extend the coverage: a 15mm wide-angle, a 75mm medium telephoto, and a 150mm designed for close-up and macro-style work.

SmallRig is using NAB Show 2026 to advance on three fronts: a modular accessory ecosystem for the DJI Osmo Pocket 4, a compact multicolor LED fixture, and a hydraulic monopod built on the TRIBEX platform. The Pocket 4 ecosystem is the most expansive of the three announcements. SmallRig has organized the accessory lineup into four pre-configured rigs addressing distinct use cases — dual-camera narrative work, daily vlogging, outdoor and adventure shooting, and mobile live streaming.