Jeff Carlson
Co-Host of PhotoActive
Author and photographer Jeff Carlson is a senior writer at CNET, has written for publications such as DPReview, CreativePro, and Macworld, and is a contributing editor at TidBITS. He is the author of numerous books, including Adobe Lightroom: a Course and Compendium, Take Control of iPhone Photography, Take Control of Your Digital Storage, and Take Control of Apple Watch, among many other titles. He writes The Smarter Image newsletter that covers how AI/ML technologies are fundamentally changing photography. He also co-hosts the podcast PhotoActive, and leads photography workshops in the Pacific Northwest. He believes there's never enough coffee, and does his best to test that theory.
Jeff Carlson has hosted seven Episodes.
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Episode 206: You Can’t Trust Photos Anymore
March 30th, 2026 | 32 mins 44 secs
apple, cameras, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast
So it’s come to this. Generative AI has quickly gotten so good that it’s hard to distinguish real photos from generated ones. So where do we go from here? We talk about C2PA authentication, trusting your sources, and more.
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Episode 205: Spec Goblins and the MacBook Neo
March 14th, 2026 | 28 mins 30 secs
apple, cameras, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, macbook neo, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast
Apple has announced the MacBook Neo, a $600 laptop running on the same A18 Pro processor that was used in the iPhone 16 Pro. Oh, and it has 8GB of RAM and starts at 256GB of storage. Believe it or not, lots of people on the Internet take issue with those specs, so we look at it from the point of view of whether it could be a good machine for photographers who blew all their money on a $10,000 Leica f/1.2 lens.
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Episode 204: Storage Prices
March 1st, 2026 | 28 mins 58 secs
apple, cameras, hard disk, inflation, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast, ssd, storage
The prices of digital storage are set to climb this year because AI is eating up all the available inventory. And modern photography is entirely dependent on storage, whether it's the SD cards that store the captured images, the internal solid-state memory that stores data on your computer, or the external SSDs and traditional hard drives that keep your archive of photos.
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Episode 203: Do You Have $10,000 to Spare?
February 14th, 2026 | 31 mins 53 secs
apple, cameras, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, leica, lenses, lightroom, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast
The best-selling compact camera in Japan is from... Kodak? We’ve talked about compact cameras in the past, but it remains a fascinating part of the photo marketplace as people look for something different than mirrorless and DSLR cameras. By the way, do you have $10,000 to spare on a new 35mm lens? Leica’s Noctilux-M 35mm f/1.2 ASPH was just announced at that eye-watering price. Lastly, Jeff covers some new Lightroom features in the latest versions.
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Episode 202: Pixelmator Pro Returns
February 3rd, 2026 | 30 mins 17 secs
apple, apple creator studio, cameras, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, photo editing, photo organization, photography, pixelmator pro, podcast, ricoh gr iv monochrome, sally mann
Now we know what Apple is doing with Pixelmator Pro after its acquisition of Pixelmator: it’s part of the new Apple Creator Studio bundle. Also, we celebrate the latest black and white camera to hit the market, the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome, and ponder large-format photographer Sally Mann’s discovery of digital photography.
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Episode 201: What’s Real
January 2nd, 2026 | 33 mins 22 secs
apple, cameras, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast
Is your phone not accurately capturing the world around you? An article in the Guardian questions whether image processing in smartphones is making photos that aren’t genuine. Also, Leica released a firmware update that radically changes the entire interface, leading to a discussion of how important the UI in our cameras is when making photos.
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Episode 200: All Our Cameras
December 23rd, 2025 | 39 mins 39 secs
apple, cameras, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, martin parr, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast
Two Hundred episodes! To celebrate roughly seven and a half years of the PhotoActive podcast, Kirk and Jeff picked some favorite photos from the digital cameras they’ve owned.