PhotoActive

Episode 191: Macro Photography

August 1st, 2025  |  30 mins 21 secs

apple, cameras, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, macro photography, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast

Don’t know what to photograph? No vacation plans? With macro photography, you can get great results literally in your back yard. What was once a style of photography that required specialized gear is now something you can do well with just your phone — though of course there’s plenty of gear available if you want to go deeper into it.

Episode 190: Fuji X-Half, AI Scaling, and Lightroom Changes

July 21st, 2025  |  31 mins 47 secs

apple, cameras, fuji x-half, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, om systems, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast

Fujifilm’s new X-Half camera is a curious hybrid: a digital camera with analog feel but a modern price. We also discuss news of OM Systems possibly using AI upscaling in future cameras to boost resolution and look at a few changes in the latest versions of Lightroom.

Episode 189: Traveling with a Camera

July 4th, 2025  |  34 mins 50 secs

apple, cameras, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast, travel photography

It’s the night before you leave for vacation and you need to choose which camera gear goes and stays. Do you reach for the 300mm telephoto, knowing it can get great photos but is large and bulky? Or do you take the smallest camera you can carry to ensure you have it with you at all times? And what else needs to come along? In this episode, Jeff and Kirk think about being on vacation, equipment they’ve taken on past trips, and what they would take now.

Episode 188: WWDC 2025

June 13th, 2025  |  30 mins 10 secs

apple, cameras, ios 26, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, liquid glass, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast, wwdc

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is always the first glimpse at what we can look forward to with new Apple software, including a peek at the photo capabilities of the next iPhones. And with iOS 26 and the Liquid Glass interface, things are going to look a lot different in the fall.

Episode 187: Checking In on AI in Photography

May 31st, 2025  |  33 mins 52 secs

apple, cameras, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast

We know, it seems like we just talked about AI in photography, but the field is moving pretty fast. Google announced improvements to their generative AI models, which are both impressive and sloppy at the same time. We also look at new AI-based landscape masking tools in Lightroom, speculate on what WWDC could bring to Apple’s Photo app, and more.

Episode 186: A Surrender: Markus Naarttijärvi and Daniel Agee

May 16th, 2025  |  42 mins 18 secs

a surrender, apple, cameras, daniel agee, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, markus naarttijärvi, photo book, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast

It’s another photo book! We’re joined by photographer Markus Naarttijärvi and publisher Daniel Agee to talk about Markus’s new book A Surrender. When we last talked to Daniel, he was at photo service Glass, but now he’s struck out on his own to form the publishing company Good Fight, and A Surrender is the first title.

Episode 185: Quintin Lake’s Book The Perimeter

May 2nd, 2025  |  35 mins

apple, cameras, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, photo book, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast, quintin lake, the perimeter

Quintin Lake traversed the Coast of Britain over several years, photographing and documenting the journey. Now, he’s turned his well-received project into a new photo book called The Perimeter. We welcome Quintin back to PhotoActive not just as a guest, but as an in-person guest with Kirk in his house in the UK.

Episode 184: US Tariffs and Camera Gear

April 11th, 2025  |  29 mins 20 secs

apple, cameras, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast, tariffs

The US government has begun to impose high tariffs on goods brought in from nearly every country in the world. Since most camera gear is made in Japan and China, what does this mean for the industry and, more important, for your own purchasing decisions? Since the policies are changing by the day, we decided to release this episode a week early.

Episode 183: Fujifilm GFX100RF, A Medium Format Walking Around Camera

April 4th, 2025  |  32 mins

apple, cameras, fujifilm, gfx100rf, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, medium format, photo editing, photo organization, photography, podcast

With the bonkers success of the Fujifilm X100VI, it seemed only a matter of time before Fuji made a compact camera based around its GFX medium format line. That’s the recently-announced GFX100RF, a new compact-ish, 100 megapixel, fixed-lens, $5,000 camera. We look at the inventions and the tradeoffs incorporated into this high-res entrant into the compact field.

Episode 182: Photoshop on iPhone

March 24th, 2025  |  29 mins 59 secs

apple, cameras, iphone, jeff carlson, kirk mcelhearn, lenses, photo editing, photo organization, photography, photoshop, podcast

Adobe has released Photoshop for iPhone, a bonafide version of real Photoshop, not to be confused with Photoshop Express or other earlier variations. We take a look at this new app with one main question in our minds: Who is this for?

A programming note: Toward the end of the episode we talk about using the Remove tool in Photoshop and Lightroom, but Jeff forgot to take screenshots. When he tried to reproduce the same actions later, he didn’t get the same results as described while we were doing it. So we apologize that we don’t have visuals to accompany what we’re describing.