Weekly News Roundup
Weekly News from The photography world.
Adobe reaches a $150 million settlement with the Department of Justice, the Getty Museum acquires a landmark Irving Penn series, and there is new gear worth knowing about from Manfrotto and Laowa.
Adobe Settles DOJ Lawsuit for $150 Million
Adobe has reached a settlement with the United States Department of Justice, bringing to a close a lawsuit that has been hanging over the company since June 2024. The DOJ alleged that Adobe had hidden fees and made it deliberately difficult for customers to cancel their subscriptions, a practice that will be familiar to anyone who has tried to leave Creative Cloud mid-year and discovered a substantial early termination fee buried in the fine print.
Under the settlement, Adobe will pay the DOJ $75 million and provide affected customers with $75 million worth of free services. Adobe maintains it did nothing wrong.
For photographers who rely on Lightroom and Photoshop, the settlement changes little in the short term. But it is a signal that subscription businesses that make cancellation deliberately painful are facing growing regulatory pressure. Adobe has been the dominant force in photography editing software for decades, and that dominance has not always translated into customer-friendly practices. Whether the settlement prompts any meaningful changes to how Adobe handles subscriptions remains to be seen.
It is also worth noting that the landscape around Adobe's monopoly on editing software has been shifting for a while. Capture One, DxO, Affinity Photo, and Darktable have all made genuine inroads. If there was ever a moment to explore the alternatives, this is it.
The Getty Museum Acquires Irving Penn's Cuzco Series
The J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired a major set of photographs from Irving Penn's Cuzco series, a body of work that represents one of the most significant turning points in Penn's career.
Penn traveled to Cuzco, Peru in 1948 on assignment for Vogue. He arrived expecting to shoot fashion, but found himself drawn instead to the people he encountered. Working with a portable studio and natural light, he made portraits of local residents that were unlike anything he had done before. The work is quiet, deliberate, and deeply respectful. It sits somewhere between documentary and fine art and it changed the direction of Penn's practice in ways that would define the rest of his career.
The acquisition by the Getty ensures this work will be preserved, studied, and made accessible to future generations. For those of us interested in the intersection of portraiture, light, and black and white photography, the Cuzco series is essential viewing. Penn understood that the most powerful portraits are often the simplest ones. A person. A plain background. Light. Everything else gets out of the way.
Joel Meyerowitz Receives Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award
The Sony World Photography Awards has named Joel Meyerowitz as the 2026 recipient of its Outstanding Contribution to Photography award, joining a list that includes William Eggleston, Martin Parr, Graciela Iturbide, and Sebastiao Salgado.
Meyerowitz is one of the defining figures in the history of street photography. He began shooting in 1962 after watching Robert Frank work on an advertising shoot, quit his job the same day, and never looked back. While he is perhaps best known as an early champion of color photography, his work spans both color and black and white and his influence on the visual language of the street is difficult to overstate.
A retrospective of his work will be on display at Somerset House in London as part of the Sony World Photography Awards exhibition, alongside specially commissioned video and audio installations. A talk with Meyerowitz takes place on April 21. If you are in London, it is worth going.
A Black and White Street Shot Wins at Sony World Photography Awards Open Competition
Worth noting from the Open Competition results announced last month: the Street Photography category winner was Giulia Pissagroia from Italy for a candid black and white photograph of a family at Ørnevegen in Norway, capturing their expressions as they take in the view. The image is comedic, well timed, and entirely human. It is a reminder that street photography does not require grit or darkness to be effective. Sometimes a well observed moment of ordinary life is more than enough.
Canon's Analog Concept Camera
At CP+ in Yokohama last month, Canon unveiled something unexpected: the Analog Concept Camera, a retro-style box camera with a top-mounted waist-level viewfinder, fully manual focus, and a deliberately vintage aesthetic. It is currently a concept prototype with a 6MP sensor, and Canon was gauging interest from show visitors, but the direction it points to is interesting. Canon appears to be taking seriously the appetite for slower, more tactile shooting experiences. No release date or confirmed price yet, but the concept alone is worth paying attention to.
Manfrotto ONE Photo: A Tripod Built for Photographers
Manfrotto has followed up last year's ONE Hybrid tripod with something more focused. The new ONE Photo is built specifically for professional photographers rather than the hybrid shooter who also needs to cover video. The ONE Hybrid was a strong platform but its feature set reflected a compromise between two disciplines. The ONE Photo strips that back and concentrates on what still photographers actually need: stability, precision, and a build quality that holds up in the field. Details on pricing and full specifications are still emerging but for photographers who felt the ONE Hybrid was slightly over-engineered for their purposes, this looks like the version worth waiting for.
Laowa Announces Two New 17mm Tilt-Shift Lenses
Venus Optics has announced two new additions to the Laowa lineup aimed squarely at landscape and architectural photographers. The first is the Laowa 17mm f/4 Zero-D Tilt-Shift, which offers both tilt and shift movements on a wide angle prime for full-frame and medium-format mirrorless systems. The second is the Laowa 17mm f/4 Zero-D Shift, which provides shift capability only at a slightly lower entry point.
Both lenses carry the Zero-D designation, meaning distortion is kept close to zero, which matters enormously in architectural work where converging verticals and bowed lines are the enemy. At 17mm with shift capability these lenses give architectural and landscape photographers a tool that was previously only available at much higher price points or in larger, heavier form factors. For monochrome photographers working in architecture or the built environment, a tilt-shift lens opens up compositional possibilities that are simply not achievable any other way.
Ready to see the world differently? The Monochrome Method is a complete video course with lessons and assignments designed to help you craft compelling black and white images and build a portfolio that's unmistakably yours. Start Learning Today.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO IMPROVE YOUR BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY TRY THE LESSONS BELOW.
A Beginners Guide To Black And White Photography