Shutterbug Editorial

There's a famous line from the otherwise forgettable movie "The Godfather: Part III." It's the scene where Al Pacino, playing an aging Michael Corleone (in bad prosthetics and make-up), laments that he can't seem to get out of the family Mafia business and live the straight life. "Just when I thought I was out . . . they pull me back in," he says angrily.

The camera market is in a constant state of flux these days thanks to a still volatile economy and the popularity of disruptive, non-traditional imaging forces including smartphone cameras, GoPros, drones and a host of other wirelessly connected, social sharing-focused digital doohickeys. So it was not a complete surprise when a rumor started making the rounds of the photo blogs recently that Samsung was planning to exit the camera business.

I got a lot of feedback – mostly positive but with a few spirited rejoiners – to last month’s editorial “Smartphones (Still) Can’t Compete with Great Camera Gear,” that I feel I should “double down.” Again, this isn’t a knock against using smartphones for shooting images. As I mentioned last month, I do it all the time with some pretty decent results. And many serious photographers are constantly turning to that little phone in their pockets and have produced many spectacular photos.

Every email I receive from Shutterbug.com writer Steve Meltzer these days is sadly familiar. “We’ve lost another one,” Steve will write while sharing news of the passing of yet another photographic master. The list is staggering, all men of a certain age (in their 80s) who’ve passed away in the last month or so.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: another one of Nikon’s new full-frame digital SLRs has a problem. In this case, a small number of Nikon D750s have been producing a dark, shadowy band in the frame when capturing images with lens flare. While the issue was first reported by D750 owners who took to YouTube to demonstrate the problem, Nikon eventually acknowledged that the lens flare flaw was real and said it would offer free repairs. Last week, the company issued an official service advisory for the D750, saying that Nikon service centers needed to a adjust the camera’s autofocus sensor “to resolve the occurrence of unnaturally shaped flare.”

If you followed the controversy over the World Press Photo (WPP) awards in March and care anything about the state of photojournalism these days, you might be a little sick to your stomach by now. In the latest debacle involving the WPP contest – and there have been a few in recent years – the organization revoked the first-place prize it had given to Italian photographer Giovanni Trolio for a photo story he had submitted called “The Dark Heart of Europe.”