Cameras and Photography Explained

Just over a year ago I began warning about card and storage prices. I detected the early pattern that was developing where the AI players were beginning to gobble up any and every bit (pardon the pun) they could. I rewarned early in 2026 when that became clearer and easier to measure in terms of price increase. We eventually hit the 100%+ inflation rate with no end in site.

Today I’m going to say that at least for cards, the end of the continuous inflation cycle in pricing may be mostly over. The smart players have been adjusting how and from where they’re obtaining their parts in order to better control their prices. I’m starting to see CFe cards plateau in pricing. 

However, my new warning is a little different. What I’m hearing in the distribution chain for other photography products is not encouraging. I’m aware of at least three major players in other photography accessories that are having cash flow issues at the moment, and I’ve become aware of what appears to be upcoming closeouts on older accessories that have bottomed out in sales volume. My prediction is this: other than perhaps B&H—which acts a bit like an inventory buffer due to their large purchasing volume and their long-term stock warehousing—by the time next year rolls around, there will be products in the support, lighting, remote, and other accessory categories that start going away. Permanently. We may lose a company or two in the first quarter of next year, too. 

Some of this is being caused by products just not moving and updating with the times. Some is being caused by Chinese copying and price undercutting. Some is caused by companies that were weakened by the pandemic and never fully recovered. 

But a big part of what I’m going to call my predicted Accessagedon triggers from the camera companies themselves. When the constant parade of new and upgraded products ended in 2026, new camera introductions became few and far between, and the main (mirrorless) volume went into a small decline, the number of people walking into camera dealers went down. It’s at those local dealers that a lot of the photographic accessories get sold, but if you don’t have as many people coming in the front door, almost by definition your sales of those items will go down. 

That isn’t quite as evident online, but consider this: if fewer people are rushing to Amazon to order the latest/greatest camera, then Amazon also isn’t serving up accessories to sell with that camera. 

You see one big combination of all this in the flash business. Makers not updating products for the times. Chinese undercut. Weak companies coming out of the pandemic. Low new camera sales, particular to new customers, lowering the add-on sale possibility. But the same thing applies to tripods, camera bags, and more. 

This has a further downstream issue, as photography Web sites that rely upon advertising are finding that their ad prices are falling and the number of companies placing ads is down. The Chinese aren’t doing ads for the most part, they’re doing affiliate links, so rewarding Web sites only on actual purchases. 

Here we go again. 

Today Fujifilm introduced the instax MiniEVO 2, yet another in their long line of instant cameras. Like the instax Pal 2 that was introduced earlier this fall, we again get the panda-style legacy look popularized by the X100 models and now popping up nearly everywhere in Fujifilm’s lineups.

First off, good on Fujifilm for establishing clear branding. Nikon has pretty much gone for a DSLR branding (other than the Zfc, Zf, ZR), and Sony seems to have mostly locked in an Alpha look. But no one is making instantly identifiable as Brand X cameras lately than Fujifilm. 

But more importantly, Fujifilm is now playing riffs off digital with their instant film cameras. The MiniEVO 2 has a big 4.5” touchscreen on the back that is used for composition and settings. The screen is larger than the 2x3” instant prints the camera takes! But coupled with a couple of clever controls, instant cameras now have very digital like customizations in real time. Oh, and yes you can save the 13mp digital images driving the built-in printer, including an up-to-five-second video of what happened prior to pressing the shutter release. 

Actually, you’ll find two shutter releases on the MiniEVO 2, one in the traditional place up top, the other near the top front of the camera for when you’ve oriented the camera in portrait mode.

I know you’re all waiting for my site refreshes and the launch of byThom MAX. 

MAX is coming, but a funny thing happened along the way.

As you probably know, my sites have thousands of pages on them, many (particularly news) dating back 15 or more years. Coupled with my wanting to refresh most of my content with editing, extension, and better wording, I took on a massive job. Really massive. Including rebuilding the sites from scratch. 

Turns out I didn’t have to do that last bit. 

I got so frustrated with a continuing problem using my old commercial site software that I asked my AI a question recently. My site structure, style, and content live in a proprietary file type. I asked my AI if it could understand that file. Turns out that everything had been so well created that it did. Everything from structure to design to my words and images. During our exploration together, the AI discovered some bugs in my current software, but didn’t find any deficiencies or masking in the data structures. So first task: suck up all that information and put it in a file I own and manage. Second task, build an app that uses that file. 

Today you can see (or actually, not see) the result. I say “not see” because I’m keeping the basic site look and structures intact. But what’s managing that is completely new.

The mothballed sansmirror.com site has now been completely republished using my own software. It looks pretty much the same as it used to. Except if you look closely. When you do you’ll notice some things. Things people have been asking me about for years and I never got around to doing. For instance, the last thing on the top menu bar is a search icon. Click that and you’ll be presented a search box that does a search of the entire site and lists out all the articles with your search request in it, showing an excerpt around the found text. This search doesn’t actually touch the usual Web search services. Instead it uses the data file for the site. Your searches aren't tracked by anyone.

Here’s another thing people have been asking me for (I used to do it, but then the commercial software I was using broke due to a macOS update and the developer never fixed it): every time I post any new article on sites handled by my new application, it generates a short summary and posts that to my XTwitter account (@bythom). This goes beyond the RSS notifications that have been in the News/Views section for years. While I’m not a fan of XTwitter, it’s currently the best way to broadcast a short update note widely.

Try out how all the new stuff works. Go to sansmirror.com, click the search icon in the menu bar, and type Nikon Z8. You’ll get more than fifty hits on that. All result in live links you can further investigate. 

The above is now true of dslrbodies.com, too, as I’ve updated it using the same application I wrote. I’ve applied the same technique and updates to it. So take a visit on dslrbodies, do a search, browse around, and enjoy the new styles in places. There’s even a new article about what’s still available in the News/Views section.

But that’s not all. You’ve all been asking for the date of the article creation or modification at the top of the page, not the bottom. Yep, that’s been added to sansmirror and dslrbodies, too. Indeed, there are a ton of things in my new application that I’ve built that I’m not going to waste my time on adding to the sansmirror site because you will really want those on dslrbodies.com, zsystemuser.com, and bythom.com. Don’t worry, you’ll be getting these new things soon. The log-jam is about to break. I’m doing this site by site. I still have a little more testing to do on sansmirror and dslrbodies to make sure everything is being done correctly, but once I’ve performed that testing then I’ll work on updating bythom.com, and then add some really snazzy updates for zsystemuser.com. No data will be harmed in the process.

I’ve gone a bit insane with this change of direction. The tool I used for over 15 years has been completely re-written, by me, from scratch, in a language that didn’t exist when that original tool was built. With my AI’s help, my new tool also understands all the structure, style, and content I’ve ever created, and moreover, I can use a chat engine directly to do a lot of the work (“add a light blue bar behind all Heading 2 elements using the site’s primary color so that headings stand out from the text better” via MCP). Yep, that works. You can see it in action on sansmirror and dslrbodies already (along with new site-wide styles for block quotes and other site elements). 

So between now and the end of the year, the existing sites will pretty much look the same and have the same content, only they’ll all be controlled from a different app, a lot of content will have been refreshed and re-imagined, and I’ll probably be a lot less frustrated and publishing more often. Plus you’ll find lots of interesting surprises as you start moving through my sites in the future. Search, more consistent styling, better organization, rating widgets, and more.

Wait, what, better organization? Yes, and this starts with mobile. With the previous site software on phones the menus became a scrolling monster. With my new app in charge, that changes to a simpler two-level pop-up when you tap the hamburger menu icon. In essence, I’ve been able to take a once popular commercial product, rewrite it, add all the features that were never done by the original creator, fixed all the known bugs (!), all while keeping the actual structure, content, and CSS styling intact. 

What I’ve done is not a restoration. It’s a complete restomod. The good things are all still there. The infrastructure is better, and there’s new goodies everywhere I’m looking forward to exploit. I’m very happy with how this is turning out. One benefit of doing things this way is that it preserves site filenames and structure, meaning that news archives that date back well more than a decade are all being preserved.

Timetable:

• sansmirror — Complete, all 2235 pages. Now running completely on the new software. Missing links have been fixed or removed. A few remaining bits that should have been cleaned up earlier (e.g. sidebars you couldn’t see) are now gone. This site was my proof that the experiment with the new application worked, as the content is now all static (i.e., not updated). 
• dslrbodies — Complete, all 1945 pages. I updated some styles, removed bad links, and any other issue I noticed. I even added a new News/Views article about the current state of buying new DSLR bodies and F-mount lenses. I should point out that I’ve got a lot of even older material (1999 to 2010) that I hope to eventually get re-added to this site, but obviously this has a low priority compared to my other projects in progress. My long-term goal is to make dslrbodies “complete,” at least in terms of my coverage of Nikon DSLRs.
• byThom — Goal is to have this done by Thanksgiving. (bythom.com is now live with the new software; for once I’m ahead of schedule.) There’s a bit more going on with the bythom site, as new articles, rewritten articles, and some slight structure shuffling is involved. 
• zsystemuser — Goal is to have this done by Christmas. This will be the most aggressive update, as there have been a lot of changes I’ve wanted to make to that site to make it more useful and to be more complete. 

I’m pretty sure I can hit those dates, and then I can kick off the new year with the new goodies I’ve been promising (and continue to create and refine in the background).

Be sure to let me know if you see any site anomalies on sansmirror or dslrbodies. Also, if you have any specific request for these four sites that I didn’t mention above, let me know, as now that I have my own application (NewBox), I might be able to change something on the fly.

For the last two weeks I’ve been barraged by people asking me to comment on the appearance of the ArtCraft clones of Adobe and Microsoft products. Whatever I have to say about them, though, will pale against the what both users and courts will eventually say about the clones. 

My first take is this: the (now) team behind this effort is sure good at storytelling and marketing. I’m also intrigued by the “Made by Artists, for Artists” tag line given that it really should read “Copied by AI, for AI users.” I’m not being coy with that switch: if you hit the Pricing link you find “Your subscription helps keep ArtCraft free and open for everyone.” Say what?

Given the scope of the project—copy all Adobe and Microsoft apps, with Autodesk next in the queue—putting ArtCraft all together took a pretty large up-front cash and time commitment. I’ve vibe coded with Claude for awhile now, and getting the big models to do this much work probably cost in the thousands of dollars a month, possibly far more if it was done agentically using API credits. Someone is going to have to pay that investment back, and it seems that ArtCraft has picked a near-same model for that as Adobe: subscriptions that come with AI use credits. 

Most of the questions I received have had to do with how legitimate the ArtCraft programs are. Well, note that they are all labeled either as “Early Alpha” or “In Development,” with no definition of what that means. Historically, Alpha means not feature complete, and In Development has no agreed upon meaning. Since ArtCraft is creating true clones of products, I also wonder how they’re doing that without breaking a license agreement they must have agreed to at some point. Section 17 of Adobe’s onerous license agreement uses the words “We…don’t allow you to recreate or attempt to recreate our products.” We don’t even have to go to Copyright law—which has a long history of dealing with software copies—to find the likely thing that Adobe’s lawyers are probably working up at the moment in order to stop ArtCraft. 

The back-story that keeps getting promoted about ArtCraft also seems disingenuous at best: “[Adobe] charged me the ‘cancellation fee’ on multiple occasions and I’ve hated them ever since.” Founder Brandon Thomas almost always emphasizes doing something for users, but doesn’t point out that such a large project will need money to keep going, and that will only occur via subscription. 

I was amused in playing with their In Development products to find that they aren’t just cloning UI, but they appear to be cloning bugs and limitations, too. In ArtCraft’s version of Microsoft Word, for instance, you’ll find the same 2GB file size limitation (due to use of 32-bit memory, not 64-bit found on modern CPUs), as well as one well-known, never fixed bug. Both those things were reasons why I moved from using Word for creating my books ;~).

While I might seem negative in my consideration here, there are some very positive bits to consider. The first is OS parity. Because these products are being developed in Rust (a language) that runs in almost any environment, suddenly we have a Lightroom look/work-alike that can run in Linux and even in a Web Browser tab. The other positive thing is that the apps are all OpenSource and available on ArtCraft’s GitHub to download and modify on your own. 

It’s instructive that the ArtCraft GitHub promotes a different “story” than what’s being discussed in the photography sites. Instead of cloning Adobe, there’s a clear identity statement: “ArtCraft is the IDE for interactive AI image and video creation.” IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. If you go to app.getartcraft.com I believe you'll see what Thomas actually was trying to create. But if you’re going to create AI-generated images and videos, you also need something to edit and modify them. And you'll need AI subscriptions or a need to be running a local model yourself.

My biggest problem is that I don’t know that I can count on ArtCraft. Nothing quite seems finished, there are gaps (can’t read Nikon High Efficiency raw, for example), and there’s the legality problem that will only get addressed once Adobe and Microsoft decide how they’re going to handle this cloning. 

Meanwhile there’s an interesting dynamic going on in most of the emails I’ve been getting: the same people who would be enraged if someone (or AI) copied their images are essentially saying that they want to use something that’s a copy. In other words, their real complaint is about the money they pay Adobe. My response would be: if you’re not getting value back for the money you paid, sure, look for another solution, but are you sure you want to encourage copying?

I find my own stance on things being challenged some by ArtCraft. AI is definitely a tool that allows us to do things that we couldn’t do before (e.g. clone an existing program). However, there’s this persistent issue with AI use that keeps arising: AI model makers have been sucking up all human knowledge and patterns, ignoring intellectual property and ethical standards along the way, all in order to build a Goliath that can live among the other tech Goliaths. There’s money chasing money going on here, and I’m getting more than a little peeved at that as an all-encompassing life philosophy. I was never a fan of Venture Capital as a funding source and have watched that corrupt what were good ideas and potential products. 

I am a fan of building things that solve user problems and expand user knowledge. And yes, I charge for those things, otherwise I wouldn’t have the time to create them. But it’s not the pursuit of money that drives me, it’s doing what I’m doing better and better for more and more customers that really drives me. And that’s exactly where I can’t quite position ArtCraft yet. They claim to be trying to free the artist. But I don’t see how they do that long-term without money getting involved somehow, particularly once they have to hire lawyers to try to protect what they’ve already done. And once money starts talking…

My basic advice is this: try the ArtCraft (and other emerging clones) if you’d like. But I don’t think you can count on them. I wouldn’t, for instance, drop my Adobe subscription just because LightCraft seems to do much (or most) of what Lightroom does. There are real risks involved in doing that. Thing is, I saw Lightroom as a risk when it first appeared, too. That’s why I’ve kept my photos structured, stored, and backed up in the same heirarchical file system I first created in the 1990’s. If I lose access to a photo, it’s my fault, not some software program’s fault or that I’ve been locked out of modifying it because a subscription lapsed. 

Over my now 50-year course of dealing with ever-changing software, I learned one thing fairly early on: you need to control your data, not let someone else do it. You need to be diligent about moving data forward to new storage and sometimes file types. Programs that “help you” create and organize your data come and go. Some have tortoise-like lifespans (i.e. long), while some are fleeting butterflies (i.e. short-lived). 

As many of you know, I’ve been on the fence about continuing to recommend Lightroom (see Recommended Mac Software). Adobe created a solid product over time, but it’s now showing its age while the monthly tithe is annoying for what you get in terms of long-term value. It’s clear to me that AI is changing how people browse and find images, too, even outside Lightroom, so the whole catalog-develop approach may be nearing its end.

What I see is that we’re at another fork in the road. We’ve had several big forks in my 50 years on both sides of the software business. AI is creating another one. How that plays out is unclear at the moment. However, after each forking there’s been a small handful of Big Winners and a great number of Large Losers. 

———

Bonus coverage: Adobe and Microsoft are the two first targets of ArtCraft. Those are not identical targets. I’d argue that Microsoft has completely lost the way with Office. Features seem to go away at the same rate that toolbars get added. Performance sucks. The Officeness (as opposed to individual apps) never evolved. Word never made it to 64-bit memory. Microsoft Word 2.0, which was an early DOS product, had arguably better features and performance than the current version. Microsoft has consistently gone for lowest-common-denominator choices over making a better product. Frankly, they deserve to be cloned out of existence given their poor stewardship of their product.

I can’t really say the same for Adobe. While I don’t always agree with where they steer their ships and there have been some culdesacs they got themselves into (remember 3D in Photoshop?), Adobe seems to be quick to move to new technology (OS changes, AI, etc.), and has continually expanded (most of) their products in ways that a fair number of users find useful. I was worried when they went to subscriptions that they would get lazier about keeping their products current, but that hasn’t seemed to happen.