iPhoto News: Europe’s Total Eclipse, Adobe’s Mask Upgrade & Rising Camera Prices — August 2026

Welcome to the second iPhoto News of August. It has been an unusually good fortnight for anyone who likes pointing a camera at the sky, and a slightly worrying one for anyone saving up for a new body.

On 12 August the Moon’s shadow crossed Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain, and a big slice of Europe saw a deep partial eclipse alongside it. Adobe quietly fixed one of Lightroom’s longest-running annoyances. And the price of memory chips is about to land on your camera shopping list.

Six stories, about five minutes. Here we go.

Europe watched a total solar eclipse — and the pictures are worth studying

On Wednesday 12 August the Moon passed directly across the face of the Sun. The shadow started in the Arctic, tracked down the eastern side of Greenland, crossed western Iceland, then swept over northern Spain and clipped the north-eastern corner of Portugal. At its very best, out over the Atlantic to the west of Iceland, totality lasted 2 minutes and 18 seconds. By the time it reached Spain the Sun was already low in the sky and totality was down to around a minute — and it was the first total solar eclipse over mainland Spain since 1905.

The northern half of the track was largely clouded out, which is the gamble you always take with an eclipse. Spain got the luck. EarthSky has published community pictures from Segovia, Zaragoza, La Coruña and Mallorca, and the low Sun gave those images something a midday eclipse never does — a landscape you can actually see, and a horizon worth putting in the frame.

That is the lesson hiding in the good photographs from this one. The corona is the easy part. The setting is what makes the picture.

Discover our Astrophotography course

Adobe’s August update finally lets you soften an AI mask

Lightroom Classic 15.5, Lightroom desktop 9.5 and the mobile apps all landed on 3 August. The headline addition is a pair of sliders sitting under any AI-generated mask — Subject, Sky, People, Objects and the rest. Feather softens the transition at the edge of the selection. Edge shifts the boundary itself inwards or outwards. There is also a new Render to DNG option that bakes your current edits permanently into a fresh DNG file, and a set of small but welcome crop fixes: rotate and flip now appear in History, and you can drop the opacity of the photo while cropping so you can see what you are about to cut away.

This is the update Lightroom has needed for a while. The AI masks have been clever since the day they arrived, but the edges gave them away — a Select Sky that sliced through the top of a tree line, a Select Subject that left a faint halo around a shoulder. Being able to feather that boundary by a few points, or nudge it inwards so it sits under the edge rather than on it, is the difference between an edit that looks finished and one that looks obviously edited. Two sliders, five seconds, and nobody can tell you masked it.

Camera prices are rising, and memory chips are the reason

Fujifilm’s latest results put a number on something the whole industry has been muttering about. The company had already estimated that rising memory costs would hit its business by around 11 billion yen this year. It has now added a further 14 billion yen on top, because prices have kept climbing. The cause is demand for DRAM and flash memory from AI data centres, and the same pressure is showing up in results from Canon, Nikon and Sony. Fujifilm raised its prices in the United States last year; Europe is next, with authorised German dealers confirming increases of 100 to 500 euros, phased in from 1 August and fully in place by 1 September.

My honest take is this: do not panic-buy. If a camera or a lens was already on your list for this year, moving that purchase forward a few months is sensible. Buying something you did not want, because it might cost more in the autumn, is how people end up with kit they never use. And it is worth remembering the used market exists and is not affected by any of this — a three-year-old body from a reputable dealer takes exactly the same photograph it took three years ago.

Capture the Dark 2026: night sky pictures anyone could have taken

DarkSky International announced the winners of its sixth Capture the Dark contest in mid-August, after a record number of entries from photographers in more than 30 countries. The judging ran across nine categories, including Nightscapes, Deep Sky Observations, Creatures of the Night and The Impact of Light Pollution, plus a People’s Choice award voted for publicly.

Two of those categories are the reason I am mentioning it at all. There is a Mobile Nighttime Photography category, and a Young Astrophotographers category.

Neither of those requires a telescope or a five-figure setup, which is a useful corrective if you have ever looked at award-winning night photography and assumed the equipment was the barrier. The contest exists to make a point, mind you — DarkSky says light pollution is increasing by nearly 10% a year worldwide. Worth a look at the winning gallery, if only to see how much sky some people still have.

Harman brings back Phoenix — this time rated at ISO 125

Harman announced Phoenix 125 on 12 August. It is a revised version of the original Phoenix colour negative film that Harman launched in 2023 as an openly experimental product and later discontinued. The emulsion is essentially the original one; the box speed has been reset from ISO 200 down to ISO 125, which Harman says came straight from photographers telling the company how they were actually rating it in practice. It will be sold in 35mm, in a DX-coded cassette, and in 120 for medium format.

What I like here is the honesty. Harman is not selling this as a flawless film. It says outright to expect high contrast, strong visible grain, punchy colours, and halation if you shoot into the light — and that it performs best in good, consistent light. If you have been curious about film but put off by how precious everyone is about it, a stock whose maker openly tells you it is unpredictable is a rather freeing place to start.

Google’s Pixel 11 Pro puts the upgrade where it counts

Google announced the Pixel 11 range on 12 August. The Pro model gets a larger main sensor, a 1/1.3-inch type behind an F/1.68 lens, but the more interesting change is the telephoto. It is entirely new: a 48-megapixel, 1/1.95-inch sensor with optical stabilisation on a 5x lens, which Google says pulls in around 30% more light than the Pixel 10’s equivalent. Digital zoom now stretches to 120x with AI processing doing the heavy lifting. The Pixel 11 Pro starts at $1,099.

Ignore the 120x figure — treat any headline digital zoom number the way you would treat a car’s top speed. The telephoto itself is the real news. A longer lens does not just make things bigger; it changes what you can photograph at all, and it compresses a scene in a way no amount of cropping will replicate. If your phone is genuinely your main camera, a proper 5x with more light behind it will change more of your pictures than another megapixel count ever would.

Final Thoughts

That is your fortnight. An eclipse that gave Spain its first totality in 120 years, a Lightroom update that quietly fixes a long-standing irritation, a warning that gear is about to cost a little more, and a film that came back with a lower number on the box.

If you photographed the eclipse — even the partial phase, even through cloud — I would genuinely love to see it. Tag us on Instagram @iphotographycourse.