iPhoto News: iPhone Gets Variable Aperture & Canon’s Lightest Body – October 2026

Welcome to the second iPhoto News of October, and it has been one of those fortnights where the announcements actually line up into a story.

Apple has given the iPhone a real, moving aperture and a set of manual controls to go with it, OM System has brought back a camera it had left alone for five years, and Canon has put stabilisation into its lightest full-frame body.

There are six stories this time, and the thread running through most of them is control — either being handed more of it, or being handed a smaller camera you will actually carry to the places worth photographing. Autumn is starting to turn as well, which is the one item on this list with a deadline attached.

The iPhone finally has an aperture that moves

At its event on 9 September Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, and the part that matters to photographers is that the 48-megapixel main camera now has a physical aperture that opens and closes.

It steps between four settings, F/1.48, F/1.8, F/2.8 and F/4 and the phone will choose for itself if you let it, reaching for F/1.48 in low light, F/1.8 for portraits and F/4 when there are enough people in the frame to need a deeper depth of field.

Every phone before this one faked the blur in software, so this is the first time an iPhone has changed depth of field the way a lens does.

Alongside it Apple has added Pro Controls to the camera app, which finally puts aperture, shutter speed and white balance in your hands, with a live histogram on screen while you frame.

Photographers have been asking for that for the best part of a decade, and it is worth saying plainly that these are the same three controls you would learn on any camera, so the skill transfers in both directions. Apple also introduced Apple Reference Image, a provenance feature meant to show that a picture genuinely came out of a camera, and said it would support the SynthID standard for flagging AI-generated or edited pictures.

The variable aperture is limited to the main camera, so the ultra-wide and the telephoto carry on as before, and none of this turns a phone into a camera with a big sensor behind it. What it does do is make the phone a reasonable place to learn exposure, because you can now change one setting at a time and watch what it does — which is exactly how the rest of us were taught.

Learn aperture, shutter speed and ISO properly

OM System has brought the PEN back

The teaser I mentioned a fortnight ago turned into a camera on 9 September, and the new OM System PEN is a 20.37-megapixel Micro Four Thirds body built around the TruePic IX processor, with a 121-point cross-type phase detection autofocus system and five-axis stabilisation rated at up to 5.5 stops in the centre of the frame. It is splash-proof to IPX1 and dustproof, which is new ground for a PEN, and it comes in silver or black with a viewfinder tucked into the corner of the body.

It costs $999.99 for the body, $1,099.99 with the 14-42mm kit zoom and $1,299.99 for the twin kit that adds the 40-150mm, and OM System says it will ship in late October.

The last PEN was the E-P7 back in 2021, so this is a five-year gap being closed, and the appeal has not really changed in that time – it is a small, genuinely attractive camera you can put in a coat pocket with a lens on the front.

Whether it is the right camera for you comes down to how much you value size, because a Micro Four Thirds sensor asks more of your technique in poor light than a full-frame one does. For travel, for street work, and for anybody who has quietly stopped carrying their bigger camera, that trade is usually worth making.

Canon’s EOS R8 Mark II adds the stabilisation the original lacked

Canon announced the EOS R8 Mark II on 15 September, keeping the 24.2-megapixel full-frame sensor and a standard sensitivity range of ISO 100 to 102,400 while adding the one thing the original R8 was most often criticised for missing – five-axis in-body stabilisation.

It still shoots at up to 40 frames a second with the electronic shutter, Canon says autofocus tracking holds on more stubbornly, and the buffer runs 58% further in JPEG and 30% further in raw before it fills.

At roughly 540g with a battery and card, Canon is calling it the lightest EOS body it has ever built with stabilisation inside, and it is fully weather-sealed. It is expected to ship in late October at $1,899 for the body, or $2,099 with the RF 24-50mm F/4.5-6.3 IS STM, and Canon announced a Speedlite EL-5 Mark II and an ergonomic grip alongside it.

In-body stabilisation is one of those features that sounds dull on a specification sheet and then changes how you shoot, because it buys you several stops of hand-held shutter speed in exactly the conditions where a tripod is a nuisance. If you have been waiting for a light full-frame body you can carry all day, this is a more complete camera than the one it replaces.

Autumn colour has started, and it is moving south

NASA published a pair of Landsat 9 satellite images on 14 September showing the Coppermine River area of Nunavut in northern Canada photographed on 27 July and again on 6 September, and the difference between the two is startling — an entire tundra landscape turning from green to red and gold in six weeks.

That subarctic ground is among the first places in North America to change, it usually peaks in early September, and the colour there can last a week or less before the wind takes it.

Further south the timing is far kinder, with places like Vermont, Maine and New York typically peaking in late September and early October, and the same slow drift happening across northern Europe.

The practical point is that autumn colour is not a season so much as a wave passing over you, so the woodland you have been meaning to photograph has a window measured in days rather than months.

Go now rather than at the weekend after next, take something to keep the wind off your front element, and remember that overcast light suits autumn far better than bright sun does, because it keeps the colour saturated and stops the leaves blowing out to white.

Viltrox unveiled seven lenses in one go

At IBC in Amsterdam on 10 September Viltrox showed four full-frame L-mount autofocus primes in its compact Air line — a 14mm F/4, a 20mm F/2.8, a 40mm F/2.5 and a 50mm F/2 — along with a 35mm F/1.4 Pro for full frame and two fast APS-C Pro lenses, an 18mm F/1.2 and a 40mm F/1.2. A high-powered flash and a camera monitor turned up in the same announcement, and no prices or shipping dates were given for any of it.

Viltrox has spent the last couple of years quietly making the cheap end of the lens market a much better place to shop, and a set of small, slow-ish primes is a more interesting idea than it first sounds, because the reason most people leave a prime at home is weight rather than aperture. Keep an eye on the pricing when it lands, since that is the part of a Viltrox announcement that usually does the talking.

Abbey Road named its Music Photography Awards finalists

Abbey Road Studios announced the finalists of its Music Photography Awards on 10 September, with five photographers shortlisted in each of six categories plus a guest category marking 50 years of punk.

Among the pictures are Lewis Evans’s portrait of Liam Gallagher, Caity Krone’s shot of Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and Gabrielle Ravet’s photograph of My Chemical Romance fans, and Rankin, who heads the judging panel, reckons 2026 is the strongest year the awards have had. Public voting on Music Moment of the Year closed on 14 September.

Music photography is worth studying even if you never point a camera at a stage, because almost every frame is made in dreadful light, at close range, with no control over what the subject does next. Look at how the finalists use the stage lighting as it falls rather than fighting it, and you will pick up something that transfers straight to any dark room you ever have to work in.

Final Thoughts

That is your fortnight, and it has been a good one for anybody who likes their cameras small. Between the PEN, Canon’s lightest stabilised body and a phone that can now genuinely change its own depth of field, the industry seems to have remembered that the best camera is still the one you were willing to bring with you.

The autumn story is the one with a clock on it, so if there is a wood or an avenue of trees you photograph every year, this is the fortnight to go and do it rather than the fortnight to plan it.

Tell me in the comments whether the new PEN has tempted you, and whether you will actually use the manual controls on a phone now that they are there. I will be back in two weeks with the next edition.