In today's episode a wildlife photographer captures a flying fox carrying it's pup, another wildlife photographer captures a sleepy mountain lion and Canon releases the 30th Anniversary Edition of their PowwerShot G 7 X Mark III.
Show Notes
Welcome back to the show everyone, Liam here and this is Episode 492 of the Liam Photography Podcast for the week of February 5th, 2026. In today’s episode a Flying Fox, Sleepy Mountain Lion on Trail cam 30th anniversary Canon PowerShot G 7 X Mark III and more.
High above the rainforest canopy of Christmas Island, a fleeting silhouette crossed a narrow gap in the trees. To the naked eye, it was little more than another bat passing briefly through the afternoon sky. To photographer Chris Bray’s camera trained patiently upward, however, the moment revealed something far more intimate, a mother flying fox carrying her newborn pup mid-flight, now photographed for what many believe to be the first time.
At first glance, the photograph appears deceptively simple. Two dark forms are suspended against a pale sky, framed by the forest canopy below. There is no dramatic lighting or visual spectacle, yet the image holds attention precisely because of what it reveals rather than how it presents itself. Within that single frame is an act of maternal care that most people would never notice in real time, alongside a quiet reminder of how much of the natural world exists just beyond human perception.
For Australian wildlife photographer and conservationist Chris Bray, the photograph represents one of the most compelling reasons photography remains essential to understanding nature. The behavior he captured is not unusual for flying foxes, yet it is almost impossible to clearly observe without freezing the moment in time. The image reveals a detail that would otherwise pass unseen, even to someone actively looking for it.
“This shot really is a great example of one of the reasons I love photography — the way it enables us to freeze and admire hidden details and beauty that might otherwise be overlooked,” Bray says.
Although Bray had heard that flying fox mothers carry their pups clinging to their underside, the reality of trying to witness this behavior proved far more challenging than expected. The Christmas Island flying fox is completely black, as is its pup, and when silhouetted against the bright sky, the shapes merge into a single moving form. Even experienced observers struggle to separate detail from motion in those fleeting seconds.
“The problem is though as I found out, that it’s really hard to SEE this with the naked eye,” Bray says.
The bats move quickly through narrow gaps in the jungle canopy, offering only momentary visibility before vanishing again. In many cases, the decision of whether a bat might be carrying a pup comes too late, long after the opportunity to confirm it has passed. That uncertainty became one of the defining challenges of the shoot.
“You only ever get a brief glimpse as they flap briefly past,” Bray says.
The photograph was not the result of a single fortunate encounter. Bray had been hoping to capture a bat carrying her pup for some time, but his work leading wildlife photography tours often takes him away during the flying fox pupping season. When he found himself home on Christmas Island during that narrow window, he made repeated attempts to observe the behavior, each time coming away empty-handed.
On the final afternoon before Bray and Dr. Annabel Dorrestein were due to leave for a photography tour in Sri Lanka and India, they decided to make one last attempt. Conditions were far from ideal. Wind moved constantly through the forest, cloud cover flattened the light, and intermittent rain further complicated visibility.
“The weather was really average: windy, mostly grey cloud, spitting rain,” Bray says.
Under those conditions, identifying whether a bat was carrying a pup became almost impossible in real time. Both mother and pup appeared as black silhouettes against a bright sky, and by the time any suspicion formed, the bat was already gone. There was no opportunity to track, refocus, or refine the composition once the moment passed.
“It really was near impossibly to tell if a given bat flapping briefly past had a pup or not, and certainly too late to find and focus on it later if you decide that maybe that one did have a little lump,” Bray says.
The only strategy that made sense was repetition. Bray photographed every bat that crossed the clearing, knowing that confirmation would only come later when reviewing images on the camera screen. The process was physically tiring and mentally taxing, but it was the only way to give the moment a chance.
“The only technique was to photograph the hell out of every single bat that happened to fly overhead, and then check afterwards zoomed in on the back of the camera to see if it had a pup or not,” Bray says.
After countless unsuccessful frames, one silhouette finally stood out from the rest. There was something subtle about its shape that caught Bray’s attention, just enough to make him hesitate and consider the risk of checking his camera mid-action. That brief decision could easily have meant missing the next opportunity altogether.
“This one that went past I thought did look a little chunky,” Bray says.
Bray lowered his camera and zoomed in on the image, carefully scanning the screen. What he saw was enough to stop him in place, a confirmation that the patience and repetition had finally paid off.
“I dared lower my camera and quickly pull up the image and zoom in on the back of the camera, and yes! Maybe?! Is that?!” Bray says.
When he showed the image to an expert researcher Dr. Annabel Dorrestein who completed her PhD on the Christmas Island flying fox, the excitement was immediate. The small dark shape was unmistakable once pointed out, nestled securely beneath its mother as she flew.
“She confirmed! There it was, a little black fluffy blob snuggled into the bigger black flying blob!!!” Bray says.
The initial thrill was quickly followed by a sense of urgency. Bray knew the image was rare, but he also knew it was far from perfect. The bat had already disappeared back into the forest, and the opportunity to improve on the frame was slipping away.
“We were super stoked, but at the same time, realised we now really needed to be paying attention to try and get a better shot,” Bray says.
Despite two additional days of shooting made possible when their flight was cancelled due to weather, Bray was unable to capture a clearer image. Rain and wind continued to dominate the afternoons, and the bats remained elusive.
“We went out again both evenings after that before we flew out, but it was so rainy and windy I didn’t get anything better,” Bray says.
The power of the photograph lies not only in its rarity but in the vulnerability of its subject. The Christmas Island flying fox is the last remaining native mammal species on the island, following the extinction of four others. Its slow life history and extremely limited range make it particularly susceptible to environmental change.
“They only occur on Christmas Island, which is just 135 km2, and nowhere else on the world,” Bray says.
With such a small population confined to a single location, threats that might be manageable elsewhere become existential here. Invasive species have significantly altered the island’s ecosystem, and feral cats are believed to be one of the most serious ongoing dangers to the flying fox population.
“With flying fox remains routinely found inside the feral cat’s stomaches it seems likely that these cats have been having a heavy impact on the flying-foxes too,” Bray says.
Beyond documenting a rare behavior, Bray hopes the photograph can help challenge the way bats are commonly perceived. Cultural narratives have long framed bats as symbols of fear or disease, leaving little room for appreciation or understanding. That perception, Bray believes, has real consequences for conservation.
“Bats are so often unfairly maligned in the media,” Bray says. “Associated with everything from vampires and witches to disease and darkness, a basic lack of understanding leads most people to hate bats by default, which is tragic on so many levels.”
By showing a flying fox engaged in an unmistakably maternal act, the image invites a different emotional response. Bray hopes it can soften entrenched views and open the door to empathy, even for those who may never have thought twice about bats before.
“Getting people to care about something, or at least not hate it, is a significant step towards helping conservation,” Bray says.
Chris Bray’s belief in education as a foundation for conservation has been strengthened through his relationship with bat researcher Dr. Annabel Dorrestein. Through her work, he has gained a deeper understanding of just how diverse and ecologically essential bats are worldwide. That knowledge continues to inform both his photography and his advocacy.
“Of the 6,758 known mammal species, a staggering 1,500 of these are types of bats. Meaning bats account for almost 1 in 4 mammal species,” Bray says.
For Bray, photography becomes a bridge between scientific knowledge and public understanding. By slowing people down and encouraging them to look closer, he believes images like this can help shift attitudes and, ultimately, inspire action.
“Education leads to a better understanding, which I think inevitably leads rational humans towards compassion and ultimately conservation and advocacy,” Bray says.
A sleepy mountain lion posed for a few amusing selfies after a nature photographer set up a trail camera right next to a kill.
Dave Kiely set the motion-detect camera while on a trip to Patagonia. The fresh guanaco kill attracted nearby South American cougars, or pumas, but one of them decided to stick around and got up close and personal with the camera.
“He even slept next to it, rolled over, took a few ‘selfies’ with the motion camera — like it was no big deal,” Kiely tells PetaPixel.
Kiely says this particular individual is the second-largest male in the Torres del Paine puma population.
“He lingered around all night, then stretched out nearby as if the camera meant nothing at all,” he says.
Kiely, a wildlife photographer who travels all over the world, says when he travels to Patagonia he likes to try out different methods, including the trail camera, which turned out to be a big success.
“I am going back down there again for a winter trip this August,” Kiely says. “So I will try the motion camera again.”
“There has been a lot of interest in these photos, which I am really happy about,” he adds.
Mountain lions, a notoriously elusive but also potentially dangerous creature, are captured on film a lot more often thanks to trail cameras. In November, a filmmaker revealed he left a remote camera inside an old grizzly bear den near Yellowstone National Park for over ten years. One of the standout findings was a mountain lion that revisited the den over and over again.
In December, PetaPixel reported on footage of a skunk confronting a mountain lion in the Angeles National Forest in California. And in 2024, a photographer captured a spectacular picture of a mountain lion in the Verdugo Hills with downtown Los Angeles sparkling behind it.
And that same year, a cougar hunt in Michigan, a state where they are seldom seen, was captured on a trail camera.
Canon is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its PowerShot series in style with a limited edition version of its most popular PowerShot camera ever, the PowerShot G7 X Mark III.
Canon’s PowerShot series began in July 1996 with the PowerShot 600, which Cameralabs‘ Gordon Laing reviewed four years ago as part of his exceptional “Retro Review” series. The Canon PowerShot series has come a long way from its very first consumer-oriented digital camera, which features a 50mm equivalent fixed lens and a tiny 0.57-megapixel CCD sensor.
As of February 2026, Canon has released 200 different PowerShot models in the United States. And no, Laing hasn’t reviewed them all, but he has reviewed some of the most interesting and important ones.
Back to the Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III 30th Anniversary Edition. On the inside, the new limited-edition camera is identical to the standard G7 X Mark III that Canon announced back in July 2019. The new version still has the same 20-megapixel Type 1 stacked CMOS image sensor, DIGIC 8 processor, and 4Kp30 video recording capabilities. It still sports the 24-100mm f/1.8-2.8 equivalent built-in zoom lens that helped set the G7 X Mark III apart from the competition nearly seven years ago.
The PowerShot G7 X Mark III 30th Anniversary Edition also oozes the same charm that has made the G7 X Mark III such a smash hit for Canon. Even today, thanks in large part to social media trends and influencers, the Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III sells very well and is difficult to find in stores, at least at MSRP. The standard black and silver versions are sold out right now at B&H, for example. For what it’s worth, Canon recently promised when discussing its latest financial reports that it is ramping up compact camera production, but it’s unclear when G7 X III supply will be able to meet demand.
What sets the Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III 30th Anniversary Edition apart from its standard siblings is its new graphite finish, an exclusive 30th Anniversary logo on top, and special-edition packaging. For photographers in the U.S., Canon U.S.A. is going above and beyond by including a limited-edition Peak Design Cuff Wrist Strap and a 32GB SD card in the kit.
The Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III 30th Anniversary Edition will be available in April 2026 in extremely limited quantities. While Canon has stopped short of saying exactly how many units will be available, the company tells PetaPixel it will be a “very limited” release. The company is working now to devise strategies to deal with potential scalpers, which is a common problem with limited edition cameras and, frankly, even the regular G7 X Mark III right now. The special edition camera will set PowerShot fans back $1,299, a $419 premium over the standard black and silver PowerShot G7 X Mark III MSRP.
Photographers routinely talk about four digital camera formats: medium format, full-frame, APS-C, and Micro Four Thirds. While there are technically two different medium-format image sensor sizes, and APS-C can mean slightly different things to various manufacturers, those are the “big four,” and they encompass basically every modern interchangeable-lens digital camera. But what about APS-H? That was definitely a digital camera format, so where did it go?
As photographer, YouTube creator, and scandalous lens maker Tom Calton explains in a new YouTube Short seen below, APS-H digital cameras have all but disappeared.
As Calton says, the common and popular APS-C image format owes its legacy to APS film formats. APS, which stands for Advanced Photo System, is a film format that hit the market in the mid-1990s, not long before the digital photography revolution.
Various film manufacturers, including Eastman Kodak, Fujifilm, Agfa, and Konica, made APS film. It was not the first consumer-oriented film format that aimed to displace 35mm’s dominance, but it was arguably the last. APS film formats were smaller than full frame, which meant the promise of smaller cameras and lenses, not unlike the promise that APS-C digital cameras have made throughout the 21st century.
Kodak’s APS dreams began as “Project Orion” in the 1980s, and in the early 1990s, Kodak and its partners, Fujifilm, Minolta, and Nikon, announced a collaborative new film camera system. Testing began in 1994, production started the following year, and consumers could start buying APS film in 1996.
APS comprised three different frame sizes. There was APS-P, APS-C, and the subject of today’s trip down memory lane, APS-H. APS-P, or APS Panoramic, had a 3:1 aspect ratio and measured 30.2 by 9.5 millimeters. APS-C, Classic, delivered the expected 3:2 aspect ratio in a smaller-than-35mm format of 25.1 by 16.7 millimeters, down from the 36 by 24 millimeters of a standard 35mm film frame. Finally, there was APS-H, where the H stood for “High Definition.” This film had a 16:9 aspect ratio and was 30.2 by 16.7 millimeters, not much smaller than 35mm. It had a 1.25 crop factor, while APS-C had a 1.44 times crop.
When digital image sensors entered the mainstream, manufacturers adopted the same terminology as for film, but the precise image area dimensions changed slightly. The first digital cameras did not have full-frame (35mm format) image sensors. They were all “crop” sensors, technically.
For example, the Nikon D1 featured a 2.7-megapixel “DX” CCD image sensor measuring 23.7 by 15.6 millimeters, the same size as Nikon’s APS-C cameras today but smaller than the APS-C film format. Canon’s first DSLR, the D30, launched in 2000 and sported a 3.1-megapixel APS-C image sensor, albeit one with a different size than Nikon’s DX-format sensor. The D30’s sensor was 22.7 by 15.1 millimeters, which is negligibly larger than the APS-C sensor Canon uses in its modern mirrorless cameras, which is 22.3 by 14.9 millimeters.
Canon’s first in-house professional DSLR, 2001’s EOS-1D, ushered in the era of larger image sensors. This groundbreaking camera sported a 28.7 by 19.1-millimeter APS-H CCD image sensor with a whopping 4.15 megapixels. Much like APS-C digital image sensors, Canon’s APS-H sensor was smaller than the APS-H film format introduced in the 1990s, but not by that much. Rather than a 1.25x crop factor, the EOS-1D had a 1.3x crop factor.
There is little doubt that Canon’s adoption of the APS-H digital sensor can be traced back to its collaboration with Kodak, which bore the fruit of a few digital cameras in the late 1990s, including the Canon EOS D6000 and the Canon EOS DCS 1.
Canon continued to utilize the APS-H format for some of its flagship professional DSLRs for years afterward, releasing its very last APS-H camera, the EOS-1D Mark IV, in 2009.
That was the end of the road for mainstream APS-H digital cameras, but APS-H wasn’t quite done yet.
APS-H has been used in some more niche digital cameras over the years, like the oft-maligned Leica M8, Leica’s first digital rangefinder that arrived in 2006, and its slightly upgraded sibling, the M8.2, in 2008.
More recently, Sigma’s last Foveon camera to date used an APS-H image sensor. The odd Sigma sd Quattro H announced in 2016 featured a 26.6 by 17.9 millimeter 26-megapixel sensor. This was, and remains, the largest Sigma Foveon sensor ever made, although Sigma says it is still working on its full-frame Foveon sensor project.
And that is it. Aside from a 250-megapixel APS-H CMOS image sensor Canon showed off in 2024, which is only for industrial applications, the format has all but vanished.
Most camera manufacturers never bothered with the format at all, and those who did, like Canon, ultimately chose to focus on full-frame and APS-C instead. It makes sense, as APS-H gets close enough to full frame that it makes little sense to make lenses specifically for it, and the space savings are relatively small. Nonetheless, APS-H was an interesting format that had its supporters, and it’s worth revisiting it now and then.
A Chinese railway operator has introduced a photography-themed tourist train that offers passengers professional photo shoots as part of the journey.
China Railway Harbin Group launched its first photography-themed tourism train, running between Harbin and Yabuli in Heilongjiang province. The service, known as Train Y783, began operating on January 25. According to numerous Chinese media outlets, the photography-themed train is being described as the first-of its-kind in the country.
The train is reportedly designed to combine rail travel with a structured photography experience. Passengers can take part in complimentary photo shoots during the journey, with professional photographers available onboard to capture images in a variety of staged settings.
To support the photography theme, China Railway Harbin Group has refurbished the carriages and expanded interior spaces to create multiple backdrops. According to China Daily, these include themes such as “ice and snow” scenes and “European-style designs”. The aim is to give passengers a range of photo shoot options without ever leaving the train.
Passengers can also choose from around 40 different costumes provided onboard. Makeup and hair services are available, allowing travellers to look their best for the photo sessions during the trip. Additional props are offered both inside the train and at the stations too.
Photography begins as soon as passengers arrive, with the stationary train at the platform used as an initial backdrop. After the photos are taken, staff assist passengers in selecting the images they want to keep.
According to a report by Travel + Leisure, the launch responds to growing demand for immersive cultural travel experiences. There has also a rising popularity of ice and snow tourism in the Heilongjiang province.
Travel + Leisure also reports that the onboard photography service is intended to meet passengers’ interest in high-quality travel keepsakes and personalised content for social media, positioning the train as both a transport option and a curated photography experience.
The move highlights the increasing interest in photography experiences across China, and comes months after it emerged some of the country’s most popular tourist landmarks were now employing attendants with timers to ensure each visitor has only one minute to take pictures.
A BASE jumper has been charged with a federal offense after he posted an Instagram video of himself leaping off Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park.
SFGate reports that Jack Propeck is facing a criminal complaint for “delivering a person by parachute”. It appears someone tipped off a Yosemite park ranger about Propeck’s video.
The video, which is still on Propeck’s IG page, was posted on October 8, 2025, and is captioned “Track like you mean it”. The song Bleed American by the band Jimmy Eat World is playing in the background. It was filmed on an Insta360 X5.
In the complaint, park ranger Cody Hays says he received a tip that included screenshots from Propeck’s video. “The video shows an individual running off a cliff (Glacier Point) and free-falling through the air above Yosemite Valley,” Hays says. “I recognized the site that the individual jumps from as Glacier Point, a viewpoint within Yosemite National Park.”
According to the affidavit, there were comments on the video asking if the jump was legal. Propeck allegedly replied: “I have a permit”. Hays says Yosemite does not issue permits for BASE jumping. The comments have since been disabled.
Hays says he contacted Propeck by phone to “discuss the video”. Hays claims he told him that it wasn’t him in the video and that “he just posts cool videos to his page”. When Hays pointed out his face was in it, Propeck allegedly told him that he “use artificial intelligence to superimpose his face onto the video”.
Propeck’s Instagram page is filled with videos that apparently show him BASE jumping in locations all over the world. In one video, he lands on a massive sandstone desert tower in what looks like Castle Valley, Moab, Utah. In another video, he jumps from a high building in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.
A few months ago, during the government shutdown, a lack of staff meant that Yosemite saw a surge in illegal activities, including BASE jumping, flying illegal drones, and hikers climbing without a permit.
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