I love the beauty and simplicity of black-and-white photography, and there's little process simpler than setting a camera to your preferred black-and-white mode and running wild with straight-of-the-camera JPEG files. But not all black-and-white picture profiles are equal, so which is the best?
Black & White Minimalism Magazine has announced the winners of its 2024 Black and White Minimalist Photography Prize, with the top photographer earning themselves a nice $1,000 award.
Wandering the empty streets of New York during the dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic, photographer Phil Penman captured the city at one of its lowest ebbs.
The reFocus Awards have announced the winners of its 2023 Black and White Photo Contest with striking images entered from 77 countries.
Check out our first YouTube video with Chris and Jordan, and the full written review!
Every time I review a Leica digital rangefinder, the major argument against buying one becomes a matter of price versus practicality. How can I recommend a camera that is neither affordable nor versatile?
The monochrome digital camera is an odd beast - something talked about in revered terms - with echoes reverberating from those hallowed Leica halls because it is only Leica that had dipped its toe in the proverbial monochrome waters... until now.
Somehow, 2023 has turned into quite the year for monochrome cameras. Leica, though, is no stranger to the format and the M11 Monochrom is just the latest in a series of excellent additions to the space.
Lens filters are one of the most affordable yet also most versatile accessories you can stow in your lens bag. Some of them, like polarizers and UV filters, are practically ubiquitous in modern-day photography, used both to lend images a unique look as well as to protect your costly gear.
Pixii says its new 2023 version of its digital rangefinder camera of the same name is the world's first to use a 64-bit processor, which leads the company to claim it as a next-level "software-defined camera."
In this era of ubiquitous high-resolution color screens, it seems hard to recall that photography established itself without color. The medium earned its position in the worlds of journalism, popular culture, and fine arts long before Kodak introduced color film. But this does not relegate black-and-white photography to the basement. The genre remains powerful, present, and widely practiced today, with both film and digital cameras.
One of the more divisive positions that I find in photographers is their rationale for, or dislike of, black and white photography. “I love color,” I hear often. “I’m all about the colors.” Absolutely, color is cool. But I think the arguments in support of black and white are strong (some better than others!).
As promised when it announced the standard edition Q2 Reporter last year, Leica has released the Kevlar-wrapped Q2 Monochrom Reporter fixed-lens camera.
For a long time now, I've been looking a little enviously in the direction of Leica because of the monochrome versions of the M and Q models.
The Leica M10 Monochrom is a $9,000 digital camera dedicated to black-and-white photography, but how does it compare to a $10 roll of Kodak Tri-X 400 black-and-white film? That's what the folks at Camera West TV decided to find out.
In an effort to encourage more people to adopt black, dark-coated animals, photographer Chantal Levesque has been working on a long-term photo project designed to highlight their happiness and push aside stigmas associated with their color and boost adoption rates.
The Leica Q2 Monochrom is really good. I liked using it, I think it takes great photos, and I think people who buy it will be incredibly happy. It's just not the M10 Monochrom, and I need to stop expecting it to be.
Leica has announced the Q2 Monochrom, its latest monochrome camera that joins Leica's black and white heritage along with the M10 Monochrom unveiled earlier this year. It features a high-resolution sensor, a toned-down design, and a macro mode.
Nikon introduced the Nikon D850 in 2017 with a 45.7-megapixel backside-illuminated (BSI) Nikon-specified/Sony-designed/TowerJazz manufactured sensor. The Nikon D850 is regarded as one of Nikon's best cameras and continues to range at the top of consumer DSLRs.
The black and white aesthetic can sometimes be a contentious issue among photographers. The decision to shoot monochromatic images is, for some, an afterthought in a way that other choices like filters, focal lengths, and exposure settings would not be.
I’m not sure on what day I realized that my street photography work had become overly homogeneous, and sometimes asinine. “Oh look, a red car and a red shirt. click.” I’d been in love with the look of Fujifilm’s Classic Chrome (based off of Kodak Kodachrome) and had begun to shoot a lot of color for color’s sake.
Something I’ve always found difficult was knowing when an image should be converted to black and white and when it should be left in color. It’s one of the more contested discussions in photography and there really isn’t a “black and white” or cut and dry answer to it. After much trial and error, I’ve come up with three questions that I consistently ask myself when trying to determine if a color image is a good candidate for B&W.
ADOX, the world's oldest photographic materials manufacturer, has announced a new monochrome film called HR-50 that will be available in 35mm, 120, and 4x5 formats.
Photo colorization is usually done in programs like Photoshop, but did you know that you can achieve good results in Lightroom as well? In this 21-minute video by tutvid, learn how to colorize a black and white photo using only Lightroom.
"Giants" is a beautiful set of black-and-white underwater photos by Australian photographer Jem Cresswell that offers an intimate look at the beauty of humpback whales.
The Leica M Monochrom is special in the Leica lineup due to the fact that it lacks a color filter, which improves image quality and restricts the camera to shooting black and white. If you'd like a monochrome-only camera but don't want to shell out $7,450 for the latest Leica M Monochrom, there are now converted Fujifilm cameras for a cheaper alternative.
If you're new to film photography, chances are that you'll get into shooting black and white sooner or later because you have been inspired by the masterpieces of old masters. But before you become the next Henri Cartier-Bresson or Sebastião Salgado, there are a few introductory things you should know.
Storm chasing photographer Mike Olbinski is known for his gorgeous time-lapse films of thunderstorms, tornadoes, and monsoons. His latest project, however, was a bit different from the rest: it's one of the first storm time-lapse films to be entirely black and white.
Fujifilm just brought its Instax instant film into the world of black-and-white photography with the unveiling of its new Instax Mini Film Monochrome.
If you've been using a channel mixer adjustment layer to help you properly dodge and burn portraits, listen up. You've been doing it wrong, and retouching expert Daniel Hagar wants to explain why.
Colorizing old black-and-white photos with Photoshop has been a popular subject on the Internet over the past few years, as skilled retouchers use their time and skills to offer a new view of vintage images. In the future, though, software may be able colorize B&W photos with the click of a button.
Before the introduction of color film, Many photographers experimented with ways to record color images using black and white mediums. One of the more famous examples comes from Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky and his photos of Russia from the early 1900s.
From the days of Jack Kerouac to the culture of Route 66, it is common knowledge that America is best experienced from its roads. That’s why I decided to grab a friend, rent a car and head off into America’s beautiful southwest to see what all of the fuss was about.
Motorola Mobility has been ordered by a court ruling to fork over $10.2 million to Fujifilm for violating one of the Japanese company's camera patents in its mobile phones.
Leica today announced its new M Monochrom (Type 246), a followup to the M Monochrome black-and-white rangefinder camera. The new camera boasts improvements in image quality as well as new video and live view features.
Michel Rajkovic is a fine art photographer based in Asnieres, France. He travels the world and captures photos of time passing through landscapes by shooting long exposure photographs on medium format black and white film.
Thanks to digital technology, monochrome photography is easier today than ever before. Check out these six black and white photography tips for getting great results.
In an age where digital photography is ubiquitous, and post processing allows everyman to bump saturation levels and create hyper-real images, black and white photography seems like a curious anachronism.
Color film went mainstream in the 1930s with the introduction of Kodachrome, but black and white has stubbornly persisted not only in newspapers, but also as an expressive outlet for many photographers who choose to shoot photojournalism, weddings, portraits and more by converting color digital files to black and white.
Black and white-only digital photography is, at this point, limited to those who own either a Leica M Monochrom or anybody brave enough to (literally) scrape the bayer array off of their digital sensor. But that might not be the case too much longer.
In July, we shared the rumor that Sony was working on a black-and-white sensor/camera, and now, rumors are beginning to swirl that Samsung is doing the same thing.
From the creators of photo-editing apps, Intensify, Focus and FX Photo Studio comes a new black and white image editor for Mac called Tonality. Both a standalone app and plugin for Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture, Tonality is versatile in its implementation into your workflow.
While he was born in 1965, it wasn’t until 2008 when Tatsuo Suzuki first picked up a camera with the intent to be a photographer. Since then, he’s been traveling around, camera in-hand, capturing the turbulent street life of Tokyo. Deep in contrast, strong in grain and often paired with a dragged out shutter, his monochrome images seem to paint a perfect picture of the world around him.