A short while ago I was reading the comments on a restaurant's Facebook group post. The post was a set of dodgy AI-generated food images, and they had that giveaway look. Too glossy, sauce behaving strangely, and bread that somehow looked like a sponge.
Welcome to another Film Friday spotlight! This time we’re turning our attention to a film that is simultaneously quite popular but still somehow underappreciated: Kodak Gold 200.
What started with a $5 photograph sitting on a shelf in a Florida antique store turned into a 76-year journey back through the early career of one of the 20th century’s most respected photographers.
Filmmaker/photographer Michael Blackshire, age 32, has made a documentary about pioneering Black photographers in Chicago, now in their eighties.
Welcome to another Film Friday review, where we like to dig into a particular film emulsion, lay out a bit of its history, share our personal experiences with it and provide some inspiration for why you should try it out. This episode features Rollei Retro 400S, the high speed member of the Rollei Retro family that also includes 80S and Superpan 200.
As debate intensifies over surveillance cameras, a photojournalist in Philadelphia has set out to document the omnipresent devices monitoring us.
“It was just breathtaking,” Wayne says, the awe unmistakable in his voice. “It was the most epic thing I’ve ever photographed in my life.” …
This week we are taking a look at Kodak TMax 100 black and white film (also now known as Kodak Ektapan 100). TMax 100 is part of a family of films that includes both TMax 400 and TMax P3200 films.
A friend of mine works in the film industry. He bought a full roll of Kodak Verita 200D, the stock Kodak built for Euphoria season three, and respooled part of it into 35mm canisters for me. That’s the only reason I have this film. Kodak doesn’t sell it to photographers.
For this Film Friday review, we are featuring one of the sneakiest best and least expensive color films available to 35mm photographers: Kodak Ultramax 400.
In a town close to the French/German language split in Switzerland lies a piece of photographic history that is worth taking a look at. In Marly, Switzerland, lies Machine E, a multilayer photographic coating machine that has been used to bring many world-beating photographic products to the market.
I recently added a camera that shoots 6x6 to my shelf. Square negatives, twelve per roll. I expected to enjoy the lens, the build, the ritual of loading film backs. What I didn’t expect was how much the shape of the frame would mess with the rest of my photography vision.
Toward the end of the summer of 2024, Lomography struck again, bringing a new (sort of) addition to its Lomochrome line of experimental films. The company introduced Lomochrome Color ‘92 Sun-Kissed, a color negative film meant for experimentation and indulging in nostalgia.
If you ask a photographer what they specialize in, they may pause before answering. That pause is worth paying attention to.
Rollei Superpan 200 is a curious sort of film, making it all the better reason to feature it today. The first impression we would give you of Superpan 200 is that on the surface it can be easily unimpressive, but dig a bit deeper and Superpan quickly reveals that it has quite a bag of tricks at its disposal.
Globetrotting Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Marcus Yam has recovered from a work injury, completed a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, and returned to the field, where he now develops, writes, and photographs features.
Ukrainian military photographer Iryna Rybakova captured the moment a Russian first-person-view drone blasted into a vehicle in Kramatorsk on July 15 amid a reported increase in FPV drone attacks on the city.
This project grew out of the many water-drop imaging experiments that my students and I have done over the years. I wondered if combining water-drop photography with portraiture might produce some unique and interesting images.
Cinestill 50D is the less popular sibling to Cinestill’s 800T and 400D emulsions. Because 50D often gets passed over in favor of those other two, we figured it would be a great film to feature on Film Friday. It is a different and lovely film in its own right and deserves a bit more attention than it receives.
This editorial photo shoot began with a simple idea, a question even: could a running sequence shot on the Hasselblad XPan create an editorial story in only a few frames?
I was four years old when my parents took me on my first mountain climb, to the summit of Fairview Peak. By six, I'd climbed my first fourteener, Mount Sherman. Climbing became my proving ground for most of my childhood, and it set a foundation I wouldn't fully understand the value of for another forty years.
We are living through the most photographed moment in human history, and somehow, street photography matters more than it ever has.
The Wall Street Journal says it is keeping pace with technology and protecting its photography archive. But hundreds of freelancers -- anxious about intellectual property ownership -- object to the Journal’s new contract and are withholding their services.
The original Fujifilm Acros film long held a special place in our camera bags here at Blue Moon Camera. We’d say that the whole Neopan line of films was highly favored by us, but we lost Neopan 400 and 1600 some time ago and Acros was the lone survivor.
Over the last few years, image upscalers powered by AI have become remarkably good at making photos larger. The challenge is no longer whether an image can be enlarged to 4K or even 8K, it's whether the result still looks like the original photograph.
C-SPAN likes the adjective “unfiltered.” Before Trump II was sworn in, C-SPAN refreshed its logo with the tagline “Democracy Unfiltered.”
When we first conceived of our Film Friday series, we had a few different motives in mind. The first was that we had long noticed that some black and white films were more popular than others with our customers. We sold a lot more Kodak Tri-X than we did Ilford XP2, for example.
Happy Football Film Friday! Football, soccer, footy... whatever you call it we know what has been captivating your attention these past couple weeks, and will for the days ahead!
In an era where we are obsessed with megapixels, AI-driven autofocus, and high-ISO performance, I find myself regularly putting down my Leica M10-R and my Leica M11-P to pick up a tool that, on paper, has no business competing in 2026: the Leica M9 Monochrom.
Linear Camera Profiles are one of those things that have been floating around the Lightroom community forever, but only a few people seem to use them. And while there are a lot of video tutorials on how to make a linear camera profile for your camera, there is almost nothing on how to use them in your editing workflow.
I have wondered for many years what you would see if you were a tiny ant looking up when walking through a flower field, or a ladybug that has just landed on a flower stem.
If you were to ask us what the perfect color film is, we’d tell you it is Kodak Portra. Exactly which speed of Portra matters only a little as the whole family of films is pretty amazing.
The world was introduced to Cleveland Browns photographer Matt Starkey in 2021 when Denver Broncos defensive player Justin Simmons plowed into Starkey on the sidelines on national television.
On June 9, Chief Judge for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Mary H. Murguia issued an Order in the case of Jeffery B. Sedlik v. Katherine von Drachenberg, aka Kat Von D, et. al. granting an en banc rehearing by the full court.
For several summers, I have taught drone photography in Iceland’s highlands under permits issued by the country’s nature conservation agency. I applied on time, followed every condition, and never received a complaint from a ranger, another visitor, or the agency itself.
Towering 11,249 feet above sea level, Mount Hood is the tallest mountain in the state of Oregon. The mountain is so large that on a clear day, it can be visible from over 100 miles away.
Most photographers I know are in constant motion. New cities, new continents, new visual problems to solve. There's truth in it. Unfamiliarity forces you to look. Familiarity gives you permission to stop. But there's another, less-discussed school of practice that works in the opposite direction: stay. Return. Go back to the same streets until the strangeness burns away and something else appears in its place.
With this Film Friday Review we are shining a light on a new color film that seems to love traveling the world under a multitude of aliases. While we first met this film as Optik Oldschool OptiColour, you might have crossed paths with it under the ORWO Wolfen NC200 or KONO Color 200 monikers.
Photographer Sam (Samantha) Owens is covering her first NBA Finals, representing the long-time advancement of women assigned to document elite sports events.
The world of photography is currently navigating a crisis of authenticity. AI-generated images are now indistinguishable from photographs. Judges and audiences alike can’t tell the difference. Even experts are getting it wrong.
TMax 400 came into the world in 1986, at the same time as its slower speed brother. You can think of them as near identical twins, in fact. Since its introduction, TMax 400 has helped define a whole new generation of black and white films with its tabular grain structure, high resolution, and sharp image details.
Lengthy photo and video editing sessions can take a toll on your body. Sitting for long periods in an uncomfortable, non-ergonomic chair is painful, bad for your long-term health, and it saps artists of their creative energy and flow. The Sihoo Doro C300 Pro V2, the first full-body, adaptive ergonomic chair, promises to keep you comfortable whether you're doing a light editing session or working in crunch time.
Xiaomi has unveiled its latest T Series smartphones, the Xiaomi 17T and 17T Pro, both co-engineered with Leica.
Photographing and writing an in-depth project enhanced the published product, says an award-winning independent photojournalist.
Post-processing has long been the most time-consuming part of a photographer's workflow, and the numbers back that up. According to the 2026 Zenfolio State of the Photography Industry report, about 70% of photographers spend between 26% and 75% of their working time on editing. Only 5% of photographers surveyed feel they are managing the stress of running their business well.
When he got his cancer diagnosis, Los Angeles-based photojournalist David Swanson vowed, “I will get through this.”
Few photographers ever get to work inside the portrait room of a major awards ceremony. Most will only ever see the finished images: the winner holding the award, the controlled lighting, the polished expression, the clean composition.
The media award season -- a time for applause -- also highlights an irony of the fast-changing marketplace: the winners could be gone.
Last year, a client came to me with a straightforward brief: they needed a full lookbook for their new clothing line. But there was a catch. “We don’t want a shoot,” they said. “Just take our phone photos and make them look professional with AI.” I could have said no. Instead, I said yes -- and it changed how I think about my entire career.
Early morning. Black t-shirt, dark blazer. I’m dragging heavy bags down from my apartment just outside Stockholm, heading to a taxi waiting outside. In twenty minutes, I’ll be at Stockholm Waterfront, where three intense days of shooting are about to begin. And I love it.
