The #1 Community for black and white photography

Photo Stories

Behind The Shot

Photographer Spotlight

Where photographers who shoot in black and white come to learn, share and grow

Ask The Collective

Every photographer has a question they have never asked

Gear, light, composition, editing, printing, or how to see. Ask a question and get a human answer.

Ask your question
  • The Decision Your Exposure Dial Cannot Make

    The Decision Your Exposure Dial Cannot Make

    High key and low key are not filters, and the exposure dial cannot produce either one. Both come from the light we go looking for, how much of the frame each tone is given, and which single thing we protect.

    Read More »

  • Your First Month in Black and White

    Your First Month in Black and White

    New to black and white? This is everything we wish someone had told us in the first month. Why the decision happens before the shutter, what to photograph while you learn, and the camera setting that shows you the picture in gray first.

    Read More »

  • A Photo Story: They Gas Us Because They’re Afraid

    A Photo Story: They Gas Us Because They’re Afraid

    More than thirty metro stations were shut the morning RV crossed Paris for a camera meetup. She left the group walk, went back for a sign she had passed an hour earlier, and found a city still arguing on its own walls.

    Read More »

  • How to Photograph the Dark

    How to Photograph the Dark

    Night rewards black and white more than any other light, and almost everything the camera does automatically is wrong about the dark. Five changes, starting with metering the light instead of the scene.

    Read More »

  • Behind The Shot With Paul Hillerich

    Behind The Shot With Paul Hillerich

    A girl bent over a mandala in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, 2012. Paul Hillerich on the frame he calls The Painter, what remains when color recedes, and why he believes a photograph begins when somebody else looks at it.

    Read More »

  • Do Your Photographs Have a Shelf Life?

    Do Your Photographs Have a Shelf Life?

    A 2026 study of five and a half million posts puts the half life of a social media post at about 18 hours, and a page on your own site at two years. The difference is not quality, it is architecture. Here is how to stock a longer shelf.

    Read More »

  • Salgado and Steinert Are Both in the Next Leitz Auction

    Salgado and Steinert Are Both in the Next Leitz Auction

    The 49th Leitz Photographica Auction runs on November 28 in Wetzlar. Lot 205 is the Leica R6 that Sebastião Salgado used on the burning oil fields of Kuwait in 1991, sold with two signed prints. Otto Steinert sits two lots earlier.

    Read More »

  • U2’s New Album Teaches Us That Your Best Work Is Ahead of You

    U2’s New Album Teaches Us That Your Best Work Is Ahead of You

    U2 release their sixteenth album in November, their first new material in nine years. What keeps The Edge in the band is a song that does not exist yet, and the photographic version of that belief is available to all of us.

    Read More »

  • Life Is Coming Back to Print 90 Years to the Day

    Life Is Coming Back to Print 90 Years to the Day

    Life returns to print on November 23, exactly ninety years after its first issue. The magazine that gave photography a mass audience also decided which half of the story ran. Here is what the first issue really was, and what the new one starts without.

    Read More »

  • Tate Modern Redraws the Map of Pictorialism

    Tate Modern Redraws the Map of Pictorialism

    Light and Magic at Tate Modern is the first major show to treat Pictorialism as a global movement. Two hundred vintage prints, more than eighty photographers from Shanghai to Cape Town, a room built around printing, and a working darkroom in the gallery.

    Read More »

Sharpen your craft and connect with the community on the Foto app @themonochromecollective