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  • Leica’s New 66mm Summicron Began Life as a Navy Spy Lens

    Leica’s New 66mm Summicron Began Life as a Navy Spy Lens

    Leica’s new Summicron-M 66 f/2 reinterprets a rare lens built for US Navy reconnaissance. Here is what Leica announced, and why its unusual focal length and high contrast rendering might appeal to black and white photographers.

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  • A New Film Gives Gerda Taro Her Name Back

    A New Film Gives Gerda Taro Her Name Back

    A new film from Alina Marazzi tells the story of Gerda Taro, the photographer who shared the name Robert Capa and was nearly written out of it. Here is what we know about the film, and why her story matters.

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  • The Black and White Setting Hiding in Every Phone

    The Black and White Setting Hiding in Every Phone

    The grayscale setting on our phones is usually sold as a way to cut screen time. For black and white photographers it is something better, a way to see which photographs actually hold up without their color.

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  • Behind The shot With Jasper Bancroft

    Behind The shot With Jasper Bancroft

    A figure appears in the mist at the Osaka Expo, caught on a Leica M3 loaded with Ilford Delta 3200. Jasper Bancroft on waiting twenty minutes, taking a single frame, and wanting a form rather than a person.

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  • If It Doesn’t Work in Two Tones, It Won’t Work in a Hundred

    If It Doesn’t Work in Two Tones, It Won’t Work in a Hundred

    Seeing in tone gets easier when we stop trying to see every gray at once. Notan, an idea from Japanese art that was taught to American photographers a century ago, starts with just two.

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  • The PEN Is Back, and It Has a Switch Marked Mono

    The PEN Is Back, and It Has a Switch Marked Mono

    OM System has revived the PEN with a rangefinder body, a built in viewfinder and a switch on the front marked Color and Mono. Here is what it offers black and white shooters, and where it falls short.

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  • A Centuries Old Technique For Photographers

    A Centuries Old Technique For Photographers

    Long before anyone pointed a camera at anything, painters were already proving that color was not required to create convincing depth, weight, or emotional force. Grisaille, the centuries old technique of painting entirely in shades of gray, has a lot to teach anyone working in black and white today.

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  • Apple Put a Real Aperture Inside a Phone

    Apple Put a Real Aperture Inside a Phone

    Phones have faked depth of field for years. The iPhone 18 Pro has six metal blades that actually move, and for once the choice about how much of the frame is sharp is yours.

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  • Behind The shot With Mark Archibald

    Behind The shot With Mark Archibald

    Mark Archibald had long kept a quarter mile gravel road in mind as a good sunset vantage point over an Amish farm near his home. When near whiteout conditions hit instead, wind whipping snow until sky and farmland became indistinguishable, he drove out before the roads got too bad, hoping a photograph could actually convey…

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  • The Myth of Photographic Truth

    The Myth of Photographic Truth

    When photography was invented, it was received as something radically different from painting, a mechanical, objective record of reality rather than an interpreted one. That belief was flawed from nearly the very beginning. Here is the real history of photographic truth, and how far we have actually strayed from it.

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