Weekly News Roundup

News

Feb 8

Canon's record breaking ultra wide, Fujifilm's historic financial surge, and a boutique recreation of legendary cinema glass the week in photography.

Welcome to your weekly dose of all things black and white. The first full week of February has brought a wave of high performance gear and impressive financial milestones. From Canon’s record breaking wide angle glass to Fujifilm’s historic market performance, the industry is showing significant momentum as we head into the spring season.

Canon Sets a New Wide-Angle Standard

On February 4, Canon officially unveiled the RF 14mm f/1.4L VCM. This lens now holds the title of Canon's widest and fastest non-fisheye prime. It features the new Voice Coil Motor (VCM) technology combined with a Nano USM, designed to provide the near-silent, high-speed autofocus required for modern hybrid workflows. Because of its large front element, the lens includes a rear gelatin filter holder rather than standard front threads. It is priced at $2,599 and is scheduled to begin shipping toward the end of the month.

Fujifilm Posts Record-High Revenue and Profits

Fujifilm Holdings reported its third-quarter financial results this week, revealing record-high revenue and operating income. The company’s imaging division saw a 14.6% increase in revenue year-over-year, driven by sustained global demand for the X-series digital cameras and the Instax instant photography line. This financial stability has allowed Fujifilm to revise its full-year forecast upward, aiming for its best fiscal year in history. The success of the X100 and GFX systems remains a primary engine for this growth.

Clever Supply Refines the Camera Sling V2

Clever Supply Co. has released the V2 6L version of their popular Camera Sling. The updated design focuses on physical refinements based on long-term user feedback. New features include a pivoting shoulder strap connection for better weight distribution, bottom cinch straps for carrying extra gear like a tripod or jacket, and a hidden internal pocket for an AirTag. The bag remains constructed from weather-resistant waxed canvas and American leather, maintaining its $198 price point despite the addition of an external accessory pouch and improved internal dividers.

Light Lens Lab Announces the 75mm f/2 SP-II

Light Lens Lab has officially moved its 75mm f/2 "SP-II" lens into the final production stage. This M-mount prime is a meticulous recreation of the legendary Cooke Speed Panchro Series II cinema lens. It utilizes a classic Double-Gaussian design and is designed to provide a "vintage" rendering that is atmospheric and soft wide open at f/2, while becoming "clinically" sharp when stopped down to f/2.8. Notably, the lens provides an image circle large enough to cover 44x33mm medium format sensors, making it adaptable for GFX and Hasselblad users. Pre-orders open on March 1 with a starting price of $749.

Adobe Launches TrueTexture Upscaling in Beta

Adobe has introduced a new "TrueTexture" AI upscaling tool within the Lightroom beta environment. Unlike standard AI enlargers that often smooth out fine details, this model is specifically trained to recognize and preserve the structure of film grain and digital sensor noise. For monochrome photographers working with archival scans or older digital files, this tool aims to increase resolution without losing the organic, tactile quality of the original image. It is available now for Creative Cloud subscribers in the beta gallery.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO IMPROVE YOUR BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY TRY THE LESSONS BELOW.

Featured

LESSON 1: How To Get Started In Monochrome Photography

A Beginners Guide To Black And White Photography

LESSON 2: Light and Shadow

The Heart of Black And White Photography

LESSON 3: Understanding Contrast, Tonal Range, and Texture

In Black And White Photography

LESSON 4: Basic Composition for Monochrome Photography

Framing Your Shots with Purpose

LESSON 5: Shooting with Smartphones vs. Cameras

What You Need to Know for Monochrome Photography

LESSON 6: Camera Settings for Black and White Photography

RAW, Exposure, ISO, and Aperture

LESSON 7: Post Processing Basics

Editing for Black and White Photography

LESSON 8: Styles and Subjects

Exploring Black and White Photography

LESSON 9: Street Photography in Black and White

Capturing the Drama of Everyday Life In Black And White Photography

LESSON 10: Portraits in Monochrome

Capturing Emotion And Expression In Black And White Photography

Featured Articles

Featured

Intuition Is Deliberate Practice in Disguise

We spend a lot of time here talking about being deliberate, studying light, naming what you see, slowing down before you shoot. This is the other side of that coin. Does intuition have a place in photography, and if it does, where does it actually come from.

What the Architect Already Knew Before You Got There

An architect spends years thinking about how light will move through a building before a single stone gets laid. A photographer usually gets an afternoon to figure that same thing out from scratch. Here is what architects already know that can close that gap.

Bring The Viewer With You

Most photographs put the viewer on the outside, looking in, the way you might look through a window at something happening on the other side of the glass. Some photographs do something different. They collapse that distance completely. Here is how to make your images do that.

Photographer Spotlight: Edward Boches

Edward Boches was pulled into photography by John Filo's 1970 image of a woman kneeling over Jeffrey Miller at Kent State, the entire story of a moment held in a single frame. He has spent his career chasing that same rawness, documenting amateur boxers, oyster farmers, Boston's homeless community, and neighborhoods in transition, always in collaboration with his subjects. We asked him about the Yankee fan who flipped him off, then handed him twenty dollars, and why he still hunts for moments instead of waiting for them.

Behind The shot With Rakesh Subramanian

The Milky Way never showed. Two nights of clouds over the Vermillion Cliffs erased the whole reason for the trip. A dinner table tip about a quieter canyon and one last morning before flying home turned the loss into the shot that actually mattered.

Everyone Else Is Leaving. That's Your Cue to Stay

Rain starts, fog rolls in, or the snow finally begins, and most people pack up and head for the car. That instinct is costing you the best light of the day. Here is why the messiest part of the weather is worth staying for.

Weekly News Roundup

A heavier week than most, worth sitting with rather than skimming past. A retired tourist has spent three months behind bars for photographing a train, Sony has made a formal offer to acquire Tamron, a group of tourists sparked real backlash for a photo shoot at Auschwitz, and a wildlife photographer documented one of the rarest sights in the ocean, alongside a new exhibition and a fresh piece of lighting gear.

The One Subject You'll Never See Clearly

Every genre we've written about so far involves pointing a camera outward, at light, at strangers, at a place. Self portraiture reverses the entire relationship. Here is why that reversal is harder than it sounds, and why it might be worth taking seriously anyway.

The Collective Eye No. 5

Every week we feature one photograph from the Collective and invite honest feedback from the community. No names attached, no backstory beyond what the photographer was trying to achieve. Just the image, open for genuine critique.

You Might Need a Fixer

Several of the strongest photo stories we have published here happened because a photographer had someone local vouching for them. A fixer is the formal version of that relationship, and it is far more accessible than most photographers assume.

Starting Your First Project

We wrote before about why committing to a project produces depth that reactive shooting almost never reaches, and promised a follow up with somewhere to actually start. Here it is, along with a real look at how one photographer's project came together one visit at a time.

Behind The shot With David Clark

David Clark has a modest summer home on a small island in Maine, and he has spent years trying not to make the average tourist photo there. When fog rolled in over the water one day, his first instinct, a diffuse sun shot, didn't jazz him at all. It was the frame he almost dismissed, a white trawler moored beside a dock, that turned into something worth the work.

Photographer Spotlight: Andrew Griffiths

Andrew Griffiths has been photographing since he was four or five years old, carrying a bakelite Brownie camera through the Pennine hills long before his mother ever bothered loading it with film. He shoots the whole river catchment now, from moorland headwaters down to the crowded center of Manchester, almost always with a single fixed lens Leica Q and never a plan. We asked him about storytelling over single images, the darkroom he still misses, and the piece of advice he wishes someone had given him at the start.

Weekly News Roundup

A Ukrainian military photographer captured the exact moment a drone strike detonated, tourists at Yellowstone risked their lives walking across a boiling hot spring for a photo, new research raises real concerns about AI editing and wildlife photography, and Godox rounds out the week with two genuinely interesting budget releases.

Learning to See: Part 5

Alex spent a week trying to find the right words, the right approach, the right script for asking a stranger to be photographed. None of it worked until Alex stopped trying to find the right words at all.

Stop Calling Yourself Amateur

So many photographers use the word right there in their social media bio. Amateur. It's meant as a disclaimer, a way of managing expectations before the images even speak for themselves. The word was never supposed to carry that weight, and neither should you.

Tune Your Frame Like a Radio Dial

We already wrote about the noise inside your head, the kind that keeps you from seeing anything worth photographing in the first place. This is about the other noise. The kind sitting right there in the frame, competing with your subject for the exact same attention you're asking a viewer to give it.

A Photo Story: The Music Never Stops

Kenneth Nelson had one goal on June 26, 2004. Document the Mermaid Parade. Then the music found him first, and it never really let go. Eighteen years and more than six thousand photographs later, he is still trying to figure out which single face captures what happens on that boardwalk.

Weekly News Roundup

A genuinely rich week. We lost a pioneering photojournalist, a Dorothea Lange archive has been made public for the first time, a photographer is suing a well known artist over alleged image appropriation, and a new biography uncovers a photographer whose second career was espionage.

What Rembrandt Knew About Light That Most Photographers Don't

Long before anyone pointed a camera at a face, painters were solving the exact problem every portrait photographer still faces. How do you make a flat surface hold the weight and depth of a real human face using nothing but light and shadow. Rembrandt solved it so well that photographers are still using his name for it.

Behind The shot With Rakesh Subramanian

Rakesh Subramanian doesn't remember which book first put the Bolivian salt flats in his head. He just remembers the feeling, and how many years he carried it before his wife's fortieth birthday finally made the trip real. He injured his back crossing the border, felt the altitude at nearly sixteen thousand feet, and walked out into it anyway, both cameras in hand, every single time they stopped.

Learning to See: Part 4

Alex fixed the thing that went wrong in the alley, off center placement, real negative space, a frame that finally had somewhere for the eye to breathe. It worked. Then Alex tried something the camera couldn't help with at all, walking up to a stranger and asking for a portrait. That didn't go nearly as well.

The Label Isn't the Cage. Forgetting You Can Leave Is.

Almost every photographer eventually picks up a label. Street photographer. Landscape photographer. Portrait photographer. There's nothing wrong with that. The label isn't the problem. What it quietly turns into, if you're not paying attention, is.

Photographer Spotlight: Onni Laine

Onni Laine found his direction in Japan in 2024 after years of shooting without a real purpose. What he found there was streets that feel slightly oppressive, slightly paranoia inducing, and a growing dissatisfaction with the silhouettes and clever reflections that street photography tends to reward too easily. He shoots ninety percent spontaneously with a Ricoh GRIII, and he is trying to push his work toward something with more documentary weight. We asked him about all of it.

The Collective Eye No. 4

The Worst Advice You Ever Got About Photography?

Every photographer has a piece of advice they were given once, believed completely, and eventually had to unlearn the hard way. We rounded up some of the classics. Now we want to hear one from you.

Weekly News Roundup

A genuinely substantial week. Ricoh marks 30 years of the original GR1 with a special edition GR IV, freelance photojournalists are pushing back hard on a new Wall Street Journal contract, a rare gangster photography series gets its due, and a veteran street photographer makes the case for why the genre matters more now than ever.

The Collective Eye No. 3

Is Golden Hour the Only Hour?

Avoid midday sun. Wait for golden hour. It's one of the first rules every photographer learns, usually before they've even figured out what aperture does. The observation behind it is real. The rule it turned into might be costing you some of the strongest light you'll ever get.

A Photo Story: What the Wood Knows

Andre Vallgren spent a day photographing a Swedish luthier who has built guitars for Keith Richards and Ryan Adams. What he found was less about the instruments and more about the man building them.

The Monochrome Collective

Darren Pellegrino is a working photographer and the founder of The Monochrome Collective. He believes that black and white photography is not a style, it is a discipline. One that forces you to see light, shadow, and composition with absolute clarity. The Monochrome Collective was built for photographers who share that obsession and who are ready to trade the algorithm for real creative connection.

Weekly News Roundup

Canon's record breaking ultra wide, Fujifilm's historic financial surge, and a boutique recreation of legendary cinema glass the week in photography.

Canon Sets a New Wide-Angle Standard

Fujifilm Posts Record-High Revenue and Profits

Clever Supply Refines the Camera Sling V2

Light Lens Lab Announces the 75mm f/2 SP-II

Adobe Launches TrueTexture Upscaling in Beta

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO IMPROVE YOUR BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY TRY THE LESSONS BELOW.

Featured Articles

The Curious Eye: Practical Ways to Sharpen Your Photographic Vision

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