Camera
Celebrate our January photo challenge: The art of black-and-white
Editors’ Photo Challenge: Your best photos of 2024
The theme for our January Editors’ Photo Challenge was black-and-white street photography, one of the most frequently requested themes since we started our Editors’ Photo Challenges last year.
We asked you to show us the city through your lens in glorious black-and-white photography, and you absolutely crushed it! To be blunt, we were blown away; you submitted more fantastic images than we could possibly present here, and we had a tough time judging this one. You’ll find our top picks on the following pages, presented in random order.
If you want to view all the photos from this challenge and see how your fellow readers voted, head to the challenge page to see the complete set.
Want to enter some other photo challenges? Here’s a list of currently open and upcoming challenges hosted by members of the DPReview community.
Open challenges
- Laughter (closes Feb. 3)
- Sunset Silhouette (closes Feb. 7)
- Repeating Patterns (closes Feb. 7)
Upcoming challenges
- Show us BREAD! (starts Feb. 3)
- Fortnight 44: My Best Non-bird Photo Shot after 2025-01-20 (starts Feb. 3)
- Black and White Landscapes (starts Feb. 4)
- Photographer(s) photographed (starts Feb. 8)
- The Power of Flowing Water (starts Feb. 8)
Smile!
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Photographer: fatplanediaries
Description: I have so many questions about this photo. The dude in the subway window. Why’d he blink? Was he posing for me? What was he texting at? And most importantly, how the heck did I get perfect focus of him at 1.2? A lucky picture.
Equipment: Sony a7R IV + Sony FE 50mm F1.2 GM
Moment in Zadar
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Photographer: dksano
Description: While exploring Zadar, Croatia, I left the main busy pedestrian walkway to explore less trafficked side streets. Here, there were local people and some gritty old apartment buildings. I walked past a group of young boys, transfixed by a mobile device. I quickly took a few photos. I still wonder what they were looking at.
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T20 + Fujifilm XF 27mm F2.8
Mesmerized
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Photographer: Daneland
Description: A young girl watches soap bubbles with a mesmerized expression on Southbank, London. If you look carefully, you can see reflections of the Tate Gallery in the individual bubbles.
Equipment: Leica Q2 + 28mm Summilux
Kings of the street
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Photographer: SFStreets
Description: Every year, the San Francisco Low Rider Council holds the “King of the Streets” event, where lowriders cruise along Mission Street. This year I caught a skateboarder come riding by one of the entrants, between 17th and 18th Streets. We all survived the encounter.
Equipment: Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 II
Hot food noodle
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Photographer: rkny
Description: This was taken in NYC in the summer of 2012. The bench the fellas are taking a break on is outside a deli, but I’m not sure if they work at the deli or a nearby restaurant. I was fascinated by the variety of poses they struck and the angles they created. I also felt for them, as they were clearly working some arduous job.
Equipment: Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100
Daredevils of Fitzrovia
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Photographer: Mike Engles
Description: Fitzrovia is a term coined to describe the area around Fitzroy Street and Charlotte Street in London. It was a bohemian area occupied by well-known writers, musicians and artists such as Jacob Epstein, Nina Hamnett, Dylan Thomas, Augustus John, and George Orwell, who frequented the Fitzroy Tavern on Fitzroy Street. They had an annual festival, and this picture was taken in June or July 1976 on Charlottes Street.
Equipment: OM System OM-1
Nemo
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Photographer: Vampscunos
Description: An old man drinking a coffee alone on a cloudy evening in a crowded bar. He was nobody to them. He was nobody to me. He was nemo.
Equipment: Fujifilm X100VI
Olympic moon in Paris
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Photographer: Samu photo
Description: I captured this picture on a warm evening in Paris during the Paralympic Games. The city buzzed with energy, lively and filled with tourists and locals alike. The festive mood of the Games was palpable, with cafés and streets teeming with crowds. People perched on every available spot, soaking in the atmosphere and scenery. I feel this photo is a snapshot of Paris embracing a special moment.
Equipment: Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II + Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 9-18mm F4.0-5.6
Day’s end, Times Square Station, 1976
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Photographer: phototransformations
Description: From 1974 to 1979, I roamed the streets and subways of NYC with two cameras and a tape recorder, documenting street life. Decades later, I compiled them into a book of stories and photos. I was working as a researcher at a stock photo agency on Park Avenue South. I changed trains at Times Square. This woman epitomized the weariness of the day-to-day grind at a time when unemployment was the highest in decades, garbage piled up on the streets, and crime was high. The camera was a Robot Star II, which captured square-format images on 35mm film. Its wind-up spring could actuate the shutter multiple times per second. It was the perfect street photography camera.
Equipment: Robot Star II
Imagine all the people
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Photographer: ebaphoto
Description: The photographer picked his best vantage point to view the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island, NY, the site of the nation’s largest art parade celebrating the start of the summer season. He exuded confidence with his chosen equipment; each of his images would be perfectly captured. On the other hand, I felt the time I spent shooting in the set-up area was more interesting than in the parade itself.
Equipment: Nikon D90 + Nikon AF-S DX Nikkor 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR
Buddhist kids driving through Myanmar
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Photographer: JohnnyBE
Description: I took this photo through the front window of a taxi while driving through a city in Myanmar. I could not believe someone would or could fit seven Buddhist kids on a modified motorcycle. They seemed very happy with the situation.
Equipment: Nikon D5
Marching in peace
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Photographer: Andreas Sander
Description: At noon in the spring of 2023 on the promenade of Tel Aviv. A young couple seems to be marching in step through the heat. The sunshade casts a wonderful pattern on the square. No one suspects anything of the developments after October 7. It is siesta time.
Equipment: Nikon Z7 + Nikon Nikkor Z 24-120mm F4 S
Monte Sant’Angelo di corsa
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Photographer: Luigi Azzarone
Description: While I was visiting a beautiful town in Italy, the Puglia region, I saw these works drawn on the wall. I waited for the right moment to immortalize the beauty of youth, the desire to live.
Equipment: Nikon D7100 + Nikon AF-S DX Nikkor 16-80mm F2.8-4E ED VR
Man on the bridge
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Photographer: Tim Zhou
Description: Some new architecture has been built and has slowly transformed the city center of Swansea, Wales, in recent years, including this footbridge that was initially called ‘The Taco’ and ‘Crunchie’ by the locals.
Equipment: Sony Alpha NEX-5N
Three old ladies
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Photographer: Pretoret
Description: This was shot a while ago and is still one of my favorite street shots. I was walking around one of my city museums when I noticed the winter late afternoon light falling on people arriving at the top of a staircase. Lucky I was. I didn’t have to wait very long before this group of elegant old ladies suddenly appeared. I just had to instinctively trigger… the decisive moment?
Equipment: Olympus OM-D E-M5
Storm surge
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Photographer: Rye Clifton
Description: We were on the top of a building in São Paulo filming helicopters. We had to take cover because of some heavy storms. When the rain stopped, the clouds opened, and we got a few minutes of amazing depth.
Equipment: Sony a7R V + Sony FE 24mm F1.4 GM
Inside West, self-portrait in Greensboro
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Photographer: West of Cary
Description: In/outside a defunct eatery and not yet defunct human in Greensboro, NC. Strolling the edge of the annual NC Folk Festival, this building invited me to peer through the window’s reflection into its heart…
Equipment: iPhone 15 Pro
Mohinga
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Photographer: ElaineSpringford
Description: Mohinga is considered to be Myanmar’s national dish. It is a fish broth with noodles, served with various accompaniments. It is traditionally eaten for breakfast, served at home or more often on the streets on the way to work/school. Here, you see a street vendor at dawn, selling mohinga to the market traders.
Equipment: Nikon D70
Light stroke at Pena Palace
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Photographer: leoncaruana100
Description: This arch at Pena Palace caught my eye as a frame for the cobblestones. The shifting sunlight suggested some interesting composition with shadows, but the ever-mingling tourists made for a busy scene. Finally, after some 45 minutes of patience and several pictures, I was rewarded with this clean and central subject.
Equipment: Panasonic Lumix DC-GX9 + Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 II ASPH Power OIS
Street spirit
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Photographer: KeithFord
Description: As far as capturing the spirit of life on the streets of India, this is one of my favorites. The men crammed into the back of a truck, waiting to leave the market somewhere in Rajasthan. I believe Jojawar, a lesser known village in the Aravalli Hills.
Equipment: Nikon D200
Hydrant at sunset, NYC
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Photographer: robsl
Description: In the later months of summer, an oppressive heat accompanies the soft glow of the early evening sun. During this time, it’s inevitable for someone to open a hydrant to let people in the neighborhood cool off. (Some say the NYFD will do it on occasion, but I couldn’t say where I heard that.) Until my time in the Dominican district (around 98th), this had always been a trope from a film – but that day, I fully understood what it meant and why this activity had become part of the social fabric. I remember sweat dripping off my forehead as I captured this from the 5th floor of a walk-up. Soon after, I went downstairs and got my feet wet!
Equipment: Canon EOS 30D + Canon 24-105mm F4
Street light
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Photographer: unView
Description: This photo captures the sometimes amazing light and shadows that appear underneath the ‘L’ scaffolding on Franklin Street in the River North neighborhood of Chicago. Sun has to be out in Chicago! And late morning to midday, so the light angle maximizes the shadows.
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 +Fujifilm XF 27mm F2.8 R WR
Lone soul in a snowstorm
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Photographer: Hooyat
Description: In a snowstorm, offices and shops closed early, and people were told to go home or seek shelter. I crossed the downtown street when I noticed a lone man crossing on the opposite side and direction. He leaned as he was struggling against the howling wind. I stopped in the middle of the street, took out my camera, and timed the moment. Later, at home, the photo inspired this haiku poem: Flakes dance like echoes; A single breath cuts the cold; Heartbeats pierce the night.
Equipment: Ricoh GR III
Don shadows. Or not…
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Photographer: agott123
Description: It was winter 2018. I just saw the shadow on the wall and immediately thought of the, at that time, POTUS. I just waited as long as I could to get something else in the picture to balance the composition.
Equipment: Olympus PEN E-PL7 + Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 17mm F1.8
Eyes
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Photographer: tolgatacmahal
Description: This refugee child, who came to Gaziantep, the closest Turkish city to Syria for refugees escaping from the Syrian war in 2015, was watching a card game played in a coffeehouse when he suddenly saw me and opened his eyes wide at me, and at that moment I pressed the shutter button.
Equipment: Sony Alpha NEX-5N + Sony E 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 OSS
| Diagram: Canon |
For many years there was something of an ideological struggle between the brands that pursued optical image stabilization and those that adopted an in-body approach. Or, to be more precise, between fans, owners and proponents of those brands.
The pro-lens crowd would willfully overlook the fact that their brand had adopted optical stabilization in the film era, when it was the only practical option, and focus on the fact that optical stabilization is better at correcting the large image displacements that can occur with telephoto lenses.
The in-body side of the debate focused on the fact that sensor-shift stabilization worked with every lens they had and was better at correcting the impact of translational movements, that can bedevil wide-angle and macro shooting.
We’ve just found a diagram by Canon that rather elegantly settles the debate, showing the relative strengths and weaknesses of optical and in-body stabilization. As the diagram makes clear both sides were right. And wrong for indulging in cross-brand bickering, obviously.
What Canon points out in the accompanying, rather marketing-led article, is that this means you can get further benefit by co-ordinating the efforts of both approaches and having them work co-operatively. This is something we first saw with Panasonic’s Dual IS 2 system and that had subsequently appeared across most brands, in the intervening years.
As a site that does its best to explain some of the more complex behaviors in photography, we appreciate a good diagram more than most.
| Images: Caldigit, Lomography, Canon |
Welcome to the weekend! The flow of accessories has been a little light this week – not a surprise, given that CES wasn’t all that long ago – but there’s still a few interesting things to round up. First, though, let’s see what’s on sale.
For the video fans
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Sony’s video-focused a7S III is definitely getting up there in years, but it’s still very capable of shooting great-looking 4K footage with very little rolling shutter. It’s currently on sale for $300 off its MSRP.
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| Photo: Richard Butler |
If you shoot equal amounts of video and stills, the Nikon Z6III is one of the most capable mid-range hybrid cameras we’ve tested, and it’s currently available for $300 off MSRP.
New printers
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| Image: Canon |
Good news for photographers who like printing their work: this week saw the launch of two new photo printers from Canon, the Pixma Pro-200S and the imagePrograf Pro-310. The Pixma, which costs $599, supports paper sizes up to 99 x 33cm (39 x 13″), as well as borderless prints.
The higher-end imagePrograf, which retails for $899, is able to print up to 238 x 33cm (129 x 13″) and uses nine colors of ink along with a “Chroma Optimizer” cartridge. Unlike its predecessor and the Pixma it uses a matte black ink for “deeper blacks on fine art paper,” according to Canon. Both models have a 3″ LCD to show you ink levels, printer status, and more, and support wireless printing.
Instant Special Editions
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| Image: Lomography |
Lomography has been selling the Lomo’Instant Square Glass camera for a while now, but recently debuted two new editions of the folding instant camera. The first, known as “The Blues” has a denim look, while the Pemberley Edition is beige, wrapped in a pink and green “pastel leather.”
Apart from the new look, the cameras are the same as the regular Lomo’Instant Square Glass. As the name implies, they use a glass 45mm equiv. lens, take the Fujifilm Instax Mini or Square film, and fold down so they’re easy to carry around. At $149, there’s no price premium if you want one of the fun designs.
Even more Thunderbolt 5
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| Image: CalDigit |
Now that some of Apple’s latest computers have Thunderbolt 5, which supports speeds up to three times faster than the 40 Gbps Thunderbolt 4, we’re starting to see a steady flow of accessories made using the standard. Caldigit, a company mainly known for its docks, has entered the game with its Element 5 hub, its first Thunderbolt 5 accessory.
The Element 5 plugs into your computer with a single cable and can provide up to 90W of charging power to it. It gives you access to three additional Thunderbolt 5 ports, two 10Gbps USB-C ports, and three 10Gbps USB-A ports. Essentially, you can use it to turn one port on your computer into 8, all while keeping it charged.
Can you hear me now?
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| Image: Tascam |
Tascam has released two new portable handheld recorders with 32-bit float audio, which more or less ensures that your recordings will never peak. While they’re mainly aimed at musicians, they have 3.5mm line outputs that will let you use them as an external microphone for a phone or camera, though you’d have to also have the unit recording if you wanted to make use of the 32-bit float function.
The DR-05XP, which costs $119, has stereo omnidirectional condenser microphones, which Tascam says “can withstand high sound pressure levels,” preventing distortion even in loud environments, such as a concert. The $159 DR-07XP, meanwhile, has “adjustable stereo condenser microphones” that let you capture a wider sound stage. Both recorders feature USB-C, so you can connect them to a computer and use them as an external microphone.
Blackmagic Camera 2.0 comes to Android
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| Image: Blackmagic |
Blackmagic’s camera app for Android is getting more powerful with a 2.0 update. It now supports select tablets, like the Xiaomi Pad 6 and Samsung Tab S9, as well as Samsung’s latest S25 smartphones.
The free video recording app, which gives you manual controls that most built-in camera apps don’t, also now lets you control multiple phones running the app from a single device. For example, you could have two people shooting with the app on their phones and monitor both streams on a Samsung Tab S9. This feature has been available in the iOS version of the app for a few months but is now available to even more users. The 2.0 update also adds support for recording 120 and 240 fps on some Sony Xperia phones and includes general performance improvements.
<p class=”actionButton”><a href=”https://www.dpreview.com/news/7253788487/leica-pelican-travel-cases-smallrig-light-lacie-ssd”>Read last week’s roundup</a></p>
| Photo: Getty Images/DeadDuck |
Nobu Teranishi, Albert Theuwissen and Eric Fossum, who between them made key breakthroughs in the development of both CCD and CMOS sensors, have collaborated on an article for the open-access “Annual Review of Vision Science” journal.
The article: “Digital Image Sensor Evolution and New Frontiers” takes a look back at the significant improvements in sensor technology and the hurdles that each one overcame.
Understandably, it’s quite a technical read, having to describe challenges of both engineering and physics in an article that covers nearly 60 years of developments.
The article touches on details such as the Bayer filter and microlenses, as well as design improvements at the silicon level.
In doing so, it helps explain why we’ve seen the changes in technology that we have.
“CCD technology can be seen as a special, dedicated technology developed and optimized for imaging,” the authors say, but the costs and restrictive yields this brought prompted a push to be able to manufacture sensors using mainstream microelectronics technology.
Click here to read the full article
CCD to CMOS
As the article makes clear, the need to transfer the charges from pixel-to-pixel before they could be read out made it difficult to design faster or higher pixel-count sensors and was challenging to fabricate. It’s hard to imagine the high resolutions and responsive live view and AF systems we have today, had technology continued to iterate on CCD designs.
The article also hints at the timelines involved in these developments, with the first active pixel CMOS designs being created from CCD underpinnings at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1993 and appearing in Canon DSLRs just seven years later. The camera phone was the “killer app” for CMOS, as it demanded the low power consumption and small size that CMOS offered. The boom in demand for smartphones “supercharged” the development of CMOS, and the world’s largest sensor maker, Sony Semiconductor, stopped making CCD designs in 2015, a little over a decade after the active pixel CMOS chip had been created.
Stacked CMOS
As we approach the present day, the article suggests that Stacked CMOS designs with complex on-chip analog-to-digital conversion could help overcome some of the bottlenecks that otherwise prevent the development of high-speed, high-resolution sensors.
What’s next?
The authors go on to summarize the areas of imaging that are currently pushing sensors forward (including the need for high DR video with no motion artifacts or sensitivity to flicker for autonomous vehicles), and the technologies being pursued beyond conventional photodiode designs. These include Single Photon Avalanche Detectors (SPAD) and the Quanta image sensors that Fossum is working on. It also looks forward to the possibility that technologies such as color routers could allow us to move on from the Bayer design that only captures a single color at each location.
The authors stress the downsides of imaging sensors becoming ubiquitous, but as photographers, their work and those of their colleagues in both industry and academia, have changed our world hugely.
This article was brought to our attention by one of the article’s authors, CMOS pioneer and forum regular Eric Fossum, now a professor at Dartmouth College. Fossum was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at the White House earlier this month.
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