Shadow & Light Monthly #6

Shadow & Light is a list of curated photography stories, features, techniques, news and inspiration that I’ve come across this month.

This month we take a look at why the Leica M10 Monochrom is more than a gimmick and see the long-term effects of Instagram’s compression algorithm. We take a look at ‘Bertha’, the camera that will shoot the largest slide ever made and look back at a rather fun advert for Kodak’s Instamatic Flashcubes from the sixties.

So, with no further ado, I give you this month’s Shadow & Light Monthly. Go grab yourself a cuppa and enjoy this month’s selections below. Please let me know in the comments what you think.

Pick of the month – Why Leica’s M10 Monochrom is more than just a gimmick

I’ll admit I only took a passing interest to the previous release of Leica’s Monochrom camera. A digital Leica that shoots only black & white seemed like a very expensive gimmick to me. Leica have just released the new M10 Monochrom and again I looked at the discreet black body and lack of the famous red dot and saw another marketing ploy. However this article over on DPReview caught my eye. I hadn’t really understood what made this camera special before now. Specifically the impact that skipping the Bayer filter array has on the final image quality. It’s fascinating to read more about the technical aspects that make the very specialised (and expensive) Leica M series camera even more specialised in this Monochrom model. Will I ever buy one? Absolutely not. Would I like one? Er… yes please!

Additional reads

Here’s What Happens When You Post a Photo to Instagram Hundreds of Times

A really interesting read over at PetaPixel. Photographer Janick Entremont took a portrait of himself, uploaded it to Instagram, downloaded it, and repeated that process over 300 times to see what the photo-sharing service’s compression algorithms would do to the image. The resulting project is titled @facetinction | A (con)temporary portrait.

How We Built Bertha: A Giant Camera that Will Shoot the Largest Slide Ever Made

I stumbled across this fascinating write up on ‘Bertha‘, an incredible hand made camera with a sensitive area of 1.10×1.10 meters, a bellows draft of about 4 meters and a 1000mm f6.3 lens. She’s a real beast!

Kodak’s Instamatic Flashcubes from the 1960s were pretty groovy

I do love a good retro camera advert and they don’t come much more groovy than this beauty from the 1960s demonstrating how you can take an incredible four flash pictures without changing bulbs! The whole advert is a thing of beauty to be honest so enjoy! If you’re interested in learning a bit more about these funky little cubes, there’s a great write up over on LightStalking.

Until next time…

I hope you enjoy the articles above. Don’t forget you can follow my Shadow & Light magazine over on Flipboard if you’d like to see more of what I’m reading if you like what you’ve seen here.