Tag Archives: Photography

Leica’s new Formula 1 camera brings carbon fiber and racing-inspired DNA to photography

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Leica and Formula 1 have combined their expertise for a special-edition camera that brings the visual language of motorsports to premium photography. The Leica Q3 43 Formula 1 Edition marks the beginning of a licensing partnership between the two brands, pairing Leica’s established camera technology with materials, textures, and details inspired by the racing cockpit.

Based on the existing Leica Q3 43, the camera focuses on tactile finishes and motorsport-inspired styling. Its black exterior features a non-slip Microvelour covering modeled on the texture of a Formula 1 steering wheel. Genuine carbon fiber appears on the wireless-charging handgrip, rear thumb rest, and soft-release shutter button, introducing a material more commonly associated with high-performance racing cars than Leica cameras.

Designer: Leica and Formula-1

The carbon fiber components are manufactured and tested exclusively in Germany. Their exposed weave adds texture and visual depth to the predominantly black body, while red accents on the shutter release and a function button reference the color-coded controls found on racing steering wheels. Formula 1 branding appears on the top plate and lens cap, and the package includes a co-branded rope strap and custom packaging with a red inlay.

The included wireless-charging handgrip adds practical functionality to the design. A matching thumb rest and soft-release button complete the coordinated set, giving the camera a more distinctive physical identity without altering its fundamental photographic capabilities.

Underneath the special-edition exterior, the Q3 43 retains its 60-megapixel full-frame BSI CMOS sensor and fixed Leica APO-Summicron 43mm f/2 ASPH. lens. The focal length offers a natural-looking perspective suited to street photography, portraits, travel, and documenting the atmosphere around a race weekend. Leica’s Triple Resolution Technology also allows photographers to capture still images at 60, 36, or 18 megapixels.

A hybrid autofocus system and extensive video capabilities round out the imaging package. The camera is therefore suited to more than motorsport enthusiasts looking to document cars and circuits; its compact, fixed-lens format also appeals to photographers who prefer a dedicated camera for everyday visual storytelling.

The most notable software addition is an exclusive Formula 1 Leica Look, developed specifically for this edition. Accessible through the Leica FOTOS app, the profile produces higher contrast and richer color saturation to reflect the visual character of the racetrack and paddock. Photographers can apply the look while shooting and preview its effect in the viewfinder, rather than relying solely on post-processing. The app also transfers photographs and videos to mobile devices.

The collaboration was unveiled at an event at Leica Store and Leica Gallery Los Angeles, hosted by Formula 1 presenter Ariana Bravo and 2009 Formula 1 World Champion Jenson Button. A display of 26 motorsport photographs by photographer Callo Albanese accompanied the launch. Available from October 21, 2026, through Leica stores, the Leica online store, and specialist retailers, the Q3 43 Formula 1 Edition is priced at $9,950.

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This Photographer Spent Weeks in a Suzhou Silk Studio. Here’s What He Found

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When Jing Huang walked into a kesi weaving studio in Suzhou, China, he made a decision that runs counter to almost everything happening in photography right now. He put away the instinct to explain and just started watching. For most photographers working today, that would feel like leaving something on the table. In a studio where a finished piece can take months to complete, it turned out to be the only approach that made sense.

Huang is a photographer with serious credentials. He won the Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award in 2011 for a series called Pure of Sight, and his visual style has always leaned toward stillness, restraint, and negative space rather than the kind of maximalist documentation that tends to flatten its subject. So when Lexar and Leica brought him to Suzhou to photograph kesi artist Hao Naiqiang, known professionally as Jingwei, the choice made sense on paper. What’s harder to predict is what happens when a photographer with that kind of discipline actually sits with a craft as slow and precise as kesi.

Artist: Hao Naiqiang (Jingwei) for Lexar and Leica

Photographer: Jing Huang

Kesi is a Chinese silk weaving technique that’s been around for centuries, and it operates on a logic completely alien to the way most things get made today. The artisan builds a piece thread by thread against a fixed warp, making constant decisions about color, contour, and rhythm with no automation, no shortcuts, and no undo button. There’s an old Chinese saying that captures it better than any technical description: an inch of kesi is worth an inch of gold. Jingwei has been practicing it for more than a decade and is formally recognized as a representative inheritor of the Suzhou tradition. Every finished piece represents a depth of time investment that genuinely earns that comparison.

What Huang found in that studio wasn’t a process to document. It was an atmosphere to respond to. His photographs don’t walk you through kesi step by step the way a documentary would. They move between Jingwei’s hands, the threads, the studio details, and the quieter visual textures of Suzhou itself, using the same painterly restraint that shapes his broader work. He described his own approach in a way that cuts straight to the point: photography, he said, is sometimes about forgetting time rather than recording it. What stays in an image isn’t when it was taken but whether it still carries beauty once the moment is gone.

That’s a fairly specific thing to believe in 2026, when the surrounding conversation about images is almost entirely about speed and generation. Anyone can produce a technically competent photo of silk threads in soft light right now without a camera, a plane ticket, or a studio. What that won’t produce is the weeks of presence, of actually being in a room watching another person work, that shapes how Huang sees and frames a subject.

This is where Lexar’s role in the project stops being a footnote. Grace Su, who heads Lexar’s European operations, made the point directly: before any photograph becomes a print, a press image, or a cultural archive, it first exists as an original file that needs to survive. Leica captures the moment. Lexar protects the file behind it. It’s a clean division of labor that gives the brand a genuine reason to be part of this story rather than just attached to it for the optics.

The show itself, titled Threads of Time: A Journey Through Silk and Lens, is presented at Leica Gallery Amsterdam and runs September 11 to 15. Curator Linda Warmerdam framed the exhibition as a dialogue between the photographer’s eye and the artisan’s hand, and that framing holds up, because both of those things require a body in a specific place at a specific time. No model trained on existing images can reproduce that.

You don’t need to care about textile history or gallery culture for the underlying point to land. Some things take real time, happen once, and mean something precisely because they can’t be convincingly faked. Huang spent weeks in a Suzhou studio to understand what kesi actually is. The photographs are what he brought back.

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ShiftCam’s $26 Stick-On Mount Finally Solves the Lens Case Problem

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I’ve rebought the same phone case three separate times because I liked how it fit in my hand, how it aged, how it just felt like mine. So when phone camera lens systems started requiring a dedicated case to work, I felt a specific kind of resistance. Buying a great lens shouldn’t mean breaking up with a case I already love.

That’s the quiet friction a lot of mobile shooters have been living with. Attachable lens systems are genuinely great for stretching what a smartphone camera can do, but most of them are built around proprietary cases, which means the lens purchase quietly turns into a case purchase too. If you already own a case with the right grip, the right drop protection, the right look, you either give it up or give up on the lens.

Designer: ShiftCam

ShiftCam’s new Stick-On Lens Mount is aimed directly at that annoyance, and the way it solves it is where the design actually gets interesting. It comes alongside the brand’s new S.Mount Camera Case for the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, but instead of asking you to adopt a whole new case system, it’s engineered down to almost nothing: a slim plate that sits flush against the phone’s existing camera housing rather than wrapping the whole device. As the company puts it, the plate exists for creators who prefer to use their existing phone case or want a more universal way to add ShiftCam optics, introducing a stick-on mounting solution that brings ShiftCam lens compatibility directly to the device.

That distinction matters more than it might sound, and it’s a design decision as much as a business one. A dedicated case is a fine solution if you’re starting from scratch, but plenty of people already have a case they trust, and asking them to replace it just to unlock a lens is a real barrier. The stick-on mount sidesteps that by treating the camera module, not the whole phone, as the design surface. It doesn’t try to be a case. It tries to disappear into one, and it does so at a price that feels almost like an afterthought purchase rather than a commitment. At $25.99, it’s priced closer to an accessory than a system upgrade, which is exactly the right instinct for a product meant to lower the barrier to entry rather than raise it.

The renders make the design intent obvious. Rather than one universal black plate, the mount comes finished to match the phone’s own colorway, sitting over the lens cluster in a tone that reads more like a factory camera bump than a bolted-on accessory. That’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of thing that separates a mount you tolerate from one you don’t mind looking at every day. Good hardware design for something this small isn’t about adding presence. It’s about matching the object it’s attached to closely enough that it earns the right to be there.

The engineering underneath that quiet finish still has to hold up. ShiftCam’s case-based S.Mount system uses a 90-degree twist lock to keep lenses aligned precisely over the phone’s sensor, and that same alignment logic has to translate into a plate thin enough to hide under a case. Its X.Series lenses lean on fluorite crystal elements and a proprietary coating specifically so that optical magnification preserves resolution and detail rather than relying on digital cropping, while minimizing color fringing and maintaining edge-to-edge clarity. None of that precision matters if the mount holding the lens in place is flimsy or poorly toleranced, which is why a stick-on plate is a harder design problem than it looks. It has to be nearly invisible and mechanically exact at the same time.

There’s a broader philosophy here too, one I actually appreciate. ShiftCam’s CEO framed the company’s newest lineup around removing friction between having an idea and being able to capture it, with the goal of helping creators get more from the lenses they already own, whatever setup they’re starting from. A stick-on mount is a small, unglamorous way of living out that idea through design rather than marketing language.

I won’t pretend a stick-on plate is as elegant as a fully integrated case, and if you’re buying a phone brand new, the case-based mount is probably still the tidier option. But for everyone else, the ones who already found a case they’re not willing to give up, this is the more honest solution. It doesn’t force a tradeoff between protecting your phone and expanding what it can shoot. It just quietly gets out of the way and lets the lens do the talking, which is really all good design should ever do in the first place.

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