Argentum
The Argentum Camera app for iPhone is a very well rounded tool for black and white photographers within the Apple ecosystem. A special emphasis is put on street photographers, but in the end what works best for fast and immediate shots in the streets should work well for all sorts of monochrome photography that are out there. So I can definitely see people using this app for intimate portrait shots in their studios or for quiet and focused landscape photography out in the fields.
Key to the overall experience of the app is the very well crafted interface. Especially the viewfinder screen and its carefully crafted options are seemingly very well balanced, with a great emphasis on details and functionality. It is a while ago now, but the Argentum Camera app won a reddot design award back in 2016. As good design ages slowly, if at all, most of the interface still feels fresh and polished today, about 10 years after the award. Especially the inherent focus on functionality and ease of use remains as current and effective as it ever was.
I want to pick out some special features of the interface and of the workflow of the app that makes it special among the rather crowded field of camera apps for iOS. First of all there's the spheric shutter button. There's an option to make this shutter button slide upwards towards the edge of your phone right to position where your thumb is when shooting a landscape composition. It sounds rather complicated and stressful when just reading about it, but in my real world tests this option just makes sense and I don't want to miss it anymore.
The Argentum Camera app also offers a mode specifically designed for fast paced street photography where the whole viewfinder area becomes the shutter release button. Also a double exposure mode is available where you can superimpose two different images at a time to expand the possibilities of your creative expression even further. The app is even able to shoot Live Photos with real time processing. There's no real video functionality whatsoever, though. The app focuses on still imagery alone.
Then of course there are the black and white filters. There are six predefined black and white filters which are named after some of the most famous black and white photographers of the past century, there are names like Ansel Adams or Henri Cartier Bresson, like Dorothea Lange or Irving Penn, Garry Winogrand or Yousuf Karsh, which are easy to remember and refer to. I like the overall differentiation of these filters, the easy and fast way to get to them and change them. For me personally I'd very much like to see a simple toolset to create, iterate and save my own set of filters. But I understand that such a feature probably adds quite some complexity to the interface, which maybe can't be the overall goal of a camera tool mainly intended for instant street photography.
What I very much enjoy is the rather expansive and prominent EV slider tool to get the overall brightness of your shot right. It's not hidden and buried in some settings, it's not taken out of the way by some weird gesture, no it's always there and always present, as it should be.
The app was just updated to remain functional even on the latest iPhone models. So even after all these years, the app still appears to be healthy and alive.
Of course there are other camera apps out there that also let you take monochrome images on your iPhone. A couple of months ago I mentioned the rather new and modern app Blark here on this blog. In comparison to the Argentum Camera app the Black app offers all the modern features you might expect of a monochrome shooting experience in 2026. The Black app has real time video processing right built in, also there's a very detailed and fine tuned feature set of controls to manipulate every aspect of your finite image. The Black app also lets you create and save your own set of filters, which feels particularly nice and versatile to me. Nonetheless the Argentum Camera still has its use case if fast paced, hassle free shooting is your main concern.
In the end it comes down to cost, and for a rather simplistic one purpose tool these are not insignificant. The Argentum Camera app comes as a subscription for 3,99 USD per month or 22,99 USD per year, additionally there's a lifetime purchase option available for 44,99 USD.