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By Richard R. Barron, May 13, 2013 2:52 pm

This is Abby’s Nikon D3000. Note that she keeps a green aluminum carabiner on the right camera strap. When she’s hiking, she locks it though her belt loop, so it doesn’t fall forward when she leans or climbs.

In October 2010, my wife Abby was spending a weekend attending her family’s annual reunion in Duncan, Oklahoma. I planned to join her late Saturday night, since I was working during the day.

She called me Saturday afternoon to tell me, with quite a bit of frustration, that her beloved Nikon D70S, her main Digital Single Lens Reflex (DLSR) camera since the summer of 2005, was dying. It was seizing up every few frames, and she was missing much of the reunion’s entertainment, a donkey ride. I told her I would bring one of my cameras for her, but it occurred to me that she would need a replacement. I knew that Staples and Wal Mart both had some Nikon D3000 cameras in stock, since I had handled them a couple of times passing through the electronics departments. On my way out of town for the drive to Duncan, I bought one for her.

The D3000 is quite small as DSLRs go, and lightweight as well. It came with a plasticky 18-55mm, but Abby’s Tamron 18-270mm, although heavier, is her usual go-to lens.

Abby shot this Ada Magazine cover photo with her Nikon D3000.

A couple of weeks after the reunion, Abby gave the D3000 its first trial by fire, on our sixth anniversary vacation. She carried and shot the D3000 the whole trip, and it seemed perfect for her. It was small and light, versatile and fun. The images we got from it were very satisfying. She kept shooting with it, and I tapped her, as I sometimes do, to shoot a couple of magazine covers with it, and they looked great. In December 2011, Abby was my second shooter at my sister’s wedding, with the D3000 and the excellent DX-Nikkor 35mm f/1.8. Aside from some difficult noise at ISO 3200, which was easier solved since we shot RAW files, the images were great. I shot with it sometimes too, and I honestly couldn’t find very many flaws with it.

So I was genuinely surprised when I was clicking through some of the reviews on the pages of KenRockwell.com and saw that the Nikon D3000 was “the worst DLSR – ever.” Were we talking about the same camera? You can read the review here. I wish we had known it was the “worst DSLR ever,” so we wouldn’t have made all those beautiful pictures with it.

Years ago I shot with the Nikon D1, and even in its heyday, it was a piece of crap. You could call it innovative or groundbreaking, but it wasn’t a great image maker. We used the D1 because that’s all we had, and in that context, we made great images anyway. It was without a doubt the worst DLSR ever, unless you count the appallingly terrible NC-2000 of mid-1990s vintage. The D3000 is better than those cameras in every way, even when adjusted for era.

Abby captured this bumble bee among flowers at the famous San Francisco de Asis Mission in Taos, New Mexico.

I hate to pull rank here, but I am credentialed. I am a multi-award-winning news photographer with more than 30 years of experience. I am a seasoned photography instructor. I am a magazine editor. Ken Rockwell is well-heeled as well, but as an engineer and technologist. As far as I know, he hasn’t, at least not recently, worked in the daily grind of professional imaging. Mostly, though, he is an internet equipment reviewer with opinions that frequently contradict each other. And his portfolio, at least the one he displays on his web site, is mediocre at best.

One of Ken’s biggest fallacies is his potent criticism of certain cameras combined with his contention that “your camera does not matter.” I think that to people like Ken Rockwell, the camera probably matters more than anything. For me, when my students come to class with 10-year-old point-and-shoot cameras, I tell them, truthfully, that they won’t make pictures with their camera, they will make pictures with their hearts and minds and imaginations, using those cameras.

The Nikon D3000 is about four years old, but if you picked on up on the used market, I would recommend it.

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By Richard R. Barron, May 7, 2013 8:58 pm

The delicate beauty of a deep purple iris shines in late afternoon light.

I live in the county, and springtime is everything you might imagine it is here. It’s a little like a Norman Rockwell painting, only without the Depression-era school children fishing from the pond.

We’ve had adequate rain this spring, and with that, everything has been green. In addition to the extra mowing that I need to do when there is enough rain, there are also more imaging opportunities. When I finished mowing the pasture tonight, the light was so nice and everything was so green that I grabbed a camera – the Nikon D80 with a Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 on it – and set out to make pictures of the iris (my favorite flower) that blooms on the other end of the patch where our defacto Mother-in-law Dorothy lived.

Our tools for the shoot: the Nikon D80 with a third-party battery grip, with the excellent Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 lens.

I like my D80s, although they aren’t as robustly built as the pro hardware I use at work every day. It’s a trade-off for their lightweight compactness. The Tamron is a capable lens, but it, too, isn’t built like the super-heavy Nikkor I use to shoot news day after day.

Initially, I had some success, especially with the deep purple iris along the fence by the barn. The maturing late afternoon light cooperated, and I was pleased. I also got some decent images of the gold-and-lilac colored iris near the rock wall by the road. It is a particularly photogenic color combination. I also noticed that the light purple/dark purple iris was blooming wildly, but was in full shadow. I almost gave up and went inside. I was covered in grass and dust from mowing. But I decided that the light might change in my favor, so I stuck around and watched as it crept into the rose garden and finally touched one iris, then another, just enough that it made beautiful, delicate images with much more evening-light subtlety that the solid-purple iris I’d photographed just 20 minutes earlier.

Before the night was over, I picked a red rose and a peace rose from Dorothy’s garden and brought them to my wife.

A more complex and rewarding image: a two-color iris is illuminated by the last of the evening light.

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By Richard R. Barron, April 13, 2013 9:49 pm

In addition to its capabilities, the HS30EXR from Fuji is a sexy little camera.

In a previous entry I talked about buying matching Fujifilm HS30EXR digital cameras for my wife Abby and me.

First and most importantly, this camera is light and small. I spent many years carrying too much equipment on many of my hikes, the result of which was more fatigue and less fun. As years went on, I shed more and more gear, and in 2009 I bought a Fujifilm S200EXR, with which I felt I could both express my vision and enjoy myself in the process. The HS30EXR is everything the S200 was, plus some key improvements, like a wider angle on the wide end, and high-definition video, in an even smaller package.

In the first week of April I took this small wonder to the Colorado Plateau as my primary camera, backed up only by my Olympus point-and-shoot. The convenience of having only one very small camera bag was huge in itself, since my car was bursting with camping gear and provisions.

Panographs like this of Arches National Park are quick and easy most of the time with the HS30EXR. (Click, then click again to see it larger.)

With two 16GB SDHC cards, ten 8GB cards, and three extra batteries, I set out, and here’s what I discovered about this camera…

The digital SLR still reigns supreme for image quality, but for my purposes, the Fujifilm HS30EXR is an excellent addition to my hiking kit. Here the evening light is captured with amazing saturation and clarity by the Fuji.

Positives:

• Excellent, saturated colors, including a mode that simulates Fuji’s famous Velvia color slide film.
• A huge zoom range, the 35mm equivalent of 24mm to 740mm, with effective, active image stabilization.
• SLR-like handling, with controls where an SLR user can find them.
• Panorama mode; though this feature is starting to be available in most cameras and phone cameras, this camera does a particularly good, high-quality job of making panoramas.
• Full high definition video is smooth and sharp handheld, and focus doesn’t hunt while shooting.
• Battery life was good.
• In spite of my insistence in shooting RAW files, most of the time I preferred the JPEG images from this camera.
• The wide angle of 24mm (equivalent) is the tipping point for me; it is wide enough to satisfy my need to express those key near/far relationships.

In spite of my praise of the HS30EXR’s excellent color, it does have a tendency in some situations to go a bit too green. I found that a slight bump in the Hue/Saturation dialog in Adobe Photoshop was all I needed to perfect the color rendition.

Negatives:

• Smaller image sensor results in higher noise levels, even at the base ISO of 100. I created a custom Adobe Photoshop/Neat Image noise reduction action just for HS30EXR files. ISO 400 is about as high as I would go, and I consider ISO 1600 unusable with this camera.
• When shooting RAW files, after two frames the camera stops taking pictures so it can write to the card. The RAW files are 25MB each, so it takes a few seconds to complete before it is ready to shoot again. For landscapes, that’s not a bad trade-off, but it would certainly be a problem if, for instance, you were shooting a wedding.
• Sometimes the camera goes to sleep and requires turning it off, waiting a couple of seconds, then turning it on again to get it going.
• Despite its SLR-like handling qualities, it is not an SLR, and is not as responsive as one, particularly regarding focus.
• In certain situations, such as mixing mountains and flatlands in the same scene, the panorama mode can’t process the image correctly and gives an error message.
• “P” mode, for Program, tends to pick medium apertures even in situations when more depth of field is required; I recommend “A” mode, for Aperture Priority, for direct aperture control.

In conclusion, I would give this camera a grade of A for my specific purpose of hiking and travel, and a B minus as a general photographic tool.

Bold, beautiful colors like in this image of Canyonlands National Park at sunset, and a compact, ergonomic form, are the fortés of the Fujifilm HS30EXR.

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By Richard R. Barron, March 21, 2013 3:29 pm

The AF Nikkor 20mm f/2.8 is instantly at home on my Nikon D2H.

When I bought my first Nikon in 1982, the Nikon FM fully-manual SLR, in its handsome box was a fold-out wall chart of all the Nikkor lenses available in their system, nearly 90 in all. I framed that wall chart and hung in on my dorm room door. I would think about photography and look at the chart. It was like camera porn.

I photographed Anna in a mirror the day I decided to sell my first 20mm, the f/3.5 of early-1980s vintage.

In April 2011, Robert and I were walking around The Plaza in Santa Fe when we came across a camera store. Unable to resist the siren song of well-treated used cameras, we went in. They had a nice, but overpriced selection that included, among other legendary photographic tools, a manual-focus Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 and an AF Nikkor 20mm f/2.8. Both were in great shape. The 20mm particularly caught my imagination because in my early days of shooting, I owned two different versions of 20mm Nikkors.

In 1983, I saw Nikon’s tiny 20mm f/3.5 at the long-defunct Lawrence Photo and Video in Oklahoma City. Although I had a 28mm, the 20mm represented the threshold of ultra-wide photography, and thinking I would never get a crack at the amazing but ludicrously expensive 18mm f/3.5, I bought the 20mm.

Getting good use out of it, however, turned out to be vastly more difficult, since an ultra wide requires a lot of patience, practice and time, sometimes years, to master. My efforts only led me back again and again to my 28mm, and within a couple of years I sold the 20mm.

In 1985, I started working at The Shawnee News-Star in Shawnee, Oklahoma. One of my beats was to cover the Oklahoma State Cowboys football program. At a game at Lewis Field in Stillwater in the fall of 1986, I saw someone with the “new” 20mm f/2.8 Nikkor, which sported a great big, cool-looking lens hood. From the moment I saw it, I wanted my old 20mm back, but instead I bought the new 20mm and put it in service.

I photographed Anna again on the day I came home with my second 20mm, the f/2.8 manual focus version from the mid 1980s.

As the years went by, I did begin to hone my skills with ultra wide imaging. The 20mm served well, and with the years, the metal lens hood took a lot of dings. Soon it wasn’t even round any more.

Then came digital. My first personal digital SLR was the Nikon D100, whose meter did not operate with older manual-focus lenses. A photographer I knew who still shot film had long expressed an interest in the 20mm, so I sold it to him. That was in 2004. Since then I always wanted the autofocus version of it. The focal length combined with the 15x24mm sensor size my cameras made the 20mm what we might call a “standard” wide angle instead of the ultra wide it was with film.

I turned down buying the 20mm in Santa Fe in April 2011, and again when Abby and I saw it, still under glass at the same camera store, in October of that year. They wanted $400, which was just too much for a focal length I could achieve with a zoom. It wasn’t until I saw one that was well-used and had a minor flaw, which always works to my advantage, on eBay for less than $200 that I gave in a bought one. The big price break for a very minor flaw is ridiculous, since it has no effect on the operation or image quality of the lens, but most people don’t make pictures as much as they collect gear totemistically.

I put it into service immediately, and it is an excellent lightweight alternative to my 12-24mm zoom, and it’s a full f/stop brighter than the zoom. Image quality with it has been superb.

After nearly an entire basketball season with the 20mm f/2.8 AF Nikkor as my primary wide angle lens, I find the image quality and handling to be everything I hoped.

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By Richard R. Barron, January 27, 2013 9:00 pm

Photographers and tourists cluster together to make pictures in Arizona’s Antelope Canyon in May, 2012.

In 2011, I decided to start using the term “Force Op,” which is short for something like “forced opportunity.” This is a situation in which photographers have gathered at an event or location and behave with a herd mentality. I run into this in my profession as a photojournalist: when I am on my own, I shoot the way I know I should shoot. When I am in a crowd of photographers, I can’t help but be influenced by what they are doing, even if it isn’t the best choice for expressing my photographic vision. As the years have passed, I have endeavored to preserve my style in the face of the Force Op. (I talked about this once before here.)

Photographers gather at sunset to photograph Horseshoe Bend south of Page, Arizona, May 2012.

Nowhere is the herd mentality more prevalent than the internet. Years ago I signed up for an account on the web site photo.net, which in 2001 was already voluminously popular. It was so popular, in fact, that fellow photographers in my circle and I felt overwhelmed by its sheer size. I surfed and studied it for a while that year, and found that in addition to its huge user base, almost all of the posts were about equipment, not photography, and that the posts of actual images were showy, yet derivative, fine art pieces that, while often beautiful, got boring pretty fast.

Two and a half years ago I dug through my notes and found my login name and password, and logged in, hoping, at least somewhat naively, that the site had matured into something like a storytellers home, full of images that delivered the promise of a community of true image makers.

It was not to be. Photo.net is, to this day, like most of its internet brethren, a site full of a few artists, and a huge number of gear lovers and number crunchers. There are still, after 12 years, hundreds or even thousands of photographs of brick walls and chain link fences shot in an effort to prove something right or wrong about a certain piece of gear.

As I wrote this, I came across a great example, a thread in the forum called “180 prime: do you agree with this…” Its contents were as predictable as any post in 2001; commenters chiming in on test methods and sharpness figures and camera features and setting suggestions. It was one of photo.net’s “Today’s Most Active Threads,” a feature which is almost always littered with forum posts about the next big camera or the problem with some high-ISO noise settings or complaints about computers being too slow. I have yet to see a “most active” post with the word “light” in it.

My wife Abby and I always have the best time making pictures when we go off on our own and stay out of the picture-taking crowds.

And photo.net users live in a paradigm of ego that implies, and sometimes even insists, that old equipment is bad, and that you are not a good photographer unless you buy new stuff all the time. These are people who honestly believe that they are artists, but who are no more than technicians. They are quick to tell you that your camera is “obsolete” and that you need to “upgrade,” or that they want to “upgrade” a camera that is less than two years old, but despite the fact that they have $20,000 of photo equipment charged to their credit card, their images are as hackneyed and derivative as anyone else’s.

You can add your comment to the forum posts saying that the gear doesn’t matter, vision does, and the next comment or two will pay lip service to it, only to be buried by an avalanche of subsequent comments about autofocus systems or noise levels.

I even have a close friend who has done this to me in the past, presumably in an effort to feel better about his body of photographic knowledge; he looked at a copy of Ada Magazine (I am the editor), glanced at a photo briefly, and informed me that he could “see the stair-stepping in the edges of the image.” My readers never see the stair-stepping. They see the story, and are moved by it.

There is a web site I just discovered that I am hopeful will offer more than photo.net: 1x.com. It seems to be focused on the art, not the hardware, and the proprietors seem to want to keep it that way. I will keep an eye on it, but I won’t participate, at least not until I know its direction.

I try to remember that the internet is not, as a rule, a place for greatness, and that truly meaningful imaging, like truly meaningful art or music or love, comes from within a creative person.

Photographers at Arches National Park in Utah in April 2011: their postures and facial expressions are ruggedly serious and their cameras are all obediently trained on the iconic Delicate Arch. The light at the time, however, was the dullest and least inspirational I have ever seen at this location.

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By Richard R. Barron, January 13, 2013 11:45 am

Lightweight, compact and handy in its day, the Canon Optura 200 has been superseded by devices far smaller, handier, and higher quality, including my smartphone.

All technology becomes obsolete, not matter how impressive it was in its day. Example: phonograph records. In their day, they were the high point in the audiophile scene. Today, their scratchy tone and awkward interface has left them to history.

For years the prevailing method for amateurs to make home movies was with 8mm film. In the 1980s, film was gradually replaced by analog videotape. An odd result of this was that camcorders were typically much larger than the tiny film cameras they replaced. The technology, however, was only a minor move toward improvement, since it was one analog recording method replacing another. True, videotape could be played back immediately and didn’t require chemical processing, but the quality, particularly with cheap camcorders, wasn’t much of a step up at all.

A 60-minute Mini-DV cassette and a 16GB SDHC card; the cassette is awkward and fragile, and there are no larger capacity cassette. At about 200MB per minute, the storage capacity of a DV tape is about 12GB. The SD card is much smaller, has no moving parts, and is available in many different and larger capacities.

At the end of the 1990s, a technology came along that promised to introduce a real improvement in home video quality, DV. In 2001, I bought a Mini-DV camcorder, a Canon GL-1. Compared to the video from almost every analog camcorder of the day, the image quality from the GL-1 was amazing. The biggest contributors to this were the excellent lens on this camera, and the 3-CCD sensor arrangement inside. The audio supplied by the large handle-mounted shotgun stereo mic was second to none. But like a lot of video cameras, it was large, and in 2003, right before Abby and I took our first vacation together, I found the Canon Optura 200 DV camcorder on sale and bought it. And while it was quite a bit smaller, it wasn’t small. It also sacrificed a lot of quality compared to the GL-1, especially its terrible microphone, which picked up the motor inside the camera almost as loud as the subject in the video. DV was good, but not great.

Downsides of DV:

• Awkward transfer to computer, requiring a Firewire cable and 1:1 downloading time.
• Linear recording method means no direct access to files
• More moving parts, such as in the tape drive mechanism and the cassette itself, which can be fragile.
• Video can’t be used by a computer until processed by a program first.
• 640 x 480 resolution, which is the resolution of analog, tube-based televisions.
  

  This is the Canon Vixia HF R10 high-definition digital camcorder I use for news gathering. It’s small and affordable, but the lens is a distinct weakness of this model.

Downsides of camcorders based on high definition digital sensors:

• Some codec schemes not compatible with some operating systems.
• Huge resolving power requires a very sharp lens, which most camcorders don’t have.
• Many, or even most, small digital camcorders don’t have an optical viewfinder, making shooting in bright sunlight very difficult.

Despite the downsides of high-definition camcorders, their video is inherently better because it’s high-definition. When I talk about pixel count in still photography, I honestly believe that in the last six to eight years resolution has become almost entirely irrelevant, but in video, the move from standard to high definition is enormous, particularly when viewed on large media devices like flat-panel desktop computers or the hugely popular big, flat-panel, high-definition televisions.

As is often the case, these advances in technology leave many of us holding once-expensive media devices that aren’t very useful any more. I won’t sell my DV camcorders, and I have made some great video memories with them, but it’s hard to imagine I’ll get all that much use out of them. Maybe I’ll come up with a special project for them, or maybe I’ll just display them at home as a reminder of the fickle nature of technology.

This is my Canon GL-1. In its day, it was one of the top video cameras available. It features an excellent stereo microphone, a stunning ferrite-glass lens, and a sharp, low-noise triple CCD imaging array. In spite of all that, it is completely obsolete.

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By Richard R. Barron, January 7, 2013 4:11 pm

Abby and I are now each the proud owners of the Fujifilm Finepix HS30EXR.

As many of my readers know, my wife Abby and I love to travel, usually in the adventure playground of the American southwest. Over the years we have explored and photographed everything from the haunting slot canyons of southern Utah to the soaring 14,000-foot peaks of Colorado, from the pearl blue skies of New Mexico to the light show of the Las Vegas strip. All of those adventures are centered around photographing these amazing places.

As the years have passed, she and I have tried various solutions for carrying what we need, from basic survival supplies like food and water, to the cameras with which to shoot the landscapes. As time has passed, I have gravitated toward simpler, lighter, smaller solutions, including a one-camera shooting scheme, with cameras that have recently been dubbed “superzoom” cameras due to their increasingly large zoom range. This is particularly significant to me since I carry and shoot multiple big, heavy digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras every day in my job as a photojournalist.

In 2009, I bought the Fuji S200EXR with that in mind, and found that while I was mostly able to use it in most situations as my one-camera solution, it did pose a few drawbacks. (Follow this link and this link to trips that I shot exclusively with the S200EXR). Recently I was poking around the internet, half-heartedly looking for a replacement for this excellent but slightly limiting camera, and last week I decided I had found it: the Fujifilm Finepix HS30EXR, and after discovering that it was amazingly affordable, I ordered one for each of us.

This is me shooting in Canyonlands National Park in 2011 with the S200EXR. That camera is capable of amazing images, and I hope our new HS30EXR cameras are capable of even more. (Photo by Robert Stinson)

My requirements for a travel camera are:

• A lens with mechanical zoom and focus rings (as opposed to the rocker zoom switches on most small cameras)
• An electronic viewfinder as well as the monitor on the back of the camera
• A fairly wide angle of view at the wide end, with at least some telephoto ability
• Lithium batteries (which was a deal breaker for the last two generations of Fuji cameras, which took AA batteries)
• Both RAW and JPEG file formats
• High-definition video, thus replacing the need for a separate video camera
• Image quality that, while it might not rival DSLR cameras, gives me something with which I can make beautiful images, even if it means a little more post-processing
• The handling and feel of a DSLR

The S200EXR came close to all that, particularly in terms of handling and image quality. Some of my favorite images in my recently produced travel book were made with that camera. Its drawbacks were the wide angle end, which, at 30.5mm equivalent, was never quite wide enough, and the standard-definition video quality. The HS30EXR addresses those failings and adds even more on the telephoto end of the lens, even more menu options and features, and is noticeably smaller and lighter than the already compact S200EXR.

The cameras arrived today, and my initial assessments of handling, feel, fit and finish are excellent. I’m sure I’ll make some test images as the next weeks pass, but the real test for this machine will be the next time I am on the trail, hopefully early this spring. Watch this space!

Fit and finish of the Fujifilm Finepix HS30EXR are excellent, as is handling. I have great expectations for this camera.

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By Richard R. Barron, December 20, 2012 3:42 pm

Each of my lenses that has threads for a filter has a filter on it. While some photographers might assert this robs the lens of a small amount of sharpness, I can attest that filters have saved my lenses on a number of occasions.

When I teach my Intro to Digital Photography class at the Pontotoc Technology Center, the second night is usually lens night. I show my students wide angle lenses, telephoto lenses, macro lenses, and so on. One thing they notice right away is that none of my lenses are wearing lens caps. The reasons for this are…

• I need to be ready to shoot as soon as I look through the camera. Lens caps impede that process. Using a cap on my lens would be a little like keeping a cloth cover on my car.
• Putting a lens cap on and taking it off tends to dirty the front of a lens with fingerprints, which is in opposition to the reason for having the cap in the first place.
• Lens hoods actually do provide some shade from extraneous light sources, reducing flare.
• Since they make lenses bigger and more commanding, hoods make a lens look more professional.
• Lens caps actually provide less protection than lens hoods.

What do I mean by that last statement? Simply put, when confronted with impact damage, lens hoods act as a buffer zone, absorbing the energy of a collision. Hoods made of steel will usually bend, and plastic ones often break. An analog for this action might be the crumple zones in the structure of modern cars.

I experienced this twice in recent months. On one occasion, a football player knocked a camera from my hands. It rolled across the field. The lens and camera were fine, since the hood, which was plastic, absorbed the impact. I was able to glue the hood back together. On another occasion, a basketball player collided with my camera. A plastic hood on my lens was crushed inward, but the lens was, again, fine, and again, I was able to repair the hood.

Another advantage to having a hood on your lens is that you can set it down on its front, and the front element of the lens remains above the surface, keeping it clean.

The next line of defense for my lenses is a filter, usually a “UV Haze” filter, or more recently one that’s simply called a “protector.” These optically flat glass filters mount on the front of lenses and take the brunt of the abuse that gets past the hood: rain, smudges, dust, smoke, and so on. I feel like I can clean muddy rain off a $30 filter with my shirt tail, but would never risk doing that to a $1500 lens. On one occasion I was standing next to a door with a camera on my shoulder when someone came through the the door unannounced. The doorknob struck smack in the middle of my lens, shattering the filter. 15 minutes later when I was back at the office, I threw away the damaged filter and put a new one on. The lens was fine.

A maxim in photography is “it is better to keep your lens clean than to keep cleaning your lens.” I feel that using hoods and filters for that purpose serves me well.

Lens hoods come in several types: stainless steel vs plastic; bayonet vs screw-on, and others. This is a collection of old steel lens hoods that fit manual focus lenses from earlier in my career.

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By Richard R. Barron, December 16, 2012 12:38 pm

In my silver-based film days, I had three enlarging lenses, a 50mm that belonged to me, and a 50mm and 75mm that belonged to my newspaper.

As we all know, each of us is a product of our era and circumstance. I entered photojournalism in the early 1980s. It was during a period in which black-and-white photography was probably at its zenith. Kodak, Ilford, Fuji and Agfa were all making exceptional silver-based black-and-white films. Most of the images I made for newspapers were in black-and-white.

One concept I learned early in those days was that of grabbing the viewer’s attention, and one way to do that in the 1980s was to darken the corners of the frame, leading the viewer’s eye to the center of the image. As the decade progressed, we photojournalists, either on our own or influenced by each other, used this technique more, and more dramatically than ever before. In the darkroom days it was called “burning” or “burning in,” since after exposing the print to the baseline amount of light, we could open the enlarging lens to a bigger aperture, and using our hand or a piece of cardboard, we would expose the corners to more light from the negative, making that part of the print darker. (If you are confused about the “more light = darker image”, just remember that when printing a photographic negative, everything is exactly that, negative.)

By the late 80s, the technique was being used so frequently and so overpoweringly it began to be known as the “hand of God” technique. Photographers were burning the corners of their prints so much that they were sometimes black.

The 1990s brought more use of color in newspapers, and this corner-burning technique looked wrong in color, so it slower faded from vogue. To this day I still sometimes burn corners in Photoshop, but only to equalize exposure so the corners aren’t too bright. In the end, the objective is to give our audience, in my case the reader, an image that unhesitantly explains the subject.

This images is from 1988. The technique was to expose our print, then open the aperture on the enlarger all the way and “burn down” the corners. The idea was to propel the viewer’s eye into the center of the image.

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By Richard R. Barron, November 8, 2012 1:54 pm

The biggest event I photographed in my months in Illinois in 1988 was a visit from Vice President George H. Bush. It was then I heard him utter his famous line, “No new taxes,” which turned out to be a lie.

When I was 25 I worked for a short time at a newspaper in Ottawa, Illinois called The Daily Times. It has since merged with a neighboring newspaper and become simply The Times. In my short time there, I shot well, in part because I was partnered with another young photographer named Harold Krewer.

Harold was friendlier than I was in those days, and more outgoing. In years since then, however, particularly after getting married, I am about as outgoing and friendly as anyone I know.

Harold and I loved to shoot news and sports. To add spice to our daily routine of grip-and-grins and rubber chicken luncheons, Harold and I would challenge each other to, for lack of a better term, shoot-outs. We would set out in opposite directions and meet back at the office in an hour with what each of us hoped would be the better image. We both shot well when we did this, and it kept us sharp.

One thing that became more and more apparent as this activity went on was that while I probably had an edge with telephoto lenses, particularly my 180mm, Harold established himself as “the undisputed king of the wide angle.” I can’t recall with total certainty, but I think his go-to lens was the Nikkor 24mm f/2.8, a staple in many photojournalists bags of the era. He made that lens sing. The angles and compositions he got with it were aesthetically and geometrically amazing.

I photographed these two girls at a street festival in Streator, Illinois, in 1988 with one of my favorite lenses of the era, the Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 ED. In recent years I have replaced that lens with the excellent AF-Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 ED.

Like all photojournalists, I use wide angle lenses all the time. My bread-and-butter lens on the job in the last few years has been the excellent Tokina 12-24mm f/4, which is a lens designed for 15x24mm image sensors, so its analog in the film era would be roughly 18-36mm. I’m good with it. I am not, however, the wide angle artist that Harold was.

I talked to Harold on the phone recently. He left journalism some years ago to pursue a career in his first real love, railroads. It was good to talk to him, and particularly neat that he remembered, word for word, the phrase, “undisputed king of the wide angle.”

This is my Tokina AT-X Pro 12-24mm f/4 DX lens, my standard wide angle. Note that the lens hood has a black band around it, which is a piece of bike tire inner tube. It helps hold the hood together because two weeks ago a football player knocked it out of my hand onto the ground. The hood, which is plastic, cracked, but the lens was undamaged.

Comments (2)

By Richard R. Barron, September 17, 2012 3:29 pm

This is Nikon’s 35mm f/1.8 lens mounted on one of my D80s. As you can see, it is compact, and I can attest that it is also very lightweight.

During the heyday of 35mm photographic film, single lens reflex (SLR) camera bodies were very often sold with a “normal” lens on them, a 50mm. There were several reasons for this; the 50mm was small enough that it fit into most photographer’s hands easily, it was cheap to manufacture, it was lightweight, it usually sported a fast (meaning large) maximum aperture, and, most significantly, its angle of view on a 35mm film SLR approximated the perspective of human vision. When you looked though a 50mm lens mounted on a camera, you saw a bright, clear image that was akin to what your eye saw.

Abby made this wedding portrait in evening light. As you can see, even with the tree-filtered sun in the image, there is little flare or ghosting, and the image is perfectly sharp.

Enter the digital SLR camera. Unlike the ubiquitous 35mm film camera, digital cameras continue to be sold with several sizes of sensors, and as a result, the 50mm is a normal lens on some cameras, but a short telephoto on others. On some early digitals like the Kodak DCS315, a 50mm lens gave the field of view of a 130mm on a film camera. Most of the digital SLRs in the field today have sensors of the so-called APS-C size, which is about 24mm x 15mm, or approximately 1.5 times smaller than a 35mm film frame. As a result, the 50mm gives a field of view equivalent to about what a 75mm lens gave on a film SLR.

That left the photographic world with a gap. What was the new normal lens? As it turned out, advances in computer aided manufacturing allowed lens makers to build small, cheap zoom lenses to sell with their new digital SLRs. These became known as “kit lenses,” since they were sold with a DSLR as a kit. These zooms, typically 18-55mm focal length, filled in for the normal lens on the APS-C sized sensor, which, if you do the math, is about 33mm.

Shallow depth of field can isolate a subject very effectively, like with this pair of reading glasses in our living room.

What is decidedly lacking in the kit zoom is a large maximum aperture. Why does this matter? Large maximum apertures give a nice, bright viewfinder images, allow us to shoot in low-light situations, and can give us shallow depth of field to isolate our subjects. To this end, last year before Abby’s family reunion, I bought her an AF-Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 DX, since I knew there would be many low-light situations coming up for which her superzoom would be too dark. It turns out that this is one of Nikon’s gems, and everything we shoot with it is solid gold. Abby misses the ability to zoom, but at a wedding we worked Saturday night, she did a great job of “zooming with her feet,” and she made many great images with the 35mm f/1.8.

As I started to pen this piece, I prowled around the house and the pasture for a few minutes to come up with a few new examples, and once again had no difficulty at all making some rather nice images. The examples I shot today were made at f/2 or f/2.8, since that is exactly the point of having such a lens.

Finally, the price is right. I think we paid $199. I highly recommend it.

I found this board with rusted screws in it down by one of the barns where Dorothy recently had a garage sale. This image is sharp, with that nice large-aperture selective-focus effect not possible with smaller-aperture zooms.

Comments (1)

By Richard R. Barron, August 15, 2012 10:35 pm

In the darkroom era you could purchase dodging kits made of wire and precut cardboard shapes, but I made my own by epoxying a quarter to the end of a piece of wire coat hanger, and a dime to the other end. A facsimile of the dodging tool is still available today in programs like Adobe Photoshop.

When I was first coming up through the ranks of photographers in the early 1980s, the technology of imaging was quite different than it is today. For example, the dominant professional camera of the time was the Nikon F3, a machine that was very much like a photographic sports car. I didn’t have an F3 in the 1980s, largely because it was out of my price range, particularly in college. (Eventually I got a used one in 1998.) But I did watch a lot of professional photographers use them. Since I was a student at Oklahoma University during the 1985 football season, during which OU won a national championship, I saw photographers from from The Dallas Morning News, The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, and even Sports Illustrated, and watched with awe and fascination as they handled cameras like the F3.

Digging through Dorothy Milligan’s house the other day (in advance of having a big garage sale for her), I found this roll of Kodak T-Max 400 film I hand loaded for her about 15 years ago for her to use to illustrate her “Byng News” column. That was long before I became her de facto son-in-law.

As I grew into a career as a professional photographer, I honed all kinds of little skills, such as being able to…

• Load a roll of film into my camera in about eight seconds.
• Load a camera in the dark.
• Load a camera in the rain and keep the rain out of the camera’s interior.
• Guess exposure to within about one f-stop.
• Shoot while walking backwards.
• Load film onto a stainless steel reel.
• Process a roll of black-and-white film in just ten minutes.
• “Push process” ordinary Kodak Tri-X film to stratospheric ISO values.
• Dodge and burn my prints, and print quickly.
• Hand roll 36-exposure film cassettes in about ten seconds.
• And the big one: manually focus.

Okay, in today’s autofocus-saturated world, the last skill is particularly hard for younger photographers to appreciate. The truth is that for the first 20 years of my career, I neither had autofocus, nor did I need it. And to this day, I have a couple of extraordinary manual focus lenses (a 400mm f/3.5, and a 200mm f/2.0) that I can manually focus swiftly and precisely. Realistically, I could never afford to replace them with modern autofocus versions (about $8000 and $5000 respectively), nor would I really have any need to replace them. But I have them, and bring them out once in a while to keep my game and my eye fresh.

Many of my little skills became obsolete in the digital era, but some translated well. This evolutionary process has been a happy journey of learning for me, and I am excited to see what’s next.

Yes, walking backwards while shooting is an acquired skill. It takes more common sense than hand/eye coordination, in the form of actually looking behind you once in a while. (Photo by Robert Stinson)

Comments (1)

By Richard R. Barron, July 13, 2012 9:24 pm

These are the three images I blended using the High Dynamic Range program called Photomatix Pro. The images are two stops underexposed (top), correctly exposed (middle), and two stops overexposed (bottom).

A popular technique for managing contrast in imagery is called High Dynamic Range, or HDR. Typically the technique employs combining three or more images, identical except for exposure, using software.

Photographing the same scene using different exposures is called bracketing. Bracketing was a necessary evil in the days of film, in situations involving complex light that was difficult to meter. We would make three or four or five bracketed images, then pick the best-exposed of the bunch for our final product. Ansel Adams, possibly the greatest nature photographer of the 20th century, regarded bracketing as lazy and imprecise, but of course, he wasn’t shooting news and sports, and could take his time to analyze exposure and contrast.

With digital photography, particularly with features like histograms and blinking highlights, getting the correct exposure no longer requires the “spray and pray” exposure method. Still, bracketing is a feature of almost every digital SLR on the market, and it allows us to create some very interesting images. HDR is easy to abuse, and sometimes the result can be disturbingly garish and unnatural.

Blending several different exposures works by capturing the highlights in the images exposed to properly render the bright parts of the image, and capturing the shadow areas in images properly exposed for the dark portions of the scene, and blending them together.

The example before you is, I hope, interesting and exciting without crossing the line into garishness. I made it at Waterholes Canyon in Arizona in May. I had the canyon to myself, so I had all the time I needed (unlike at Antelope Canyon, which was so crowded it was difficult to find time or space to work patiently.) I had a small tripod with me, and with my Nikon D80 on it with my 12-24mm, I made the three images you see to the right, bracketed at two-stop intervals. I then used a program called Photomatix Pro to blend them. This program has a number of built-in presets for various blending effects, from “Fusion” , which is quite mild, to “Painterly,” which is quite wild. The final image below used the “Compressor – Smooth” blending method, with a few tweaks of the sliders to get the values I wanted. I then exported to image as a 16-bit TIFF, which I edited in Adobe Photoshop with a few more modest tweaks, including using the brush tool to make the sky bluer.

This is the final product, a fairly wild rendition of the original scene, using Photomatix Pro’s “Enhancer – Smooth” tonemapped blending method.

Comments (4)

By Richard R. Barron, June 22, 2012 12:30 pm

I just returned from another adventure in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, and I am excited to say that the trip was a complete success.

In my last entry I talked a about what kind of gear I would select if I needed to assemble a bag for my professional work, which involves a lot of low light situations, fast-moving subjects, and the need to respond quickly to meet my journalistic needs. Big lenses. Heavy cameras.

The Tamron 18-250mm lens is a perfect solution for Abby’s photographic needs, and an excellent choice for my own adventures in remote and wild places.

As my years of prowling some of the wildest places in the American Southwest have progressed, however, one of my goals has been to lighten my load. I’ve tried several schemes over the years. For a while I was carrying two cameras, one with a wide angle and one with a telephoto, like I do at work. It was a heavy and cumbersome setup, and prevented me from climbing or scrambling on some trails.

The first step in reducing this load was to shed one camera and carry one of my lenses in my pack or vest. This has the decided disadvantage of forcing me to have to change lenses in what can be some of the dustiest and sandiest environments a camera can face.

For a while, and still sometimes, I carried a so-called prosumer camera, the excellent Fuji S200EXR. I love that camera, but being a prosumer model, it uses a very small imaging sensor, and despite all my tricks, the image quality just wasn’t as good as a digital SLR.

My compromise for my latest hiking trip was to borrow my wife’s AF 18-250mm F/3.5-6.3 Di-II LD Aspherical (IF) Macro Zoom Lens. I know that’s a lot of alphabet soup to use in a name for a lens, but I sometimes think manufacturers believe that more letters equals more sales. The lens is what we call an all-in-one or a walk-around lens, and literally takes the place of all the lenses, at least in theory, you might need. On my Nikon D80 at 18mm it provides a fairly wide angle of view, and at 250mm it gives me a fairly tight, or telephoto, view.

One reason for giving this lens a try on my latest trip was that I was hiking in The Maze District at Canyonlands National Park, Utah, and The Maze is among the most remote and inaccessible places in the lower 48. The hikes we made from our base camps lasted for eight hours or more, and carrying enough water, not a lot of camera gear, was a top priority.

Lenses in the all-in-one class are, of course, built around optical compromises, not specializing in wide angles, not specializing in telephoto performance, not specializing in close-up quality, and so on. The 18-250mm doesn’t focus particularly fast, and isn’t all that sharp at the telephoto end. Yet this lens allowed me to travel light enough and still shoot the scenes.

Nikon just came out with an 18-300mm lens, and it will be interesting to see how good it is. If initial price estimates are any gauge, it should be spectacular. In the mean time, with the proper discipline and technique, the 18-250mm got the job done, and I am happy with the product it produced.

You can see some of the images I made with this lens here.

Dennis Udink photographed me making pictures in The Maze District at Canyonlands National Park, Utah.

Comments (4)

By Richard R. Barron, May 9, 2012 2:18 pm

Since my college days I have been fantasizing about photography equipment. My first Nikon camera, an FM, came with a fold-out poster featuring the more than 60 Nikkor lenses that would fit my new camera. I framed that poster and hung it on my dormitory room wall, and have had it ever since. That was in 1982, and since then, lens design and capability have changed considerably, though the function of lenses has remained the same, to focus light onto film or a digital sensor.

I dreamed about what I would do with each of those lenses if I had them all, and of course I dreamed about which ones I would buy next. By the late spring of 1982, I had my first newspaper internship, and on my first day on that job I had the Nikon FM, a Nikon Series-E 28mm f/2.8, a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8, and the vaunted Nikkor 105mm f/2.5. I’ve been building and rebuilding my kit ever since.

When I dream about what kind of gear I would use for my work as a news and magazine photographer, it’s tempting to imagine what I would buy if I won the lottery or found an unclaimed satchel of money in the woods behind our house. Since those are somewhat remote possibilities, more of the time I imagine what kind of kit I would assemble if I were starting from scratch today, or recommending what a young professional photographer might need.

In terms of cameras, the pixel count, at least in my work, is irrelevant. More important considerations are things like focus speed, battery life, color rendition, and build quality, the last one being more significant for pro shooters than weekend photographers, since we pros tend to be rather relentless with our gear. I currently shoot with the excellent Nikon D2H, and with modern software and shooting RAW files, image quality and resolution is superb. The only thing I would change about the camera if I could would be to make it capable of shooting video, since I currently have to carry a separate video camera for movies I make for our newspaper’s web site.

Since this article is slated to be my next column for our newspaper, we went outside and made this image of me with my older but still amazing 300mm f/2.8.

If I were buying new cameras today (plural, because I always shoot with two), I would seriously consider the Nikon D300S, not just for its capabilities (including video), but because it is next in Nikon’s line to be replaced, and that might translate into a price break.

I know that many photographers in the market today are pushing for, and buying, the so-called “full frame” sensor for their next cameras, but I have always considered the “full frame” sensor, which is the same size as a frame of 35mm film, arbitrary and somewhat irrelevant. The DX-sized sensors in my current cameras remains an excellent choice for what I shoot.

All of today’s cameras are great. What matters more to me is lenses, since you can cheat yourself out of image quality by putting a $59 lens on a $5000 camera. So what lenses would I consider?

• A decent wide angle lens. At the moment I shoot with the excellent Tokina 12-24mm f/4. It’s an amazing lens, and I have nothing negative to say about it, but if I were starting from scratch today I would look for an f/2.8 in this same focal length range. Nikon makes a couple of excellent choices for this role, but they are quite a bit more expensive, and based on my own experience, I trust Tokina. For me, it’s the  Tokina AT-X 116 PRO DX, an 11-16mm f/2.8 zoom.
• A top notch 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom. I presently use the excellent AF-S Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8, an industry workhorse. It is not near retirement, and gives me stunning results, but if I were replacing it, the only real choice would be Nikon’s superior but crazy-expensive AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II. I know that’s an alphabet soup of specs, but the bottom line is that this lens is indispensable for sports, news, portraits, night photography, you name it.
• A versatile super-telephoto. I have a 20-year-old AF-Nikkor 300mm f2.8 that still serves me well, particularly for night football action. It is huge and very heavy, however, so I don’t bring it out all that often. For many of the daytime sports I shoot, I have a nice AF 300mm f/4 Nikkor I bought used a few years ago. Its maximum aperture is only one stop smaller than the bigger, heavier 300mm f/2.8, so it is still bright enough for much of what I shoot, yet is vastly smaller, lighter, and cheaper. Replacing either of them today is an easy choice: the AF-S-Nikkor 300mm F4D IF-ED. It is compact, lightweight, works well with Nikon’s excellent teleconverters, and is almost four times less expensive than the newest f/2.8 300mm.

A lot of photographers (or wanna-be photographers) will tell you that older cameras have noisier sensors and they would “never shoot above ISO 800″ with thus-and-such camera, but those photographers are ultimately missing the point, that technology and equipment aren’t a goal and don’t make images. A good photographer’s goal is to capture and share a moment in time, and good images are made in the eyes and minds of talented photographers.