Since early in 2015, I have been using two Nikon D300S digital cameras for my work at The Ada News. They are great cameras, made better by recent advances in noise reduction software from various vendors. They shoot at eight frames per second, the color is great, autofocus is fast, and they fit well in…
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I know I probably talk too much about getting and staying organized, both in your photography and in your life in general. And it’s easy to say you should keep the good stuff and throw away the junk, but it is much more difficult to decide what really is useful and valuable, and what really…
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A photo buddy and I recently met at the Stratford Peach Festival. He lives in Tulsa, and only occasionally makes time to do professional photography work, so he liked the idea of photographing the Festival. He and I have known each other since college, where we were both photojournalism students. In the embarrassingly large number…
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It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that, as a photographer, I have always been interested in any technology that allows us to see more, see better, and even see things that we can’t really see with our own eyes. I love telescopes. What we saw with the Hubble Space Telescope was nothing short…
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My readers know well that I love old cameras, both digital and film. I make solid, sometimes award-winning images with cameras that some professional might shun, cameras they consider obsolete. Last week I was handed another tote full of old cameras, all of which had been used up and quit working. One of these cameras…
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From the start of my career, the photography press recommended using a filter on the front of all my lenses, and my peers always used a filter on the front of all their lenses. This filter was usually an ultra-violet (UV) blocking filter, but once in a while, especially early in my career, a “skylight”…
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I had another great night at the Oklahoma Press Association’s annual convention June 6. I received first and second place for education story, first second and third place for feature photograph, first and third place for news photograph, first second and third place for photo essay, and first place for sports photograph. ______________________________ Props to…
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I’ve never been shy about suggesting to my readers that the act of updating, migrating, and curating old photographic content is important. A phrase popped into my head the other day that went something like, “No one has ever taped a Facebook post into a scrapbook.” It is a sobering, even depressing, truth that social…
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Something calls to us when we see or hear something that feels or looks innocent. It’s true when we are falling in love, listening to beautiful music, or, in today’s topic, interacting with and photographing babies and animals. My next door neighbor Mike Nipps loves keeping chickens, ducks, guinea fowl, dogs, and one grumpy goat….
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It has been a raining off and on this week. Instead of last year’s endless parade of severe thunderstorms, this week has mostly featured quiet, steady, intermittent showers. I have already made three walks in the rain, one with our summer intern Sara Mearns to get to a house fire, and two with my Chihuahua….
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When the Artemis II mission to fly astronauts to the moon was being prepared for launch, the internet photography media, and its readers, were losing their minds about the astronauts being equipped with “10-year-old technology.” The technology in question is the Nikon D5, a digital single-lens-reflex design that represented the top of the line when…
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Are you a photographer, or a shopper? Are you an artist, or a dilettante? Do you really want to make pictures, or are you following the crowd? Are you into photography for the right reasons? I’m going to go down a rabbit hole here – or possibly open a can of worms – whichever analogy…
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Last week I discussed my Uncle Wes’ Canon FTb, a gift to me from his daughter, my Cousin Lori. In the same box she gave me was a much older, odder camera, the Canon II. This camera came out of the post-war period of the twentieth century when camera names were pretty straightforward, unlike today’s…
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I was attracted to photography since I was a young kid. The first camera that I owned myself (meaning not my family’s shared camera) was a Yashica GSN Electro 35. A lot of us had this camera in the 1970s because it was cheap, and made great images if you knew what you were doing….
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Spring is about to spring forth, and with it, color. Photographers across the northern hemisphere will pull their cameras out, charge their batteries, format their storage media, and generally “suit up” for the coming weeks. It’s a time of brown grass turning green, flowers and trees blooming, outdoor gatherings that include Easter and Ada’s excellent…
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