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By Richard, August 29, 2010 11:47 am

Shooting with the 400mm in Ada's Wintersmith Park

When I was in college, my photographer friends and I had what we thought were the best cameras and lenses we could afford. I remember by the time I was looking for my first job after college, I had two Nikon FM2s and an FE2, plus a 28mm f/2.8 Nikkor, a 50mm f/1.2 Nikkor, a 105mm f/2.5 Nikkor, and a 200mm f/4 Nikkor. It was a pretty balanced bag, and in the right hands, it was capable of great imaging.

These lenses, as you can guess, were not as capable on the long end as they could have been, especially for low-light, and, of course, there was always something out there I wanted, thanks to tons of free Nikon brochures and magazine ads. One lens in particular stood out as possibly the ultimate in photographic capability and hubris, the gigantic AI-S 600mm f/4 IF ED Nikkor. In the fall of 1985, I saw this lens once in a while at Oklahoma University football games, usually in the hands of a Sports Illustrated photographer, but sometimes belonging to the Dallas Morning News or Denver Post. I don’t remember if the Daily Oklahoman had one (if you are one of my friends from the Ok, please chime in.) It was actually pretty rare to see the 600mm, but it made appearances because OU was in the process of building a national championship season.

An image I made of a blue heron in Wintersmith Park with the 400mm

Oddly, the Associated Press photographer in Oklahoma City did not have the 600mm, although he talked about wanting one. Instead, he had a well-used AI 400mm f/3.5 IF ED Nikkor, which, while not the coveted 600mm, he described as “a sweet piece of glass.”

As the years passed I kept my eyes open for a well-used 400mm like that one, since new ones cost $5000 or more. In 1997, while Nikon was offering new autofocus versions of its big glass, I found one and bought it for $1400. From the first frames of my own through it, I knew why this lens was so highly regarded. It focused smoothly and effortlessly, and was super sharp, especially wide open. With the Nikon TC-14b, my 1.4x teleconverter, it was still very sharp, and gave me the reach I needed for pretty much anything in sports or news.

Now, in the digital world, this magnificent 1980s-era lens still shines, although I don’t lug it around when I am super-busy. On days that I just have, say, one baseball game, I’ll bring it, and it absolutely shines with its sharpness and its ability to fill up a frame from all the way across the diamond or all the way down a soccer field. It is also a fantastic lens for nature photography, for animals like bird and deer that require a lot of reach. And despite the fact that it requires manual focusing in an autofocus world, it’s still a sports and news champ. If you can snag one, I highly recommend it.

Recent baseball action, about 20 minutes before sunset, shot from the third base dugout at the Roff High School baseball field, with the AI-Nikkor 400mm f/3.5 ED IF at f/4, 1/2000th of a second, on the Nikon/Kodak DCS 720x.

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By Richard, August 22, 2010 1:37 pm

Altering this image was quick and easy; unless you were there, how would you know how it should actually appear?

Since the introduction of Adobe Photoshop and similar software programs in the early 1990s, photography has changed in some very fundamental ways. Since Adobe developed Photoshop in large measure to aid advertising entities in creating more effective ads by manipulating and retouching reality, it inherently aids in retouching everything that passes through it. Recent iterations of Photoshop, which include a feature called “content aware fill” that is specifically designed to make altering images easy and fast, create an environment in which original photographs are only the beginning building blocks of a final image.

Every step toward making it easier to create altered photographs is a blow to the integrity of photography. I’m not talking about photography as entertainment or art, but as a means of recording the human, historical and natural worlds around us. How will we know in 50 years if the photo we see is a record of history or an excellent fake? Some people in my line of work, photojournalism, have lost their jobs because they faked content. But suppose in ten years, when Photoshop 1000 is out, it’s completely impossible to tell if an image has been manipulated? Who writes history then?

Another relevant issue we face today is the decline of the newspaper industry. The way in which it is declining is, in my estimation, a threat to free societies throughout the world: newspapers aren’t being replaced by latter-day electronic news agencies, they are being replaced by bloggers, Tweeters, Facebookers, “e-reporters”, and an increasingly less-qualified cadre of people who supposedly “report” the news simply because they have access to technology. Their biggest deficiency is not that they lack credibility, which they do, but that they lack accountability. Who do you sue if you are slandered by some anonymous guy who took your picture with an iPhone and posted it somewhere? What stops him from claiming you are stalking grade-schoolers?

I don’t know how to stop the slide from genuinely representing the world around us to a world that is represented by fakes, except to say that I myself will always maintain the integrity of my imaging.

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By Richard, August 16, 2010 12:39 pm

My best shot at the Bedrock Store, Bedrock, Colorado in October 2009; while it is nice, it isn't as successful at expressing the place as Abby's image.

For as much photographic information and experience as I have under my belt, there is one thing I can’t teach you: vision. How you see the world and how you want to express that to others is something entirely personal to you, and something only you can develop and nurture.

When I talk about vision or “your eye,” I am really describing how you feel about what you see when you are making pictures. When I teach photography, I can help students understand how to translate their vision into an image, but I can’t give them the vision. In some ways, in fact, teaching students the “rules” of composition is really just teaching them to copy other photographers.

An excellent example of different visions expressing the same scene is when my wife Abby and I shoot together, which we both love more than almost anything else we do as a couple. Sometimes we shoot commercial jobs for local businesses, sometimes we shoot magazine images together, and sometimes we travel. Recently we worked the Miss Oklahoma Scholarship Pageant together.

Through all of this, each of us brings a unique vision to our imaging, and we almost always get different images while shooting the same scene, often standing right next to each other. I like this because it keeps my images from getting stale; Abby sees the scene in a fresh way, and brings that to our cadre of images.

When I learned to fly some years ago, one axiom in aviation I liked is that your pilot certificate is a “license to learn.” When I am done teaching a photography class, I hope I have given my students that license.

The Bedrock General Store in Bedrock, Colorado as photographed by my wife Abby in October 2009; this image, in my opinion, expresses more about the mountain air and the antiquity of this charming roadside attraction.

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By Richard, August 14, 2010 7:20 pm

Latta vs Byng softball today; a longstanding rivalry, these two teams are never lacking conflict.

In sports photography, it’s one thing to talk about shutter speeds, ISO settings and focal lengths, and entirely another to discuss the real heart of sports, what we call the moment of conflict. Sports is mostly competition between humans. Much of the time the best way to visualized it is to capture this moment of conflict, when human meets human. It can be quite intense.

To capture it requires several things, most of which are between the photographer’s ears. One of the best is an at least cursory understanding of the sport you are working. Another would be a little bit of planning based on that knowledge, such as anticipating where the action will be happening the most, and where you need to be to see and photograph it. Timing, as in when to expect that the conflict will peak, is critical as well.

A camera with a fast frame rate can be something of a distraction. It can mess with your sense of timing, and if you lean on it too hard, you end up with boring sequences that seemed entertaining in the camera, but just don’t quite tell the story. It can also make it difficult to make sure that your autofocus, if you are using it, is doing what you want it to do.

I also like to have the ball in my sports photos. I think it adds an element of storytelling that helps draw the reader in without having to do much explaining about that is happening.

I shoot a lot of sports, and my community tells me they like my work. I try not to bore them, and every time I can find a moment of human conflict to show them, I feel I’ve done my job well.

An Ada Lady Cougar softball third baseman leaps over a sliding McLoud Redskins base runner; either of these elements alone is only modestly interesting, but together they bring the viewer into the moment of conflict.

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By Richard, August 13, 2010 10:27 am

A Byng Lady Pirates infielder collides with a Byng outfielder during a matchup against the Ada Lady Cougars in the annual Back to School Classic softball tournament co-hosted by Byng and Konawa. This image was made with my 80-200mm f/2.8 AF-S Nikkor on one of my D2Hs.

You would think the first week or two of August would be part of summer, but for most of the schools around here, the new year is here. This means, among other things, that I am working sports, often in the blazing heat of the afternoon sun, shooting early softball and baseball tournaments and football media day events. As long as I remember to grab a Gatorade (blue is my favorite), I don’t get too worn down by the 102ºF weather.

I’m already happy with the product I am getting.

As far as football goes, late August and early September are the choice months, since there is some daylight remaining at the start of the 7:30 pm games, and I don’t have to rely on the usually very poor stadium lights at the small schools around our area. Our sports editor usually sends me to a small-school game early Friday night, then home to ECU’s Norris Field for the Ada High Cougars as my nightcap, when the schedule allows. When Ada is away, I often will go to two small schools that are near each other.

By the first of October, baseball and softball will be at playoffs, as will I.

Summer is over.

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By Richard, July 21, 2010 2:46 pm

An image from Saturday's Peach Festival in Stratford, Oklahoma; it was a welcome assignment.

My job as chief photographer  for our small-town newspaper involves a lot of “hurry up and wait” situations much of the time. Now, though, summer time, things are different. School is out, so sports assignments are far between. People are out of town on vacation, so there are fewer local structured activities. It’s Oklahoma hot outside, so most of the population is hunkered down in their asphalt igloos, awaiting September.

My photo assignments are fewer as well. I shoot the occasional baseball summer camp and the odd ribbon cutting, plus any spot news that comes up, like fires or crashes. And I can catch up on housekeeping chores like burning CDs and tidying up in the newsroom (those who know me know that my office is always tidy.)

While I am not assigned to go shoot stuff, we still have a daily newspaper to fill and sell, and it always looks nicer and sells better with decent photos in it. That leaves me to go out and find images. In college we called those images “wild art.” At another paper where I worked, we called it “enterprise art.” Here at my newspaper I just say, “I’m going feature hunting.” As many in my line of work know, in the summer it pays to go where the people will be cooling off, and starting this year that place is our new splash park.

It’s possible to go there too often, so I space it out, but when I do go, it’s a gold mine of fun, interesting images that put local faces on the front page and make everybody feel good about summer.

In three weeks, the fall season will begin with baseball and football, and school will be back in session in a month, but in the mean time, you’ll see me out at the shaved ice stand or the front yard with a sprinkler, making the pictures of summer.

Splash park image from today, made with my 180mm at f/4; this lens is super sharp and has great bokeh. I gave my editor a different image than this one because the little girl is looking straight at me, disturbing the "observer" point of view.

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By Richard, July 12, 2010 4:31 pm

After a hiatus from teaching, I am teaching a session of digital photography for beginners starting tonight at 6 pm. It’s been nice having Monday nights off, but I’ve also missed teaching. I have eight or nine enrolled tonight, and I am hoping for a great session.

September 2008 Photography Class

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By Richard, June 22, 2010 3:08 pm

One thing I try to emphasize to my students about shooting action photos, whether they are working as a sports photographer or shooting their children at ballet recital or a soccer match, is the value of filling up the frame. I see a lot of inexperienced shooters, and even some professionals, shoot action too “loose” as we say, meaning that the subject only occupies a small portion of the frame, usually right in the middle.

Lucky shot: while I was walking to my spot in shallow left field to work using my 300mm f/4, this play happened, and although I was way overlensed, it worked out just right.

The problem with this twofold. The first issue is wasted pixels. When you shoot too loose, you either bore the reader with a lot of irrelevant clutter toward the outside of the frame, or you crop out literally millions pixels for which you paid when you bought your camera. The second issue is depth of field; when an image is shot too loose, the isolation of the subject that is so valuable in drawing the viewer’s eye to the action is lost, even with large apertures like f/4 or f/2.8.

As a result of wanting to fill up the frame, I try to shoot from a position fairly close to the action, and I try to shoot with “big glass.” Estimating the right lens and position for your sport gets easier with practice, but it’s still a fairly subtle art. Generally speaking, with an APS-sized sensor in most digital cameras, you can start with these numbers:

• For baseball, a 300mm from a position in one of the dugouts about halfway down the foul line, or a 400mm from farther down the line. This will give you home plate, second base, the pitchers mound, and the closest outfielder.
• For basketball, I like to shoot from the base line, since there is usually more room to work. An 85mm gives nice tight action out to about the three-point line, and a 200mm gives you much of the rest of the court. I like a fast (meaning bright like f/2.8) 80-200mm zoom here too.
• For softball, the layout of the field sometimes dictates whether I use an 80-200mm or a 300mm, but both can work from the right spot.
• For soccer on a regulation-sized field, 400mm or more is the only real choice, since the action can move to the opposite end of the field in just a few seconds.
• For football, an 80-200mm from 10-15 yards downfield from the line of scrimmage, or a 300mm from about 25 yards downfield. Sometimes if there is enough light, I’ll camp in the end zone with a 400, a spot that has the advantage of backgrounds not cluttered with fans or players.
  

  Oops! From the middle of the third base foul line, my 400mm f/3.5 was just a little too tight.

Why not use a zoom instead of a 300mm or 400mm? Typically a consumer zoom that gives you 300mm will be f/5.6 at that focal length (and is typically not sharp unless stopped down the f/8 anyway), and f/5.6 or smaller won’t allow shutter speeds needed to stop the action, nor will it give you those nice, smooth out-of-focus backgrounds that isolate the subject like an f/2.8 or f/4 will. The one zoom I might recommend for a lot of sports would be the AF-S Zoom-Nikkor 200-400mm f/4, for which Nikon wants almost $6000.

Of course, when I shoot super-tight stuff like this, there are times I miss the shot because of heads cut off, baseballs out of the frame, or frames that are entirely empty, but when I can “hit” these images, they end up looking great.

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By Richard, June 3, 2010 11:52 am

An alternate title for this post might be, “What I Don’t Do Best.”

For my entire career, I have had the privilege to work a job that I love. I am a news photographer. I get to attend and photograph events that shape the lives in my community, from lazy July 4 parades in one-street towns to college football national championships; from high school graduations to swaths of tornado damage; from kids playing in the park on beautiful days to my least favorite thing to photograph: human suffering.

House fire today in Pickett; an image like this can tell the story to our readers without invading personal space.

I thought about this today as I drove away from a devastating house fire in the small community of Pickett, Oklahoma. I could see a dense plume of grey smoke hanging in the morning sky as I approached, listening to firefighters on the scanner saying the house was “fully involved.” The brick home was completely engulfed when I arrived, and just as I did, so did the owner of the property. She ran up to the burning remains of her home and was immediately restrained by firefighters. She kept screaming, “It’s my house!” Finally she fainted, and was carried to an ambulance, where she apparently regained consciousness and continued screaming.

I could not make myself photograph her. I know a lot of news photographers would, and those images might then win awards for them. But throughout my career, I have always been reluctant to intrude on violent, intimate, terrible moments like that. In the past when I have, I always did it from a distance, with a long lens, trying to hide behind obstacles and remaining quiet. In the moment, it is very obvious that no matter how prestigious the accolades might be for such a photograph, it is a violation of a private, horrible event for someone.

As the years have passed and I have become a welcome member of this community, winning awards has become less important to me than telling stories in a compassionate way.

Previously unpublished image of the catastrophic "Funeral Crash" of May 1992, when four members of a family driving to a funeral were killed when struck head-on by a pickup truck; I used my 300mm and kept my distance to shoot images like this one that day.

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By Richard, May 25, 2010 9:18 pm

Emily Estes shoots a basketball camp at Roff High School today

This week I have an intern, an eleventh grader from Latta High School named Emily Estes. She seems pretty excited about learning photography from me. I had her shoot a bunch of the same stuff I shot, then edit and caption it. In most cases, we submitted her work for publication. She’s something of a natural.

I have her for a couple of days, and I will definitely put her to work.

My summer intern for the week, Emily Estes, making pictures at The Eccentric Duffer golf course west of Ada

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By Richard, May 20, 2010 10:13 pm

The new Tokina 100mm on one of my Nikon D100s

I finally broke down and did it. After months of watching Wil Fry with envy as he shot amazing images with his Sigma 50mm f/2.8 Macro lens, and then in March watching with envy as Michael got ahold of a 105mm f/2.8 Sigma Macro and made some amazing images, I decided I wanted to have a “true” macro lens, not just a zoom or two that would focus close.

For many years I carried the famous Micro-Nikkor 55mm f/2.8, and while it was an excellent lens, it wasn’t quite what I wanted in a macro lens.

My box arrived from B&H today, and inside was the Tokina 100mm f/2.8 D AT-X Pro lens. I took it out into the pasture and shot with it in the evening light, and the images it has produced so far are excellent. The build quality and handling are much to my liking as well. I think it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

A Spotted Cucumber Beetle on a Mimosa leaf tonight; this bug is about the size of a match head

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By Richard, May 19, 2010 2:04 pm

I don’t get to do this very often, since most of the lenses I own and use are built so well that they don’t really wear out. Most of my lenses are Nikon’s Nikkor brand, and especially the older ones are build to last. The lens I am discussing today is not a Nikkor, though, but a Sigma 14mm f/3.5 of 1997 vintage. It was fairly well-built, but was “rode hard and put up wet” too many times, and finally just fell apart.

The Sigma 14mm f/3.5; this lens was decently sharp, but oddly balanced and quite heavy

I bought this lens after a conclave of newspaper photographers in Enid, Oklahoma in the summer of 1997. One of them had an example of this lens which was, at the time, the only real wideangle lens for the digital cameras of the day. The sensors in those cameras were 16x20mm, even smaller than the APS-sized sensors of most popular digitals that followed, making the 14mm only modestly wide angled. Feeling that I would probably be going digital soon, I picked up one of these lenses and started shooting with it. Of course, at the time I was still using film, and a 14mm is an incredibly wide lens when shooting 35mm film. I found that I had to go out of my way to use it, and when I did, the results were a little odd for news and sports. I did make a few truly memorable images with it on film, including one of a severe thunderstorm with a lowering cloud base south of Ada in 1998.

Wall cloud with inflow, Chimney Hill south of Ada, Oklahoma, spring 1998

In 2004, my photographer friend Michael and I took it with us on a hiking trip to southeastern Utah, where it acquired an ugly scratch on its huge front element. From then on, it require a bit of Photoshop skill to remove the grey fuzzy area the scratch produced in most of the images.

The Sigma 14mm after dissection; it is now a collection of parts

But the 14mm soldiered on for a while longer, until a couple of years ago its autofocus mechanism gave out, relegating it to being focused by hand.

Then this week I was searching for some other piece of gear when I saw it forlornly sitting in the back of the lens cabinet. I decided that since spring sports are done and it was going to be a light week, I’d put a few frames though it, just for kicks. When I picked it up, though, the aperture ring fell off in my hand, and I knew that the Sigma was dead.

Like I said, I don’t get to do this very often, so it is a fun little journey to take apart these complicated pieces of optics and gears and see how they are made. I got most of it disassembled, but stopped when the tip of one of my screwdrivers snapped off in a tiny screw in the bowels of the thing. Now my cranky old Sigma 14mm is a pile of odd souvenirs.

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By Richard, April 27, 2010 12:53 pm

3.5-inch floppy disks typically hold 1.44MB of data

At some point in my class, students ask me how I store my images. My answer is basically always the same: thoroughly. I explain to them that the world of data storage is, unlike film and photographic prints, always in motion. 20 years ago the storage medium for computers was floppy disks. Ten years ago it was Zip© disks. Five years ago it was a mix of  CDs, DVDs, and USB storage. Today, as always, we are faced with trying to sort out which of these media has a future, and which new media will be a smart choice for the future.

My own preference has been to back up my files, be they photo files or other document, on multiple media. Typically my data both at my newspaper and at home gets stored as follows:

• Two copies on archival-quality CD-Rs (Compact Disk, Recordable), in a full-sized jewel case with the spine labeled so I can find it when stacked with other disks. At work, I burn one each month, and at home I burn when I get to the limit a CD will hold, about 700MB. One key reason I still prefer CDs for my archiving is that once it is created, a CD-R can’t be accidentally erased. I make two copies and store them in two different locations, usually one at home and one at my office.
• When I get enough CDs to fill a DVD, usually about six, I burn that group onto a DVD. A single-layer DVD will hold about 4.7GB. I don’t believe DVDs are as reliable an archival media as CDs, since DVDs were never designed with the error correction levels of CDs. However, I find that DVDs are fairly reliable, and having all that data on a single disk means spending less time repopulating my hard drive with archived images after a crash.
• And yes, it is probably inevitable that all hard drives crash, but I keep an “Archive” volume at work and at home, since a big hard drive will allow me to access thousands of image and video files whenever I need them. At work, my computer system bus allows me to have an archival hard drive internally, and at home I have a large external drive. If you think hard drives, even solid-state ones, are just as reliable as CDs, ask yourself this: when was the last time a power surge or lightning strike trashed all the data on a CD?
• Since I have an Apple computer, I also use a native program called “Time Machine,” which automatically backs up literally everything I do on my Mac every hour. It, too, requires an external hard drive, but if you look, you will find that hard drives are very affordable.
• I don’t really like the idea of archiving on USB keys (also known as thumb drives), CF cards, SD cards, etc., for two reasons: 1) They can be erased with ease, and 2) They are so small that they are easily lost, and can also easily fall into the hands of strangers.
• The article I read that inspired this entry suggested that “cloud storage,” which involves uploading your files to a commercial storage site, is a possible answer, but I don’t like that idea except as a second-tier backup, for one reason: that company could go out of business.

If you have data on old media like floppy disks or Zip© disks, all is not lost. It’s already too late for older floppy disks like 5.25-inch and older. While it will soon be too late to migrate other media to modern storage, you still have a chance to preserve that data; now is the time. Get a Zip© drive and a floppy drive on eBay and do it.

Single-layer DVD-R disks hold about 4.7GB of data, or the equivalent of about 3300 3.5-inch floppies

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By Richard, March 28, 2010 1:37 pm

My blogging friend Steph emailed me today to ask, “How do I take a picture of my kids when they’re moving and not have it be blurry? Example: say they are jumping and I want to catch them in the air.  When I do it, they are blurry.” This entry is for her and those like her who need a primer in exposure time.

Baseball action, an example of a very short shutter speed, about 1/1000th of a second

Short answer, and often the long answer: shutter speed. For the beginner, shutter speed is exactly what you would imagine, the amount of time the image sensor is exposed to light. When I am teaching, I try to give out a few guidelines when people ask me the same kinds of questions as Steph did. I explain that 1/1000th of a second is a very short amount of time, and 30 seconds, in photography anyway, is a very long amount of time.

I thought of this just last weekend when my wife Abby and I were shooting pictures together at a nearby spa that has been a client of ours for several years. We were in one of their elegant rooms, which is very quiet, and Abby started shooting with her D70S. Immediately I could tell that her shutter speeds were too long for her to hand hold her camera without a tripod. I could tell because I could hear two clicks. If you can discern more than a single click, the shutter speed is longer than about a 1/30th of a second, and that’s, well, a long time in photography. Over the years, I’ve gotten to where I can usually tell within a stop or two what your shutter speed is, if it’s longer than a 1/30th of a second.

Indoor image at a pow wow, an example of a somewhat long shutter speed, about a 1/15th of a second, used to illustrate motion

So what does that mean in the real world? Well, Steph‘s kids move, in photographic terms, very fast, as do most kids. The benchmark for “fast” shutter speeds, ones that pretty much assure you of freezing the motion of human beings, is 1/1000th of a second. For you math nurds, that’s one millisecond, and it’s a pretty short period of time. Since it is such a short amount of time, an exposure like that simply doesn’t let all that may photons travel through and strike the sensor. Thus, some situations don’t allow us to use super-short exposures.

Thus begins the eternal compromise in photography. What can we do to “freeze” the action? On a sunny day, we can set the shutter speed to 1/1000th of a second, set our ISO to 200 or so, and realistically get an aperture value around f/4 or f/5.6. But on a gloomier day, that combination of exposure settings will render an image that’s too dark. What do we do? Increase the ISO, open the lens aperture, lower the shutter speed, or some combination of all three. As things get darker, like when the sun goes down or we go inside, eventually we are going to run out of options; the lens is all the way open, the ISO is all the way up, and the shutter speed? Well, we can keep increasing the shutter speed indefinitely, can’t we? But of course, we are unable to freeze the action of our subjects.

One alternative for Steph might be to use flash. The duration of modern electronic flash hovers around a 1/1500th of a second, which is a very short amount of time. There are two disadvantages to flash. One is that your average flash takes four or five seconds to “recycle” and be ready to flash again. The other is the dreadfully unflattering look of direct flash. Thus enters bounce flash, which I discussed some here.

Point-and-shoot cameras have another factor that tends to complicate this formula, and that is shutter lag, the time that passes after you push the shutter release but before the camera takes the picture. Digital SLRs don’t have much shutter lag, but small cameras can lag up to as much as a second before taking the picture. Using them in the case of shooting action requires some mental calculation and anticipation.

I know this seems like a lot to someone like Steph who really just wants pictures of her kids having fun, but once you play around with shutter speeds enough, it will “click,” and suddenly a whole new world of imaging becomes possible.

Christmas parade floats glide past spectators, in this long-exposure image, about 15 seconds, used to illustrate motion over time

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By Richard, February 28, 2010 3:39 pm

Abby shoots with the Coolpix 885 at Navajo Bridge, July 2003

When Abby and I first met, I was still shooting some film. On the budget of a small-town news photographer in a world of $5500 digital SLRs, I wasn’t in any kind of position to buy the digital cameras I wanted. I had, however, bought a digital point-and-shoot, the Nikon Coolpix 885, in the early summer of 2002, as a travel and grab camera. I liked it pretty well, and made some decent images with it. I followed that with the Minolta DiMage 7i, which was more camera, as my “fine art” camera, and in the fall of 2002, I made some terrific images with the combination of those two.

In early 2003, Abby and I got together, and almost immediately I lent her the Coolpix. She carried it with her during her travels when she worked for a fundraising company, and shot some great stuff. The more she used it, the better she got with it, and the more she noticed its distinctive chattering sound as it focused. Soon she nicknamed it R2D2 after the chattering android in Star Wars.

The camera seemed fairly capable at the time. One reason I chose it was that it had an optical viewfinder, so that you can compose and shoot in blinding sunshine without struggling to see the monitor on the back. It has a 3.1 megapixel sensor, which seems tiny today, but which has produced some remarkably detailed 13×19-inch prints. Some of Abby’s gallery images were made with this small wonder.

A couple of years ago, R2D2 shuffled off this mortal coil, but remains above Abby’s desk as a reminder of all the great times we enjoyed and great images we made with it.

The Nikon Coolpix 885