30 Years at The Ada News: Evolution and Revolution

Portions of this entry are from my Saturday, Oct. 20, 2018 column in The Ada News.

This was one of the first images I made at The Ada News in October 1988, shot with my Nikon FM2n and my 300mm f/4.5 ED-IF Nikkor at Hayes School. It ended up winning an Oklahoma Press Association award for feature photos.
This was one of the first images I made at The Ada News in October 1988, shot with my Nikon FM2n and my 300mm f/4.5 ED-IF Nikkor at Hayes School. It ended up winning an Oklahoma Press Association award for feature photos.
This is the page-sized process camera in the office directly below mine. It was once served by a dumbwaiter, and was made obsolete by the 1998 addition of an imagesetter.
This is the page-sized process camera in the office directly below mine. It was once served by a dumbwaiter, and was made obsolete by the 1998 addition of an imagesetter.

I started at The Ada Evening News (The Ada News since 2012) October 24, 1988, 30 years ago today. In that time, a lot has changed, mostly for the good. A few notes…

  • In the 1980s and most of the 1990s, all my newspaper photography was on film, most of it black-and-white…
  • Most of those images were printed using a system invented in the 1950s, the Kodak Ektamatic processor, which used activator and stabilizer with papers that had developer incorporated into their emulsions, like Ektamatic SC, which…
  • …was a single-weight, fiber-based photographic paper offering very fast turnaround at the expense of quality and longevity. Although there are literally thousands of Ektamatic prints in within my reach as I write this, none are worth saving.  Additionally, because the prints had only been stabilized, not washed and dried, they smelled like vinegar.
This is the Kodak Ektamatic processor in my darkroom at The Ada Evening News in 1989.
This is the Kodak Ektamatic processor in my darkroom at The Ada Evening News in 1989.
I happen to think the Ada area is home to many great sports traditions, and for me, shooting celebrations and dejections is as important as shooting the action. In this image, Ada softballers Amory Morgan and Taryn Jack celebrate an extra-innings score at the Ada High Softball Complex in 2010.
I happen to think the Ada area is home to many great sports traditions, and for me, shooting celebrations and dejections is as important as shooting the action. In this image, Ada softballers Amory Morgan and Taryn Jack celebrate an extra-innings score at the Ada High Softball Complex in 2010.
Sometimes sports photography, like sports itself, comes down to a few critical seconds. In this image from a February 2002 area playoff basketball game at Wilburton, Latta Panther players and fans celebrate a go-ahead score against Haworth with just 1.2 seconds remaining in the contest. Latta won the contest to advance to state.
Sometimes sports photography, like sports itself, comes down to a few critical seconds. In this image from a February 2002 area playoff basketball game at Wilburton, Latta Panther players and fans celebrate a go-ahead score against Haworth with just 1.2 seconds remaining in the contest. Latta won the contest to advance to state.

 

  • When I first came to The Ada Evening News, we had no capability to reproduce four-color images on our own, and had to send images to an Oklahoma City first to have color separations made, so having a color photo in the paper was relegated to holidays and special events. In 1991, we inherited a primitive color separator (its software was stored on a microcassette), and could then have a color picture on Sunday.
  • A lot of more of my shooting in the film era involved flash photography for the simple reason that we couldn’t change ISO settings like we can today. I would shoot two or three assignments on one roll of film, usually T-Max 400.
  • The digital era began for me in 1998, when my newspaper bought a 35mm film scanner (a Nikon LS-2000) and a computer (an Apple PowerMac G3,) which had a floppy drive, and a Zip® disk drive, but only a CD-ROM, so I was unable to archive scanned images from that era. The editor during that period was too cheap to buy Zip disks for archiving, which was very seriously short-sighted,

    though we still have the negatives on file.

I made this image of Boy Scouts presenting the colors at an Ada Cougars home football game at Norris Field in my first week at The Ada Evening News, in October 1988. It later placed in the Oklahoma Press Association's Photo of the Year contest in the "character study" category.
I made this image of Boy Scouts presenting the colors at an Ada Cougars home football game at Norris Field in my first week at The Ada Evening News, in October 1988. It later placed in the Oklahoma Press Association’s Photo of the Year contest in the “character study” category.
  • It was around this time that my newspaper got its first imagesetter, a device that printed the page-sized negatives of newspaper content, replacing the downstairs process camera and fundamentally advancing our layout, design and publishing methods.
  • In 2000, I asked for and received a Minolta medium format film scanner, which I used as often as I could, but which gave poor color scans.
  • My first digital camera was the Nikon D1H, purchased by my newspaper in August 2001. Despite its 2.66 megapixel sensors, the D1H was a great addition to my toolbox, and despite having film cameras and scanners in my bag, digital became increasingly prevalent in my work. My last photographic negatives were made in 2005.
  • By the middle of the 2000s, the scanners we had slid into obsolescence due to their SCSI interfaces, which stopped being supported my modern operating systems. Although I could scan with USB-based flatbed scanners, I was never able to get a true high-resolution film scan again.
  • Since 2007 I have been teaching photography at the Pontotoc Technology Center, and I hope being a news photographer has made me a better teacher, and that teaching has made me a better news photographer.
If you lived in Ada in the spring of 2000, you remember when the mill burned in the middle of the night in downtown Ada, and how it smelled for a month afterwards.
If you lived in Ada in the spring of 2000, you remember when the mill burned in the middle of the night in downtown Ada, and how it smelled for a month afterwards.
  • We sold our press in 2012 or so, and began printing our product at our sister paper, The Norman Transcript, and delivering it by mail. With the departure of our press crew and our carriers, our building became mostly vacant. Portions of it were so poorly cared for that they are probably beyond rehabilitation, and will remain closed off and used as storage.
The Ada Cougars claim a state championship trophy at Owen Field at Oklahoma University in 1994. Since I have been at The Ada News, the Cougars have brought home five football championship trophies.
The Ada Cougars claim a state championship trophy at Owen Field at Oklahoma University in 1994. Since I have been at The Ada News, the Cougars have brought home five football championship trophies.
  • One of the best developments in these three decades has been my relationship with the community. While it’s true that bosses and coworkers have been unkind to me on occasion over the years, the public is overwhelmingly glad to see me, impressed with my work, and regards me as the face of The Ada News.
  • According to a count by a few long-lasting co-workers and me, in my time at our newspaper, there have been eight publishers and 14 managing editors.
Not all news is good, as in this image of a firefighter frustrated that he can't get water to his hose during a snowstorm at the scene of a fatality house fire north of Ada in January 2010.
Not all news is good, as in this image of a firefighter frustrated that he can’t get water to his hose during a snowstorm at the scene of a fatality house fire north of Ada in January 2010.