As spring approaches, and with the arrival of Daylight Saving Time, I am outdoors more, both as a journalist and as a homeowner.
Two folding chairs cast long shadows on a sunny morning recently.
Since I am a photographer both as a profession and for a hobby, I am always taking pictures. Some of these pictures are very straightforward, like tornado damage, flowers blooming, or kids playing ball, but I also try to indulge my artistic side.
Thus, when I see a splash of color, or a crooked shadow, or a streak of light, I make a picture. But the real question is: is this art?
I know, I know. Art is art if the artist says it’s art, right? Don’t we get to decide about our own creations? Sure, but that doesn’t make it valuable.
A splash of pink paint decorates a parking block at a baseball field. I used an in-camera filter to make the pink even pinker.
And more significantly, does our art convey a message? Is the message worth conveying? Is it the truth?
Okay, this is getting complicated. A better question might be: do I like it?
I know it looks like I am on TV, but it’s really just a reflection. This old console television was for sale at a garage sale.
Another way many people gauge art is by it’s monetary value or popularity. I think of recent examples like the conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan’s banana taped to a wall with duct tape. The second in the series sold in November 2024 for $6.2 million.
That must have been a really delicious banana.
For what it’s worth, if you drop $6.2 million in my Venmo account, I’d be happy to duct tape a peach to the fence in the back yard for you.
The town of Allen has done a nice job making their downtown look nice. I made this image after covering a pair of Allen High School basketball games.
I recently spoke to the Byng School student body as part of Journey of Hope, a program from the Oklahoma City National Memorial, about my experience as a journalist covering the terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.
At the end of the session, organizers opened the floor to questions from the students, and they all asked good questions. I thought the most interesting question was, “What were you feeling as you covered this event?”
I thought it was an interesting question because I had no hesitation in answering: I was thinking about how I was going to do my job.
I think this is probably true for everyone who strives to do their work in situations fueled by stress and adrenalin. That can be everyone from school teachers to air traffic controllers to firefighters to nurses.
What we were feeling that day was the urgency of the moment. There was very real work to do, and we were all simply going to do it.
There were certainly moments of shock, especially when we in the media got our first in-person look at the scene and the enormity of the damage, but I, and all my other peers in the media, simply set that aside and started making decisions: what film, what lens, what angle, should I move, should I stay put, who can we talk to, who has more information.
Our feelings about the events of that day would wait.
Newspapers, it has been said, are the first drafts of history. On the right side of this image is our newspaper from the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, put together from immediately-available sources, and on the left is the paper from the next day, April 20, with more-complete content.
My Chihuahua Summer scrunches down between pillows on the living room couch.
As I write this, my community and I are mostly idle, since most activities have been halted by a sharp cold snap, accompanied by freezing rain, sleet, and snow.
Before turning to freezing rain, these drops clung to the sunroof in my car.
Despite the outdoors being somewhat inhospitable, life goes on, and we all try to do something inside. Housecleaning is productive. Movie night is fun. Eating hot foods is good for us. Putting those two together, dinner and a movie, was always a go-to for my wife and me.
Frost clings to the outside of the back door at my house.
But if you know me, I’m all about being creative, so writing and photography are my go-to rainy-day, icy-day, indoor-day projects.
These are just a few ideas, and while it will be warm and dry by the time you read this, more rainy days are on the way, waiting to be photographed.
Wind-driven snow clings to a welcome mat on the front porch.
I made these images one very early Christmas Eve in 2012, in my wife’s hometown, Ryan, Oklahoma. I was out extra early to walk our dogs. I shot these with my Sony Cybershot F828.
Images like this remind us the the value of always being ready to make pictures.
My readers know that I tend to be a healthy eater. One thing that makes eating healthy easier is that I have very little “sweet tooth.” The result is that I seldom have added-sugar foods in my home, foods like candy and cake, and only eat them sparingly when I encounter them elsewhere.
A Cara Cara orange sits between two Minneola tangelos in my kitchen this week.
And I know that I’m not a doctor or nutritionist, but we have all seen a body of evidence showing that refined sugars are among the worst things you can consume.
Okay, Richard, if you want something sweet, where do you turn?
It’s also no secret that I have a small peach orchard where I live in Byng, and when my trees make fruit (which is about every other year), there is nothing better than a fresh, home-grown peach.
I’m always looking for fruit in the grocery store. Some bulk-sold produce is consistently terrible, since it is usually picked green and allowed to ripen in a truck as it is hauled across the country.
Oranges and their cousins like lemons, limes, mandarins, and grapefruits seem to travel better, and are in pretty good shape when we get them in the produce section.
I have discovered that I am picky about my oranges. I love a couple of varieties, blood oranges and Cara Cara oranges, for example, but I don’t care for regular navel oranges or grapefruit.
This time of year is Cara Cara season, so I get them when I see them. I’m also open to trying new varieties.
There is an interesting subtext here: people who are overly-dedicated to only one variety of something. I know someone (a nice lady I went to high school with) who outright refuses to even consider buying any apple variety other than Fuji.
“You might enjoy ‘Cosmic Crisp’ apples,” I say.
“No, I’m going to stick with Fuji.”
“You also might like ‘Cameo’ “…
“No! Only Fuji!”
Anyway, I thought of all this recently at the grocery store, where I picked up another bag of Cara Cara oranges, and saw what looked interesting, Minneola tangelos.
After our parents moved to Florida, my sister and I bought them orange, grapefruit, and lemon trees as Christmas gifts. The trees made a lot of oranges, and while they had a great flavor, they were full of huge, chewy seeds, so we only used them to make juice. The oranges pictured here are ones my mom had just picked, and were ready to be washed to remove the ugly but harmless mildew on the skins.
See, I’m open to trying new varieties.
I have tried to like these brightly-colored little orange-like fruit, and though I didn’t hate them, I discovered they were a bit on the sour side, and tangy but in a harsh way. I still ate them, but also decided that their bright skin and smooth shape made me want to photograph them.
I set up a couple of reflectors and flashes in the kitchen, sliced open a few tangelos and a couple of Cara Cara oranges. Photographing brightly colored spheres, then eating them, is a next-level fun activity for someone like me.
You can make pictures just like this if the inspiration strikes – it’s a relatively straightforward setup.
While you are at it, taste-test whatever fruit or vegetable you are photographing, and send me a recommendation. I would love the hear about your favorite orange!
This is my kitchen sink setup for photographing oranges and tangelos this week. It includes two reflectors (the folding type you might put in your windshield on a hot summer day) and two flash units. The foil wrapped around the flash in the middle is to both attenuate the amount of light, and make it slightly more edgy and directional.
My readers know that among my favorite things in the world, not just in my photography, are lenses. I like old and new, heavy and light, complex and simple, and on and on. There are almost no lenses that don’t intrigue me.
My humble AF-S Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 lens sits in my office today.
One class of lenses I find the most satisfying to work with are prime lenses, so named because they have only one (“prime”) focal length, as opposed to zoom lenses, which let you “zoom” through a range of focal lengths. There are a lot of zoom lenses in this world, since their design has matured dramatically in the last 25 years.
I like prime lenses for several reasons. They tend to have larger maximum apertures, they tend to be lighter, and they tend to have great optics.
Flash forward to today, and an interesting collision of prime lenses. First, I brought my AF-S Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 to my Ada Sunrise Rotary meeting today, where our guest speaker was beekeeper Trudy Mills.
My friend and former photography student Danielle, who I am trying to recruit into Rotary, grabbed my camera, with the 35mm lens, to photograph me pouring honey onto a spoon this morning. As you can see, this gem of a lens can get the trick done.
And second, PetaPixel posted a review of Nikon’s newest prime lens, their Nikkor 35mm f/1.2S.
Okay, since both these lenses are 35mm, they should be mostly the same, right? Well, yes, and no. They are both the 35mm focal length, which is a very popular focal length. In the years before zoom lenses began dominating the profession, news and sports photographers like me had this lens, often using it as our second-camera, everything-else lens at everything from the basketball court to the courthouse. It provides a slightly wide angle of view, and shows almost no foreshortening.
But my 35mm and the new 35mm from Nikon are two very different animals. My 35mm f/1.8 is very light and small, very easy to carry, and is remarkably affordable. I think I paid less than $200 for mine.
The new 35mm f/1.2, is none of that. It is huge, heavy, and – at about $2800 – is quite surprisingly expensive.
The obvious question is: what do I get for my $2800 that I don’t get for $200. The answer might be a little disappointing: not much.
The maximum aperture of f/1.2 is a real think with real benefits, but those benefits are on a very thin margin, especially compared to the 35mm f/1.8, which is, of course, only one f-stop smaller than the f/1.2. Yes, if you live in the low-light concert world, or the police surveillance world, or the theater world, and constantly required the gaping f/1.2, this new lens might be on your radar.
But even I, as a news and sports photographer, can’t see a huge advantage to this big-ticket lens. I’m sure reviews will say it is “sharp, even wide open,” but so is my 35mm, and, for that matter, every 50mm lens I own.
If you want one of these are think you will use it, and have the money, sure, why not? But I’ll continue to be happy with my honey of a lens.
I made this just a couple of nights ago with my 35mm lens.
When I was 16 years old, my father and I watched Super Bowl XIII, January 21, 1979.
My dad was a chronic TV watcher, so as soon as NBC’s coverage started, the TV was on, and, because my dad was hard of hearing, cranked up loud enough to rattle the windows.
I believe that during that broadcast, there was a feature about the network coverage saying they were using a record 18 cameras to bring us the game.
I made this photo of Santa running a TV camera at the Big 12 Championship football game in Dallas a few years ago, thinking about how much I would have loved that job when I was 16.
(It’s possible that I am blending memories here, since it was 46 years ago.)
They showed us a few of those TV cameras, and I combined that with a memory from three years earlier when my dad let me be part of an in-house TV production for his work at Cameron College (later, University), to construct what I imagined at the time to be my dream job: television camera operator.
It’s hard to tell in this frame grab from a Super-8mm movie my dad made, but that’s me in a TV studio, making an in-house instructional video. My co-star was an older co-worker of my dad’s, whose character was known as “Gramps.” I guess I was Jimmy or Billy or something, and the scripts usually had the two of us talking about fixing a flat or repairing a bicycle. We would come across a problem and I would ask, “Golly, Gramps, what does tightening these spokes have to do with managing different personalities in the workplace?” “Good question, Jimmy! Let me explain…”
You might think that a teenagers dreams would have stuck around, but now, with all the experience I’ve had in a career full of covering news and sports, I would definitely say “no thank you” to any offer to be running a camera at the Super Bowl this year.
The reason? Unlike when I was 16 and television and magazines force-fed us a steady diet of Dallas Cowboys, which we all ate up like hungry puppies, I find big-time sports to be sanitized, pretentiously melodramatic, and, most importantly, uninvested in me.
What do I mean by that? Simply put, who are these athletes? Maybe they are from California, or maybe they’re from Ohio. Maybe they even went to college in Oklahoma, but that doesn’t make me interested in them.
And the outcome of the game has become much less meaningful over the years. For example, the Kansas City Chiefs are playing in this year’s Super Bowl, and I have a strong connection to the Kansas City area. My dad was born and raised in nearby Independence, Missouri, and I have a cousin who lives just outside Kansas City in Platte City. So I’ve lived in greater KC, and visited many times, but I have no meaningful connection to the Chiefs organization or any of the players.
To whom, then, Richard, do you have a meaning connection? I hope this doesn’t sound trite, but it’s you. It is the members of our community. And that instantly gives me a connection to the sports I cover, since instead of a heavily-recruited all-star tailback from Frezno, it is your kids. They are in front of my lens, and I hope they always will be.
I recently learned of a fun hack photographers can perform on the Sony DCS-F828 digital camera of 2002 vintage. I happen to have a sort-of-working F828 in my photo closet, so I thought I’d try it out.
My sort-of-working Sony Cyber-shot DCS-F828 of 2002 vintage is shown with three infrared filters.
The fact that I just learned about it doesn’t mean it’s new. It only means that I stumbled upon it on one of a million trips into Internet dreamland.
The trick is to use a neodymium (“rare earth”) magnet to move the tiny infrared-blocking filter, sometimes called a “hot mirror” filter, inside the Sony camera. The result is that you can then place an infrared filter on the lens, enabling the photographer to explore the range of the spectrum in wavelengths longer than visible light.
Neodymium magnets are cheap. I ordered mine from Ebay for $9.
Holding this neodymium magnet just above a spot on the bottom of the Sony DCS-F828 digital camera will move the tiny infrared filter out of the light path, or back into the light path, depending on which pole of the magnet is next to the camera.
Holding the magnet just above the right spot on the bottom of the lens will either move the filter out of the light path or into the light path, depending on which pole of the magnet is next to the camera. The movement of the filter creates a barely audible “click” from inside the camera, and changes the image on the monitor from black to a kind of deep purple, depending on the filter mounted on the lens.
I have three infrared filters, each blocking a slightly different part of the spectrum. The filters are labeled in nanometers (a billionth of a meter), 720nm, 850nm, and 950nm. The filters appear black to the naked eye, since they don’t pass visible light, but, unlike eclipse glasses, are not safe for viewing the sun, which emits damaging ultraviolet energy.
The idea behind infrared photography is to express a view of the world unlike human vision. Therein lies the challenge, too, since while it is neat to explore our world in a different way, it doesn’t immediately lend itself to a strong narrative. I have explored infrared a couple of times before, but I think it may be time to push a little harder and make images that have more visual value than just “this is different.”
This is a view from my front deck using the Sony F828 with the infrared blocking filter “hacked” out of the light path and a 950nm infrared filter on the lens, yielding an eery, ghost-like rendering of ordinary trees and sky.
Continuing with a series of scans from my newspaper files from the film era, these images are from a photo essay to go with a story about the Ada Police Department training in special tactics in February 1990.
This is an interesting study in the evolution of police gear, attire, weapons, and tactics.
I made these images with my Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 lens and my 24mm f/2.0 lens, two of my all-time favorite lenses.
Here are a few recent images that passed my eyes on the job, but which weren’t suitable as content for my newspaper.
Crooked arrow on sidewalkI want to be like BarbieCrumbled chalk on crumbled sidewalkMorning, small town, ChristmasFlowers in brilliant morning sunYou’re pretty uglyBless our snipersShirt on hangerSummer naps in the sunZendaiya photographs a brush fire
Some of my old 50mm lenses sit on a shelf in my home office. It’s always fun to play with these.
I sometimes miss the days of Internet past, when a search yielded an interesting web page that had links in it to other links, which might have still more links. I loved clicking around to see everything from dancing hamsters to moon landing hoaxes.
Now, I say with a heavy sign, the Internet seems to be dead. Look it up if you want: use the phrase “Dead Internet Theory.” I know it’s a “conspiracy theory,” but it makes more sense every day.
With that said, I did a few obscure web searches recently, deliberately trying to find actual, real web content, and I went down one rabbit hole after another.
As a photographer, of course I’ll click on all things photographic. One of these led me to revisit an interesting topic: ultra-large-aperture lenses, especially, in this case, the Nikkor Z 58mm f/0.95.
This lens is what’s known as a “halo” product, something that shows the prestige of the camera maker, car maker, computer maker, fine winery, distillery, etc., but is expensive enough that they actually expect to sell very few of these items.
The 58mm f/0.95 sports a list price of $7999.95. Wow. What could this lens offer that sets it so far above and out of reach? Well, upon reading some reviews and looking at some sample images, the answer is: nothing. Reviews like to point out that the optics are just about perfect, as is the build quality, and that shooting this lens at f/0.95 should result in an impressive amount of selective focus.
Two of my photographer friends and I have occasionally talked about possible renting this lens, which appears to be $363 for seven days from one prominent lens rental place.
Then, of course, the practical photographer in me took over and said, “Can I create what this halo lens can do, with the equipment I already own?” I reached into my bag of tricks and pulled out a broken, 40-year-old Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 that someone had given me, and stepped out into my front yard.
The result, as I might have expected, was every bit as usefully good as the $8000 behemoth. It’s probably not quite as technically perfect, but right out of the camera, it delivered.
So I am completely unimpressed with the idea of an $8000 50mm or 58mm lens.
I always have fun with little “what if” projects like this, and they often remind me of a term I’ve been using in the last couple of years, “Shop your closet first.”
I photographed this Shumard oak leaf lodged in a chain link fence in my front yard just after dusk, using my 40-year-old Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 at f/1.4. I don’t know how a much more expensive lens could offer to this image, which is sharp, has good color, and shows great selective focus.
I was sorry to see the Ada Cougars football team’s season come to an end Friday with their loss to Bethany.
Ada Cougar football fans wore hunting camo for their Friday, Nov. 22, 2024 playoff game against Bethany.
At the same time, I am definitely a forward-looker, and I am looking forward to basketball season.
Honestly, every season is great, as long as I and mindful of what matters most: being the eyes and ears of our newspaper.
Vanoss cheerleaders line up to wait for a free throw as their Lady Wolves team takes on Latta Friday night, Nov. 22, 2024 at Latta Panther Field House.
As I write this, I just finished covering the Santa Stroll in Wintersmith Park. I saw hundreds of people who were glad to see me, and glad I was there.
Community members enjoy the Santa Stroll Monday, Nov. 25, 2024 in Wintersmith Park.
A friend of mine pulled me aside and chatted for a minute, then said something incredibly humbling and flattering: “Richard, you have done so much for our community.”
Community is, in my opinion, the real reason for being a journalist, and it has been an honor that you welcome me as your community journalist.
It is amazing and humbling that the people of my community like me and love my work. Thank you, my friends.
The Ada Cougars’ recently enjoyed pep rallies in advance of their playoff football games.
Both pep rallies were hosted by Doc’s Food Truck Park, which is fun and says that Doc’s is really engaging with the community.
Ada Cougar football team members play “Musical Chairs” at a pep rally Thursday at Doc’s Food Truck Park. Shot at 1/40th of a second, there is some motion blur, but I happen to like the way the blur shows us what’s happening.
The stage and a sound system are lit by couple of street lights, various LED lights on food trucks, and a few dozen string lights, low-wattage light bulbs strung across the park. The light is enough to see by and have a pep rally, but it is somewhat challenging photographically.
First, there’s not a lot of light. In the film era, this essentially meant we would need to use a flash to get an image at all, or rely on mounting our camera on a tripod and shooting at long shutter speeds.
Secondly, the light is from all sorts of odd angles, and is all different colors, so there isn’t really a “correct” white balance setting.
As digital has evolved, cameras have gotten more and more capable at very high ISO settings. ISO is one of the three items in the triad of exposure control, with shutter speed and aperture.
This is a side-by-side comparison of Adobe Lightroom’s noise reduction tool, and you can see how effective it is at cleaning up very-high-ISO images.
For my coverage of these events, I dialed my Nikon D3 cameras up to ISO 12,800, which would have sounded like science fiction in 1980. In fact, I’m not entirely sure I would have believed you then if you told me that ISO 12,800 is even a real thing.
The D3 is an older camera, but actually creates a very usable image in what I like to call “the ISO stratosphere.” The images are somewhat noisy, but in the last 18 months, products that I use like Adobe Lightroom have introduced some very sophisticated and effective noise filters.
Shooting in the low-light regime doesn’t just test the high-ISO capabilities of your camera. It also takes lenses, image-stabilization systems, and your ability to see and manage a situation, to their limits.
Cheerleaders and Couganns perform at a pep rally Thursday at Doc’s Food Truck Park. I shot about 40 frames of this performance, and only a couple are decently sharp. But I also recognize that getting really sharp images isn’t always as critical as photographers make it out to be, and a better priority is to tell the story.
My readers might remember that last month I talked about my very memorable first weeks at The Ada News, in October and November 1988.
On a Friday night at Norris Field, while covering the Ada Cougars on the way to their 15th State Championship in 1988, I made this image of scout saluting the flag. Everyone loved this image.
One image in particular, of five Boy Scouts holding the U.S. flag and saluting it, came back to mind last week when Scouts from Troop 4, Hawk Mater, Kevin Fender, Carter Osborn, Aiden Holder, Finn Holman, and Harrison Townsend presented the colors at an Ada High football game.
These young Scouts were doing the same exact thing, in the same exact spot, 36 years later, and I think that is pretty cool.
Boy Scout Troop 4 members Finn Holman, Harrison Townsend, Aiden Holder, Carter Osborn, Kevin Fender, and Hawk Mater present the colors ay the Ada High School football game Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024 at ECU’s Koi Ishto Stadium.
This is part of a much larger project of mine: scanning the thousands and thousands of images I made during the first years of my career (before digital), a project my readers and I both love.
So watch this space for more old photos, scanned from film so they can see the light of day once more.
Finn Holman, Harrison Townsend, and Aiden Holder salute the U.S. flag at the Ada High School football game Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024 at ECU’s Koi Ishto Stadium.
There has been a lot of talk lately about point-and-shoot cameras being repopularized by the Gen Z crowd. The photography press says influencers on popular social media sites are buying them up on the used market, then using them to create content that they then hashtag #Digicam.
My old, well-worn and well-used Olympus FE-5020 digital point-and-shoot camera sits next to the keys to my vehicle, illustrating how small it is.
The only working point-and-shoot camera I still own is the Olympus FE-5020, which my wife bought for me for Christmas in 2012. All our other point-and-shoot cameras died long ago, mostly because Abby and I used them all the time, and they just wore out.
The 2012 smart phone scene was quite different than it is today, with the built-in cameras barely able to make selfies. Abby and I both had Olympus point-and-shoot cameras at the time, and used them as often as everyone uses smart phone cameras today.
I loved the FE-5020 for its very slim form factor. It is so small that I can tuck it into a shirt pocket and take it anywhere.
Here are some thoughts on why we liked them, as well as things we didn’t love about them.
Advantages
If someone runs off with your point-and-shoot camera, or if you drop it into a manhole or off a cliff, you won’t lose your entire life and identity like you might with a smart phone.
Although you were just buying a camera (vs buying a whole lifestyle with a smart phone), they were cheaper overall, and the image quality tended to be more robust than the over-processed images from smart phones.
When using it, you felt more like you were “being a photographer.”
Disadvantages
Most point-and-shoot cameras aren’t connected to cloud storage, so if you’ve gotten accustomed to having everything backed up automatically, you will need to adjust your workflow.
New point-and-shoot cameras are hard to find on the market or in stores because camera makers were driven to lower production as Apple and Samsung put better and better cameras in our phones. There are some on the used market, but prices have shot up.
Despite the advantages, one of the most obvious reasons smart phone cameras got so popular is that they are the one thing we all grab on the way out the door. The old slogan says that the only camera that matters is the one you have with you, and that’s absolutely true.
Periodically, I will pull my FE-5020 our of its bag, charge the batteries, and try to motivate myself to use it, but I seldom do. Maybe I’ll set it next to my keys in the next few days, and make myself fold it into my workflow, and see what happens!
When the Olympus FE-5020 is shut off, the lens retracts into the body, making it so flat that it fits easily in any pocket.
Images like this remind us the the value of always being ready to make pictures.
