Alternate title: Shoot First, Ask Questions Later This entry is about the value of having your camera with you, and not being afraid to use it. Much of the time we get busy or lazy, and skip photo opportunities because we are tired, in a hurry, or unwilling to make the effort. As I have…
Continue reading →At our newspaper and magazine, as well as at home, a lot of images pass through my hands, including a lot of images that are emailed to me. Much of the time the images are correctly formatted and pretty much ready to use, but we still get a fair number of images that are mishandled…
Continue reading →I have to say, teaching photography is one of the most fun things I do. It’s particularly fun when we have more people in the class, and, like the last three weeks, people who want to be there and aren’t afraid to be creative and learn. Last night, despite the fact that I was starting…
Continue reading →My last article was titled, “Proof That Your Camera Doesn’t Matter,” even though as we all know, sometimes your camera does matter. The message of that entry was that photography resides in your heart and your head, not in your wallet. This week we had several basketball teams playing in the area tournament at one…
Continue reading →Lots of people spend lots of time worrying about cameras. I have news for them: your camera doesn’t matter. Over the years this has been repeatedly iterated in blogs and on camera mogul’s web sites, yet people are still suckered into the festival of consumerism surrounding digital cameras. The truth is, though, that much of…
Continue reading →This is a lesson to myself about keeping my eyes and my mind open to ideas. One night some years ago I was trying to make a black-and-whie print of a negative I had made years earlier than that, of our friend Deb Stinson. Those who have printed black-and-white know that despite a number of…
Continue reading →Everyone who wants to become a successful photographer will, at some point, break through the plateau of the learning curve and suddenly start to see more, shoot more, learn more, and experiment more. It’s a natural way that our brains help us accommodate the world around us, and an important way we keep from getting…
Continue reading →For those of you who completed my Beginning Digital Photography class last month, or for those of you who have some photographic experience and want to take it to a new level, my Advanced Digital Photography class starts Monday night at the Pontotoc Technology Center south of Ada. We have three three-hour nights in which…
Continue reading →With a bountiful snowfall in Oklahoma again this winter, I have had more opportunity to photograph beautiful snowfields and snow shapes here in our own pasture, as well as making news images for our newspaper. Other people have taken advantage of the situation, though with less satisfying results. There have been whole photo albums on…
Continue reading →My close friend Michael and I spent a day recently in northern Oklahoma, attempting with some success to photograph the Great Salt Plains area. The reason we do this is entirely artistic. This exercise in imaging isn’t in any way commercially viable; we’re not building our portfolios to sell online, and we don’t have any…
Continue reading →Alternate title: Lens Selection for Basketball Action I shoot a lot of sports, and in winter, I shoot a lot of basketball. Over the years I feel like I’ve gotten pretty good at it, and while I am set in some of my ways, I am still flexible in some of my choices, like lens…
Continue reading →As a professional photographer, I have lots of friends, including my lovely wife, who are photographers. I guess the axiom “birds of a feather fly together” really does make sense. One of the things we like to do as photographers is get together for the purpose of making pictures, often with the idea that we…
Continue reading →It is a sad and telling fact that the technological world around us is a throw-away world. Consumer products like televisions and microwave ovens are built to be used for a relatively short time, then replaced by another one. This is possible because of a couple of factors: the efficiency of mass production of everything…
Continue reading →In 2003, Nikon introduced what they thought would be an ideal camera for photojournalists like me, the D2H. The camera capitalized on developments in ergonomics and high-speed computer processing, and the result was outstanding in every respect. It features the excellent CAM-2000 autofocus module, a blazing eight frames per second burst rate, a battery that…
Continue reading →We just finished another advanced digital photography class, and this one seemed to be one of the best. Everyone brought a lot of energy and creativity to the sessions, and everyone had fun. At the end of class tonight, it seemed that everyone was happy to receive their certificate of completion. One of the most…
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