Advanced photography class has started again, and it looks like it will be another good one. I was supposed to have six students, but two couldn’t make it. We started outside, photographing my car, since it was relatively warm. I like to give the “painting with light” exercise when I can, for two reasons. One…
Continue reading →My job as a newspaper and magazine photographer is to record and express the lives and times of my community. When I am working in the field, I get a lot of requests, and one I get all the time is for group photos. The group photo is, in some ways, the refuge of the…
Continue reading →The intensely complex visual puzzle that photography represents is rife with thousands of lessons to be learned, only a few hundred of which I am able to share with my students in the time we have in class. The lessons can be graphic, geometric, mathematical, photometric, sociological, economic, psychological, even physiological. Imagery in the 21st…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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.
Continue reading →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”…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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,…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
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