I started teaching another round of beginning digital photography Monday night. One thing we cover in the initial stages of this class is file formats. Of course, my students are very familiar with JPEGs, since these files are ubiquitous, from the photos on this blog to the shots of me at the front of the…
Continue reading →In 1998, the company bought me a film scanner, and the computer to go with it. Within a few weeks of tweaking and adjusting, I was scanning everything. That left two 500-sheet boxes of Kodak Ektamatic SC black-and-white, single-weight paper sitting on the shelves in my office. For a while I kept them, just in…
Continue reading →Photographers who shoot outdoors a lot try to take advantage of what has become known as the “Golden Hour” or “Golden Moment.” In reality, this period of time during the first or last light of day can vary depending on what you are shooting and how you want to use the light. Essentially, this moment…
Continue reading →One thing I stress to my photo students is the value of editing. Specifically, I tell them that no one wants to see 1200 photos of anything, and that no matter who shot those 1200 photos, only a tiny fraction of them are any good. (I cite 1200 based on a gallery of someone I…
Continue reading →Most of my photography students have the same gear: a digital SLR, the “kit” lens sold with it, and sometimes a telephoto “kit” lens as well. In the long-ago days of film cameras, SLRs were frequently sold with a 50mm lens, for several reasons. They were cheap to make, they had fast (meaning “large”) maximum…
Continue reading →It is always such a pleasure to have people in my class who get it, and who are there because they want to be there. Tonight’s first of three sessions of advanced digital photography gave me the privilege of hosting just such a group. It was a cold night, but everyone was having so much…
Continue reading →Update 2018: At one point the Tamron 70-200mm fell from a car seat onto a paved parking lot, and the lens never performed well again. Despite liking its handling and look, I ended up selling it. For a couple of years, I’ve had the excellent AF-Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 in my bag here at home, but…
Continue reading →One thing I try to stress in my class, which is sometimes ignored, is the value of what we call in the biz “fast glass,” meaning lenses that feature big apertures. In general, the gold standard in my line of work is f/2.8. It represents the point at which most camera/lighting/lens combinations can get the…
Continue reading →My blogging friend Tom the Beanie Cap Guy posted an entry recently called “11 Images,” in which he talks about the 11 images that represent his photography in the past three years. His art is quite different from mine, though I find it incredibly passionate and compelling. I thought it would be a neat challenge…
Continue reading →For lots of years during the film era, I shot with manual cameras, usually the Nikon FM2. With no automation, I learned a lot of subtle tricks through trial and error, including one that has since been aided by the addition of a feature called slow-sync flash. I can still remember coming back from a…
Continue reading →For some time now I have wanted to find a replacement for my dying Minolta DiMage 7i, an excellent, lightweight camera with a sharp lens, all in a small package. It was ideal for hiking, especially in places where I didn’t want to haul much gear. Long hikes, slot canyons, anything with scrambling; if I…
Continue reading →As I write this, football season is upon me, and I am going through my usual internal debate: should I shoot football with the 80-200mm f/2.8, or should I break out the 300mm f/2.8, which my photographer friends and I refer to as the “three large.” I am satisfied with the results I get with…
Continue reading →I had a lot of different lenses over the years. For the most part, they were the excellent, reliable, well-built Nikkor lenses made by Nikon. Some of them wore out, and I sold the rest of the manual focus Nikkors when I made the transition to digital. Most of my Nikkors were bought out of…
Continue reading →People like me, who take pictures for a living every day, seem to be interested in the latest, greatest and most capable cameras and lenses that the Japanese can crank out. We fuel the concept of “latent demand,” expressed best by the phrase, “If we build it, they will come.” If I was a quillionaire,…
Continue reading →Monday night I finished up my first Intro to Digital Photography class for this fall at the Pontotoc Technology Center. The intro is really a beginner class, and is fullest right after Christmas, when lots of people have new cameras that seem alarmingly complex to them. This class is mostly spent in the classroom, talking…
Continue reading →