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 →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…
Continue reading →This may seem like a trivial and/or simple principal, but I feel it is key to learn how to hold your camera and make it a habit. Early in our relationship, my wife Abby learned and adopted the correct posture for using a digital SLR, and has used it ever since, and I think it…
Continue reading →I’ve had the Fuji Finepix S200EXR since early October 2009. I got it just in time for Abby’s family reunion in Duncan, Oklahoma. I got it primarily as a hiking camera, as a replacement for my dying Minolta DiMage 7i. In addition to some walk-around shooting, I’ve shot three major events with it, the reunion,…
Continue reading →Most digital imaging sensors are equipped with a set of filters, either adhered to the surface of the sensor itself, or, as is the case with some of Kodak’s digital SLR cameras, in front of the viewfinder mirror. Typically there are at least two filters, an infrared filter designed to block the long wavelengths that…
Continue reading →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 →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 →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 →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 →Frequently in the field or the classroom I am asked how I get my images so sharp. Often the question takes a more vague form, like, “how do you get your images so crisp?” or, “Why are my pictures so fuzzy?” In the biz, the opposites are sharp and soft. In the world of the…
Continue reading →A friend called me yesterday to mourn the demise of Kodachrome, the once-popular color slide film that was originally introduced in 1935. Kodak is discontinuing the film after 74 years because of dwindling sales in the digital age, and because there is only one lab remaining in the world that is able to process this…
Continue reading →For years the mainstream of digital photographers clamored for a “full-frame” sensor. The smaller 15mm x 24mm sensors in digital SLRs since 1999 were too small, they claimed. When were we going to see a “real” sensor? Eventually the camera industry responded, and by 2007, both Canon and Nikon had cameras that sported 36mm x…
Continue reading →