I am reenergizing this after a dormancy period. Please consider participating. I had a lot of fun with these two new images… It stared in 2000, on a trip called The Shooting Spree. Coming south out of Farmington, New Mexico, just after sunset, I saw the moon rising to my left. As I moved along,…
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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →I have shot a lot of hard-hitting photos in my career, spanning personal tragedy, death, natural disasters, the human drama of athletic competition, and much more. I have been threatened, called names, yelled at, almost assaulted, run over by athletes on the field, hit by baseballs, etc. Once I even covered my own car crash. With…
Continue reading →Here are some things you can do to discourage me from visiting your web site. Intro page that says “click here to enter my site.” Let’s assume I went to your web site to enter it in the first place. Thanks for wasting my time. Flash player intro that takes more than a second or…
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