As spring approaches, and with the arrival of Daylight Saving Time, I am outdoors more, both as a journalist and as a homeowner.
Two folding chairs cast long shadows on a sunny morning recently.
Since I am a photographer both as a profession and for a hobby, I am always taking pictures. Some of these pictures are very straightforward, like tornado damage, flowers blooming, or kids playing ball, but I also try to indulge my artistic side.
Thus, when I see a splash of color, or a crooked shadow, or a streak of light, I make a picture. But the real question is: is this art?
I know, I know. Art is art if the artist says it’s art, right? Don’t we get to decide about our own creations? Sure, but that doesn’t make it valuable.
A splash of pink paint decorates a parking block at a baseball field. I used an in-camera filter to make the pink even pinker.
And more significantly, does our art convey a message? Is the message worth conveying? Is it the truth?
Okay, this is getting complicated. A better question might be: do I like it?
I know it looks like I am on TV, but it’s really just a reflection. This old console television was for sale at a garage sale.
Another way many people gauge art is by it’s monetary value or popularity. I think of recent examples like the conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan’s banana taped to a wall with duct tape. The second in the series sold in November 2024 for $6.2 million.
That must have been a really delicious banana.
For what it’s worth, if you drop $6.2 million in my Venmo account, I’d be happy to duct tape a peach to the fence in the back yard for you.
The town of Allen has done a nice job making their downtown look nice. I made this image after covering a pair of Allen High School basketball games.
I recently spoke to the Byng School student body as part of Journey of Hope, a program from the Oklahoma City National Memorial, about my experience as a journalist covering the terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.
At the end of the session, organizers opened the floor to questions from the students, and they all asked good questions. I thought the most interesting question was, “What were you feeling as you covered this event?”
I thought it was an interesting question because I had no hesitation in answering: I was thinking about how I was going to do my job.
I think this is probably true for everyone who strives to do their work in situations fueled by stress and adrenalin. That can be everyone from school teachers to air traffic controllers to firefighters to nurses.
What we were feeling that day was the urgency of the moment. There was very real work to do, and we were all simply going to do it.
There were certainly moments of shock, especially when we in the media got our first in-person look at the scene and the enormity of the damage, but I, and all my other peers in the media, simply set that aside and started making decisions: what film, what lens, what angle, should I move, should I stay put, who can we talk to, who has more information.
Our feelings about the events of that day would wait.
Newspapers, it has been said, are the first drafts of history. On the right side of this image is our newspaper from the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, put together from immediately-available sources, and on the left is the paper from the next day, April 20, with more-complete content.
My Chihuahua Summer scrunches down between pillows on the living room couch.
As I write this, my community and I are mostly idle, since most activities have been halted by a sharp cold snap, accompanied by freezing rain, sleet, and snow.
Before turning to freezing rain, these drops clung to the sunroof in my car.
Despite the outdoors being somewhat inhospitable, life goes on, and we all try to do something inside. Housecleaning is productive. Movie night is fun. Eating hot foods is good for us. Putting those two together, dinner and a movie, was always a go-to for my wife and me.
Frost clings to the outside of the back door at my house.
But if you know me, I’m all about being creative, so writing and photography are my go-to rainy-day, icy-day, indoor-day projects.
These are just a few ideas, and while it will be warm and dry by the time you read this, more rainy days are on the way, waiting to be photographed.
Wind-driven snow clings to a welcome mat on the front porch.
My readers know that I tend to be a healthy eater. One thing that makes eating healthy easier is that I have very little “sweet tooth.” The result is that I seldom have added-sugar foods in my home, foods like candy and cake, and only eat them sparingly when I encounter them elsewhere.
A Cara Cara orange sits between two Minneola tangelos in my kitchen this week.
And I know that I’m not a doctor or nutritionist, but we have all seen a body of evidence showing that refined sugars are among the worst things you can consume.
Okay, Richard, if you want something sweet, where do you turn?
It’s also no secret that I have a small peach orchard where I live in Byng, and when my trees make fruit (which is about every other year), there is nothing better than a fresh, home-grown peach.
I’m always looking for fruit in the grocery store. Some bulk-sold produce is consistently terrible, since it is usually picked green and allowed to ripen in a truck as it is hauled across the country.
Oranges and their cousins like lemons, limes, mandarins, and grapefruits seem to travel better, and are in pretty good shape when we get them in the produce section.
I have discovered that I am picky about my oranges. I love a couple of varieties, blood oranges and Cara Cara oranges, for example, but I don’t care for regular navel oranges or grapefruit.
This time of year is Cara Cara season, so I get them when I see them. I’m also open to trying new varieties.
There is an interesting subtext here: people who are overly-dedicated to only one variety of something. I know someone (a nice lady I went to high school with) who outright refuses to even consider buying any apple variety other than Fuji.
“You might enjoy ‘Cosmic Crisp’ apples,” I say.
“No, I’m going to stick with Fuji.”
“You also might like ‘Cameo’ “…
“No! Only Fuji!”
Anyway, I thought of all this recently at the grocery store, where I picked up another bag of Cara Cara oranges, and saw what looked interesting, Minneola tangelos.
After our parents moved to Florida, my sister and I bought them orange, grapefruit, and lemon trees as Christmas gifts. The trees made a lot of oranges, and while they had a great flavor, they were full of huge, chewy seeds, so we only used them to make juice. The oranges pictured here are ones my mom had just picked, and were ready to be washed to remove the ugly but harmless mildew on the skins.
See, I’m open to trying new varieties.
I have tried to like these brightly-colored little orange-like fruit, and though I didn’t hate them, I discovered they were a bit on the sour side, and tangy but in a harsh way. I still ate them, but also decided that their bright skin and smooth shape made me want to photograph them.
I set up a couple of reflectors and flashes in the kitchen, sliced open a few tangelos and a couple of Cara Cara oranges. Photographing brightly colored spheres, then eating them, is a next-level fun activity for someone like me.
You can make pictures just like this if the inspiration strikes – it’s a relatively straightforward setup.
While you are at it, taste-test whatever fruit or vegetable you are photographing, and send me a recommendation. I would love the hear about your favorite orange!
This is my kitchen sink setup for photographing oranges and tangelos this week. It includes two reflectors (the folding type you might put in your windshield on a hot summer day) and two flash units. The foil wrapped around the flash in the middle is to both attenuate the amount of light, and make it slightly more edgy and directional.
Continuing with a series of scans from my newspaper files from the film era, these images are from a photo essay to go with a story about the Ada Police Department training in special tactics in February 1990.
This is an interesting study in the evolution of police gear, attire, weapons, and tactics.
I made these images with my Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 lens and my 24mm f/2.0 lens, two of my all-time favorite lenses.
Here are a few recent images that passed my eyes on the job, but which weren’t suitable as content for my newspaper.
Crooked arrow on sidewalkI want to be like BarbieCrumbled chalk on crumbled sidewalkMorning, small town, ChristmasFlowers in brilliant morning sunYou’re pretty uglyBless our snipersShirt on hangerSummer naps in the sunZendaiya photographs a brush fire
I was sorry to see the Ada Cougars football team’s season come to an end Friday with their loss to Bethany.
Ada Cougar football fans wore hunting camo for their Friday, Nov. 22, 2024 playoff game against Bethany.
At the same time, I am definitely a forward-looker, and I am looking forward to basketball season.
Honestly, every season is great, as long as I and mindful of what matters most: being the eyes and ears of our newspaper.
Vanoss cheerleaders line up to wait for a free throw as their Lady Wolves team takes on Latta Friday night, Nov. 22, 2024 at Latta Panther Field House.
As I write this, I just finished covering the Santa Stroll in Wintersmith Park. I saw hundreds of people who were glad to see me, and glad I was there.
Community members enjoy the Santa Stroll Monday, Nov. 25, 2024 in Wintersmith Park.
A friend of mine pulled me aside and chatted for a minute, then said something incredibly humbling and flattering: “Richard, you have done so much for our community.”
Community is, in my opinion, the real reason for being a journalist, and it has been an honor that you welcome me as your community journalist.
It is amazing and humbling that the people of my community like me and love my work. Thank you, my friends.
The Ada Cougars’ recently enjoyed pep rallies in advance of their playoff football games.
Both pep rallies were hosted by Doc’s Food Truck Park, which is fun and says that Doc’s is really engaging with the community.
Ada Cougar football team members play “Musical Chairs” at a pep rally Thursday at Doc’s Food Truck Park. Shot at 1/40th of a second, there is some motion blur, but I happen to like the way the blur shows us what’s happening.
The stage and a sound system are lit by couple of street lights, various LED lights on food trucks, and a few dozen string lights, low-wattage light bulbs strung across the park. The light is enough to see by and have a pep rally, but it is somewhat challenging photographically.
First, there’s not a lot of light. In the film era, this essentially meant we would need to use a flash to get an image at all, or rely on mounting our camera on a tripod and shooting at long shutter speeds.
Secondly, the light is from all sorts of odd angles, and is all different colors, so there isn’t really a “correct” white balance setting.
As digital has evolved, cameras have gotten more and more capable at very high ISO settings. ISO is one of the three items in the triad of exposure control, with shutter speed and aperture.
This is a side-by-side comparison of Adobe Lightroom’s noise reduction tool, and you can see how effective it is at cleaning up very-high-ISO images.
For my coverage of these events, I dialed my Nikon D3 cameras up to ISO 12,800, which would have sounded like science fiction in 1980. In fact, I’m not entirely sure I would have believed you then if you told me that ISO 12,800 is even a real thing.
The D3 is an older camera, but actually creates a very usable image in what I like to call “the ISO stratosphere.” The images are somewhat noisy, but in the last 18 months, products that I use like Adobe Lightroom have introduced some very sophisticated and effective noise filters.
Shooting in the low-light regime doesn’t just test the high-ISO capabilities of your camera. It also takes lenses, image-stabilization systems, and your ability to see and manage a situation, to their limits.
Cheerleaders and Couganns perform at a pep rally Thursday at Doc’s Food Truck Park. I shot about 40 frames of this performance, and only a couple are decently sharp. But I also recognize that getting really sharp images isn’t always as critical as photographers make it out to be, and a better priority is to tell the story.
My readers might remember that last month I talked about my very memorable first weeks at The Ada News, in October and November 1988.
On a Friday night at Norris Field, while covering the Ada Cougars on the way to their 15th State Championship in 1988, I made this image of scout saluting the flag. Everyone loved this image.
One image in particular, of five Boy Scouts holding the U.S. flag and saluting it, came back to mind last week when Scouts from Troop 4, Hawk Mater, Kevin Fender, Carter Osborn, Aiden Holder, Finn Holman, and Harrison Townsend presented the colors at an Ada High football game.
These young Scouts were doing the same exact thing, in the same exact spot, 36 years later, and I think that is pretty cool.
Boy Scout Troop 4 members Finn Holman, Harrison Townsend, Aiden Holder, Carter Osborn, Kevin Fender, and Hawk Mater present the colors ay the Ada High School football game Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024 at ECU’s Koi Ishto Stadium.
This is part of a much larger project of mine: scanning the thousands and thousands of images I made during the first years of my career (before digital), a project my readers and I both love.
So watch this space for more old photos, scanned from film so they can see the light of day once more.
Finn Holman, Harrison Townsend, and Aiden Holder salute the U.S. flag at the Ada High School football game Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024 at ECU’s Koi Ishto Stadium.
This week on October 24, I marked 36 years at your Ada News. I know at least a few of my readers will remember what Ada looked like in 1988, and who I was then, just 25 years old.
I photographed these girls on a swing at Hayes School, on my very first day at The Ada News. Some people on social media saw this image this week, and suggested getting these people together to recreate this image, since they would be in their 40s now, and I love that idea. Let’s make it happen!
The passing years have brought changes, but the essence of the work we do at the paper hasn’t changed: bringing you the news.
One thing that’s been on my mind for a while is the idea that my photographs – photographs of you, your friends, your family, and our community – deserve to see the light of day again. It kills me to think that a really nice image I made lots of years ago is sitting in a Kodak box tucked away under my desk, might not ever be seen again.
On a Friday night at Norris Field in 1988, while covering the Ada Cougars on their way to their 15th State Championship, I made this image of scout saluting the flag. Everyone loved this image.
Thinking about this is a broader context, I wonder how many newspapers and their photographs were lost or destroyed or are sitting in a storage building somewhere, only having been published once and forgotten.
I don’t yet know what I am going to do about it, but I know that if I don’t make an effort to archive and preserve and reshare the tens of thousands of images I made during the film era (before digital), it won’t get done.
I am also mindful of my own ideas about big, seemingly overwhelming projects: chisel away at them one tiny bit at a time. What if I dug out and scanned just 10 photos a week? It would get done slowly, but it would get done.
Finally, thank you for reading our newspaper. We love bringing you the news.
In November 1988, I made this image to go with a story about Hanukkah, and it, too, was very well-received.
Most of us have seen the fake photos making the round this week, mostly the one of the little girl in a boat holding a puppy. These photos are easy to spot as fakes, being created by AI image-generators.
Many of my photojournalist friends called out these photos, some even promising to “unfriend” anyone who shares them.
I called someone out for it right here in our community, and the response was the usual defensive nonsense: yes, but there is a real crisis, so it’s okay. They even took the opportunity to accuse me of “the liberal media,” laying bare the depth and breadth of their ignorance.
As it turns out, there are plenty of real photos of the hurricane and the flooding, created by real photojournalists.
“Fake disaster images don’t just damage trust in the specific events they misrepresent, they erode trust in all media over time. People who feel deceived by one image are more likely to become skeptical of future disaster coverage, even if it’s legitimate,” Forbes Magazine said last week.
So what are these AI defenders saying? That sharing, posting, and believing fake photos is fine when you want them to support your point of view?
As I write this, Hurricane Milton is bearing down on Florida, but by the time you read this, it will have struck. My hope is that everyone sets aside the nonsense of AI and fakes, and takes in the real journalism surrounding this event.
Picking out fakes from real photos isn’t always easy, so one thing I hope my readers understand is the importance of knowing real sources of content, like my newspaper. This photo is an example: it looks like a fake, and you might assume I drummed it up from an AI generator, but no. This image is a real scene, shot by me, with a camera with an infrared filter on it. Such a technique isn’t intended to fool anyone, but to explore different imaging possibilities. It turns out that the red sign and the white STOP lettering reflect almost exactly the same amount of infrared light.
The photography community has been taking itself a little too seriously lately, so I thought it might be fun to explore the more playful side of my work.
I took a vase outside to photograph it against the trees in the front yard with the morning sun shining through them. I made this image with a screw-mount 35mm f/2.8 lens, and the bokeh, the characteristics of the out-of-focus areas in this image, has a ring-like appearance that I think expresses the idea of shimmering.I then photographed the same scene with a 50mm f/1.4 lens, and, as you can see, the bokeh is softer and rounder, expressing to the viewer a different idea about how the morning light looks and feels.
One thing us nerdish-leaning photographers do is pull out old lenses and explore their “bokeh,” which is a term used to describe the quality of the out-of-focus areas in an image. It’s not only fun, it can teach us how to use tricks and techniques like this more effectively in the future.
I love to photograph the outdoors where I live. My home is in Byng, on a nice patch of green. I love photographing my dogs. I love photographing mornings and evenings.
One thing I love to photograph that stands above these other things is the light itself. I love it when it takes on colors and and shapes and textures. I love it when light plays tricks, or shines through otherwise normal objects to make them striking or beautiful.
Photography is literally recording light, and I am reinventing my ideas about how to record light all the time. What will you do today to reinvent how you make pictures?
As my morning progressed, I had need of a toothpick. This container had just the right number of toothpicks in it that they fell into this interesting, colorful configuration.
One of my biggest ongoing projects this summer into fall has been my efforts to make certain my digital life – the photos, videos, writings, audio recordings, and everything else that lives as data – is safe and easy to access.
An interesting, even counterintuitive, part of this project is that I am throwing away (deleting) files and folders that are actual digital junk.
This project is a subset of cleaning, organizing, and decluttering my home.
Here are four flash drives of various sizes, which hold an incredible amount of data. One of them has the case off so you can see what’s inside these small wonders.
They both follow the same basic theme, that I have more stuff than I need, that all that stuff has the effect of cluttering my life and make my life more difficult to navigate, and that any number of things could just go in the trash.
“But, Richard, I just bought a gadrillion gigabytes of cloud storage. Why can’t I just put all my files there?”
Yes, sure, that’s possible, but have you ever tried to find a photo from June 18, 2017 on a cloud server like that? Or worse, have you ever had anyone say, “You took my picture when I was in high school. Can I get a copy?” Then they don’t know what month or even year it was?
I have thrown away a few hundred compact discs (CDs) that were filled with my photos, but not before making certain that those files resided in several safe locations, like solid state flash drive or cloud servers.
And yes, I know I have talked about saving and migrating your data (if you care about it), but this is different: this is about getting rid of junk, throwing it away. I did that with hundreds of my wife’s saved, moldy, spider-infested books and magazines, and I did it with thousands of saved, irrelevant, bloated computer files over the years.
The trick, of course, is to be confident that you are deleting the right files. When using a laptop or desktop computer, it’s actually pretty straightforward: search for a file name (if you have an Apple Computer with a Macintosh operating system, it’s Command-F, and if you are using a PC with a Microsoft operating system, it might be Control-F), and look at how many times that file appears. If I search for “Utah” for example, I’ll probably see dozens of the exact same file, some saved in my archive, some resized for my website, still more orphaned by various unfinished products.
The only critical photo file to save are the full-size, archived versions. Everything else can probably go into what the Macintosh Operating System calls “trash,” and Microsoft calls the “recycle bin.
Pro tip: just moving a file to the trash doesn’t delete it. It just makes it inaccessible and marks it as trash. To really get rid of a file, you have to empty the trash.
I know, I know: Richard, I don’t want to end up accidentally throwing away the wrong photos. Solution: buy a really big solid-state external drive, plug it in to your USB port, and drop all of those files into it. Take a big magic marker and write “deleted files” on it, then put it somewhere safe.
I’m not a big fan of buying software or hardware as a way to clean up my digital life. My wife constantly bought shelves and hangers and organizers and and even a book about it, all to help her de-clutter, but that all just became part of the clutter.
When I say I am getting rid of clutter, I really mean it.
Prior to the Olympics this summer, several news agencies decided to issue new cameras and lenses to their photographers, some of whom would take them to Paris to cover the Games. Some of those photographer posted this news, often that their newspapers or agencies were buying them new Sony equipment.
Almost immediately, Sony users chimed in, saying they were great cameras and lenses, but “Good luck navigating the menus!”
Most modern digital cameras are “set up” by pushing a “menu” button somewhere, then scrolling through lists to select things like color space, date and time, flicker reduction, and so forth, but once those are set, there is seldom reason to change them.
A “menu” in the camera world is a list of features and functions we can access by pushing a button on the back of a camera, usually labeled “Menu.”
Apparently, Sony engineers have yet to figure out how to organize camera settings, at least in a way that will please everyone.
But for me, most menu items are “one and done.”
I know there are photographers out there, maybe most of them, who would disagree, but the way I run a camera makes very little use of menus, so I don’t really understand why photographers who complain bitterly about how confusing they are.
One popular online camera critic said of the Sony A9 III, “It’s a pain to sort through the obtuse and complex menu system.” He also adds, “The menu system is huge and disorganized. This is not a fun camera to set up.”
And that’s the real reason I don’t care about menus: once I get a camera set up, I almost never revisit the menus, and I don’t really get why other photographers do.
An apt analog to this might be the way audiophiles used to buy stereo equipment with more and more controls, buttons, filters, switches, knobs, sliders, and on and on, though most of the time, they got the sound they wanted from their equipment, they seldom changed those settings. I know – I was one of those guys.
An odd addendum to this line of thought is the fact that despite complaining about the difficulty getting these cameras “set up,” many photographers don’t bother with some of the most basic settings like the date and time.
All the digital cameras I use professionally have buttons on the body that allow you to perform important basic functions on a regular basis, like this “FORMAT” button on one of my Nikon D3 cameras.
The bottom line is that once I really, actually get your camera set up, I almost never go into the menu again.
As I write this, the photography press has been up in arms again about, as you might be able to guess, Artificial Intelligence, or AI. And while there are legitimate concerns about the misuse of anything complex enough to damage the human condition, I feel that AI will soon move from the “next big thing” list onto the “whatever happened to” list.
No, it’s not going away, but as the flash-forward world of technology moves on to the next interesting topic like an 11-year-old at a Game Stop, so will the photography and media companies move on.
In this world of photographers, from seasoned professionals to dabblers and dilettantes, our world is full of photographers. What are we trying to accomplish, and what it the role of commerce in all this? Photographers seem so eager to spend money to prove themselves, tell the world that they are actual artists, whether they are artists or not.
I am certain there is too much ego in photography, and not enough humility and compassion.
That notion helps me circle back to my real topic today: the explosion of technology, and the idea that we think it works for us, but we actually work for it.
What do I mean? An article about photographic technology on fstoppers.com recently echoes one of my oft-recited ideas: do we really need the tech we claim to need?
A few specifications about photography serve as example; for instance, frame rate. I shoot tons of news and sports, and it’s nice to be able to shoot 8, 9, 10 frames per second. The fastest camera I use right now will shoot 11 frames per second, and sure, it means I am making lots of pictures of the events in front of me. But then I think of some of the fastest cameras in the world being able to fire off 240 frames per second, and, honestly, at that point, aren’t we really just making more of the same frame?
For what it’s worth, I actually put “fastest frame rate camera” into a web search, and it told me that the “swept-coded aperture real-time femtophotography” camera is capable of making 156.3 trillion frames per second. Finally, a camera fast enough for Ada’s fast-paced t-ball scene!
Yes, I know. But seriously, where is it all leading? When will photographers decide their cameras are enough of this and enough of that? What did you get for your $5000? Doesn’t it seem, at least some of the time, that we spend more effort (in the form of money) to acquire equipment so we can say we are photographers than time we spend actually being photographers?
Part of me has always had the desire to take the path less traveled, and the feverish race to load up credit cards and empty bank accounts in pursuit of ever-less-significant camera improvements has left me wanting to to pull out a sketch pad and some pencils and draw a flower instead of photographing it.
This is your humble (hopefully) host making a picture of himself with a humble Pentax Auto-110 lens, one frame at a time.
