My readers know that one of my favorite things about photography is lenses. One of my favorite lenses, which I have talked about before, is the 85mm focal length. I love it for any number of different situations. For some of the now-ending basketball season, I shot basketball action with it. I love it for…
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In my current class at Pontotoc Technology Center, my students all have new Canon mirrorless cameras. The mirrorless scene is an interesting and exciting evolution in photography, one made possible by the fusion of digital imaging sensors and the instant read-and-feed technology that lives in our smart phones. Because mirrorless cameras don’t have mirrors, the…
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I have bought and sold a few lenses in my day. Many of my favorite lenses, like the beautiful manual-focus Nikkor 105mm f/1.8 and Nikkor 24mm f/2.0, simply wore out, a testament to the fact that they were so great, so I used them all the time. Other lenses were not as great, some were…
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Over the years, a topic that I have raised over and over is the use of lenses with large maximum apertures. Just last week, I talked about the Christmas season as being one of the best for those lenses, like the famous 50mm. Most of us have at least one of these in our bags,…
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The Christmas season has officially started with the annual Santa Stroll in Ada’s Wintersmith Park. With it starts to Christmas photography season. At recent events I’ve covered, I saw a lot of smartphone photography, and that works for a lot of us. Smartphones have amazing cameras, and I fold smartphone photography into my work all…
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Updated, September 2025 Life is full of foolish myths, ideas that get planted into our brains by rumor or gossip or misperception, and seem to endure. One of those myths in photography is that sensor size affects depth of field. I hear it all the time in class, in the field, and, of course, on…
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The Most Interesting Accessory You Will Never Use I recently had lunch with a fellow photographer, someone I have known since 1985. We talked about everything, but, as is true about most photographers, we mostly talked about photography. At the end of lunch, he handed me a box that look like it had just appeared…
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Spring and summer are green and colorful in southeastern Oklahoma where I live. You can frequently find me walking my dogs or cutting the grass, and many evenings in the middle of that, I will see things I want to photograph in the golden evening light. I keep cameras just inside, for just this reason….
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Most photographers would agree: a 50mm lens is a great addition to your lens collection. The 50mm focal length has always been popular, and 50mm lenses tend to be cheap, lightweight and small. There are a couple of odd exceptions. Many lens makers use this focal length to create what are called “halo” products: large,…
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My readers know that among my favorite things in the world, not just in my photography, are lenses. I like old and new, heavy and light, complex and simple, and on and on. There are almost no lenses that don’t intrigue me. One class of lenses I find the most satisfying to work with are…
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I sometimes miss the days of Internet past, when a search yielded an interesting web page that had links in it to other links, which might have still more links. I loved clicking around to see everything from dancing hamsters to moon landing hoaxes. Now, I say with a heavy sign, the Internet seems to…
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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. 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…
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I’ve said on more than a few occasions that I love the 50mm focal length. There are quite a few reasons to love your 50mm, but at the top of the list is that in human scale terms, it fits just right into the efficiency quotient of manufacturing, shipping, cost, weight, and, of course, making…
Continue reading →Before I make my main point, I’d like to take a second and say that photographers have really been embarrassing themselves at the Olympics this week, including one who obliviously wandered onto the track where an active race was taking place, forcing runners to go around him. I am appalled , but not surprised –…
Continue reading →I’ve been taking pictures for a living for a long time. The apex of technology when I started in this field were cameras like the Nikon F2, the Canon F-1, the Hasselblad 500 series, and the Leica M and R series. It was a very interesting time in the evolution of photography. The film technology…
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