When I was 15, I bought my first Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera, a Fujica ST-605n. At the time, I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever held in my hands. The camera arrived one July day with a light, small 50mm f/2.2 lens mounted on its even-in-1978-archaic screw threads. It was a decent…

When I teach my Intro to Digital Photography class at the Pontotoc Technology Center, the second night is usually lens night. I show my students wide angle lenses, telephoto lenses, macro lenses, and so on. One thing they notice right away is that none of my lenses are wearing lens caps. The reasons for this…

I have talked in previous entires about “bokeh.” Every lens exhibits bokeh, a word of Japanese origin that describes the characteristics of the out-of-focus areas of an image. Some lenses are noted for being able to produce good bokeh, while others, particularly cheap zoom lenses, routinely yield bad bokeh. Lots of photographers on internet forums…

Trends in photography, like all trends in society, come and go. One trend in recent years that I am glad is finally, at least from my observations, waning is obsession with bokeh. I have talked about it a time or two, but I became interested in exploring it some more late last week when a…

For more than 107 years, since before Oklahoma statehood, my newspaper was printed in Ada, in the building where I work. The room that housed the press even burned once, in 1959, destroying our first press. Recently, however, as our News King press got quite old and parts got harder and harder to find, our…

If you read photography press or internet forums, eventually you will come across talk of lens focal lengths that are regarded as “portrait lenses.” As surely as there are lenses that can provide beautiful portraits, there are caveats to that notion, the most important of which is that most lenses can produce excellent portraits of…