Alternate title: Lens Selection for Basketball Action I shoot a lot of sports, and in winter, I shoot a lot of basketball. Over the years I feel like I’ve gotten pretty good at it, and while I am set in some of my ways, I am still flexible in some of my choices, like lens…

The intensely complex visual puzzle that photography represents is rife with thousands of lessons to be learned, only a few hundred of which I am able to share with my students in the time we have in class. The lessons can be graphic, geometric, mathematical, photometric, sociological, economic, psychological, even physiological. Imagery in the 21st…

When I was in college, my photographer friends and I had what we thought were the best cameras and lenses we could afford. I remember by the time I was looking for my first job after college, I had two Nikon FM2s and an FE2, plus a 28mm f/2.8 Nikkor, a 50mm f/1.2 Nikkor, a…

One thing I try to emphasize to my students about shooting action photos, whether they are working as a sports photographer or shooting their children at ballet recital or a soccer match, is the value of filling up the frame. I see a lot of inexperienced shooters, and even some professionals, shoot action too “loose”…

Most of my photography students have the same gear: a digital SLR, the “kit” lens sold with it, and sometimes a telephoto “kit” lens as well. In the long-ago days of film cameras, SLRs were frequently sold with a 50mm lens, for several reasons. They were cheap to make, they had fast (meaning “large”) maximum…

Update 2018: At one point the Tamron 70-200mm fell from a car seat onto a paved parking lot, and the lens never performed well again. Despite liking its handling and look, I ended up selling it. For a couple of years, I’ve had the excellent AF-Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 in my bag here at home, but…

As I write this, football season is upon me, and I am going through my usual internal debate: should I shoot football with the 80-200mm f/2.8, or should I break out the 300mm f/2.8, which my photographer friends and I refer to as the “three large.” I am satisfied with the results I get with…

I had a lot of different lenses over the years. For the most part, they were the excellent, reliable, well-built Nikkor lenses made by Nikon. Some of them wore out, and I sold the rest of the manual focus Nikkors when I made the transition to digital. Most of my Nikkors were bought out of…

Like most professionals who shoot news and sports for a living, I have, and shoot, a big f/2.8 lens in my bag. The Zoom Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8 AF-S is the bread and butter for most of the occasions when I am faced with low light and the need for faster shutter speeds. It is everything…

Nikon and Canon make fantastic ultra-wide lenses for their APS-sized sensors sensors, and while I would not hesitate to recommend them, I would say that Nikon and Canon are so proud of them that only larger-than-individual entities like newspapers and photo studios can actually reasonably afford them. For the rest of us I offer this:…