In sports photography, it’s one thing to talk about shutter speeds, ISO settings and focal lengths, and entirely another to discuss the real heart of sports, what we call the moment of conflict. Sports is mostly competition between humans. Much of the time the best way to visualized it is to capture this moment of…
Continue reading →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”…
Continue reading →I don’t get to do this very often, since most of the lenses I own and use are built so well that they don’t really wear out. Most of my lenses are Nikon’s Nikkor brand, and especially the older ones are build to last. The lens I am discussing today is not a Nikkor, though,…
Continue reading →I’ve had the Fuji Finepix S200EXR since early October 2009. I got it just in time for Abby’s family reunion in Duncan, Oklahoma. I got it primarily as a hiking camera, as a replacement for my dying Minolta DiMage 7i. In addition to some walk-around shooting, I’ve shot three major events with it, the reunion,…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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:…
Continue reading →In the by-gone days of film, it was widely and truly held that once you had a couple of reliable camera bodies and a flash, it was time to sink money into lenses, which we in the biz simply call “glass.” The reason was that aside from nice features and correct exposure, camera bodies didn’t…
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