I possess an increasingly rare skill: being able to focus a manual-focus lens. In today’s autofocus-saturated world, this skill is particularly hard for younger photographers to appreciate. The truth is that for the first 20 years of my career, I neither had autofocus, nor did I need it. And to this day, I have several…
Continue reading →My readers know I love lenses for more than just photographic reasons. I think they are beautiful, art unto themselves, and worthy of having just because it’s fun to have them. The trouble with a philosophy like this is that it can get pretty expensive, so I make a point to wait and wait and…
Continue reading →My wife Abby has been in the hospital for a couple of days. She’s getting better, and we hope she comes home tomorrow, but in the mean time, since I can’t visit her due to the pandemic, I have been fooling around with some Christmas Lights.
Continue reading →Christmas is almost here, and that means photography. I recently grabbed some of my favorite lenses to help create these beautiful backgrounds. In some circles, these artifacts are called “bokeh balls,” after the largely misunderstood and over-emphasized feature of the out-of-focus portions of an image. You are welcome to download them and use them as…
Continue reading →Photographer Kyle Phillips at one of our sister newspapers, The Norman Transcript, was out of action recently, so he offered to let me borrow their new Nikon D500 digital SLR since I was slated to shoot the college football Big 12 Championship game in Dallas on December 19, and I accepted. The D500 is a…
Continue reading →Readers might recall that I recently bought a long-ago favorite lens, the Nikkor 85mm f/2.0, and that I mentioned that this lens has an undeserved reputation as not very sharp, especially when compared to the 85mm that preceded it, the 85mm f/1.8 of 1970s vintage. I have made a point of shooting with this pearl…
Continue reading →I admit I might have a lens addiction problem. In my defense, this most recent purchase was delayed for months while I searched and searched for a bargain on eBay. I know I already have a couple of 85mm lenses, and that I can make 85mm with several zoom lenses. This 85mm, the Nikkor 85mm…
Continue reading →A hard cold front roared through Oklahoma last night, leaving today the kind of day that inspired me to write awkward poetry in my youth. It was grey all day, and it eventually lured me outside several times to walk the dogs and, of course, make pictures. I grabbed my Fuji mirrorless and my $50…
Continue reading →Here are a few more images from the Mamiya Sekor SX 200mm f/3.5 I recently bought on eBay for just a few dollars, shot on my Fujifilm X-T10 with an M42 screw-mount adaptor.
Continue reading →Sometimes when we see an old tractor, a restored antique firearm, or even a beautiful old house, an aphorism that sometimes comes to mind is, “They don’t make them like they used to.” Such a phrase came to my mind when I opened box from eBay recently to find the Mamiya Sekor SX 200mm f/3.5…
Continue reading →I worked outside for a while after walking the dogs last night. We had a very wet spring and summer, so I had let some vines and trees in the back yard get thick and out of control. Lately I’ve been very much enjoying my new/used Fuji X-T10 with an ancient and very well-used Pentax…
Continue reading →Two of the things I write on the dry erase board at the start of every Intro to Digital Photography class are… You can’t buy mastery. You have to earn it. What can you do to make your camera take better pictures? Wear it out. I’ve got enough great cameras, lenses, lights, filters, computers and…
Continue reading →This is also my “Picture This” column for June 27, 2020 Nobody likes cameras better than I do. I like old ones and new ones. I like film cameras and digital cameras. I like cameras of all sorts and brand names. So no one was sorrier than I was when I learned this week that…
Continue reading →Irises are my favorite flower. Our neighbors to the west have them in their yard, which were originally planted by Dorothy, my wife Abby’s first mother-in-law when she lived there. The 85mm is my favorite lens. I made these images this evening.
Continue reading →My wife Abby and I have made many great photographs of each other over the years, both at our home in the bucolic splendor of Southern Oklahoma, and on our dozens of road trips over the years. One session that stands out among them, and always makes me smile to view and remember, is “The…
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