Last year one of my favorite lenses, the AF Nikkor 85mm f/1.8, died. Its autofocus linkage was built with plastic bushings, and as they aged, the focus mechanism got increasingly stiff and rough. Both manual and auto focus were effected. Then last week, Abby and I were talking about some after-Christmas shopping, and I mentioned…
Continue reading →As I have taught in the past, “bokeh” is an elusive and often misunderstood aspect of photography. Roughly translated as “blur” or “haze” from it Japanese language origins, it refers to the quality, not amount, of the out-of-focus portions of any photograph. It is an important sub-category of selective focus, using shallow depth of field…
Continue reading →As I go about my job as a photographer, I am often asked by the people I am photographing if they can “get a copy” of the photograph. When I tell them they can purchase anything I shoot for the newspaper at our SmugMug site, they sometimes seem a little disappointed, as though the images I…
Continue reading →The modern photographic lexicon owes a lot to electronic technology. I’m not just talking about digital cameras; in fact, the technology to which I refer can apply to film as well. This technology is broadly discussed as “post-production,” often simple shortened to “post” on photography web sites. I don’t think this is a particularly good moniker…
Continue reading →A photon goes into hotel. The bellhop asks, “Do you have any luggage?” The photon answers, “No, I’m traveling light.” A year and a half ago, I penned a piece about working indoor sports like basketball, wrestling, volleyball and cheer using smaller, lighter, cheaper lenses than the full-time professional zoom lenses I often carry. Now that…
Continue reading →I bought the AF-Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 in about 1993. I didn’t really need it, but I’d never owned an 85mm, and the focal length had some legend attached to it. In the film era, the 85mm was an excellent choice for portraits, but it was a little on the short side for sports. Once in…
Continue reading →On my travel blog, I post images from all of our adventures, including some from quite long ago. The oldest in the collection is a college road trip from 1985. In 1985, the year I got my first newspaper job, I carried a 28mm f/2.8, a 50mm f/1.2, a 55mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor, a 105mm f/2.5…
Continue reading →As I have mentioned in previous posts, when I travel, I like to travel light. I also like to be able to accomplish my photographic goals, which are often quite ambitious. Earlier this year I was able to cash in some credit card rewards points for a Nikon D7100 and a AF-S DX Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G ED…
Continue reading →Or: Cheap zoom vs cheap prime. When I talk to my students, either in class or in the field, they often ask me about lenses. They already have one, and it’s almost always the “kit lens” that came with the camera, usually an 18-55mm with a variable maximum aperture, like f/3.5 at 18mm and f/5.6 at…
Continue reading →A friend of mine requested a “how to” specifically on shooting football. My newspaper’s coverage area has a very exciting sports scene. Seasons seldom go by without one or more of our teams playing deep into playoffs. The Ada Cougars, for example, have 19 football state championships. Like much of my news photography (and like…
Continue reading →The hay guy came by this morning to ask if he could cut and bail the pasture in July like he has every year recently, and it reminded me to grab a camera and photograph the pasture in the coming weeks before he cuts it. I grabbed the Nikon D7100 tonight, and very deliberately chose…
Continue reading →In my time, I owned two fisheye lenses. From 1993 until 2004, I had a the Fisheye-Nikkor 16mm f/2.8 AI-S, which I seldom used and sold to a friend when I phased out film and switched to digital, since its image circle was for a 24x36mm image area. I carried it for a while for imaging…
Continue reading →I got a text from a buddy of mine asking for the best method for cleaning the surface of his lens. He said there were a “couple of water droplet stains” on the front surface, though he didn’t say if it was on the front element of the lens itself or a filter on the…
Continue reading →I was poking around on kenrockwell.com the other day. Rockwell is equally liked and despised by the web community. Some cite him as example, while others tag him with appellations like Krockwell. I know he likes it that way, or he would be less inclined to contradict himself from one article to the next. Despite…
Continue reading →When I got ahold of the AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm recently, I discovered it took 72mm filters. Great, I though, my 77mm polarizer won’t fit on it. In fact, I had a number of polarizers sitting around (49mm, 52mm, 58mm, 62mm, 67mm, and 77mm), none of which fit the new lens. I found a cheap 72mm…
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