Orange You Glad It’s Not a… Tangelo?

February 13, 2025 / Richard R. Barron

My readers know that I tend to be a healthy eater. One thing that makes eating healthy easier is that I have very little “sweet tooth.” The result is that I seldom have added-sugar foods in my home, foods like candy and cake, and only eat them sparingly when I encounter them elsewhere.

A Cara Cara orange sits between two Minneola tangelos in my kitchen this week.

And I know that I’m not a doctor or nutritionist, but we have all seen a body of evidence showing that refined sugars are among the worst things you can consume.

Okay, Richard, if you want something sweet, where do you turn?

It’s also no secret that I have a small peach orchard where I live in Byng, and when my trees make fruit (which is about every other year), there is nothing better than a fresh, home-grown peach.

I’m always looking for fruit in the grocery store. Some bulk-sold produce is consistently terrible, since it is usually picked green and allowed to ripen in a truck as it is hauled across the country.

Oranges and their cousins like lemons, limes, mandarins, and grapefruits seem to travel better, and are in pretty good shape when we get them in the produce section.

I have discovered that I am picky about my oranges. I love a couple of varieties, blood oranges and Cara Cara oranges, for example, but I don’t care for regular navel oranges or grapefruit.

This time of year is Cara Cara season, so I get them when I see them. I’m also open to trying new varieties.

There is an interesting subtext here: people who are overly-dedicated to only one variety of something. I know someone (a nice lady I went to high school with) who outright refuses to even consider buying any apple variety other than Fuji.

“You might enjoy ‘Cosmic Crisp’ apples,” I say.

“No, I’m going to stick with Fuji.”

“You also might like ‘Cameo’ “…

“No! Only Fuji!”

Anyway, I thought of all this recently at the grocery store, where I picked up another bag of Cara Cara oranges, and saw what looked interesting, Minneola tangelos.

After our parents moved to Florida, my sister and I bought them orange, grapefruit, and lemon trees as Christmas gifts. The trees made a lot of oranges, and while they had a great flavor, they were full of huge, chewy seeds, so we only used them to make juice. The oranges pictured here are ones my mom had just picked, and were ready to be washed to remove the ugly but harmless mildew on the skins.

See, I’m open to trying new varieties.

I have tried to like these brightly-colored little orange-like fruit, and though I didn’t hate them, I discovered they were a bit on the sour side, and tangy but in a harsh way. I still ate them, but also decided that their bright skin and smooth shape made me want to photograph them.

I set up a couple of reflectors and flashes in the kitchen, sliced open a few tangelos and a couple of Cara Cara oranges. Photographing brightly colored spheres, then eating them, is a next-level fun activity for someone like me.

You can make pictures just like this if the inspiration strikes – it’s a relatively straightforward setup.

While you are at it, taste-test whatever fruit or vegetable you are photographing, and send me a recommendation. I would love the hear about your favorite orange!

This is my kitchen sink setup for photographing oranges and tangelos this week. It includes two reflectors (the folding type you might put in your windshield on a hot summer day) and two flash units. The foil wrapped around the flash in the middle is to both attenuate the amount of light, and make it slightly more edgy and directional.

Magnetic Personality

January 8, 2025 / Richard R. Barron

I recently learned of a fun hack photographers can perform on the Sony DCS-F828 digital camera of 2002 vintage. I happen to have a sort-of-working F828 in my photo closet, so I thought I’d try it out.

My sort-of-working Sony Cyber-shot DCS-F828 of 2002 vintage is shown with three infrared filters.

The fact that I just learned about it doesn’t mean it’s new. It only means that I stumbled upon it on one of a million trips into Internet dreamland.

The trick is to use a neodymium (“rare earth”) magnet to move the tiny infrared-blocking filter, sometimes called a “hot mirror” filter, inside the Sony camera. The result is that you can then place an infrared filter on the lens, enabling the photographer to explore the range of the spectrum in wavelengths longer than visible light.

Neodymium magnets are cheap. I ordered mine from Ebay for $9.

Holding this neodymium magnet just above a spot on the bottom of the Sony DCS-F828 digital camera will move the tiny infrared filter out of the light path, or back into the light path, depending on which pole of the magnet is next to the camera.

Holding the magnet just above the right spot on the bottom of the lens will either move the filter out of the light path or into the light path, depending on which pole of the magnet is next to the camera. The movement of the filter creates a barely audible “click” from inside the camera, and changes the image on the monitor from black to a kind of deep purple, depending on the filter mounted on the lens.

I have three infrared filters, each blocking a slightly different part of the spectrum. The filters are labeled in nanometers (a billionth of a meter), 720nm, 850nm, and 950nm. The filters appear black to the naked eye, since they don’t pass visible light, but, unlike eclipse glasses, are not safe for viewing the sun, which emits damaging ultraviolet energy.

The idea behind infrared photography is to express a view of the world unlike human vision. Therein lies the challenge, too, since while it is neat to explore our world in a different way, it doesn’t immediately lend itself to a strong narrative. I have explored infrared a couple of times before, but I think it may be time to push a little harder and make images that have more visual value than just “this is different.”

This is a view from my front deck using the Sony F828 with the infrared blocking filter "hacked" out of the light path and a 950nm infrared filter on the lens, yielding an eery, ghost-like rendering of ordinary trees and sky. — This is a view from my front deck using the Sony F828 with the infrared blocking filter “hacked” out of the light path and a 950nm infrared filter on the lens, yielding an eery, ghost-like rendering of ordinary trees and sky.

The Light Nobody Likes

October 31, 2024 / Richard R. Barron

A flash cube sits mounted on a Sears Easiload Auto 600 camera, which dates to about 1970.

Journey back in time with me to a time before digital photography and before the peak of film photography, in which photography wasn’t the ubiquitous juggernaut of internet culture it has become today.

Today’s wayback topic is from the 1960s and 1970s. Families made far fewer pictures in a year than families make now in a day. Cameras were awkward, film and processing was expensive, and lighting was unheard of.

When a photographer wants to shoot in low light today, we have all kind of luxuries at our disposal, like sky-high ISO settings on our cameras, bright, lightweight LED panels, and a plethora of large-maximum-aperture lenses.

But to make pictures in 1974, for example, we faced some annoying obstacles. Film was low-ISO, affordable cameras had very small lenses, and most of the indoor artificial light in our daily lives was produced by incandescent light bulbs.

In these difficult lighting situations, some photographers had electronic flash units that we could put atop our cameras. They were expensive, bulky, and didn’t deliver good light more than a few times per minute.

For the rest of us, like my family, were flash cubes.

Flash cubes were almost always mounted on top of the camera, close to the center of the body. Not only was the light from this setup harsh, but it often resulted in "red-eye," which is caused when light reflects directly off of the retina in the eye back into the camera. — Flash cubes were almost always mounted on top of the camera, close to the center of the body. Not only was the light from this setup harsh, but it often resulted in “red-eye,” which is caused when light reflects directly off of the retina in the eye back into the camera.

Flash cubes contained a flash bulb, usually filled with filaments of metallic magnesium, with a small reflector behind it. The bulbs were arranged so that all four faces of the cube had a bulb and reflector, so each cube delivered four flashes. The socket the cube plugged into at the top of the camera rotated when the film was advanced, putting a fresh bulb at the front of the camera, ready to shoot.

It’s worth noting at this point that very frequently, the family photographer (usually a parent), forgot to advance the film, so there would be an awkward moment when everyone stopped to grin at the camera, waiting while Mom or Dad figured out that they needed to wind the crank to advance the film. All the time. All. The. Time.

In that era and environment, a roll of film was considered very valuable, so after the photo session in front of the Thanksgiving dinner table, shooting maybe three of four “now I want the kids in this one” photos, you put the camera away. So many people did this, so that after Christmas when you finally got that roll of film processed (“developed” is a misnomer when talking about film, since developing is only one step in processing film), revealing surprises, like photographs you forgot you made.

So here we are, dressed up for Easter or the beach or Halloween, and Mom or Dad want a picture. They line you up against a wall, since it was plain and therefore not distracting, clicked a flash cube on top of the Kodak Instamatic, “Smile,” and kapow!

I made this image of my father in the late 1970s, showing how harsh the light from the flash cube can be.

The funnest thing about using flash cubes was that everyone who had just looked directly at the camera now had a bright green spot in their visions for a little while.

It’s hard to imagine bad lighting today, when our AI-powered smartphones fix it automatically, but, just like with the pop-up flash on all our consumer digital cameras, flash cubes delivered some of the least-flattering light in photography. The reason is pretty straightforward: everything and everyone close to the camera is over exposed, and everything in the background is underexpose, often by a lot.

The science behind it is the inverse square law: the intensity of a light source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. You don’t really need to memorize that, since there are tons of examples everywhere, but I happen to think science is fun.

Following the painful, blinding flash from the cube, the bulb inside the cube was too hot to touch, since there was just a tiny explosion in there. In a minute it could cool off, but I always thought it was neat to try to touch it, just to experience that little science experiment first hand.

You might be able to find a flash cube in the box of junk in the top of the hall closet, but I advise against trying to use them. The components in the newest flash bulbs are likely to be 50 or more years old now, and have surely deteriorated. But if you do find some, now you know how they worked!

Two flash cubes sit on a table recently. Each cube contains four flash bulbs.

I Love a Parade!

December 8, 2023 / Richard R. Barron / 1 Comment

It’s one of my worst kept secrets: I love a parade. It’s also no secret that my favorite parade of all time is the Pat Taylor Memorial Parade of Lights every December here in Ada.

The Parade of Lights has gotten easier to photograph as technology has improved, both in terms of cameras, and the lights on display.

My strategy for photographing nighttime parades is pretty straightforward: sky-high ISO settings and large aperture lenses. I usually use my 180mm f/2.8 and my 20mm f/2.8, both older designs, but very capable.

Digital imaging has made a difference, but incrementally. In the early 2000s, for example, my digital cameras were the Nikon D1H and the Kodak DCS720x, at the top of the low-light game in their day, but definitely left behind by one generation after another of better and better digital cameras.

In the film days, there was Kodak T-Max P3200, a high-ISO black-and-white film I used for sports. But a Christmas parade is often very colorful, and that left shooting films like Fujicolor 1600, which was okay.

This is a scan of one of my Parade of Lights images from 1995. Made with Kodak T-Max P3200 film, you can see it is pretty grainy. Still, I got an image, and sometimes that's what counts the most in photojournalism. — This is a scan of one of my Parade of Lights images from 1995. Made with Kodak T-Max P3200 film, you can see it is pretty grainy. Still, I got an image, and sometimes that’s what counts the most in photojournalism.

It is an understatement that I no longer have to rely on such limitations.

Additionally, the lights themselves have transitioned to Light Emitting Diodes, or LEDs, and are brighter and less yellow-red.

So, fast forward to this year’s Parade of Lights: I shot it all at ISO 12,800, knowing that I could fall back on photography’s newest secret weapon: Lightroom’s AI-based noise reduction feature.

I know it sounds like cheating, or even skirting the edge of ethics, because AI has the potential to damage photojournalistic credibility, but I am always up front about how I use it: never alter content.

Even with the stratospheric ISO and f/2.8 lenses, I was still down to 1/30th of a second shutter speeds sometimes, so I just had to accept that many of my images would be throw-aways.

So if you made it to the Parade this year, and I’m guessing from the hundreds and hundreds of people there that you did, you would have seen me prowling around, having the time of my life, making tons of pictures. I love a parade!

Kids wave at passing floats in this year's Parade of Lights. — Kids wave at passing floats in this year’s Parade of Lights.

Filters, Filters, Filters!

October 2, 2023 / Richard R. Barron

A photographer friend and I were talking recently about how and why we use filters on the lenses of our cameras. The discussion centered around clear “lens protector” filters, but in that same group of filters are “UV haze” filters, and “skylight” filters.

I am not a collector by nature, but photographic filters seem to find their way to me. Many of these filters came from camera bags that were given to me or sold in estate and garage sales in "grab bag" fashion. — I am not a collector by nature, but photographic filters seem to find their way to me. Many of these filters came from camera bags that were given to me or sold in estate and garage sales in “grab bag” fashion.

They all do essentially the same thing to your images: nothing. Many photographers use them to keep rain, smoke, dust, and their own clumsy finger off the front elements of their lenses.

In the film era, the thinking was that ultraviolet light in the atmosphere would be a problem because it would contaminate our images. The answer was the UV (ultra-violet) filter, sometimes with the word “haze” added because it would supposedly reduce the appearance of haze in the distance, since haze tends to be in the blue to ultra-violet portion of the spectrum. If you look closely, you will see this filter is very faintly yellow.

I have a few more than a few UV-haze and skylight filters in my collections. They seem to accumulate more than anything else.

Likewise, a lot of film photographers, including me, used a “skylight” filter on their lenses, since magazines like Modern Photography and Popular Photography told us to. This filter appears very faintly pink if you look through it.

Those filters were intended for use primarily for color photography, but we almost always left them on our lenses when we shot in black-and-white. The exposure penalty is negligible, as is any noticeable tonal rendition.

Other filters for color film photography included color correction filters for use with daylight-balanced film in incandescent or fluorescent light, or to fine-tune color balance in a studio setting.

Here are three "graduated" filters, part of a kit that screws onto the front of a lens, letting you drop in filters like this, and rotate them to change where to effect is strongest. — Here are three “graduated” filters, part of a kit that screws onto the front of a lens, letting you drop in filters like this, and rotate them to change where to effect is strongest.

A popular filter paradigm in the late-1970s was the “graduated neutral density filter,” so named because they gradually got lighter or darker across the image area. You could get these filters in colors, too, so your image would be unchanged at the bottom of a frame, for example, and blue or brown or red toward the top of the frame. Watch the intro the the movie Top Gun, the jets on the carrier scenes, and you will see that they used exactly that to created those sunsetty-looking shots.

Here is the kind of effect you can expect to get if you use graduated filters.

Like a lot of trends, this kind of filter system experienced a flash of popularity which waned quickly, but stuck around at a low level, and once in a while you can see these filters in use, especially with nature photographers.

Here is a spectrum of filters for black-and-white films. Filters like these have mostly been orphaned by software like Photoshop, and "film look" in-camera settings. — Here is a spectrum of filters for black-and-white films. Filters like these have mostly been orphaned by software like Photoshop, and “film look” in-camera settings.

My favorite kinds of photographic filters are for black-and-white photography, although I didn’t get to use them very often. Their impacts on images could be dramatic. Red and orange filters would block blues and greens, creating deep, dark skies and cutting haze, while yellow and green filters tended to help black-and-white films respond more realistically. Blue filters, thought seldom used, darkened red and yellow areas, and lightened blues.

I only made a handful of really successful black-and-white medium-format images in my day. This is probably my favorite. It depicts a clearing summer thunderstorm over the Pecos River in northern New Mexico. I shot it with my Fujifilm GW670 III using Kodak Verichrome Pan Film, with a deep orange filter on the lens. The filter helped create the deep skies and shadows.

This view from the top of the Capulin Volcano in northeastern New Mexico emphasizes the beauty of the high-desert sky. Made with my Fuji 6x7 loaded with Kodak Verichrome Pam Film, I filtered the lens with a deep orange filter. — This view from the top of the Capulin Volcano in northeastern New Mexico emphasizes the beauty of the high-desert sky. Made with my Fuji 6×7 loaded with Kodak Verichrome Pam Film, I filtered the lens with a deep orange filter.

Finally, there are polarizers, but I promise to cover those in another article.

The golden age of filters is gone, mostly because of editing software like Photoshop, which can accomplish most types of filtration effortlessly.

Easily the weirdest of the color-correction filters is the "FL-D," meant for use with daylight-balanced film in fluorescent lighting conditions. That in itself isn't weird. The weird part is that I see dozens of these in the hands of photographers who buy digital camera "kits", which usually include a cheap tripod, maybe some cleaning cloths, and, for some reason, this filter, which is completely useless and obsolete in the digital age. — Easily the weirdest of the color-correction filters is the “FL-D,” meant for use with daylight-balanced film in fluorescent lighting conditions. That in itself isn’t weird. The weird part is that I see dozens of these in the hands of photographers who buy digital camera “kits”, which usually include a cheap tripod, maybe some cleaning cloths, and, for some reason, this filter, which is completely useless and obsolete in the digital age.

A Shot in the Dark

September 22, 2023 / Richard R. Barron

A friend of mine asked me this week about how to shoot candlelight vigils. She’d been to one, and while she got some usable images, she was not able to catch any magic with her camera.

Vietnam veteran James Pippen salutes as he holds a candle during an Ada Indivisible candlelight vigil in 2017.

Photographing low light situations has always been a challenge, but it has gotten easier in the last few years as the highest ISO settings, which control how sensitive the imaging sensor is to light, have shot into the stratosphere. It is pretty common in 2023 to shoot at ISO 12,800 with surprisingly controllable noise.

Even so, photographers sometimes run into situations where we are right on the margins of imaging: kids around a Christmas tree, detectives with flashlights at crime scenes, Relay for Life lit by luminaria, bonfires, people at fireworks shows, and, of course, candlelight vigils.

Luminaries glow at Relay for Life 2014 at Ada High School Friday, May 30, 2014. For this image, I used a tripod, which allowed me to shoot with a smaller aperture while still collecting a nice balance of last evening light with candles inside luminaria.

I tend to lean on lenses with very large maximum apertures, like f/1.8 to f/1.4. The easiest way to get into lenses in this category is to look at 50mm lenses. They have been around for decades, are easy and cheap to make, are lightweight, and, most importantly, they let a lot of light into the camera.

I know a couple of very talented photographers who have even brighter (known in the biz as “faster”) lenses, like the 85mm f/1.2.

Nothing invites you to the low-light party like lenses with vary large maximum apertures. Here are two 50mm f/1.4 lenses. The 50mm class of lenses is a great place to start low light photography.

Note that not all 50mm lenses are sharp wide open. Most 50mms need to be stopped down just a squinch, maybe to f/2, but that still invites a lot of light into the camera.

Tripods are another factor, though I find they slow me down. You can park your camera on a tripod and shoot at medium ISO values and medium aperture. The only problem that presents is that if people move while the shutter is open, they can be blurred, but there are some instances in which that can actually help your image, if that’s the look you want.

A good practice session might involve going outside with a 50mm set to f/1.8 and shoot by porch light or streetlight light and experiment with how to finesse those situations. Don’t be afraid to push yourself and your camera outside your comfort zone. Failed experiments can teach us a lot.

Once in a while I'll reach into my bag of tricks and pull out my rare and slightly mysterious Nikkor 200mm f/2.0. It is a challenging lens to use, and is big and heavy. And while I expect to delete a bigger percentage of images made with this lens, it has some very real low-light potential. — Once in a while I’ll reach into my bag of tricks and pull out my rare and slightly mysterious Nikkor 200mm f/2.0. It is a challenging lens to use, and is big and heavy. And while I expect to delete a bigger percentage of images made with this lens, it has some very real low-light potential.

Another Walk in the Park

March 21, 2022 / Richard R. Barron

The sun peeks through grey clouds, with just a trace of color.

You can say many things about Ada, Oklahoma, but one thing everyone says about it is that Francis Wintersmith Park is a jewel, an asset many communities don’t have.

Last week I had the chance to poke around Wintersmith Park with my photographer friends Mackenzee and Robert (link). We had fun, and it was a sunny afternoon I felt was best expressed by shooting in monochrome.

Later in the week, photographer Dan Marsh visited, so we walked in the park again, this time in the evening as it matured into the blue hour. I shot the entire walk with my Nikon D3000 and it’s perfectly-matched AF-S 35mm f/1.8 Nikkor.

These numbers were carved in the back of a park bench behind WIntersmith Lodge.

As the blue hour progresses, streetlight begins to shine more on the water of Wintersmith Creek.

This view looks straight down at a rusty stand that had been cut off many years before and allowed to rust. I guess this was the mount for an outdoor charcoal grill.

As on the walk earlier in the week, we found more locks on the fence above Wintersmith dam.

I went a little wild in this single-frame High Dynamic Range image of a tree I have tried to photograph mostly unsuccessfully for more than 30 years.

This water fountain near Firefly Cabin takes on blue light from the sky.

A Little More Light Can Make a Big Difference

March 13, 2021 / Richard R. Barron

Miss Oklahoma Kris Gonzalez was given a send-off recently for her travels to Las Vegas to participate in the Miss for America competition. Of note in this image is the flattering light in her eyes, made possible by an electronic flash bounced into a corner of the small room over my left shoulder.

The basketball season just ended in our community. It was a great one, though it was full of fits and starts because of the pandemic, and it kept me busy, and shooting really well.

All the sports action I shoot is made under existing light.

A modest electronic flash that have a rotating, pivoting head like this one can give you very nice control of light in many situations.

When sports scale back a bit, I have more time to concentrated on feature stories and photos, and I am almost always happier with my indoor feature photos if I include some flash.

I recently worked on two such features, one about Bladesmith Logan Morris, the other about Miss Oklahoma Kris Gonzalez. I photographed both of these people indoors under institutional fluorescent light, which is everywhere, from classrooms to businesses to warehouses. It is efficient in lighting these spaces, but can be somewhat unflattering to human faces.

To help with these images, I added some electronic flash. I almost always bounce the light from the flash into a wall, ceiling, or, if I am feeling particularly ambitious, a reflector. Bounce flash allows me to control the angle of the light striking the faces, as well as the color of the light.

Sometimes I add more electronic flash units to the lighting mix with a device called a slave unit, which is able to detect a flash and fire additional flash units simultaneously.

Also of note is the rise of ever-brighter, more efficient, more portable light emitting diodes (LEDs), that may soon replace electronic flash in many situations.

Finally, the Morris story is also one of contrasting worlds: a high schooler brings a knife to a small-town school and everyone is excited and proud of him. But imagine a similar situation at a big-city high school. A knife? Instant lockdown, call SWAT, send texts and social media posts saying to “shelter in place.”

It’s nice to know that small-town sensibility about such matters remains with us.

Bladesmith Logan Morris, a Vanoss High School Senior, is shown Thursday, March 10, 2021 at the School. Note how the sheen of the blade is enhanced by the light, an electronic flash unit bounced into a white surface above me and to my left slightly.

Fooling Around with Christmas Lights

February 25, 2021 / Richard R. Barron

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.

An old point-and-shoot camera sits on a tripod with Christmas lights in the background. 85mm Nikkor f/2.0 at f/2.0.

Model airplane with Christmas lights in the background and airliner-shaped "bokeh kit" on the front of the lens. 50mm f/1.4 Pentax at f/1.4. — Model airplane with Christmas lights in the background and airliner-shaped “bokeh kit” on the front of the lens. 50mm f/1.4 Pentax at f/1.4.

More from the Mamiya Sekor

September 21, 2020 / Richard R. Barron

The Mamiya Sekor SX 200mm f/3.5 sits in my dressing room today.

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.

Hawken Rifle Trail, our Irish wolfhound, enjoys an evening walk.

Marigold color is muted in hazy evening air.

Flare creates a dream-like effect on this morning glory vine.

Wheat grass gently sways in the evening air.

That Little Dance Called Creativity

May 3, 2020 / Richard R. Barron / 1 Comment

The weather and the light has been beautiful the past few days, so I took another crack at the neighbor’s irises. The light on these flowers filters through some trees, so it flashes in and out with the wind and the movement of the sun. The wind also blows the flowers around, so the whole thing is an exercise in patience. Tokina 100mm f/2.8 Macro.

Irises only stay in bloom for a short time in April and early May, so, like my peach blossom six weeks earlier, I made sure to photograph these several times.

When irises finish blooming, this is the result.

You can see the momentary splash of sunlight through the trees in this image.

While I was photographing flowers, I came across these kid's bikes being taken back by the weeds. — While I was photographing flowers, I came across these kid’s bikes being taken back by the weeds.

I also wanted to try to make pictures with a photographer friend of mine using a couple of ancient process camera lenses, but ended up making some fairly creative images of them instead of with them. Tokina 100mm f/2.8 Macro.

Using a tripod in a darkened room, I lighted this with an LED flashlight. 8 seconds, f/11, ISO 100.

The LED flashlight I used to light this has a red setting, which I used in combination with the white LEDs for this image. 8 seconds, f/11, ISO 100.

The third attempt at photographing this beautiful process lens, which is older than I am, was made with the LED flashlight again, with a different set of movements while the shutter was open. 8 seconds, f/11, ISO 100.

The Yard Session

April 14, 2020 / Richard R. Barron / 2 Comments

Years after the Nikon D100 digital camera has been retired from my workflow, it's easy to talk about its shortcomings. Despite those, the D100 actually was able to create beautiful images. — Years after the Nikon D100 digital camera has been retired from my workflow, it’s easy to talk about its shortcomings. Despite those, the D100 actually was able to create beautiful images.

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.

I bought the Nikon Coolpix 885 in the summer of 2002 as a small alternative to the Nikons I was using professionally at the time. By the time Abby and I had been dating a few months, she had made it her own.

One session that stands out among them, and always makes me smile to view and remember, is “The Yard Session.” We shot these images on February 26, 2004 (thanks, EXIF data!) It was a warm late afternoon in our friend Michael‘s front yard in Norman, Oklahoma. The light was beautiful, and I’d asked Michael to photograph us with his Fujifilm Finepix S2 Pro. His images are great, but the ones that stand out and bring us the fondest reminiscences are the ones we made of each other.

Abby photographed me with our Nikon Coolpix 885, and I photographed her with my Nikon D100 with the manual-focus 85mm f/2.0 lens. Because the D100 lacked an aperture indexing ring, it couldn’t talk to manual-focus lenses, so exposure was based entirely using histogram on the monitor on the back of the camera.

Images like this happen organically, often without planning or effort, and the result is a very natural, telling, intimate photography session.

Looking back on that moment more than 16 years ago, we were young and in love, engaged to be married, and so very happy. I hope these images show that.

First Day of Spring 2020

March 20, 2020 / Richard R. Barron

It’s spring, and despite a rather dire situation in the world, nature on our small patch of Oklahoma is unstoppably beautiful. 85mm f/1.4 wide open.

A redbud branch curves toward afternoon sunlight.

Peach blossoms gently sway in a light breeze.

Evening Walk

September 30, 2019 / Richard R. Barron / 4 Comments

Photography for the sole purpose of expressing myself and the moment… all these images were made with my AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 at about f/2.2…

Hawken the mighty Irish Wolfhound keeps a watchful eye on me.

Morning glory vines cling to the fence in the front yard.

A morning glory vine curves away from the front fence.

Vines on the back fence catch last light.

Lyme Gym Syndrome

January 19, 2019 / Richard R. Barron

This is an image from a recent basketball game "right out of the box," completely unedited. You can see a preponderance of yellows and greens in this image. In situations like this, there isn't really a correct in-camera white balance setting. — This is an image from a recent basketball game “right out of the box,” completely unedited. You can see a preponderance of yellows and greens in this image. In situations like this, there isn’t really a correct in-camera white balance setting.

Basketball season is in its peak, and my newspaper and I cover a lot of games. We have a great sports scene in our area, competitive and exciting.

I wondered as I was photographing one of those games last week, a tournament-heavy week with lots of games, how many photographers face the same thing I do all the time: overwhelming color casts in certain gyms.

Here is a screen shot of some of the tools I use to fix those hard-to-fix images.

In fact, there were at least six other photographers in last week’s mix: Steve Sisney, Josh Clough, Jeannie Neal, Courtney Morehead, Glen Bryan, and Lonny Dorman. I am always glad to see them.

The lighting problem comes from a combination of lights that are designed to be efficient (instead of color-neutral), and floor and ceiling colors that create a sort of color feedback loop. For example, several of the gyms I photograph have yellow school colors, painted on courts that are finished in yellowing varnish, reflected by yellowing ceiling tiles.

These are nice places to work, and I love the opportunity to work at these schools, but the color balance in my photographs requires some very aggressive correction. How do I do this?

I always, always shoot raw files. We in the photographic community probably preach about this too much, but it really is a game-changer. Raw files contain thousands or even millions of times more color values than standard JPEG files.
I don’t bother adjusting white balance in-camera, because…
I will use Adobe Lightroom to fix the color, first with the eyedropper tool, which I click on a neutral spot; sometimes this is all the fix I need. It’s pretty dramatic, actually, sometimes accompanied by the word, “wow.”
I use additional color adjustments in Lightroom’s excellent Hue/Saturation/Luminance (HSL) dialog, which allows me to change not only the amount of the offending color, but also the brightness and the hue of it. I can use this to take a bright lime green basketball court and make it appear a very natural pale tan.
The most important aspect of this, of course, is to create normal-looking skin tones of the players and fans. This can sometimes requires some very aggressive application of color sliders in Lightroom or Photoshop.
As tempting as it is to use the pop-up flash instead of existing light at these venues, you will always be happier with existing light for sports.

I see other people’s image from some of these places, and they all exhibit a common thread: difficult color balance. Take it from me: raw files plus aggressive editing can fix these problems, and result in very satisfying images.

Here is the image as I submitted it for publication, cropped, filtered for noise, sharpened, and with the lime green and yellows dialed way down, resulting in better skin tones and an overall better image.

Moving Pictures

Category: Lighting