Weather Art

For most of the history of photojournalism, photographers and their editors have used slang, jargon that doesn’t mean much or sounds made-up to outsiders. We use words like dummy, presser, scoop, wire, embargo, cuts, nutgraf, advertorial, tab, -30-, breakout, stringer, and a couple of favorites at my newspaper for a long time, “three-murder Saturday,” and…

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Magnetic Personality

This is the result of yesterday's quick infrared experiment. It only required a few simple steps in Photoshop to make it visually interesting.

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. The fact that I just learned about it doesn’t mean it’s new. It only means that I stumbled…

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The Light Nobody Likes

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…

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I Love a Parade!

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. My strategy for photographing nighttime parades is pretty straightforward: sky-high ISO settings and large aperture lenses. I usually use my…

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Filters, Filters, Filters!

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. They all do essentially the same thing to your images: nothing. Many…

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A Shot in the Dark

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. Photographing low light situations has always been a challenge, but it has gotten easier in the last few years…

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Another Walk in the Park

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…

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