The Christmas season has officially started with the annual Santa Stroll in Ada’s Wintersmith Park. With it starts to Christmas photography season. At recent events I’ve covered, I saw a lot of smartphone photography, and that works for a lot of us. Smartphones have amazing cameras, and I fold smartphone photography into my work all…
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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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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. And I…
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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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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. When sports scale back a bit, I have more time…
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 →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 →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…
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…
Continue reading →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.
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