Evening Walk
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…
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Lyme Gym Syndrome
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…
Continue reading →Striking Photos of Lightning
Two rounds of thunderstorms rolled through our home in Byng, Oklahoma last night. The first one skirted us to the north, so from our point of view, we had an excellent view of the right flank of the storm. It was the first time in the last couple of years that all the factors came…
Continue reading →A Light Serving of Light
With the recent addition of the handsome AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 to my bag, I noted that this new lens features an aperture with nine rounded blades, unlike its predecessor, the AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D, which has seven straight aperture blades. The reason this matters to me is that I like to use sunstars in…
Continue reading →How to Rock the Sunset
Those who follow me on social media might recall that my current batch of students were disappointed that it rained during last week’s class, forcing us inside. Tonight’s forecast is more likely to produce a sunset opportunity. All photographers with any experience know that a good sunset can be difficult to pin down, and it’s…
Continue reading →The Gift of Aperture
It’s Christmas time again, and with it we photographers find ourselves photographing something very pure to our imaging instincts: Christmas lights. Beautiful and dazzling to the eyes, we love photographing them for several reasons. They are everywhere, they are fun to shoot, and they summon the children inside us who looked on them with amazement…
Continue reading →Coloring with Lights
By now we should all be getting comfortable with concepts dealing with color, like white balance and saturation. If not, and I don’t mean this sarcastically at all, go back and look at your pictures of people, and ask yourself why most of their faces are too orange or too blue, which, in all honesty,…
Continue reading →The Light Can Make All the Difference
Two nights ago as I mowed, I watched, as I always do, the maturing light. About 20 minutes before sunset, with bands of clouds on the horizon, the sun peaked through and struck an early stand of my wife Abby’s favorite flower, Indian Paintbrush, in the pasture. I ran inside to grab a camera with…
Continue reading →Tested and Failed: the Sigma DC 17-50mm f/2.8 EX HSM
Like most professional photographers, I like equipment that is transparent. No, I don’t mean I want my cameras to be made out of clear plastic, though that might be really interesting. I mean that I want my equipment to get out of the way, do it’s job, and allow me to concentrate on the real…
Continue reading →The Plus-X Conundrum
In April 1979, I was quite proud to be selected to be on the Talon Yearbook staff the following year. At that time, I imagined I would be a writer. During the following year on the staff, however, I discovered that I wasn’t at all interested in writing feature stories, but very much was in…
Continue reading →Water of Love, Love of Water
In Intro to Digital Photography, I teach a lot of basics. I point out the effects of changing this, changing that, changing the other, and how best to take advantage of the result. One thing we discussed recently was shutter speed, and everyone had fun waving their hands in front of each other at 1/8th…
Continue reading →Coming Soon to an America Near You
I’ve been shooting various Independence Day celebrations for my entire career. Our community, Ada, Oklahoma, has a big day-long party in Wintersmith Park. It starts at 7 am with the Fireball Classic 5k/10k run, and ends 14 hours later with a fireworks display over the lake in the park. Many Adans set up tents and…
Continue reading →Commanding the Light: Polarizers
In recent entries I talked about the use of filters in black-and-white film photography, and ways to emulate them using digital image files and editing features such as Adobe Photoshop’s channel mixer. Unlike black-and-white filters, which pass their own color, but don’t pass opposite colors, polarizers pass light that is polarized in the same direction…
Continue reading →Observations on Film, Filtration and Our Roots
I touched on black-and-white filters in an entry not long ago after a photographer webfriend of mine, Tom Clark, said he was returning to black-and-white film combined with one of his very favorite lenses, the Nikkor 105mm f/1.8. I had one of these jewels for most of my film-based shooting career, and it was an…
Continue reading →Worst Lighting Ever
“The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.” ~Gloria Leonard There is really no way to light a subject worse than with direct flash. Much of the time, beginner photographers don’t have any knowledge about their camera at all, and in particular they have no idea how to light something. Their cameras are usually set…
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