This category will focus on my photography in the film era.
Continuing with a series of scans from my newspaper files from the film era, these images are from a photo essay to go with a story about the Ada Police Department training in special tactics in February 1990. This is an interesting study in the evolution of police gear, attire, weapons, and tactics. I made…
Continue reading →Social media has been up to its old tricks lately; ignoring what it wants, or the truth, and being outraged by minutia. While browsing this lackluster scene this week, a video by a young photographer shuffled past my web crawling called “2024 Will Ruin Film?” Film is already dead, and here’s why: it is actually…
Continue reading →There are a lot of terms tossed around in the digital photography scene. One of them is “in post.” It refers to changing or fixing an image in the computer or other device in post-processing using software applications. My readers know that I teach photography at the Pontotoc Technology Center, and in a recent class,…
Continue reading →I ran into an old friend, Gerald, at the the park on Independence Day. Gerald’s wife Doreen took my photography class a few years back, and long before that, my wife worked for Gerald. Gerald told me that he had an old camera and a few lenses for it, and asked if I would I…
Continue reading →As I approach the age of 60 years, I am starting to thing about what might become of my work when I am gone. Now, before you label me as one of those “back in my day” guys, you should know that I remain healthy and happy at my job as a news and sports…
Continue reading →For my entire career photographing news and sports, I have thought again and again about doing more of my work on medium format film as a supplement to the day-to-day 35mm film product. Medium format is a class of film sizes between 35mm and large format sheet film. I tried it for a while in…
Continue reading →A couple of years ago, a friend of mine asked if I would consider writing about how to process your own film at home. I told her it was easier than she imagined. In the business, processing film is called “souping,” and you “soup” film, and say, “it’s in the soup.” To process your own…
Continue reading →These are a few frames from the mountain of film negatives I shot over the years before the advent of digital imaging.
Continue reading →I worked for a short time at The Daily Times in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1988, with a very talented young photographer named Harold Krewer. We often challenged each other to feature photo shoot-offs, and it raised us both up in quality, and it was very fun.
Continue reading →I worked in Student Publications at the University of Oklahoma in 1983, 1984, and early 1985, where I met some very talented artists and photographers, notable R. E. Stinson and Scott AndersEn, with whom I am friends to this day. We shared darkroom facilities at Copeland Hall in the School of Journalism. Because many student…
Continue reading →I was the swing-shift photographer at The Shawnee News-Star from November 1985 through April 1988. I was partnered with a talented former Vietnam Air Force member Ed Blochowiak. Between us we made some great images and won some awards. Ed spent his entire career at the News-Star, and, sadly, died just two months after retiring…
Continue reading →I had been at The Ada Evening News (now, The Ada News) just six weeks when I photographed the Ada Cougars winning their 15th state championship in December 1988 at Oklahoma State University’s Lewis Field. Most of the action and trophy photos were published in the sports section that Sunday. I was looking through a…
Continue reading →My ambitious young photographer friend Mackenzee Crosby came by the office earlier this week, at my invitation, so I could lend her a Minolta X-700 and a couple of lenses, as well as a couple of antique 620 cameras. In recent months, Mackenzee has been curating film photography into her body of work as an…
Continue reading →A friend of mine recently asked me to look over an older film camera of his. He told me he had grown up making pictures with it. I I told him I would be happy to look it over, and to drop it by my office. I wasn’t surprised when the that camera showed up…
Continue reading →In my last post, I talked about buying a nice used mirrorless camera and some adaptors so I could experiment with older lenses. It got me thinking about some of the very first images, and very first experiments, I tried. Ignorance is bliss, and some of my most successful early photographic experiments wouldn’t have happened…
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