As consumers and the camera industry are well aware, the most common type of photography in the world today is smartphone photography, and the most popular smartphone is the iPhone. My wife Abby and I have iPhones, and their sophisticated, convenient, built-in cameras have all but silenced our point-and-shoot cameras. As I explore the most…
Continue reading →On a couple of occasions before, I have described how much fun I have covering Ada’s Independence Day celebrations in historic Wintersmith Park. Our community goes all-out, starting with the Fireball Classic half-marathon, 10k, and 5k races (this year was the 50th), followed by kids games, then grown-up games, then fireworks at dark over Wintersmith…
Continue reading →For the first 16 years of my career as a photojournalist, starting with my first newspaper internship in Lawton, Oklahoma, in 1982, my craft was entirely mechanical and analog. I made pictures exclusively on photographic film, and printed them on photographic paper using a darkroom, an enlarger, and processing chemistry of various kinds. A dominant…
Continue reading →Just because some loudmouth Millennial rolls his eyes and dismissively says, “That’s the oldest trick in the book!” (with an implied “old man!”), doesn’t mean it’s not a good trick. I used one of the oldest tricks in my lexicon recently in class: the hair shake. This works well with people who have long hair that is…
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In October 2016, my wife Abby and I traveled to the American West for our twelfth anniversary, a journey we make as often as we are able. We love the west, and were married in southern Utah in 2004 at Arches National Park. The trip report, The Endless Sky, posted on our travel blog, was among my favorites….
Continue reading →One aspect of my Intro to Digital Photography class is on the third and final night, during which I talk about what to do with our images. I show and tell about how to organize, edit, save, archive, share, and display our images. Since I am about to start another class, I’ve been recently pondering something that troubles…
Continue reading →Yesterday I posted this photo on Facebook of myself showing many of the new images I recently printed and hung in the halls at my newspaper. Cue Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition… Props to our Publisher Amy Johns for facilitating getting these big prints made. One Facebooker asked me how I go about picking images for…
Continue reading →also known as “Constrain Proportions.” I was amazed and disappointed recently when I had to reject a number of poster-sized prints my office and I had printed at a profession printer, because despite my exact words “preserve the aspect ratio” of the photos, eight of the 22-image batch had been squished to fit the poster….
Continue reading →In many of my classes, people want to know how to organize their photos. They are mostly lost about how to arrange files and folders on their computers. I’ve known many professional journalists – people who should know better – who have essentially no clue how to organize computer stuff. I don’t fault them, though,…
Continue reading →The third night of my Intro to Digital Photography class built around what we can do with what we have learned on the first two nights: the basic theory of how cameras work, and how to use some of our tools to create images. In the digital age, we make a lot of images, and often…
Continue reading →My readers know that as a small town news photographer, I cover a lot of, well, small town stuff. One thing I have always loved is small town sports, and how the whole town comes out to the games and has a great time. Saturday, I worked a basketball twin bill, girls and boys basketball…
Continue reading →In the year 2000, the gravy days of newspaper publishing had just about peaked. Many publishing companies around the country failed to recognize the gathering storm of information technologies and the way they would affect how we get our news. “People will always need the newspaper,” they’d say. Photographers, particularly photographers like me, tended to…
Continue reading →I’ve won lots of awards over the years. Sometimes I think members of my profession have award-winning events and images thrust before them all the time. My most recent award was one for just showing up, the Oklahoma Press Association’s Quarter Century Club award, given for 25 years of service at OPA members newspapers, presented…
Continue reading →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 →The third night of my Intro to Digital Photography class could be called our “what to do with our pictures” class. The first night coveres the nuts and bolts of cameras, and the second night touches on the basics of exposure, lighting, lenses and composition. With that done, the third night’s “what to do” is…
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