Most of us have seen the fake photos making the round this week, mostly the one of the little girl in a boat holding a puppy. These photos are easy to spot as fakes, being created by AI image-generators.
Many of my photojournalist friends called out these photos, some even promising to “unfriend” anyone who shares them.
I called someone out for it right here in our community, and the response was the usual defensive nonsense: yes, but there is a real crisis, so it’s okay. They even took the opportunity to accuse me of “the liberal media,” laying bare the depth and breadth of their ignorance.
As it turns out, there are plenty of real photos of the hurricane and the flooding, created by real photojournalists.
“Fake disaster images don’t just damage trust in the specific events they misrepresent, they erode trust in all media over time. People who feel deceived by one image are more likely to become skeptical of future disaster coverage, even if it’s legitimate,” Forbes Magazine said last week.
So what are these AI defenders saying? That sharing, posting, and believing fake photos is fine when you want them to support your point of view?
As I write this, Hurricane Milton is bearing down on Florida, but by the time you read this, it will have struck. My hope is that everyone sets aside the nonsense of AI and fakes, and takes in the real journalism surrounding this event.
Picking out fakes from real photos isn’t always easy, so one thing I hope my readers understand is the importance of knowing real sources of content, like my newspaper. This photo is an example: it looks like a fake, and you might assume I drummed it up from an AI generator, but no. This image is a real scene, shot by me, with a camera with an infrared filter on it. Such a technique isn’t intended to fool anyone, but to explore different imaging possibilities. It turns out that the red sign and the white STOP lettering reflect almost exactly the same amount of infrared light.
The photography community has been taking itself a little too seriously lately, so I thought it might be fun to explore the more playful side of my work.
I took a vase outside to photograph it against the trees in the front yard with the morning sun shining through them. I made this image with a screw-mount 35mm f/2.8 lens, and the bokeh, the characteristics of the out-of-focus areas in this image, has a ring-like appearance that I think expresses the idea of shimmering.I then photographed the same scene with a 50mm f/1.4 lens, and, as you can see, the bokeh is softer and rounder, expressing to the viewer a different idea about how the morning light looks and feels.
One thing us nerdish-leaning photographers do is pull out old lenses and explore their “bokeh,” which is a term used to describe the quality of the out-of-focus areas in an image. It’s not only fun, it can teach us how to use tricks and techniques like this more effectively in the future.
I love to photograph the outdoors where I live. My home is in Byng, on a nice patch of green. I love photographing my dogs. I love photographing mornings and evenings.
One thing I love to photograph that stands above these other things is the light itself. I love it when it takes on colors and and shapes and textures. I love it when light plays tricks, or shines through otherwise normal objects to make them striking or beautiful.
Photography is literally recording light, and I am reinventing my ideas about how to record light all the time. What will you do today to reinvent how you make pictures?
As my morning progressed, I had need of a toothpick. This container had just the right number of toothpicks in it that they fell into this interesting, colorful configuration.
One of my biggest ongoing projects this summer into fall has been my efforts to make certain my digital life – the photos, videos, writings, audio recordings, and everything else that lives as data – is safe and easy to access.
An interesting, even counterintuitive, part of this project is that I am throwing away (deleting) files and folders that are actual digital junk.
This project is a subset of cleaning, organizing, and decluttering my home.
Here are four flash drives of various sizes, which hold an incredible amount of data. One of them has the case off so you can see what’s inside these small wonders.
They both follow the same basic theme, that I have more stuff than I need, that all that stuff has the effect of cluttering my life and make my life more difficult to navigate, and that any number of things could just go in the trash.
“But, Richard, I just bought a gadrillion gigabytes of cloud storage. Why can’t I just put all my files there?”
Yes, sure, that’s possible, but have you ever tried to find a photo from June 18, 2017 on a cloud server like that? Or worse, have you ever had anyone say, “You took my picture when I was in high school. Can I get a copy?” Then they don’t know what month or even year it was?
I have thrown away a few hundred compact discs (CDs) that were filled with my photos, but not before making certain that those files resided in several safe locations, like solid state flash drive or cloud servers.
And yes, I know I have talked about saving and migrating your data (if you care about it), but this is different: this is about getting rid of junk, throwing it away. I did that with hundreds of my wife’s saved, moldy, spider-infested books and magazines, and I did it with thousands of saved, irrelevant, bloated computer files over the years.
The trick, of course, is to be confident that you are deleting the right files. When using a laptop or desktop computer, it’s actually pretty straightforward: search for a file name (if you have an Apple Computer with a Macintosh operating system, it’s Command-F, and if you are using a PC with a Microsoft operating system, it might be Control-F), and look at how many times that file appears. If I search for “Utah” for example, I’ll probably see dozens of the exact same file, some saved in my archive, some resized for my website, still more orphaned by various unfinished products.
The only critical photo file to save are the full-size, archived versions. Everything else can probably go into what the Macintosh Operating System calls “trash,” and Microsoft calls the “recycle bin.
Pro tip: just moving a file to the trash doesn’t delete it. It just makes it inaccessible and marks it as trash. To really get rid of a file, you have to empty the trash.
I know, I know: Richard, I don’t want to end up accidentally throwing away the wrong photos. Solution: buy a really big solid-state external drive, plug it in to your USB port, and drop all of those files into it. Take a big magic marker and write “deleted files” on it, then put it somewhere safe.
I’m not a big fan of buying software or hardware as a way to clean up my digital life. My wife constantly bought shelves and hangers and organizers and and even a book about it, all to help her de-clutter, but that all just became part of the clutter.
When I say I am getting rid of clutter, I really mean it.
Prior to the Olympics this summer, several news agencies decided to issue new cameras and lenses to their photographers, some of whom would take them to Paris to cover the Games. Some of those photographer posted this news, often that their newspapers or agencies were buying them new Sony equipment.
Almost immediately, Sony users chimed in, saying they were great cameras and lenses, but “Good luck navigating the menus!”
Most modern digital cameras are “set up” by pushing a “menu” button somewhere, then scrolling through lists to select things like color space, date and time, flicker reduction, and so forth, but once those are set, there is seldom reason to change them.
A “menu” in the camera world is a list of features and functions we can access by pushing a button on the back of a camera, usually labeled “Menu.”
Apparently, Sony engineers have yet to figure out how to organize camera settings, at least in a way that will please everyone.
But for me, most menu items are “one and done.”
I know there are photographers out there, maybe most of them, who would disagree, but the way I run a camera makes very little use of menus, so I don’t really understand why photographers who complain bitterly about how confusing they are.
One popular online camera critic said of the Sony A9 III, “It’s a pain to sort through the obtuse and complex menu system.” He also adds, “The menu system is huge and disorganized. This is not a fun camera to set up.”
And that’s the real reason I don’t care about menus: once I get a camera set up, I almost never revisit the menus, and I don’t really get why other photographers do.
An apt analog to this might be the way audiophiles used to buy stereo equipment with more and more controls, buttons, filters, switches, knobs, sliders, and on and on, though most of the time, they got the sound they wanted from their equipment, they seldom changed those settings. I know – I was one of those guys.
An odd addendum to this line of thought is the fact that despite complaining about the difficulty getting these cameras “set up,” many photographers don’t bother with some of the most basic settings like the date and time.
All the digital cameras I use professionally have buttons on the body that allow you to perform important basic functions on a regular basis, like this “FORMAT” button on one of my Nikon D3 cameras.
The bottom line is that once I really, actually get your camera set up, I almost never go into the menu again.
As I write this, the photography press has been up in arms again about, as you might be able to guess, Artificial Intelligence, or AI. And while there are legitimate concerns about the misuse of anything complex enough to damage the human condition, I feel that AI will soon move from the “next big thing” list onto the “whatever happened to” list.
No, it’s not going away, but as the flash-forward world of technology moves on to the next interesting topic like an 11-year-old at a Game Stop, so will the photography and media companies move on.
In this world of photographers, from seasoned professionals to dabblers and dilettantes, our world is full of photographers. What are we trying to accomplish, and what it the role of commerce in all this? Photographers seem so eager to spend money to prove themselves, tell the world that they are actual artists, whether they are artists or not.
I am certain there is too much ego in photography, and not enough humility and compassion.
That notion helps me circle back to my real topic today: the explosion of technology, and the idea that we think it works for us, but we actually work for it.
What do I mean? An article about photographic technology on fstoppers.com recently echoes one of my oft-recited ideas: do we really need the tech we claim to need?
A few specifications about photography serve as example; for instance, frame rate. I shoot tons of news and sports, and it’s nice to be able to shoot 8, 9, 10 frames per second. The fastest camera I use right now will shoot 11 frames per second, and sure, it means I am making lots of pictures of the events in front of me. But then I think of some of the fastest cameras in the world being able to fire off 240 frames per second, and, honestly, at that point, aren’t we really just making more of the same frame?
For what it’s worth, I actually put “fastest frame rate camera” into a web search, and it told me that the “swept-coded aperture real-time femtophotography” camera is capable of making 156.3 trillion frames per second. Finally, a camera fast enough for Ada’s fast-paced t-ball scene!
Yes, I know. But seriously, where is it all leading? When will photographers decide their cameras are enough of this and enough of that? What did you get for your $5000? Doesn’t it seem, at least some of the time, that we spend more effort (in the form of money) to acquire equipment so we can say we are photographers than time we spend actually being photographers?
Part of me has always had the desire to take the path less traveled, and the feverish race to load up credit cards and empty bank accounts in pursuit of ever-less-significant camera improvements has left me wanting to to pull out a sketch pad and some pencils and draw a flower instead of photographing it.
This is your humble (hopefully) host making a picture of himself with a humble Pentax Auto-110 lens, one frame at a time.
I’ve said on more than a few occasions that I love the 50mm focal length.
Another 50mm? Yes!
There are quite a few reasons to love your 50mm, but at the top of the list is that in human scale terms, it fits just right into the efficiency quotient of manufacturing, shipping, cost, weight, and, of course, making pictures with it. For decades now, the photographic community has dubbed it the “Nifty Fifty.”
Of course, I have maybe a dozen of these gems sitting around, some in camera bags in the field, others in shelves in my home photo studio, others still on adaptors, waiting to be mounted on a mirrorless camera and experimented with.
Why, then, did I buy yet another 50mm recently? It started a couple of Christmases ago when I bought a couple of photo grab bags, one of which contained a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT, a squirrely little camera of 2005 vintage. It worked fine, and I’ve shot a few assignments with it, all with the unimpressive but ubiquitous 18-55mm “kit” lens that equipped almost every Canon consumer digital SLR in history.
I shot a with it, then put it away, only to dig it out again and again, trying to to remember to throw it over my shoulder as a second camera at a street festival or softball game. All the while, I kept asking myself if there was any point to using this camera. Wasn’t it hopelessly outdated, with it’s three frames per second, 1600-maximum ISO, and 1.8-inch view screen on the back? Sure, but photographers (at least the creative ones) love to tinker and play with whatever gear we can find, and no camera is truly worthless until it stops working.
The 50mm lens, from the top $1600 Nikon or Sony to the lowly $85 Yongnuo 50mm f/1.8 is a wonderful focal length. I made this with the Yongnuo in my back yard a few evenings ago.
I looked on Ebay for Canon EF lenses that might bring new life to this camera, but they remained expensive, especially on a camera that might die in my hands the next day.
Finally, finally, on Amazon, I saw a 50mm f/1.8 from Chinese lens maker Yongnuo, marked down twice to something like $85 on Prime Day.
The result was predictable, but not in a bad way. The lens did the job the “Nifty Fifty” promised, and if the camera died, I’d probably gift the 50 to some Canon user out there who also needed to dial up there game.
So, yes, I have yet another 50mm lens, and yes, I will be making pictures with it.
Hopefully, the experimental combination of old digital camera and cheap 50mm lens will yield some great, and maybe even unexpected, results.
Before I make my main point, I’d like to take a second and say that photographers have really been embarrassing themselves at the Olympics this week, including one who obliviously wandered onto the track where an active race was taking place, forcing runners to go around him. I am appalled , but not surprised – photographers can be very self-absorbed.
My 1985-era 85mm f/2.0 is a great-looking lens, and feels great in my hands. Some photographers claimed it wasn’t as sharp as other 85mm lenses of the era, but I’ve proven that wrong time and again.
Anyway.
Many photographers own more than their share of lenses. I am one such photographer. I love lenses, especially those from the era in which I was building my skills as a young photojournalist.
I thought about this at a monthly open-mic event I attended this week, to which I brought my Nikkor 85mm f/2.0 lens, a lens I owned in the 1990s, and always regretted selling, then found again on Ebay.
This 85mm is not my main “duty” lens (that honor goes to my autofocus 85mm f/1.8), so I don’t get it out as often as I’d like. When I make a point to throw it into the mix, I am never disappointed.
One of my favorite things about using older, manual-focus lenses is the reassurance that I am still able to actually focus a lens. It’s a skill I am happy to say I still possess, in part because I remember to keep it fresh.
I also love using old, sometimes obscure lenses on mirrorless cameras with adaptors.
Most of my advice about using old lenses starts with the familiar, the 50mm lens. I have something like 12 of these lenses, whether from boxes of junk from garage sales, given to me by someone who never uses them, or on cameras that I put away on the “one of these days” shelf. The classic 50mm lens is very much right-sized in human hands and to the eye, they are cheap and plentiful, and are usually sharp and bright.
And yes, I know I have offered up this challenge before, but my experience using my old prime lenses at the open mic thing this week was just great. So get out your old 50mm, 85mm, 105mm, 135mm, tag me or collar me on the street, and between us and these classic lenses, and I’ll bet we can make some great pictures.
I love the way I can stay reasonably inconspicuous with a small prime lens like the 85mm f/2.0. So many photographers barge into a scene with huge gear, party because they need it, but partly because it feeds our egos.
I’ve been taking pictures for a living for a long time. The apex of technology when I started in this field were cameras like the Nikon F2, the Canon F-1, the Hasselblad 500 series, and the Leica M and R series. It was a very interesting time in the evolution of photography.
Most long-time Nikon photographers will recognize the “claw” on the aperture ring of Nikkor lenses.
The film technology on the day I started my first job in journalism as an intern in 1982 was Kodak Tri-X Pan Film in the black-and-white realm, and Kodacolor, Kodachrome or Ektachrome in color. Fuji had only begun to compete with Kodak, and had yet to introduce their groundbreaking films like FujiChrome Velvia or Fuji’s Super G and Super HG line of color negative films, and Fujicolor Press, which I used all the time in the early 1990s.
One piece of kit that has changed completely since I’ve been in the business is the way lenses are made. Until the 1990s, most lenses were built like tanks, but as plastics got better and bottom line profits got more important, lenses just aren’t build like they once were.
An older Nikkor lens with an aperture “claw” is shown next to a lens from the next generation of Nikkor lenses that used a notch in the ring itself instead of a claw.
An interesting piece of trivia about Nikon lenses made prior to 1977 is the crescent-shaped metal “claw” on the aperture ring. When you mounted a lens on a camera from that era like a Nikon F2 or a Nikkormat, the claw would engage a pin in a collar around the lens mount of the camera. The procedure, which most non-photographers have never seen, is to mount the lens on the camera, then rack the aperture ring until it stopped in both directions, which would set a little tab in the collar to the maximum aperture of the lens.
A lesser-known fact about the old aperture indexing “claw” is that the holes machined into the ears of the claw are there to let light through to the smaller aperture numbers behind the larger numbers. The smaller aperture numbers were part of Nikon’s “Aperture Direct Readout,” which let the photographer see the selected aperture in the viewfinder.
A photographer friend of mine showed me her Nikkormat a few years ago, and I saw that the aperture wasn’t indexed, so I dutifully racked the aperture ring back and forth. She’d never seen that done, and told me she didn’t even know it was a thing.
Believe it or not, the “skeleton holes” drilled on either side of the claw were there to let light shine on the ADR (Aperture Direct Readout) scale, the smaller aperture scale below the main aperture scale.
Our photographic history is so interesting, and one of the funnest things about it is that we have access to old cameras and lenses that still work perfectly. I would encourage you to dig out and dust off these old machines, and if you are so inclined, shoot some film with them. But if film photography doesn’t interest you, these machines remain so interesting, and, as it happens, can be excellent props for photo and video shoots, so get them out, play with them, and have fun!
This is what the aperture indexing “claw” looked like on a Nikkormat of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Note that this claw doesn’t have holes cut into it because it predates Nikon’s “Aperture Direct Readout” feature.
Several friends of mine recently took the dive into Nikon “mirrorless” digital camera photography. Two of these photographers, Robert and Scott, hail from Tulsa. The three of us met at the University of Oklahoma forty years ago.
I used the Nikon Z30 mirrorless camera to make this image at sunrise recently. It’s a solid image, but I could have made it with any number of cameras, old or new.
In 1984, we photographers had only the vaguest idea about digital photography, and I recall quite clearly imagining that newspapers would merge with or form partnerships with television stations. I had in mind that all photographers would shoot video for tv and newspapers would use screen captures for their print editions.
Robert bought a Nikon Z5 a couple of years ago, while Scott bought a Nikon Z30 and last year, then just a few months later, a Nikon Z8. With the Z8 easily overshadowing the Z30 for Scott’s wildlife and wilderness photography, he mostly stopped using his Z30, and recently offered to send it to me to test it out and see how it fit into my workflow.
The Nikon Z30 sits in my home studio recently.
The short answer was: it didn’t really fit.
The Nikon Z30 is a very capable camera. It is lightweight and fast, makes clean images, and is made and marketed as the kind of camera you might use if you were a videographer or vlogger. And that’s the rub for me: it’s a great camera for someone else.
The Z30’s biggest deficit for me is the lack of a viewfinder. It is set up to be used the same way you might use a smartphone, by holding it at arms-length, and looking at the monitor on the back of the camera, or, in the case of many cameras in this class, with the monitor flipped up, down, or to the side.
I own a couple of mirrorless cameras that more-or-less fill the same role at the Z30. From left to right are the Fujifilm X-T10, the Nikon Z30, and the Lumix GH2, each wearing similar “kit” lenses.
I’ve been throwing this camera into my news and sports workflow, and over and over I have put the camera up to my eye, only to remind myself to hold it away so I can see the monitor.
The Nikon Z series is an impressive lineup or cameras. Scott has been posting images made with his Z8, and they are amazing, but I am inclined to say it’s because of his constant journeys into the mountains above his home near Provo, Utah. A great camera can certainly help make images there, but the real end game is what’s in front of his camera, not inside it.
Robert brings his Nikon Z5 mirrorless down when he visits, and I’ve shot some with it. It does have an electronic viewfinder, so I am more at home with it in my hands and at my eye.
A fellow photographer friend in California, Nic Coury, mostly shoots as a freelancer for news organizations and magazines, and a couple of years ago bought a Nikon Z9, the current top-of-the-line Nikon mirrorless. He makes great images with that camera, but again, the camera is only one link in his photography chain. For Nic, especially, I’d say that his biggest asset is his understanding of light.
Photographer Nic Coury is based in Monterey, California, so he has the opportunity to photograph the state’s Wine Country. He made this with the Nikon Z9.
Scott didn’t place any kind of deadline on returning this camera to him, so I’ll keep shooting it for a bit. I’m grateful both for his trust and his generosity.
The bottom line seems to me to be this: the current mirrorless cameras are great machines, and when it comes time to replace aged-out cameras, that’s the way for many to go. But they aren’t the game-changers everyone seems to think they are. In fact, if you have a new mirrorless camera, my challenge for you is to show me – not just tell me – how great these cameras are and what they allowed you to do that you couldn’t do before.
I used the Nikon Z30 to photograph fireworks in Ada’s Wintersmith Park July 5.
The Pentax Auto 110 was a neat-looking little camera, show here with its lens and film removed.
Sometimes we in the photography community take things too seriously. We are inclined to tell ourselves that our work is important, sometimes more important than it really is, when much of the time, we need to take a breath and relax, and have fun doing our jobs.
I thought of this recently when I saw an article about the Pentax Auto 110, a novelty camera sold in the 1970s. This camera used the 110-sized film cassettes, which produced a negative of just 17mm x 13mm, and had interchangeable lenses.
The Pentax Auto 110 sits in my hand, illustrating just how small this SLR camera really is.
The article suggested getting a cheap adaptor to put the Auto 110’s lenses on a modern mirrorless camera, and I happen to know someone who has an Auto 110 with it’s most popular lens, the 18mm f/2.8. I poked around on Amazon for about 30 seconds before I found an adaptor to put this teensy lens on my Fuji X-T10 mirrorless camera.
Shooting with it delivered as expected: this small, well-built lens is optically kind of primitive, and creates a look and feel of photographs from the 1970s. Of course, that’s really reverse engineering, since the look and feel of photographs from the 1970s were defined by lenses like these.
The lens doesn’t have aperture blades in it, since the camera used an internal aperture, so the only way to use it is “wide open,” f/2.8, but I think of that, and the look of the lens, as tools instead of liabilities.
It’s been fun to play around with this combination, and I would encourage my readers to dig around the house or the shed and see if you have any relics that might be fun to play around with, and explore their look and feel in a creative way.
This image of Summer, my Chihuahua, made with the Pentax 18mm f/2.8, has the look and feel of a photographic print you might have gotten from the Fotomat in 1976.
My social media followers may have noticed that Facebook recently removed one of my posts, saying “It looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way.”
This post wasn’t an offensive meme or a politically or socially insensitive comment. It was a link to a photo on my newspaper’s, YOUR newspaper’s, website.
I shared this to social, and people were sympathetic, but then I settled down and considered a truth that I have often emphasized when other people tell us that their posts were “censored” by Facebook: social media is not a right.
I know a lot of people who are deaf to this argument, and I kind of understand why: Facebook is a huge, influential, international entity, and pictures and words can carry messages across the globe. But that doesn’t make it a right.
“Yes it does, Richard. I have the right to say anything I want.” I know you do, I do too. But your right to free speech is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, not social media and other websites.
If you still disagree with this, suppose you created your own website, maybe “bobsadaopinion.com.” You own it, but you also allow people to contribute to it. Maybe your website is devoted to the opinion that 2+2=4. Then someone posts a comment saying that 2+2=5. Do you have to accept this comment? It’s your website, not theirs, and you won’t accept that 2+2=5. Is this a violation of their free speech if you delete that comment?
No, of course it isn’t. Facebook, Instagram, X, Youtube, Pinterest, and on and on – and I can’t emphasize this enough – don’t belong to you, and aren’t obligated to let you say anything they don’t want you to say.
I’ll say that I thought Facebook was wrong to remove a link to a newspaper’s website because some algorithm thought it was inappropriate, but my newspaper and I weren’t censored.
I think social media in general tends to create a community of incivility, and we should all take it a whole lot less seriously.
This is the scene in question. I’m not entirely sure what Facebook thought was “misleading” about it, but my readers know I would never manipulate or deceive them.
I love the idea that this beautiful image was made with a camera that someone once described as “the worst DSLR ever.”
If you know me at all, you know how fed up and I with the mythology surrounding photography, and at the center of my frustration is the idea that you can – an should – buy mastery.
Anyone in any art knows that you have to earn mastery. A new piano won’t make you play that etude better, a new red dot sight won’t make you shoot straighter, a new airplane won’t make your approaches safer.
In the photography community, there is a lot of social pressure to “upgrade.” Photography websites often rely on advertising, so they are eager to promote and praise the latest and greatest, and, of course, the most expensive, cameras and lenses. That message goes hand-in-hand with the idea that what you have now, what you bought last year or five years ago, is “outdated,” and by proxy, incapable of making good photographs.
I know it sounds ridiculous to pay $6000 for a camera, then be told by the web, and the photography community, that your camera isn’t good enough because the next $6000 camera is better.
But that is the unambiguous message of the photography community.
I know so many photographers who bought into this thinking, and bought newer, more expensive cameras, yet whose work remained exactly the same.
If you think I am talking about you, I probably am.
I can think of an important exception: my photographer friend Scott AndersEn bought a Nikon 200-500mm and a 35mm f/1.4 a couple of years ago, then – and this is the real reason for buying it – he went to Europe for two weeks. His stuff from Europe was incredible, and I know he enjoyed shooting it with his new cameras. But of course, the real star wasn’t more pixels or sharper lenses, but the things he photographed with them. (See his images here and here.)
But photographers themselves are often the heavy hand of social pressure to spend more money on equipment. I was at a baseball playoff game a few years ago in a media scrum next to the third base dugout when a photographer from another newspaper grinned and rolled her eyes and, with a sarcastic lilt in her voice, said, “So you’re still using the D2H.” Her message was clear: I was an idiot for having an old camera.
What these photographers never do: hand you their credit card.
In the years since then, her newspaper has collapsed under the weight of foolish spending and failure to plan for the future, with wave after wave of layoffs, while my news staff and I do our jobs with what we can afford, and keep going strong. I wonder if she would trade any of her pricey gear to have a few more photographers or reporters at her paper.
So that circles us back to the central idea in photography, the idea that you can’t make great pictures without this lens and that camera. It turns out that last weekend, I actually won an award for Photo of the Year, which I shot with the very camera she scoffed at years ago, the Nikon D2H. There is nothing about this photo that would be improved in any way with a more expensive or newer camera.
It’s a shame this photo wasn’t shot with a modern mirrorless camera. It’s too … uh, well. You tell me what’s wrong with it.
I found a post about the topic of how to advise your younger photographer self on a photography website, and thought I might weigh in.
Okay, class, it’s time to learn how to draw a selfie on a chalk board.
It’s also worth noting that I am almost 61, older than most professional photographers, and their advice to five-years-ago them will be completely different than my advice to 45-years-ago me.
So what would I tell my fledgeling photographer self?
Shoot more film in high school and college. This seems obvious, but in my high school and college days, film was expensive in my Ramen-noodle budget. I made a point to drag a camera along with me almost anywhere I went in college, thinking that I would be ready if the jumbo jet crashed on the South Oval. But since I had almost no money, I was reluctant to use up what little film I could afford. On a trip to New York in 1984, for example, I brought just four 36-exposure rolls of film.
Shoot more film early in my career. This also seems like a no-brainer, since the company, not I, was buying the film, but I often faced pressure to scale back and save money for the bottom line, in what I like to call the “editor paradox”: an editor or publisher says something like, “We need more color on the front page,” or “Let’s expand our coverage of such-and-such.” Two weeks later, I’d be sitting in his or her office listening to, “Why are we spending so much money on film and chemicals?” I sometimes wish I’d been the guy who said “that’s too bad,” but I’m not. And as I did in college, I made a point to take cameras everywhere, not just to work, but still didn’t shoot a whole lot.
My photographer buddies and I did some interesting experiments with light back in the day. This is a scan from a 1984 image made late at night.
Shoot my heavy primes at or near wide open, like at f/1.4. This is something everyone does today, but with film and lenses in the 1970s and 80s, we all correctly assumed that some lenses needed to be stopped down a couple of stops for them to be decently sharp. The only consistent exception to this rule were the 180mm f/2.8 and the 300mm f/2.8, which were super-expensive so you could shoot them wide open. Even some primes that we count on today to be amazing, like the 50mm f/1.2 I owned for a couple of years, needed to be stopped down a little to be sharp, but renewed interest in things like freelensing are showing me that these lenses always had something to offer, but many of us were too stubborn to try it.
Make more time to print. I worked in six different darkrooms over the years, from the grim concrete tomb at Eisenhower High School, to the messy shared one in college, to the three different darkrooms at newspapers.
Print everything you can afford to print, and store it safely. One or more versions of the Digital Dark Ages could be around the corner, and you don’t want to be the last one holding the Zip Disc.
Figure stuff out for myself. In high school both an advisor and a fellow photographer were sore afraid of film grain and, mysteriously, a phenomena known as “reticulation.” The fear of film grain meant we had to shoot with Kodak’s worst film of the era, Plus-X, and the 125 ISO meant long shutter speeds, large apertures, and, so much of the time, direct flash. It ruined a lot of potential images. The concept of film reticulating said that changes in the temperature from one solution to the next during development would cause the film to expand and contract, creating an alligator-skin look to the image. I tried it a few times in my darkrooms as a adult professional, and could only get the effect using near-boiling water, so a couple of degrees between the developer and the fixer was negligible. They also believed, very incorrectly, that drying negatives with hot air would damage them, so they would hang film in a closet to air dry, adding an hour to their workflow for no reason at all.
Come down from my ivory darkroom. I don’t know why, but photographers think they have a better pot to pee in. We called everyone else in the newsroom “word herders.” So many of us did this, but it creates friction that benefits no one.
Don’t be afraid of being visually messy. A slightly blurry image might not dazzle with technique, but if it’s the only image and the only way to get it and tell the story, blurry it is.
I admit that early in my career, I might not have shot or kept this image because it’s too messy. Sharpness was a goal unto itself in the early years of my photography, but as I write this, getting a sharp photo is very common, even (or especially) with a smart phone camera.
Quit obsessing about cleaning gear and keeping it clean. I spent much too much energy using lens caps and canned air to keep my stuff like-new. I abruptly stopped doing this as soon as I started working full-time at a newspaper and saw that my colleagues across the state didn’t give a hoot about cleaning their gear, and I discovered that beat-up cameras equalled great images.
Don’t dismiss photo opportunities because I think they aren’t my goal, my strength, or “newsworthy.”
I am so happy with myself when I can make pictures that aren’t necessarily for my newspaper, like this morning light streaming in through the front blinds here in my home.
Consider an affordable intro into medium-format film photography. A 6×7 negative, treated right, can give you an edge that helps you discover the next level of photographic artistry. In the 1980s at The Shawnee News-Star, I had access to two twin-lens-reflex (TLR) cameras, but found myself setting them aside when I slid back into my happy work groove. As an aside, after I left the News-Star in 1988, I never saw either of those cameras again, and that newspaper recently moved, so they could be in someone’s garage, or at the bottom of the dump. In the 1990s, I owned a Fujifilm rangefinder medium format camera, which I tried many times to fold into my news and sports workflow, but I should have been more aggressive in figuring out a way to take these cameras where they needed to go.
Be friendlier, have more fun, and try not to take it all so seriously.
I made this image in the late winter of 1983, when I was living in the dorms at The University of Oklahoma. Note how clean and lens-capped everything is. Instead of getting them out to dust them off and feel good about myself, I should have been wrecking them making pictures.
Let’s not also forget that we did some things very right as we grew more adult, with one of them being photographing my wife a lot, and keeping track of, and not accidentally deleting, my digital archives.
A buddy of mine said he would advise his 20-something to focus more on storytelling.
Another friend sort of sidestepped the question, saying he’d tell his tiny grasshopper to go into real estate. And sure, it might be super-dope to go back in time and give stock tips to yourself, but that dilutes the idea of photography as the creative goal of a lifetime, and makes it into the chase for more money. I have known some photographers who showed promise, but left the craft when their first opportunity to grab their parents’ fortune, so that answer almost sounds like a sellout.
I also acknowledge that I have been both smart and lucky to get on board with my newspaper, for which I have worked since 1988. The lucky part comes from the fact that we are still in business, and the smart part was that I waited out a dozen or more bad choices, bad decisions, and bad co-workers (disclaimer: not you) to stay in this community, and at least for the moment, I feel like my staff and I are still making a great product, and are doing good journalism.
What would I tell this kid about photography? Do it every day.
With graduations behind me, I’d like to thank my readers for welcoming me and having me at as many of these ceremonies as I was able to attend.
It got me thinking about some of the rules of photography that I practice, and why these ideas stay with me.
Access is everything. The title of this post, “f/8 and be there,” comes from the film days when shooting news (usually) outdoors, whether it is a groundbreaking ceremony for a new hospital or a train derailment. F/8 was really just a suggestion, but almost all lenses are sharp at f/8, and using f/8 maintains some depth-of-field. It’s great advice to new photographer, or reporters who don’t usually take pictures. The more important part of this advice is “be there.”
Never be “that guy.” I’ve made a point throughout my career of being polite and cooperative with everyone I encounter. No one likes it when a photojournalist is being a jackass, and why would you even want to be that guy? And yes, I’ve known my share of “that guy” over the years.
My relationship with the community is valuable. I feel like I make better pictures when I am welcome, and I usually try to work in the shadows and spaces. The less visible I am at upbeat events like graduations and parades, the more likely I am to make more candid, less-posed images, and the less visible I am at tragic events, the less likely I will be to become part of that tragedy.
Try to avoid the clichés. When I photographed the tornado damage in Sulphur last month, I made every effort to be respectful and sympathetic, and I tried to avoid any notion of self-importance. Sure, our readers deserved to see what happened, but never, ever at the expense of making someone’s bad day worse. One person I briefly interviewed thanked me for not asking her how it felt to lose her business in the tornado. “How do you think I felt?” she said about some television crew who asked.
Always, and this is the biggest and best one, always have fun.
So, f/8 be there, be respectful, and have fun!
Heather Power was making pictures with a Fujifilm Instax Mini 11 instant camera at Thursday’s Stonewall commencement, so I asked her to make this photo of me.
Last week I talked a little about my 200mm vs my 180mm, both from a previous era of photography.
This is me holding my ancient Nikkor 400mm f/3.5 on my also-ancient Nikon D3. It turns out that the three of us are a great combination.
Today I’d like to take a look at my 40-year-old Nikkor 400mm f/3.5. This lens was the envy of all of us in 1985. I saw them all the time, at press events and big games like OU and OSU football.
One photographer of the era called it a “sweet piece of glass.”
When this lens was new, most photographers couldn’t afford to buy it, so most of the 400mm through 600mm lenses I saw in the field belonged to their employers, like the Dallas Morning News or the Associated Press.
Last month a much younger photographer and I were talking shop, and he kind of scoffed at the idea that I still own, and still use, older camera gear. After all, every time a new camera is announced, one of the selling points is how fast and accurate the autofocus is.
I’m willing to bet that this younger photographer has been using autofocus lenses his whole career, and manual focus is just a novelty. I could hear in his voice the doubts that he had when I told him I was still pretty good at focussing manually. And why wouldn’t I be? I spent the first 20 years of my career with manual-focus lenses.
Flash forward to last week. I was at my last baseball game of the season, Latta vs Cashion. Because of a rain delay, I arrived at Shawnee High School a little early, in time for me to make a few frames of the end of the previous game, Wister vs Preston.
I decided earlier in the day that I wanted to shoot this game with my 400mm, though I couldn’t really say why. Maybe part of it was that I didn’t need to generate dozens of images, since this was the last game of the season.
Preston baseball teams members and coaches go wild after a single and an error allowed them to score the winning run in a first-round playoff game last week in Shawnee.
The game was tied, so I assumed it would be a while before my local team got on the field, but just as I set up, Preston hit a grounder, but Wister bobbled the ball, allowing Preston to score, winning the game.
Before my eyes and in my viewfinder, I captured celebration and dejection through my 400mm. And, it turns out, I can still focus, fast and accurately, and this lens, a relic from 1985, was still “a sweet piece of glass.”
I always feel bad for the kids who lose in the playoffs, like these Wister baseball players last week.
