Most of my photography students have the same gear: a digital SLR, the “kit” lens sold with it, and sometimes a telephoto “kit” lens as well. In the long-ago days of film cameras, SLRs were frequently sold with a 50mm lens, for several reasons. They were cheap to make, they had fast (meaning “large”) maximum…
Continue reading →It is always such a pleasure to have people in my class who get it, and who are there because they want to be there. Tonight’s first of three sessions of advanced digital photography gave me the privilege of hosting just such a group. It was a cold night, but everyone was having so much…
Continue reading →Update 2018: At one point the Tamron 70-200mm fell from a car seat onto a paved parking lot, and the lens never performed well again. Despite liking its handling and look, I ended up selling it. For a couple of years, I’ve had the excellent AF-Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 in my bag here at home, but…
Continue reading →One thing I try to stress in my class, which is sometimes ignored, is the value of what we call in the biz “fast glass,” meaning lenses that feature big apertures. In general, the gold standard in my line of work is f/2.8. It represents the point at which most camera/lighting/lens combinations can get the…
Continue reading →My blogging friend Tom the Beanie Cap Guy posted an entry recently called “11 Images,” in which he talks about the 11 images that represent his photography in the past three years. His art is quite different from mine, though I find it incredibly passionate and compelling. I thought it would be a neat challenge…
Continue reading →For lots of years during the film era, I shot with manual cameras, usually the Nikon FM2. With no automation, I learned a lot of subtle tricks through trial and error, including one that has since been aided by the addition of a feature called slow-sync flash. I can still remember coming back from a…
Continue reading →For some time now I have wanted to find a replacement for my dying Minolta DiMage 7i, an excellent, lightweight camera with a sharp lens, all in a small package. It was ideal for hiking, especially in places where I didn’t want to haul much gear. Long hikes, slot canyons, anything with scrambling; if I…
Continue reading →As I write this, football season is upon me, and I am going through my usual internal debate: should I shoot football with the 80-200mm f/2.8, or should I break out the 300mm f/2.8, which my photographer friends and I refer to as the “three large.” I am satisfied with the results I get with…
Continue reading →I had a lot of different lenses over the years. For the most part, they were the excellent, reliable, well-built Nikkor lenses made by Nikon. Some of them wore out, and I sold the rest of the manual focus Nikkors when I made the transition to digital. Most of my Nikkors were bought out of…
Continue reading →People like me, who take pictures for a living every day, seem to be interested in the latest, greatest and most capable cameras and lenses that the Japanese can crank out. We fuel the concept of “latent demand,” expressed best by the phrase, “If we build it, they will come.” If I was a quillionaire,…
Continue reading →Monday night I finished up my first Intro to Digital Photography class for this fall at the Pontotoc Technology Center. The intro is really a beginner class, and is fullest right after Christmas, when lots of people have new cameras that seem alarmingly complex to them. This class is mostly spent in the classroom, talking…
Continue reading →Like most professionals who shoot news and sports for a living, I have, and shoot, a big f/2.8 lens in my bag. The Zoom Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8 AF-S is the bread and butter for most of the occasions when I am faced with low light and the need for faster shutter speeds. It is everything…
Continue reading →Frequently in the field or the classroom I am asked how I get my images so sharp. Often the question takes a more vague form, like, “how do you get your images so crisp?” or, “Why are my pictures so fuzzy?” In the biz, the opposites are sharp and soft. In the world of the…
Continue reading →A friend called me yesterday to mourn the demise of Kodachrome, the once-popular color slide film that was originally introduced in 1935. Kodak is discontinuing the film after 74 years because of dwindling sales in the digital age, and because there is only one lab remaining in the world that is able to process this…
Continue reading →For years the mainstream of digital photographers clamored for a “full-frame” sensor. The smaller 15mm x 24mm sensors in digital SLRs since 1999 were too small, they claimed. When were we going to see a “real” sensor? Eventually the camera industry responded, and by 2007, both Canon and Nikon had cameras that sported 36mm x…
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