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…
Continue reading →Nikon and Canon make fantastic ultra-wide lenses for their APS-sized sensors sensors, and while I would not hesitate to recommend them, I would say that Nikon and Canon are so proud of them that only larger-than-individual entities like newspapers and photo studios can actually reasonably afford them. For the rest of us I offer this:…
Continue reading →In the by-gone days of film, it was widely and truly held that once you had a couple of reliable camera bodies and a flash, it was time to sink money into lenses, which we in the biz simply call “glass.” The reason was that aside from nice features and correct exposure, camera bodies didn’t…
Continue reading →I have shot a lot of hard-hitting photos in my career, spanning personal tragedy, death, natural disasters, the human drama of athletic competition, and much more. I have been threatened, called names, yelled at, almost assaulted, run over by athletes on the field, hit by baseballs, etc. Once I even covered my own car crash. With…
Continue reading →A friend commented recently that one of my photos really impressed her. The photo, a black-and-white shot of a mission graveyard south of Farmington, New Mexico, was made one morning in 2003 as David Martin and I were ending an excellent desert hiking trip, Desert Cold. One reason it’s possible to make photos like this is…
Continue reading →Here are some things you can do to discourage me from visiting your web site. Intro page that says “click here to enter my site.” Let’s assume I went to your web site to enter it in the first place. Thanks for wasting my time. Flash player intro that takes more than a second or…
Continue reading →I was cruising though some links on a friend’s blog this morning and came across one family blog after another that featured photos of their children. The photos weren’t very good, in part because of a common element: the Stare. The Stare is ubiquitous and pervasive in amateur photography, and ultimately ruins what might be…
Continue reading →