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. 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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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”…
Continue reading →I’ve said on more than a few occasions that I love the 50mm focal length. 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…
Continue reading →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 –…
Continue reading →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. The film technology…
Continue reading →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. In 1984, we photographers had only the vaguest idea about digital photography, and I recall quite clearly imagining…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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. 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….
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →Last week I talked a little about my 200mm vs my 180mm, both from a previous era of photography. 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…
Continue reading →Once in a while, when I am going through my gear and trying (usually unsuccessfully) to get better organized, I pull out one of my oldest, most prized lenses, a Nikkor 200mm f/2.0, and set it aside with the notion that I am going to insert it into my workflow in some way. This lens…
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