I was leafing through one of my old journals recently, looking for notes about a friend of mine who died in November. The journal was from February 1992, when I was frequently driving to Oklahoma City to hang out with some fellow photographers, and occasionally pick up a few bucks making pictures for the Associated…
Continue reading →Part of my job is to capture and illustrate the action of sports. As I write this, it’s mostly basketball, but we have a very sports-rich community, so there are sports to cover all year long. “What you’re doing here is you’re giving us the opportunity to shake the tree and create chaos.” ~Sicario Chaos…
Continue reading →Much of the photography press is on fire this week about the various iterations of AI, Artificial Intelligence, and its effect on photography and culture in general. Getty Images announced an AI image generator for stock photos, a company that was starting to manufacture a product called “AI Pin,” a tiny lapel camera, is already…
Continue reading →For New Year’s Day this year, I met up with a photographer buddy named Robert. He and I met in college 40 years ago. Wow. Let me say that again: 40 years ago. That’s right, my photographer buddy Robert, and our mutual photographer friend Scott, met at OU in the spring of 1984, where we…
Continue reading →
There are a few digital cameras on the market today that have monochrome sensors. These sensors work the same way that color sensors work, in that each pixel, or picture element, senses the amount of light that strikes it. The key difference is that color sensors have one of three, red, green, or blue, filters…
Continue reading →A wise person once said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” Periodically photojournalists around the country post their content to social media. I see their work in their timelines and inevitably compare my work to theirs. It’s unfair to both them and me. First, it’s completely futile to look at the work of others as…
Continue reading →
I was tapping away at this and that on my laptop recently. I listen to my Apple Music on shuffle most of the time. As I worked, I came across the song Silo Lullaby by Toad the Wet Sprocket, originally offered as a “hidden bonus track” on the CD Coil in 1997. When I first…
Continue reading →It’s one of my worst kept secrets: I love a parade. It’s also no secret that my favorite parade of all time is the Pat Taylor Memorial Parade of Lights every December here in Ada. My strategy for photographing nighttime parades is pretty straightforward: sky-high ISO settings and large aperture lenses. I usually use my…
Continue reading →
There are so many lenses for sale these days, from the $16,296.95 Nikon AF-S 800mm f/5.6 FL ED VR superlens, all the way down to a lens one of my students showed off recently, a camera body cap which holds the lens taken from a disposable film camera, on sale for $19.99. One lens I’ve…
Continue reading →The biggest news in photography in recent weeks has been Sony’s announcement of their release of the Sony A9 III, a $6000 mirrorless camera that is equipped with the first-ever global shutter. Do a web search for “why is global shutter a big deal?” and you will find no shortage of articles and videos explaining…
Continue reading →Like a majority of photographers, I have had various pieces of equipment pass through my hands. Many of them were great, while many of them, like the Nikon D1 or the Nikkor 43-86mm, were absolute duds. I especially love lenses. I had a pretty standard kit coming up on the newspaper scene in the 1980s….
Continue reading →There are a lot of terms tossed around in the digital photography scene. One of them is “in post.” It refers to changing or fixing an image in the computer or other device in post-processing using software applications. My readers know that I teach photography at the Pontotoc Technology Center, and in a recent class,…
Continue reading →I hope everyone had a great fall break week. I took advantage of the slight slowdown in my work to take a trip out west, my first since before my wife died. Many of the spots and attractions reminded me of her, but not at all bitterly; I was reminded of all the great times…
Continue reading →A photographer friend and I were talking recently about how and why we use filters on the lenses of our cameras. The discussion centered around clear “lens protector” filters, but in that same group of filters are “UV haze” filters, and “skylight” filters. They all do essentially the same thing to your images: nothing. Many…
Continue reading →