Father and son at end of baseball game

father and son leaving fields after final game of day 2011-9-14-00074

I’ve waited for this photo for several weeks. The scene has happened a number of times but usually too cluttered in the background or lacking the touch of a hand on the shoulder. As luck would have it, this was the last father-son duo to leave the fields. They stayed for throwing practice past the [...]

Light leads the way

iphoneography-20110311-IMG_0384

  When I have the time between shoots or before heading home, I enjoy a walk in Uptown Westerville, always with a camera in hand. Sometimes the camera is an iPhone. Sometimes it’s a D300 and a full complement of lenses. The territory is familiar, usually along alleys, roadways, and sidewalks I’ve traveled before on [...]

Reverse Clarity for better portraits

Reverse Clarity in Camera Raw for better portraits

One of the joys of shooting RAW is the Clarity slider in Camera Raw for Photoshop and Lightroom. The typical expectation for this slider is to increase contrast in the mid-tones adding a degree of sharpness to the center of a histogram. The edges of the photo, the shadows and highlights, are untouched except in [...]

From a different angle

barn in afternoon light

Several days a week I pick up the granddaughter after basketball practice. I try to arrive early, especially in the winter, so she doesn’t have to stand around and wait on me to arrive. Some days my arrival time is early enough that I can work the area for photo possibilities. One scene that had [...]

Five Exposures

Corn Dogs and the five exposure roll of film

When budgets would get tight, as they always did at the end of the year, the AP’s main office in New York would modify every film supply order changing requests for 36 exposure rolls into orders for 24 exposure rolls. The intended purpose was economy during shooting. Logic was supposed to show that a photographer, [...]

6,000 My Final Photos and counting

My Final Photo number 6,000

I knew Sunday would be the day I’d shoot the 6,000th photo in the My Final Photo collection. The series of daily photos began on November 15, 2004, about two weeks after I left The AP for “retirement.” The collection would now number 6,000, more than one photo a day as some days I’d posted [...]

Not a prayer

Rosary prayer at sunset

I don’t always travel with a full complement of photo gear. Sometimes I carry just my Canon G9, which you read about yesterday. On this day, as we walked out of the house, I grabbed a Nikon D300 with the 14-24mm f2.8 lens.I love the wide-angle perspective both for its ability to emphasize foreground objects [...]

Automatically Wrong

Automatic exposure automatically wrong Canon G9

Although it isn’t my favorite camera, my Canon G9 is my preferred carry camera. It’s almost always at my side, even when I’m lugging two D300s and a full complement of lenses and strobes with a tripod strapped over my right shoulder. The compact camera has high resolution, relatively low noise at lower ISO settings, [...]

Wide-angle blurring – Shutter Speed #3

wide angle lens blur effect

Yesterday’s Shutter Speed #2 not only dealt with stopping action, it also concerned keeping backgrounds in focus to help explain context and location. It was important in yesterday’s photo to keep the background sharp to place the racers in a small town business district setting. Part of the charm of the photo was the building [...]

High Speed Corners – Shutter Speed #2

High speed shutter stops bike racing action

Finding the spot was easy. I knew that when I laid down on the wet sidewalk I’d have a great low angle to frame a bike racer against the skyline as he made a turn into Uptown Westerville. The low view would place the rider in an exaggerated angle with the city’s small town building [...]