Canon Rebel T7 camera body and two lenses.
Yes, you can get a quality, name brand DSLR with two lenses for under $500 at Canon USA. I found this particular kit today (June 19, 2025) at the Canon USA web site.
Google maps tracking for July 19, 2024.
If you have the Google Maps app on your phone, you can turn on or off the ability of the app to track your travels. Some people like this and some don’t. You can turn tracking on and off any time you want. The map does not drop bread crumbs that track your exact routes. It draws straight lines between stops. Each round symbol on the map shows one of my stops for the day. Most of these are photo stops but some are for food, gas, or other necessities. By using two fingers on the map on your phone’s screen, you can zoom in or out on the map.
Trip Log, September 28-29, 2024.
Before there was Mapquest or Google Maps, there was me! (Tongue-in-cheek font.)
Sunset, “The Window”, from the Chisos Basin.
Big Bend National Park was officially established June 12, 1944. Generally I don’t like deserts. I like mountains, high altitude lakes and streams, cool breezes, and pine scented air. So imagine my surprise when I fell in love with Big Bend on my very first visit.
Children flee a napalm attack in Tr?ng Bàng on June 8, 1972. Left to right: Phan Thanh Tam, who lost an eye, Phan Thanh Phouc, Kim Phuc, and Kim’s cousins Ho Van Bon, and Ho Thi Ting. The “Napalm Girl” photograph galvanized an anti-war movement in the United States.
Associated Press/AP
53 years ago today a photographer clicked his shutter and one of the world’s iconic images was created. Officially known as “The Terror of War”, until recently it has been attributed to AP photographer Nick Ut who won a Pulitzer Prize for this image.
President Reagan’s 13 minute speech at the U.S. Ranger Monument at Pointe du Hoc is considered to be one of the great speeches in American History. In addition to President Reagan, these world leaders were present: Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands, King Olav V of Norway, King Baudouin I of Belgium, Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg, and Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau of Canada.
Links The text of Reagan’s D-Day speech at The History Place Video of Reagan’s D-Day speech at YouTube
John Morris, Capa’s London photo editor, tells the story behind Robert Capa’s D-Day photos, including the terrible darkroom mistake that ruined most of the photos. The high resolution video is best viewed full screen. You can see a contact sheet of the nine surviving negatives (ripped sprocket holes and all), Capa’s photo notes, and hear the story of the rush to get the prints back to the U.S. for publication in Life more. Fascinating imagery.
Link
Robert Capa: Normandy. June 6th, 1944.
June 6, 1944 was the allied invasion of Normandy, the largest seaborne invasion in history. 24,000 allied troops parachuted into France shorty after midnight. The next morning beginning at 6:30 am over 150,000 American, British, and Canadian troops landed. There were 10,000 casualties and 4,414 confirmed dead.
Last Light on Mt. Rainier
Summer is the most popular time to visit the national parks. With so many to choose from, where should you go? Which national parks will provide the best photographic opportunities in the summer?
Pika, Rock Cut, Trail Ridge Road, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
Which national parks are at their photographic best in the summer? Here are my favorite choices, grouped by state from west to east, plus one Canadian province.
Blue Jay, Whitefish Point, Michigan’s U.P.
My Northern Michigan weekend photography workshops are usually in the fall, but this one was on Memorial Day Weekend. At each workshop we take a full day to go on a field trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
DaiQing Tana, Columbus Ohio.
The annual Asian Festival in Columbus Ohio falls on Memorial Day Weekend. Daiqing Tana is from Central Asia. She has a beautiful and unique singing voice and she is a talented folk dancer. She mostly sings Mongolian music and does dances that are typical of Central Asia. She performs with the group HAYA. They were in town for the Asian Festival.
Portrait collage of some of the people I have worked with. To fit this format some of these images are seriously cropped. Click to see a larger version.
My first photo shoot with a professional mode was with Sarah. Before our shoot she had checked me out. And as for me, I had checked her references. I learned she was well known and highly respected. But I was more of an unknown quantity to her. She did not know anyone who knew me. She wanted to have an in-person meeting at a popular outdoor mall. She showed up with a male companion who hovered not too far away. She asked a lot of questions. Part way through our get acquainted meeting she nodded at him and he walked away. I knew I had passed some kind of test. She was doing her due diligence. Unhappy things have happened to models who do not thoroughly check out the photographers they plan on working with. Photographers have had unhappy experiences too. Once Sarah was confident about me, we scheduled the shoot.
A photographer came by recently for some lens purchasing advice. He is headed for Alaska in a couple of months and he has a new R-series Canon camera body. Before his visit I dropped over 700 of my favorite Alaska and Colorado photos into a folder and opened the folder with Adobe Bridge. One of the cool things about Bridge is you can search for photos by the lens that was used, or even individual focal lengths. That way I could show him what was possible with lenses of different focal lengths.
Vietnam Women’s Memorial
Richard Duane Klug (the name just above the rose) was born January 26, 1946. He died in Darlac Province, Vietnam, November 14, 1967 at the age of 21. He is one of over 58,000 American soldiers that died in Vietnam, and one of over 1.1 million American soldiers that have died in all American wars (almost half of them in the Civil War).
U.S. Flags at Sunset, Rose Hill Cemetery, Lamoni, Iowa
From Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865.
Eastern Bluebird
Based on the theory that you can create nice images with inexpensive camera gear, these photos were all taken with my “toy camera” and a $239, 55-250mm telephoto lens. I am impressed with the job this lens is doing. These are recent examples.
Nicole in a church foyer.
The Graceland University choir were performing at a church in Grove City Ohio, and I was in the foyer to take casual photos of some of the choir members. The cool colored evening light was streaming in the north facing foyer windows, turning everything blue. I clicked the shutter at 7:08:40 pm. The light is not good. Sometimes I love blue, but not for this image. The image also looks hazy and lacking in contrast.
I was processing this image of Lyn Marie in Photoshop and the longer I looked at it the more I decided the color of the door frames, carpet, and walls took away from her colorful clothing. It made sense to me to remove all color from the image except Lyn Marie. In this tutorial I will show you how to do that. The simplest approach was to create a black and white layer on top, and remove part of that layer so you can see the color layer of Lyn Marie underneath.
Nicole, casual portrait, Grove City Ohio, May 7, 2018.
Seven years ago, the Graceland University Choir (from Lamoni Iowa) was on tour and I caught their performance at a church in Grove City Ohio. I was in the lobby taking casual portraits of the choir. This young women happened to step into the sunlight that was streaming through a lobby window, making for wonderful, warm “short side” lighting. Short side lighting means the light is shining on the side of the face that is away from the camera.
Motel rooms in Ludington Michigan.
Last summer I went to Michigan on a photo trip. I did not book any rooms in advance. Why? Flexibility. What if the conditions were so good at Trillium Ravine Nature Preserve (SW Michigan) that I wanted to stay another day? What if a photo location didn’t pan out and I wanted to move on much earlier than I had planned? The point is, I often don’t know where I will stay overnight until late in the afternoon.
Top: Original image. Bottom: Optimized version.
This before and after version is one more example. Your best images deserve to be optimized.
The Conference Chamber, The Auditorium, Independence Missouri. My favorite image of the morning.
I was photographing a Communion service at a church conference in Missouri using two DSLR cameras and an iPhone. All told, during this one service and the short time before and after, I created 354 images. So how many “selects” did I pick? When an editor asks you for “selects” from an event, that means they want your best images in chronological order. The editor will narrow that down even further when deciding which images to publish. Several photographers were covering this event as a team so I didn’t have to worry about capturing everything. This article explores the selection process between taking the photos and the final published images.
Blue-winged Teal
I take our dog for regular walks at our local lakes. I watch the waterfowl come and go with the seasons. I always have my “toy” camera gear with me, just in case (link below). For the last two weeks I watched the number of Blue-winged Teal slowly drop from 54 to 11. I wanted a photograph but they were always way out in the lake and too far away for a good image. And then it happened.
You don’t need a $1,400 camera and a $2,000 lens to take a picture like this. You don’t even need a camera at all. You don’t need any photographic knowledge, skills, and experience either. You don’t even need to go outside. It took me less than 30 seconds to create this image from scratch on my computer.
Great Egret. Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, Fremont, California.
When I posted this photo on one of my Facebook pages, a friend posted this happy comment “I LOVE this egret photo!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Look at the right wing trailing in the water. How DO you capture these?!”
Good question.
Loon, Seney National Wildlife Refuge, July 1, 2019.
Seney National Wildlife Refuge is one of my favorite places on the planet. Loons arrive every year in the spring, one of the many reasons to go to Seney. Not only are they fun to watch and photograph, there is nothing quite like hearing the call of a loon. Seney is in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula just north of Germfask. As an added bonus, ABJ has returned once again to Seney this spring. More about him later.