Portfolios: Roger Johnson

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Morning Walks in the Marsh

"I have been a photo enthusiast since I was given my first camera, a Brownie Flash 620, in 1948. I bought a Nikon F when it was first introduced and ended my use of film cameras with a couple of Nikon 8008s. Much as I hated abandoning those wonderful cameras, once I tried digital, I never looked back.

I’ve recently retired and am enjoying the pleasure of being able to go on leisurely walks most mornings, and, when I walk through the nearby Corte Madera Marsh on the edge of San Francisco Bay, I always take my camera with me. All of the attached images were taken in the marsh with either a Nikon Coolpix 5700, or, more recently, a Nikon D70. Included among my lenses, mostly left over from my film days, is an 80-200 f2.8 lens, which reaches 300mm on the D70, and that extra reach has made a world of difference in capturing the various birds and animals that abound in the marsh.

Though I own a couple of sturdy tripods, my morning walks are leisurely affairs, so the cumbersome tripods remain in the hall closet, and all of the shots in the marsh were hand-held. The camera is always set at an aperture that ensures a shutter speed of at least 1/1000 of a second. I've gotten to know my way around Photoshop Elements 3 pretty adeptly, so most of the images have been tweaked and sharpened a bit.

Except as a brief stint as a wedding photographer for a studio in Connecticut forty years ago, I have never earned any money with my cameras, but they have provided me with a world of pleasure, never more so than now, with the advent of digital, Photoshop and an Epson R800 printer."

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