Nebraskaland

June 2026 • Nebraskaland 57 feature." That camera may also have captured some of the grouse photos previously mentioned. When Bob Grier joined the staff in 1970, they did have some Pentax Spotmatic 35mm SLR cameras, standard lenses up to 500mm, and even a 1000mm reflex mirror lens. But the primary camera was a Mamiya twin-lens reflex with interchangeable lenses up to 400 mm, equivalent to a 320mm in 35mm cameras. The medium-format camera produced a 6cm-by-6cm image and held 12 exposure rolls of film. The maximum speed of the leaf shutter, located in the lens, was 1/500th of a second. Staff moved to a different medium format camera, the Hasselblad, in the late 1970s and continued using it into the late 1990s. Grier said most staff had five lenses from 40mm to 500mm, which compared to 30mm to 400mm. The tack-sharp Zeiss glass, and the comparable resolution of the large film, made them excellent cameras for landscape photography, if you forgive the weight and bulk. Like the Mamiya, however, the maximum shutter speed was 1/500th of a second, making them less than ideal for wildlife. The interchangeable film backs did allow flexibility. "You had two or three film backs," Grier said. "You could have one preloaded with faster film for wildlife situations, but you're still only getting 12 exposures." Of these early cameras, only the Pentax had a built-in light meter, so photographers carried hand-held meters to set their exposure. When rushed, they went with settings printed on film boxes, which they had memorized, and could always fall back on the "Sunny 16" rule. Grier said he continued to use hand-held meters for several years after built-in meters became standard. "I didn't know if I could believe the meter in the camera," he said. The serious move to 35mm SLRs came in the early 1980s, when Nikon F3 and Canon F1 bodies were added to the bags. Some had motor drives, a first, allowing between 6- and a blazing 9-frames-per-second, a major advancement. Autofocus technology hit the photography scene in the 1980s. The magazine staff began moving that way in 1990 with the purchase of two Canon T90s. A few years later they added Canon EOS-1, Nikon F4 and other bodies. The early autofocus technology "sucked," Forsberg said. All practiced zone focusing, prefocusing at a set distance and letting depth of field expand the range. And they excelled at tracking moving subjects because they practiced. "I'd go sit out in my front yard and practice, focusing on the cars driving by on the street," Forsberg said. In the early years of the magazine, photographers used both black-and-white and color film, including Kodak Tri-x and Kodacolor. Film was processed in house from the 1950s into the 1980s. It didn't have much latitude, and the cardinal rule in film photography was to keep the sun over your shoulder. When staff began using color-slide film, Kodachrome was a favorite of some due to its color reproduction and wider latitude. Others used Ektachrome. Later, the staff switched mostly to Fuji film, including Velvia 50, with its rich colors, and Provia. If light or the situation changed, requiring a switch to a faster film, they were adept at switching, even in mid-roll, when they would mark the last frame on the film leader and reload it later to save a few bucks. They bracketed exposures, taking one image at the setting the camera's meter recommended, one at a stop over and another a stop under, just in case the meter was fooled. Advancements in the quality of film, cameras and lenses allowed the magazine staff to abandon their Hasselblads and move fully to 35mm SLR cameras in the 1990s, something Grier said was "extremely freeing." "You could carry a belt pack with a few lenses and camera around your neck and very easily go hiking," he said. The biggest advancement in photography came with the advent of digital. Grier and I began Nebraskaland's move to digital on our own equipment, Grier with a Canon Powershot G2 in 2002 and a D60 the following year, and myself with a Nikon D1x in 2004. Once we started shooting digital, it was hard to go back to film. Instantly, we knew if the exposure was correct and whether we captured the image we were hoping for. The entire staff switched to digital in 2005 and has upgraded several times since. "We're photographing wildlife on the prairies here in Nebraska that are mostly active on the edges of day, when the light is low," Forsberg said. "There are a lot of photographs that can be made today that couldn't be made in the old slide-film days. "[With digital] you could look at the back of your screen and see if you've got what you wanted. And if it wasn't running away or flying away, if it was a landscape or a person or something else, you could explore compositions with your camera, you could explore exposures with your camera … and so I think it allowed us to start to see things in a little bit different way. "And we didn't have to wait a week for the slides to come back and put them on the light table to see if we got something or not."

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