Bullseye

I was working at a tiny newspaper in 1983, and everyone kept telling me that I was a lousy photographer; all of my shots were fuzzy.

Turns out, though, that it wasn't me. I was using a camera with a long zoom lens, and I eventually learned that, if you zoomed all the way in or all the way out, the photos were slightly out of focus. I also learned that they weren't that great somewhere in the middle. It wasn't a great camera, period.

Then one of the news reporters moved to another newspaper, and for a day I inherited the Nikon that she'd been using to take mug shots at town meetings.

My first time out, I did a story on a rodeo school, and I used the Nikon. The result? The photos were so sharp that our artist mortised a bull's tail into the Lifestyle logo, and the page was beautiful. The page won the South Carolina Press Association's award for best lifestyle page that year, and my photography skills got a reprieve.

But I don't remember using the Nikon again. Rats!