"The Rochester" a huge, glorious pipe organ being built by Paul Fritts & Company ( see the audio slideshow ) nearly fills the room in which it is being built. It's hard to move back far enough to see the whole thing at once, let alone photograph it.

For our story on Fritts & Co., the lead shot needed to convey its immensity, but with the widest lens we have, a 14mm, I couldn't get the whole thing into the viewfinder of my Nikon D2H. I needed a wider lens, but they are hard to come by. Or I needed a camera with a "full-frame sensor" to fully utilize the wide angle 14mm.

THE EXPLANATION: Most of the cameras and interchangeable lenses over the last half century have been based on the "35mm standard". These lenses produce an image that is just large enough to cover the 35mm film frame which actually measures at 24mm by 36mm. But the image sensors of most digital cameras-- mine included-- are smaller than this, and you get the same result as if you had cropped the image from a 35mm camera. Which means that a really wide lens like the 14mm produces a not-so-wide view in my camera-- equivalent to a 21mm wide angle lens on a "full-frame" 35mm camera.

Here's a simulation of what the shot would look like using my D2H:

Not being able to shoot with a really wide lens annoys me regularly, but in this case, it would actually prevent me from getting the most important shot of this story-- unless I could get my hands on a full-frame body. Renting one from Glazer's in Seattle would cost $200. Knowing we couldn't spend that much money, I posed the problem to my boss, Jeremy Harrison, our high-tech whiz.

He pondered for a moment or two, then suggested a low-tech solution: How about using the 14mm lens on a film body?

I whacked myself on the forehead. Duh. I guess that's why he earns the big bucks.

I hadn't used a film body for almost seven years. I found an old clunker, an FM2 with busted meter and no motor drive, bought some film, shot the photo (using a digital camera as a kind of light meter), took the film to Bartell's, and had to resurrect our old Kodak film scanner that runs on an older Mac with OS 9 to get the image into PhotoShop.

This was cumbersome, but it all worked.

Later, reader Brian Harrison asked: why is there no distortion? Answer: all wide angles have distortion.

If it's a "rectilinear" type (which all of them are except fisheye lenses), there is "marginal distortion" in which straight lines stay straight, but the edges of the image get stretched. But this isn't so apparent in most photos.

In the organ picture it's most apparent when you look in the lower right corner at the bottom of the lift's scissor mechanism. Its shape is that of an very oblique parallelogram. It's more oblique than you'd see if you looked at the mechanism with your eye, and more oblique than it would be if the same lens were pointed directly at the bottom of the lift. The fact that the mechanism's bottom is at the edge of the picture is what makes it stretched.

This kind of distortion is commonly seen in group shots with a wide lens. At the edge of the shot people's heads become egg-shaped.

Yet, if you use an extreme wide angle lens and take a picture of brick wall (with the camera pointed straight at the wall) the bricks won't be distorted. Even the corner bricks will be properly shaped.

Alternatively, if the wide lens is a fisheye, people's heads will stay properly shaped at the edges of the photo, but the lines of bricks will curve in the photo no matter what you do.

I made this unpublished photo of Rogers coach Jaclyn Ramsey, right, and Olivia Tama laughing at each other's attempt to keep dry during intermittent heavy rain at the SPSL 4A Fastpitch Fastpitch Tournament final Saturday in Kent. Coach is wearing the cover of a plastic bucket on her head. The Rams defeated Emerald Ridge and luckily the weather never became a factor other than we all got wet.

I wanted the impression of speed. Using the blur-pan technique is a good way convey that. (Blur-pans are done using a slow shutter speed and moving the camera so that the main subject doesn't move in the viewfinder.)

Usually blur-pans are done with a telephoto from a position to the side of the motion. In this case I also wanted to make the viewer feel like he/she is in the action, so I put the camera just behind the shoulder of the driver using a tripod and gaffers tape (also, a 14mm lens and a half second shutter speed).

As you can see from how the specular highlights danced around his helmet, there was WAY too much vibration. Maybe having the drivers roll along at 1/10th of the normal speed would've worked.

Or I could've rented a gyroscopic stabilizer from a photo supply house in LA for about $400. (NOT!)

Such pictures CAN be done. Below is one from last summer.

This girl is fascinated by the goofy costume worn by "Amy C." at the spring celebration called Quatro de Mayo held at Alpental ski area.

I just call her a little girl because her parents were reluctant to have her name used, and Amy had a similar notion when she declined her full last name.

I'm not surprised of course-- ribald humor such as this costume is commonly enjoyed but folks are squeamish about being publicly associated with it.

The same applies to most American newspapers. I don't think most editors would want this picture in the paper-- why risk offending a couple of readers for a photo that isn't important and is only mildly amusing? We can be a little looser on the web because we have a different audience and readers' expectations are different.

I didn't think the costume warranted a photo by itself, but the girl's rapt attention did. Is the girl's sense of female sexuality being developed? Or just her notion of the types of costumes people can wear? Notice that with her hands she seems to be imitating the "big girl".

I've been doing news photography for so long now, I can hardly remember when I shot a picture that appeals purely for the aesthetics. This one is really REALLY cliche, but it's still lovely. It's just not original nor very artistic.

It was this kind of photography-- or even more abstract-- that sucked me in back in the mid-1970's.

On this occasion I was looking for a cover photo for our GO! section when I chanced upon this rusty old "donkey engine" at Camp 6 in Pt. Defiance Park. Another shot made a better one for our cover story on "mini museums", but this one kept tugging at my eye.