Exploring the wonders of creation through a 50mm lens...and other lenses too.

In July my wife and I took our kids on a 2000-mile road trip out west, spread out over the course of ten days. We had been planning the trip for several months, and it was such a fun and rewarding experience to visit the Black Hills, the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial, and many other locations that none of us had ever seen before. Including, in a bit of an ironic twist for me, the storied western Nebraska landmark Chimney Rock. We both grew up in Lincoln, hundreds of miles to the east, and while this ancient rock formation near the Oregon Trail isn’t exactly a pilgrimage for people where we come from, it’s also not uncommon for folks to have visited it. My brother and my wife even took a bus trip out west in elementary school, along with most of their class, in order to see this and other historical landmarks from the pioneers’ journeys across the continent.

That’s all to provide a bit of context, as you know I’m fond of doing, about this particular image. Though the landmark has shrunk over the years as weather and erosion take their eons-long toll, it still stands proud on the prairie, towering in the distance much as it once did. The question, then, especially as it relates to photography, was how to capture the majesty, or even the essence, of Chimney Rock with naught but a Fuji X100F? The answer, or at least an answer, lies in the image you see today. And while I’m not sure how successful I was at doing what I set out to do, it was a fun and, for me, unique experience that I will likely remember for a very very long time.

Exposure settings weren’t really that much of an issue here. I shot at a relatively pedestrian f/11, 1/450 second, ISO 200. Nothing special at all, and pretty standard for this kind of landscape shot. Instead, it was the compositional choices I made that had a far greater impact. I put the limestone landmark on the left side of the frame, roughly aligning with the classic rule of thirds, which meant the right side was occupied by the sweeping hills that are so common on the Nebraska prairie. The clouds in the sky really did me a solid here, as a wide-open empty blue sky doesn’t always convey a sense of scale–which is pretty important in a shot like this. I also moved myself off the dirt road on which we were standing so as to get the fence in the foreground out of the shot entirely.

And that’s one interesting thing about visiting a spot like this: what you don’t see is often just as essential as what you do. For instance, in addition to a very artificial fence in front, what filled the field directly behind me was dozens of cows. That’s right, all the majesty of Chimney Rock is just a backdrop for a pretty normal Nebraska farm. Many of the cows even came over to say Hello (or, rather, “moo”) to me and my family as we stood around looking at that giant rock in the distance. It was a fun, and to be honest, humbling way to contextualize this image that often evokes images of endless fields and western adventures.

Ok, so before I get too deep into this I want to ask you: what do you think this is? What are you looking at? What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you see this shot? You don’t have to actually answer (I mean, you’re reading text on a blog. You don’t have to do anything at all.)

If something water-related came to mind, you’re probably not alone. This definitely looks like something you’d see in a lake or at the ocean, or even in a fish tank. But it’s nothing like that at all, and in fact kind of the opposite. It’s a flower (what kind? I have no idea, as per usual.) in a clump of tall grass in the Native Plant Corridor on the Oklahoma State University campus. I shot this about ten minutes after last week’s photo which, you might recall, was taken in the early morning after a rainstorm while on my way to work. Obviously by the time I shot this I was already at work, but otherwise the general conditions were pretty similar: calm, overcast, with a fresh post-rainstorm sheen on everything around me. Those kinds of subdued conditions, with diffused overhead lighting through a layer of clouds, often results in some incredible photography opportunities and this was no exception.

I shot this purple flower with my camera pointed to the east to get a bit of backlighting (not as much as last week’s photo, but the same overall idea) with my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens. I used an aperture of f/6.7 for this particular photo, though as per usual I took a variety of shots at different apertures to see how things would look with various depths of field. (Depth of fields?)

Side note: A modern mirrorless camera would negate some of this exposure experimentation, as their electronic viewfinders show an exact representation of what the final shot will look like. No guesswork necessary! But the ol’ D750, even with it’s flippy-flappy mirror and old-school optical design, still produces great images and as long as it works I’ll keep on using it.

I liked this shot because the subject is sharp, the background is blurry but not too blurry, and the sunlight poking through the green grass gives the entire scene a sense of life and vibrance that I really enjoy. It also lends a sense of ambiguity: are these land-based flowers or some kind of underwater plants? Upon close inspection it’s probably pretty obvious, but I like that at first glance one might not be quite so sure. Normally I tend to shy away from that kind of thing in my pictures, but every now and then it can be a fun way to present a scene :)

There’s a field not too far from our house that my wife and I walk past almost every day. It’s usually unmoved, which is likely intentional on the part of the owners, since it gives the grasses, flowers, and animals that live among them, a chance to flourish where they otherwise might not if the green space was more maintained. It’s a pretty large open area where houses will probably be built someday, but hopefully not for a good long while. Though the way things are going around here, you never know. #fingerscrossed

This field is also a good spot for taking pictures, and a couple of my favorites were shot here over the past several years including one of a butterfly resting on top of an Indian Paintbrush flower in the morning dew. A few weeks ago as we walked past the exact same spot, my wife remarked that it looked like rain and sure enough, a thunderstorm rolled through overnight. The next morning was a bit too wet to bike to work so I took the car, but made a slight detour to the field with my camera in hand hoping to get a good picture of one of the flowers.

Nature, as it turned out, did not disappoint. I got to the spot just as the sun was barely showing itself on the horizon, and found this flower rising above the grass which made for an excellent photo opportunity. I experimented with a variety of exposure settings and eventually settled on f/19 which seems a bit small, but the more I looked at the images in Lightroom the less I liked the ones at wider apertures because, while the flower was fairly sharp, the rest of the image was so blurry as to be almost entirely incomprehensible. I also like how the trees on the edges of the frame help provide a bit of (what else?) context while also serving to contain the sky just a bit. And the orange glow on the horizon as the sun pokes through the clouds is icing on the photography cake.

Some of my shots are the result of serendipity, and others only come about after a great deal of careful planning. This was a bit of both, and a good reminder that good things come to those who wait…but also those who plan ahead.

For the past several years, I have enjoyed taking my DSLRs and several lenses to our family vacation at Milford Lake, Kansas, and experimenting with different kinds of photography that I don’t normally get the chance to do back home in central Oklahoma. A couple days at the lake means there’s a host of photographic opportunities at one’s disposal including close-up shots of plants and animals, long-exposures of the sunset, telephoto pictures of wildlife, and lots more. Many of these shots have been featured in Weekly Fifty over the years, and this kind of photography is usually one of the highlights of my year.

But this year things were different. I still brought some photography gear, but not as much as I normally do. I also took some photos, but not with the same fervor as years past. Instead of spending time with camera in hand and eyes pointed at nature, I traded that for time with family in the pool, at the beach, and in the cabins playing games and catching up long after the sun had set. I also did a lot more with my GoPro this year, both in terms of video but also photos, and in the end I think I found a place (figuratively, not literally) where I tried to spend more time just being present with the people, rather than out and about with my camera. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but I just found it to be much more pleasant and meaningful to put the camera down (or, more accurately, not pick it up in the first place) so I could be more involved with my family.

But when this opportunity presented itself…boy howdy. You better believe I ran inside and grabbed my camera! My brothers, or maybe one of the nieces or nephews, found some snails crawling on and around various objects outside after a thunderstorm blew through, including this one making its way across a crack in a fallen tree that had been carved into a bench seat some years ago. I knew right away that the combination of late afternoon sunlight, glistening post-precipitation texture, rich natural greens, browns, and grays, and the two little antennae sticking up would make for a fun photo. And, if you don’t mind me saying so, I think I was right :)

I shot this looking straight down at the snail using my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens, dialed in to an aperture of f/13, 1/125 second, ISO 6400. Thankfully the snail wasn’t exactly moving fast, but even so it was a little tricky to get the focus just right given the super thin margins I was working with for depth of field. I really like how you can see the texture of the snail’s body and shell, and even now looking back at this I find myself cheering on the little crawler for making it across that gap. Way to go, little fella!

On a side note, I have been leaning more and more into Lightroom Classic’s AI-powered Denoise feature and this shot is yet another example of how effective it is. Though ISO 6400 is pretty great on a D750, it’s obviously not as crisp and clean as ISO 100, but whatever algorithms Adobe has developed for the Denoise feature work wonderfully.

By now, if you have been following Weekly Fifty for any length of time at all, you have probably heard me wax at length about the idea of context and how important it is, for me anyway, when taking pictures. I like to give viewers, whether myself or someone else, a sense of the broader time, place, mood, or even weather conditions that led to the creation of any given image. The clearest, or perhaps simply the most recent, example of this phenomenon is my picture of star trails while we were camping at a nearby lake with some friends. Instead of just water, earth, and sky, I made the deliberate choice to include our tents in the shot which made a huge difference in the meaning, message, and mood of the final image.

This concept of context, and that star-trails-with-tents image, was certainly on my mind when I took this week’s image during my family’s annual trip to Milford Lake, Kansas–the same location where I took my first GoPro star trails shot a year ago. As things were winding down for the evening and I got to thinking about where to position my camera to take a long-exposure shot of the night sky, I realized I could enhance the composition and tell a bit of a story by including our cabin in the frame instead of just the lake. All the other star trails shots I have taken at the lake were set up with the camera near the shore, but this one would be different: I found a picnic table across the gravel turnaround near the cabin, and used a jaws-style clamp to secure the GoPro to one of the bench seats. I was pretty sure no one would be coming around at night and, even if they did, I was similarly confident they would not notice a small black camera attached to the picnic table with black securement. There was still just enough light to compose the shot with the cabin on the horizon and the expanse of sky above, though there was one small hitch in the plan. I wasn’t sure exactly where Polaris would be and, as such, I wasn’t sure how to orient the camera so the stars would rotate around it.

The next morning when I checked the camera, everything had worked out more or less how I expected but with a bit of a twist. The rotational center was also in almost the exact center of the shot! I did not plan that at all and was actually hoping it would be closer to one of the edges, but as my sister would say, you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. Everything else worked out great though! The cabin lit up by the dim glow of the porch light, some green streaks from fireflies slicing vertically through the foreground, and a brilliant sky full of stars showing our relatively small place in the heavens. In the end I’m very pleased with how this picture turned out, and I actually appreciate that it didn’t go quite how I expected. Sometimes it’s fun to have things pan out just how you want them, and sometimes it’s fun to just be surprised :)