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

I almost used this photo as my first shot for 2026. I thought it would be a pleasant way to ring in the new year, even though my first photo of said year would not appear here on the blog until several days after the year began. No matter, I thought. I could come up with a couple metaphors to apply here, having to do with the start of something new, bright things ahead, and so on.

So what happened? Why didn’t this image appear in conjunction with a change of the calendar? Honestly, and this is going to sound kind of silly, but I promise it’s true: I just forgot. I almost never put up photos on Weekly Fifty that coincide with any temporal calendar events and, if I do, it’s usually just a coincidence. In this case, it’s kind of the opposite in that I actually did think about using this as my first photo of 2026 when I took it, but ended up waiting until a few weeks later because it, as Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up, just slipped my mind.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how one of the most important things you can do if you want to take good pictures is to have a camera with you. It seems kind of silly, and pretty obvious, but it really is foundational to any good photography. Or even any bad photography. Any photography at all, really, requires a camera. And so it went with this shot: the only reason I was able to capture this scene is because I had my camera with me. I was on my way to my son’s high school cross country meet about an hour away, about ten minutes behind the team bus and just kind of enjoying the early morning drive when I looked to the east and saw the horizon positively glowing as the sun crested the line of tree-covered hills in the distance. I didn’t know if it would even be possible to capture the magnificence of the scene but I thought I might as well at least give it a try.

I pulled off on a dirt road and drove a couple hundred yards down the deep red tracks left by other cars that had traveled the same path, my tires kicking up rusty splotches of mud against the side of my car. A minute later I pulled off on a patch of brown grass, got out my Nikon D500 with 70-200mm f/2.8 lens–my favorite combination for getting photos of the cross country team–and fired off a couple shots of the sunrise. The sun was so dim that even at f/2.8 I was getting an exposure of 1/80 second at ISO 1800; a smaller aperture would have been better for overall depth of field, but not great for shutter or ISO. The crop sensor D500 is ideal for sports and action, but definitely not my first choice for landscapes or any kind of low light situation.

I got about a dozen photos at various focal lengths, and in the end was pretty happy with this one at 112mm. (Again, on a crop sensor so you figure about 155mm or so full-frame.) Lightroom Denoise did an incredible job of cleaning up the, what in my mind was a pretty excessive amount of noise, and a couple other manual tweaks to color, saturation, etc., resulted in the image you see here. It was a fun photo to take of a scene that doesn’t really seem like Oklahoma, but does go to show that there’s more to this state than people might realize :)

This is a bit of a companion to last week’s picture of a rose in the early morning, in that it was taken at the same location, at roughly the same time of day, and bears some interesting characteristics that are not super common for my pictures. Basically, despite the familiar elements in this picture it was nonetheless a fun learning opportunity and a chance for me to try out something new or, perhaps more accurately, try taking a picture in lighting conditions that are quite unfamiliar to me.

One notable difference between this photo and many of my photos is that I didn’t set out to capture a specific subject in the traditional sense. Rather, my goal was to capture a mood, or an emotion, and convey it through an entire scene. If you look at this picture and feel something–a sense of calm, quiet, or peace, or maybe think about the early predawn hour and what it portends for the coming day, then I think I’ve done what I set out to do. If not, well, maybe I’ll try again another time :)

As I paused to consider this scene, I first thought about what I could include, and how to set my exposure, such that the viewer might feel what I was hoping to transmit through the still image. That might sound a bit cold and academic, but it’s necessary to think about these kinds of things if you want your images to come out right–or at least, come out how you want them. The light was so low that I had to shoot at f/2.8, 1/125 second, ISO 6400 in order to get anything usable at all. And f/2.8 meant I had to, then, be a little picky about what I would focus on. All of these small decisions led to one conclusion: it had to be the bench. It was the focal point of the image, the one thing to draw in viewers and help ground them in the scene.

The only trouble with this line of thinking, however, is that the bench is too dark to see. And in retrospect I think something else might have worked better: the light, perhaps. Or maybe the bright stairwell in the background. A shrubbery, perhaps? It’s not that focusing on the bench yielded some kind of unusable image, just that it didn’t really have the effect I hoped it would. And if you visit the original on Flickr and zoom in to 100% you’ll see that the bench is too big of a target to be in focus: the center is sharp, but the support legs in the foreground and background are not. If anything, the back legs are a bit sharper which isn’t really what I was going for at all. By sheer coincidence the light next to the bench ended up being in focus even though that was not my intent at all. (I did, however, shoot this at -1EV so I wouldn’t clip the highlights, and that approach actually did work out pretty well.)

I’m going to close this out by circling back to the beginning: I felt something when I walked past this scene, and used my camera to attempt to capture that feeling and, hopefully, impart it to you, the viewer. If that happened, great! If not, well, no worries. There’s always next time :)

I didn’t realize how similar this photo was to last week’s image until I saw them next to each other in my Flickr gallery. And because of that similarity, I almost didn’t even post it this week. It felt like I should have something a bit different, perhaps grander or with some kind of deeper meaning or symbolism to kick off the new year. Anything but what basically amounts to a re-skinned version of the same shot I put up last week.

And yet, here we are :) Why? I’m glad you asked! And while I’m at it, happy new year! It’s only been about a week since 2026 started, but I hope it’s been a good one for you and portends good things ahead as well.

So about this photo. See, the thing is, in a lot of ways it’s very much a classic Weekly Fifty photo: a single easily-identifiable subject in the center, a simple color pallet, an interesting out-of-focus background to add context, and the usual trappings of the kinds of images you’ve seen on here many times over the years. It’s the kind of picture I like taking and, hopefully, you like looking at. Some would say this isn’t real art because it’s not courageous or challenging or whatever, but, to those I would say…it’s my blog and I get to do what I want :)

The thing is, this is actually quite different in some notable ways. Subtle, perhaps, but notable nonetheless. For one, the light source on the subject is entirely artificial which is a significant departure from most, if not all, of the flower-in-the-center-with-blurry-background photos I have ever taken. I shot this early in the morning while walking across campus on the way to work, and noticed this single rose stretching upwards towards a waist-high fixture illuminating the sidewalk below. I had my usual combination of Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, and thought that the flower itself would be an interesting photograph just because it was early morning and the combination of artificial light and deep shadows in the background would be interesting in its own right.

But then, as if I had stumbled into a Billy Mays infomercial, I found more. I realized that two additional sidewalk lights in the background could be used to add a whole new dimension to the photo. I crouched down with my camera and moved around from side to side until they were framing the subject in the center, and took a handful of shots at f/2.8 to see how things turned out. I was not super close to the rose and wanted the lights in the background to be big, bright, and blurry so I figured f/2.8 would be just right.

And in the process I learned, once again, that when shooting photos like this, how easy it is to over-do it on the depth of field. The initial photos I took had just the tiniest sliver of the flower in focus, with the front and back being little more than an orange blur. Sure the lights in the background were huge and bright, but it was definitely not worth the tradeoff. I took one more picture at f/5.6, packed up my stuff, and headed to work. And that final shot, uncropped, is the one you see here. Aside from just a bit of standard Lightroom editing (shadows, highlights, etc.) I used the AI Denoise feature to turn an ISO 2800 image into essentially an ISO 100 image. I really like that tool :)

The end result is a picture that bears some significant similarities to many that I have taken in the past, but differs in some interesting ways too. It was a fun photo to take, and I hope it’s a welcome addition to 2026 for you.

I don’t usually do timely or topical photo here on Weekly Fifty (case in point: last week’s shot of a purple leaf with a raindrop, which had pretty much nothing at all to do with Christmas) but I did think that this one might be fitting to close out the year. Not in any literal sense, since sunflowers and the end of the year don’t typically go together, but mostly because what this photo represents to me.

This has been a year of growth and change, but for many people, a year of uncertainty and even anxiety. Conflicts around the world as well as here at home, political unrest, economic uncertainty…the list goes on and on. And yet, the sun still rises. In dark days, such as the thick of winter when, in the northern hemisphere, daylight wanes and temperatures drop, the sun still rises. In difficult times, the sun still rises. Through it all, the sun rises as the earth turns, night gives way to day, and the blessings of the Lord are renewed each morning. This sunflower, as with most of its kind, looks to the light of dawn and unfurls its green shroud to greet the day with a sense of hope, purpose, perhaps even joy. (Though as I have said many times here on Weekly Fifty, I know very little about plants so that last description might be stretching things just a bit.) And that is a good reminder to me, and a bit of reassurance that even in the midst of challenges and difficulties, there’s always something to look forward to.

Which is why I thought today might be a good day for this shot :) I took it earlier in the year with my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens while walking across campus on the way to work, and specifically composed it in such a way as to get the blurry lights just behind and to the left of the yellow petals. It might seem like a simple thing, but those bits of bokeh, which were coming from the back of a delivery van, made a big difference in how the final shot looked. They gave it a sense of vibrance that was missing when I positioned myself differently with the lights out of the frame, and I’m glad I was able to get the shot looking like this. There’s also some fun bonus bits in the shot if you look carefully, such as a spider peeking out from a yellow fold and some wisps of webbing connecting a couple of petals on top, but even if all you see is just a yellow flower, then that’s just fine with me :)

And so that brings us to the end of another calendar year, while looking ahead to what comes next. Whatever is in store for you for 2026 I hope it’s good, right, and salutary, and your quiet moments bring peace, reflection, and perhaps even prayerful meditation rather than worry and anxiety. Hold on to what you can change, let the Lord take care of what you can’t, and in between it all, keep your camera in hand, and go out and take some cool photos.

YouTube link in case the embed doesn’t work.

Note: I was wrong about 14 years! The first Weekly Fifty photo was posted on March 5, 2013, which means this year will be 13 years.