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

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 :)

This photo changes things up in a different way than I expected. One fairly common thread that runs through a lot of my pictures recently is that many of them are improvements, so to speak, upon an original version that was created years ago. Some of these are intentional, others coincidental, but part of the continual journey of growth and improvement in photography, at least for most people, is learning from what you have done before and then building on it to create something even better.

This photo, however, changes things just a bit. It builds on an image of a coneflower from July 16, 2014, that I hot with my original camera kit: A Nikon D200 and 50mm f/1.8 lens. A combination that is positively ancient compared to modern gear, combined with almost no knowledge of light, exposure, composition, or any other fundamental elements of photography. I had no idea what I was doing, but I took a picture that I was proud of and have since printed to hang on my wall. I knew there was room for improvement though…

A few weeks ago as I walked from my car to my office on a rainy weekday morning, I saw a scene with some coneflowers that was not too dissimilar from the one I encountered over a decade ago. I had my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 lens in my backpack and thought that this would be a great opportunity to use my years of experience to take a picture of a coneflower that was even better than the original. I carefully composed the shot, taking into account things like the aperture (to control depth of field), the angle of light, the background, and the other flowers that might be in the frame, and took a dozen photos–my favorite of which you see featured above.

But here’s the odd thing: I still prefer the original. This doesn’t usually happen with my photography, and it’s got me thinking about things a bit differently lately. Normally a picture I take today, which was inspired by a similar shot I took years ago, is almost always improved in many ways. It’s normal for most photographers, and a sign of growth and change. It’s a good thing. But in this case, the opposite happened. The original has a lot more contrast, a lot more shadow detail, and also a bit more of something I can’t really quantify: character. It just feels more…moody, perhaps? Brooding, even? The petals have more life and texture to them, and I prefer the giant brush stroke (as it were) of dull red and green on the right side over the blurry yellows in the background of the new one. There’s even a glint of light on one of the flowers in the background, thanks to a bit of rain that had not yet rolled off, which adds to the overall tone of the original image.

This isn’t me trying to be self-deprecating or anything like that. It’s just an observation, and one that has got me thinking about my photography a little differently lately. Or maybe my editing style, which has, I think, grown a little punchier and brighter over the years. Maybe I need to tone things down a bit, and let my photos breathe a little instead of dialing the Lightroom sliders all the way to one edge or the other. Whatever it is, I do like that this photo gave me an opportunity to stop and contemplate things in a rather unexpected way.

This photo is mostly the result of some simple experimentation. A proof of concept, perhaps, to see if an idea I had would actually work out. In the end I’m not entirely sure it did, but at the same time, not altogether convinced it did not. If nothing else it was a fun picture to take and a good chance to come away from a walk around Theta Pond on the OSU campus with a cool picture and a bit of a story to tell, which means the whole exercise was time well spent. The trick here, which is the same as that on many a close-up photo, lies in the depth of field: how to get the right aperture, along with the proper distance from the subject, in order to get the shot I was aiming for. In this case there was a bit of an additional wrinkle added to the mix in that the subject, as it were, could be many things. Should it be just one purple flower? Perhaps two? What about the main portion of the plant or, perhaps, one of the unfolded flowers? What about using a small aperture so the entire plant? Lots of options to consider, for sure.

I ended up going with a pretty simple, perhaps obvious, solution: just use the most colorful part of the flower and go from there. I shot at f/8 to get a nice mix of subject sharpness and background blur, even though that meant most of the plant besides the purple petals was not in focus. It didn’t really matter to me after I decided to use the flowers as the subject, but what did matter was the background: I wanted to position the plant (or, rather, myself) such that everything behind it helped accentuate it while also adding some fun context. The bright white blur is one of the fountains in Theta Pond, and the dark vertical line is a cypress tree at the eastern edge of the water.

In some ways this is a bit of a classic Weekly Fifty composition: it’s certainly not the first time I’ve taken a picture at Theta Pond in the afternoon, of a bit of flora while facing west with a fountain in the background. Is it a complicated setup? Nope, not at all. But it’s fun style of picture to take, and it brings a smile to my face–not only while taking it, but viewing it afterwards.

Some of the best Star Trek episodes involve time: freezing it, traveling through it, jumping between various versions of it, and so on. The exploration of time in the context of a science fiction show where anything is possible, limited only by the imagination of the writers, is fertile ground for some incredible storylines that go well beyond the simple idea of galavanting across the galaxy while shooting lasers at Romulans. There’s a particular frozen-in-time scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation that has stuck with me for decades, and was certainly on my mind as I took this photo. Midway through the Season 6 episode Timescape, some of the crew come across a warp core breach in progress but, in a bit of a twist that can only happen in the realm of science fiction, extremely slowly. An incident that would normally happen in the blink of an eye is instead unfolding over the course of several hours, and Picard is so dumbfounded at the thought of the Enterprise exploding that he loses his mind for a bit and proceeds to, in one of the show’s stranger moments, draw a smiley face in the cloud of gas bursting forth from the dilithium chamber. The warp core, as Commander Data explained, has already exploded. The chain reaction is set, and nothing can be done to stop the sequence of events about to unfold. The only reason it appears to be paused to Picard, Data, and Troi is that they are merely experiencing it in ultra-slow motion.

The point is, and I don’t mean to get too sidetracked here, that taking a photograph is not too dissimilar from this fictional event. A singular mark in time is captured when you press the shutter, but even if the image is tack sharp it’s important to remember that time has not been captured in a frozen state. Even at 1/100 or 1/1000 of a second, a photograph is recording the passage of actual time–just slowed way down. And that, as it just so happens, brings us to this week’s featured photo.

If you think that this picture somewhat resembles an explosion, you’re not wrong. What you’re seeing is a small clump of seeds in the process of slowly expanding over the course of several days. Not long before this shot was taken, this was a ball about the size of a pencil eraser with some spiky protrustions all across its surface. A day or two later the spiny shape you see here will be a small stalk of grass with several tiny seed pods dangling from its tip. And during the in-between time, you get what you see in today’s shot: an explosion in slow motion, captured in a single photograph. It’s essentially the same as what Captain Picard saw, or will see hundreds of years from now, in the Engineering deck of the Enterprise.

To get this shot I positioned my Nikon D750 and and 105mm macro lens on a very tiny tripod a couple of inches away from the exploding ball of seeds, which was about a half-inch in diameter.

I used a two-second delay timer to minimize camera shake, and an aperture of f/32 to keep depth of field under control and get as sharp of an image as possible. I also shot with the sun behind the subject in order to get some backlighting, which helped accentuate the sharp edges and detailed textures that you wouldn’t see if the light was behind the camera.

One final fun note is that this was all in my own yard. I didn’t have to travel anywhere to get this shot–just keep my eyes open for what was right in front of me.