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

For as long as I have owned DSLR cameras, all the way back to the good ol’ Nikon D200, I have enjoyed taking pictures of a few specific subjects around the same time each year. Crocus and magnolia flowers in spring, butterflies in the fall, squirrels and geese near Theta Pond…anyone who has been following Weekly Fifty for any length of time has no doubt seen pictures of such things and, hopefully, enjoyed looking at them as much as I enjoyed taking them. Add to the list the seed pods of the Golden Raintree that you see here, which are fascinating on a normal day but particularly mesmerizing after a good soaking from above with cloudy, overcast skies casting even, diffused lighting as far as the eye can see. Such was the case way back in Summer 2013 with this picture, and these little balloonlike structures continue to be one of my favorite photography subjects today.

I saw this scene, the one featured above, while walking across the OSU campus with my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens the day after a mild thunderstorm blew through the area. Conditions were just about perfect for outdoor photography, and as I walked past this tree I could not help but stop and snap a couple shots with my camera. I went with a tried-and-true, simple-yet-effective rule-of-thirds setup here, with the main subject on the right and another seed pod in the background roughly along the left vertical. I shot this at f/6.7 to get a good combination of subject sharpness and background blur, though I think my go-to macro aperture of f/8 might have yielded better results…though probably not by much. (Read: I am very happy with how this turned out, and don’t mean to let my small nitpicks overshadow the rest of the image.) The rich, deep reds and bright yellows nicely complement each other, with the dark greens lending a sense of texture and context to the background.

It’s a good photo to be sure, but to really see what I like about it, and what makes it vault to very near the top of my favorite shots of golden raintree seeds, is the tiny, almost microscopic water droplets on the leaf in the foreground. If you don’t see them, I recommend clicking or tapping the shot so you can see the full-size original on Flickr, and then view it at the largest possible size. The minuscule drops clinging like velcro to the red vertical wall of the seed pod are something I almost never see, and even more rarely, take the time to notice or consider. Those drops encapsulate many things that I enjoy about taking close-up shots, and they serve as a good reminder to stop and ponder the world around me, and remember that there really are wonders of creation as far, or as close, as the eye can see.

Most of the pictures I take, and then share here on Weekly Fifty, are pretty straightforward: what you see is, as the saying goes, what you get. I don’t much dabble in abstract artwork and my images generally don’t present much in the way of deeper meaning, nor are they designed to promote introspection, contemplation, or much else aside from a passing “Hey, that’s kind of neat.” I do this to learn and grow as a photographer, and help me keep my camera in my hands and off the shelf where it might otherwise sit collecting dust. But every now and then something shows up in front of me, and then, susbequently, in front of my camera lens, that does prompt me, and now you, the viewer, to think just a bit deeper or perhaps use your imagination. That’s what we’ve got going on here :)

This is, on one level, naught but a simple leaf. Nothing much else…just a plain, simple, ordinary leaf. And if that’s all you take away from this picture, great! No worries at all; feel free to go about your day. All is well.

But perhaps there is something more here. Take, for example, the fact that the leaf is not fully intact. It’s broken and bowed, drawn downward under the weight of the passage of time as it is no longer capable of pointing upwards to the life-giving sun in the sky above. And whither the sun? It is obscured behind a veil of gray clouds, as one can deduce by the even, diffused lighting throughout the frame. The colors of the leaf, no longer healthy and green, are instead shades of orange and red, a brilliant beauty that only shines forth in the fading final portion of the leaf’s short life.

And yet all is not despair, for the leaf is not dying but rather departing, taking flight on wings to the great adventure that lies ahead. It’s not sighing with defeat, but soaring with victory while leading the leaves behind it into the unknown that lies ahead, soaring high above a stormy sea of green and white.

Or perhaps not. Sometimes a cake is just a cake, and a leaf is just a leaf. I try not to wade too deep into the deep end of the pool when it comes to interpreting visual art, even my own, but I do think it’s fun to dip a toe in these kinds of waters every now and then.

This picture is somewhat of a return to form, you might say, albeit not exactly intentionally. It’s not like I threw away my full-frame camera and macro lens, in order to recapture my roots with my original 50mm lens and Nikon D200 body, but the idea here isn’t too far (literally as well as geographically) from some of the pictures I took years and years ago. Like many of my earlier images I shot this right in my own back yard, and there wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy that went into the planning of this photo. It wasn’t planned at all, really. But the end result is an image that I like quite a bit, and more than that, really enjoyed taking.

One recent evening after a few hours of rain had quenched the parched ground, I found myself with a bit of time while my kids were playing video games and my wife was out with a friend. I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired or even fully lucid, having not slept all that well the previous night, but I thought I would grab my camera and walk around the yard just to see what I might capture despite my somewhat wan frame of mind. I’m sure glad I did, as often this kind of simple act can, in and of itself, provide just the kind of revival, to to speak, that might be needed.

I had my eye out for color, or at least contrast, that stood out in the overcast evening. Much of our yard was varying shades of earth tones–green, brown, and a little red in the dirt which is not unusual for our modest residential property here in Oklahoma–so when I saw this leaf, and several others like it, I thought it might make an interesting picture. It’s not that this single individual leaf stood out from the rest in any particular way; it just kind of looked good, if you know what I mean. I saw it and though I bet that would make for a good photograph. So that’s what I tried to do.

I squatted down on the somewhat soggy grass, put my camera in Live View, flipped up the screen just a bit, dialed in an aperture of f/11 with minimum shutter speed of 1/180 second, and fired off a couple of shots. (My aging D750, as I have written about before, still stands toe-to-toe with any modern camera in terms of straight-up image quality, but when it comes to composing in Live View…well, let’s just say it’s pretty outdated. It works great if the subject is still though, which this leaf most certainly was.) This one ended up as my favorite from the bunch: the leaf is sharp, detailed, and stands out from the foreground and background. It even has a cool purple fringe on the lower portion which is not, as one might assume, an optical artifact from light bouncing around in the lens, but just the natural color of the leaf as it withers away.

There’s one other feature of this photo that I wanted to share, or rather, a bit of information (disclosure, perhaps?) about how it was processed. As with most of my Nikon D750 photos I shot this in RAW, and here you can see a closeup the original image:

It’s darker, of course, and the colors are not as pronounced, but that’s to be expected on an undeveloped RAW file. It’s also quite noisy, since it was shot at ISO 2200. But here’s the same section of the final image:

This is entirely due to the AI Noise Removal tool in Lightroom, which I have found myself using more and more thanks to the incredible quality of its results. I don’t know exactly how it works, all I know is that it sure does work. It’s so much nicer than fiddling with the Color and Luminance sliders that I used for years, and does an outstanding job of preserving details that would otherwise be lost with the old way of removing noise.

Anyway, just thought I’d share :)

I had no time to prepare for this photo. It came about with no planning, no thought process other than “Grab the camera!” and no control over almost anything including my own point of view. A few minutes before this shot was taken the sun had not yet crested the horizon, and a few seconds after I clicked the shutter the spider had skittered down and started to disassemble its web altogether. It was an incredibly fortunate moment of serendipity, and one that I’m thrilled to have been able to capture with my camera.

Shortly before I had to leave for work my son and I noticed this large spider web in the back yard, which we happened to see while looking out the window just kind of at random. One of us, I’m not sure who, remarked at how the web was lit up in the morning sunlight, creating a scene that had hitherto been hidden in plain sight without the incoming light. As we examined it through the kitchen window we saw the spider still asleep, presumably, in the middle of the web which made it feel like we were witnessing something that had been frozen in time. That’s when it occurred to me that I could, at the very least, attempt to take a picture and even if it didn’t turn out at all at least I would know that I tried.

I snatched my Nikon D750 with 105mm macro lens from the shelf, went outside with my son, and then carefully approached the spiderweb which was still absolutely drenched in sunlight. The last thing I wanted to do was disturb the spider, its web, or anything else so I took great pains to tiptoe around the yard and sidestep anything that might be connected to the spider web. I wasn’t sure what exposure settings to use, or even what I was hoping to capture with my camera…all I knew was that this was a scene worth photographing and I wanted to do it. Somehow.

I ended up dialing in f/5.6, 1/180 second, with an Auto-ISO of 1600 to get the shot you see above. I wasn’t particularly close to the spider or else I would have used a smaller aperture to keep the depth of field under control, but in the end I kind of wish I had. f/5.6 worked fine, but I wish the spider was just a bit sharper and the web a bit more in focus. Also, I think my presence did have the unintended consequence of waking up the spider…possibly due to the noise of my footsteps or subtle variations in air pressure as my body moved closer to the web. Whatever caused it, the spider soon started scooting south and I only had a second or two to take this picture before the entire scene changed. The spider began disassembling its food-catching creation and before we knew it, all that remained of the web was a thin strand of silk. The spider drew itself, and what was left of its overnight creation, up into the tree above.

My son and I were kind of amazed at what we had just witnessed, and as I write this I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. Is this behavior normal? Did the spider pack up it web like we might pack up a tent, only to unfurl it the next night? Or did it just start over altogether once the sun came down? Did it move to another location? So many questions with so few answers, but at least I got a fun picture out of it :)

Not long ago we met up with some friends for a weekend in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, roughly halfway between our respective home bases in Nebraska and Oklahoma. We got a big Airbnb with plenty of room to spread out, make meals, play games, and just catch up on life while the kids hung out together. The town was small, the weather was warm, the entire experience was one that, in some ways, felt like something out of a postcard. Not long after dinner we all walked down the cobblestone-paved Main Street over to the eponymous Falls, and then continued on for a bit of geocaching. (We found one!) Before heading back to the Airbnb we all just kind of hung out on the bridge near the falls, which had long ago been transformed from a road into a pedestrian area, and after getting some shots of my family and our friends I set about seeing what I could capture of the falls themselves.

I set up my Fuji X100F on a tripod and, in an effort to smooth out the water a bit, I dialed in an exposure setting of f/16, ISO 200, and 1-second shutter. (Which, now that I think about it as I type this, I could have increased by a few seconds if I had activated my camera’s built-in ND filter. I forgot about it!) I didn’t spend too long trying to get an ideal picture here; mostly I just wanted something that would capture the scene and, hopefully, convey a sense of mood, feeling, or emotion to the viewer. The calm air, the smooth surface of the river, the aging concrete structure holding it back, and the clear sky in the background. But there’s something else going on in this picture if you look a bit closer…

Did you see it? Look on the left side of the frame, on top of the dam just near the water.

That guy is the missing piece of the photographic puzzle, the key to all of this, one might say. He provides the much-needed element of context and perspective, immediately giving viewers a sense of scale while also serving as a point of calm and serenity next to the swirling waters coming off the dam. I don’t know who he was, but until he showed up with his fishing pole the scene, while interesting, also felt a bit hollow and empty. I’m just glad he didn’t move much in the one second it took to take this picture! So to that fisherman dude: thank you, whoever you are.