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

I normally get to work at 7:30am, which means that I get some interesting photo opportunities as the sun is coming up especially on warm days in the spring and summer when signs of life are just starting to be visible as the sky turns from black to blue. However, one morning recently I had to take my son to school to load the bus for an out-of-town track meet, which meant I would then get to work about 6:45am. My building doesn’t open until 7, so I knew I would have a bit of time to just kind of…chill, I guess. I really didn’t think much of it or what I would do, but as my son and I were pulling out of the driveway I came to a sudden realization about how I would use that time. I parked the Subaru, ran inside, grabbed my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens, and hightailed it back to the car to get him to the loading location on time. A few minutes later as I was walking between some buildings on campus after parking my car, I decided to take a slight detour to see if I could get any photos with what limited light there was.

And my goodness, what opportunities were before me.

I came across a row of whatever plants these are (perhaps coleus?), which were illuminated by the soft bulbs on the side of a building, and in the distance was the parking lot of the football stadium. I thought that if I could only take a picture of one of the leaf clusters with the sea of lights in the background, it just might be a fun and creative new way of seeing a familiar plant in a well-known location.

And oh my, did it ever work out.

I shot this at f/5.6, with Auto-ISO giving me a shutter of 1/125 which it lowered from my pre-set minimum of 1/160 after hitting the ISO ceiling of 6400. Basically…it was really dark and my camera had to compensate in a big way. I fired off at least a dozen shots here, hoping, just hoping, that one of them would be in focus with my mid-sized aperture of f/5.6. I also shot some others at smaller apertures but I really wanted those lights in the background to be as big and blurry as possible, and it really did work out quite well. And thanks to Lightroom’s AI Denoise, the final shot is about as clean as if it were shot at ISO 100.

I moved around a lot to get shots of different leaves as well, but this one was my favorite. (You can see two more if you click through to the original on Flickr, and look through my photostream.) I think the one thing that made this image just hit different is the second branch at the bottom. It added an interesting new dimension that was missing in my other photos, and then the lights coming up in the background, as if the coleus were literally poking up through them as it might emerge from the ground, added a whole other element of dynamic energy to what otherwise felt like a rather still, static, serene shot.

I’m going to try to remember this technique a bit more–that is, shooting photos early before the sun is up. It’s a bit counterintuitive, since you can’t take a photo without light, but this experience made me think about ways to get creative with the former when there isn’t much of the latter. Photography, as Dr. Ian Malcolm might say, finds a way.

Ok so I know this isn’t exactly an Oblivion Gate. But it reminds me of that thing on the cover of the Elder Scrolls IV box art that…summons an Oblivion Gate? I forget, exactly. It’s been a while since I played the game. But that giant tooth-looking stone edifice is pretty memorable, and it’s the first thing I thought of–albeit rotated 90 degrees–when I took this photo.

The story of this photo begins over a decade ago, when I took this shot with my Nikon D7100 and 50mm f/1.8 lens. I don’t know what kind of plant this is, but its leaves are such incredible, deep shades of red, green, and yellow that it’s practically perfect for pictures–especially after a nice bout of rain. I think about that picture often when I walk through the formal gardens on the OSU campus where I shot it, and those plants have been the subject of many of my photos in the years since. And so on a recent rainy afternoon as I was on a quick break between Zoom meetings at work, I took my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens to the same spot where I got the original shot all those years ago, and took the picture you see today.

I deviated a bit from what has become my normal close-up aperture of f/8 and stopped down to f/13, which gave me an exposure of 1/180 second at ISO 2000 when using my standard Auto-ISO settings. I only took a couple photos of the leaf and did just a bit of editing in Lightroom to get what you see here–highlights, shadows, texture, and of course, AI Denoise to make it ultra smooth despite a bit of noise and grain in the original RAW. No cropping or rotating at all, and the only other notable edit was removing a blurry leaf in the lower-left corner with the eraser tool in Lightroom. Nothing major, and nothing that significantly altered the composition at all.

I really like the simplicity of this photo. It’s a clear, easy-to-understand subject in front of a blurry background. The colors are bright and beautiful, and the rain adds a sense of richness and dimensionality to the shot that isn’t normally present on a dry day. Everything here just kind of works, and works well, and serves as a good reminder of why I like photography so much in the first place.

It’s not too uncommon for me to share a photo here on Weekly Fifty and, in the process, write (or talk) about how it was kind of unplanned serendipity but, having been accidentally in the right place at the right time, I was able to capture a compelling image nonetheless. That’s not the case here at all. Well, not for the most part anyway. I didn’t exactly plan this exact picture in the strictest sense, but I did have a strategy in mind that allowed me to get this shot. And it worked! All it took was a quick look at the weather forecast one day, a big of preparation the next day, and the result is what you see here.

Let’s take a step back though, so I can offer a fuller picture (har!) of what’s going on here and what led to it. This magnolia tree is just outside the building where I work at Oklahoma State University and, as I was walking past it on the way to my car after signing off for the day, I noticed it was covered in huge purple flowers that only show up this brilliantly for a couple days each year. I didn’t have my camera with me, but I immediately told myself to rectify that situation the next morning. An hour later my wife and I were talking about our days while doing a bit of post-dinner cleanup, and she mentioned that it was probably going to rain overnight. The combination of bright flowers, a few hours of rain, and early morning light is right near the top of my list of all-time favorite photography conditions, and it was looking like that is exactly how things would turn out the next day.

So as I got ready for work I made sure to pack my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens in my bag, and sure enough, as I walked past the same tree as I had the day before, I saw dozens of purple flower photo opportunities just waiting to be captured. I got out my camera, set to my go-to aperture of f/8 with Auto-ISO allowing a minimum shutter of 1/125, and carefully stepped around the tree until I saw the flower featured above. I positioned myself so that the flower was centered between the three streetlights in the background, and captured the photo you see here. I did have to crop just a bit in Lightroom, and also use AI Denoise to make the ISO 6400 original look more like an ISO 100 final, but the end result is, if I may say so, quite beautiful. I particularly appreciate the rich, glossy texture and the large water drops on the tree branch reflecting the brilliant early-morning sunlight. Everything just worked out so well in this photo, and I’m so glad I saw an opportunity the day before and decided to take advantage of it.

Look. We all know by now that titles aren’t my thing. I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to make a classic Star Wars reference with a bit of a flora twist.

I’m the first to admit, as I have done here on Weekly Fifty many times over the years, that I know almost nothing about plants. I know how to take pictures of them, but I don’t know what they are, how to take care of them, or almost anything else. Maybe I should try learning more about plants, flowers, trees, and more but I guess I’m just not all that interested. And I’m OK with that. What I do enjoy, though, is taking pictures of plants. Even if I’m not sure exactly what I’m photographing, I find that the act of taking these photographs is challenging, rewarding, satisfying, gratifying, and honestly, just plain fun.

That’s a bit of perhaps unnecessary lead-in to this post, but maybe a bit of context as well since I really don’t know what this thing actually is. What I do know is that it was sticking straight up from a rather large aloe plant, as it did last year as well, for just a few days before wilting, shriveling, and disappearing altogether while the rest of the plant just continued to hum along as if nothing had ever happened. Last time this pointed promontory poked up from the plant my wife thought it might eventually produce flowers, but…nothing. We thought the lack of any floral display might be due to the conditions of my wife’s office, particularly over breaks when the university is closed and the heat in most buildings is turned way down, so this year she brought it home in the hope that it would present the aloe with the conditions it needed to finally flower.

Which brings us to this week’s picture. I shot this one chilly Saturday morning just as the sun was coming up, right before the world started to come alive. I was the only one awake and I could hear the drip of the coffee pot coming from the kitchen, accented with the subtle crackling of two eggs in the frying pan, and thought it would be as good of a time as any to take a picture of this aloe stalk. I shot this with my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens, but I’m not sure I even needed the latter since this isn’t really an image that demands a close-up view as would be afforded by that type of gear. I scooted the plant around until it was a few feet from the window, and used a wide f/3 aperture to blur all of the streaks and spots on the glass. I also dialed in an exposure compensation of -1EV (I think, anyway. It might have been -1.5EV) to keep the sky from getting clipped, which worked really well. Of course that meant boosting the shadows in Lightroom, but that’s kind of trivial when shooting in RAW at low ISO on a full-frame camera.

I’m really happy with the result, especially the somewhat minor and inconsequential fact that I did not need to crop it at all. Not that cropping is bad (that’s what all those megapixels are for, after all) but it just feels kind of nice to nail the composition in camera. Kind of like a bonus. The early morning colors, the gradation from yellow to blue/green, the dark tips of each end of the center stalk, and the way the entire scene seems kind of otherworldly but in really just my back yard…it was a fun photo to take and I hope, for you, a fun one to look at :)

Over the last several years, one of my favorite photography locations I keep returning to time and time again is Theta Pond on the OSU Campus. I don’t really have location data on my photos, but if I did some kind of heat map I bet there would be a giant blob right in this section of the OSU campus where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students (not to mention faculty, staff, and just members of the general public) walk past each day. It’s an outstanding place to get photos, but also take a brief respite from the daily rigors of working on a college campus.

The pond is surrounded by cypress and magnolia trees, some of which tower above the landscape but others, such as the one you see here, that are smaller, somewhat spindly, and produce beautiful purple flowers that are quite unlike almost any others I can recall seeing. As I walked past this tree I saw this flower bud that looked like it would have some picture potential, though I wasn’t quite sure exactly what to do with it. Should I try moving around so it would be backlit? What about taking a picture from above or below? What else should be in the frame? Lots of possibilities for sure, but I didn’t have all day and even if I did, I wasn’t about to spend more than a few minutes on this photo. I cared, but…not that much :)

I soon realized that if I included the fountain behind the flower it might give me a unique background that seemed a bit more interesting, and compelling, than brick walls or green grass that I was seeing when I positioned myself at other points around the flower. I dialed in an aperture of f/8 and took a few shots where that bright spot of blurry light was to the left of the flower–just as you see here. The more I looked at the results I was getting in my camera, the less I liked it. I thought the focus of the photo should be the flower, of course, and ended up shifting my point of view just a bit so that the bokeh ball was on the right side and the fountain, which is more of a white blur in the end result, was filling the spot vacated by the light. Ah, that’s more like it. I thought to myself as I fired off a couple shots and then went back to my office.

Except…when I got home from work and loaded the images into Lightroom, I found myself strangely drawn to the original composition that you see here. Everything about it was more pleasing, and more balanced, than the other version. The off-center flower looked much better with the spot of light to its left. The diagonal branch cutting vertically through the frame, combined with branches below and to the right, created a set of triangles that just kind of felt right.

And that’s probably my main takeaway here: taking a good photo isn’t always, or even often, about achieving mathematical, metaphysical, perfection. Sometimes you just have to go with your instinct and take a picture (or multiple picture, and then select one for your blog) that feels right. Even if you can’t exactly explain why you like it, liking it alone is reason enough.