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

My neighbors across the street own two acres of land, and each year they let about half of their property grow untouched, unmowed, and undisturbed. This simple action, or lack of action, results in a host of flowers, along with tall grass and a great deal of wildlife, taking over the north portion of their yard for a few months. It’s a beautiful sight, and with their permission it also becomes one of my favorite spots to take photos. I particularly enjoy walking around the area in the evening as the sun fades in the distance, camera in hand, to see what photos I can get. Even though I don’t know much about flowers or most things that grow in the ground, I do know a bit about lighting, composition, and photography in general and my neighbor’s yard in the evening is a great place to practice–and hopefully get a few good shots while I’m at it.

Over the years I’ve gotten many photos like this one below, which aren’t super difficult but can still be fun and rewarding.

I shot that a few minutes before I got the actual image I’m featuring this week: all you need to get a photo like it is find a flower, position yourself so that the sun is behind it, dial in your aperture (in this case, f/11), and click the shutter. Bam. Easy, simple, and fun. Nothing wrong with this kind of image at all. But after I shot it I had a sense that I could do better. So I kept walking until I saw another similar flower but with a bit different lighting, and that made all the difference.

Normally when my subjects are backlit I don’t like to actually show the light. Instead I prefer to just show the effects of the subject being lit from behind, such as a glow around the edges and a bit of a sparkle here and there, which you can see in the second image. But in the photo at top you can actually see the sunlight breaking through the trees which makes everything seem significantly more alive, dynamic, and three-dimensional. Instead of a simple flower against a dark background, it’s a flower stretching, almost yearning, for the sunlight which is breaking through the trees like a physical presence in the frame. I underexposed the shot by a bit (Maybe one stop? I forget exactly.) so as to not blow out the highlights, and was left with plenty of data in the shadows that I could lighten to get the light purple to shine through. It was a fantastically enjoyable experiment and I’m glad I kept at it, looking for a new way to photograph a rather mundane subject in a normal everyday setting. There’s a sense of kinetic energy in this photo even though nothing is moving at all, and it gives me some ideas to think about how I might expand my photography beyond the familiar and into new frontiers.

Apparently this is a Red-banded hairstreak, or at least it sure seems to be. Whatever it is I know it’s not the first time I have taken a picture of one of these tiny little animals and probably won’t be the last, partly because these things are all over down here in Oklahoma but also because they are really fun to photograph. I shot this in my own back yard the morning after a downpour–the temps were mild, the humidity was high, the sun was shining low on the horizon, and everything felt refreshed in that way it only can after a thunderstorm rolls through. This butterfly was just kind of hanging out on the leaf of a holly busy, minding its own business and enjoying the day before the sun warmed things up a bit too much. I shot the photo with my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens which meant I had to get pretty close to the subject, but I think the time of day and the post-rain conditions worked in my favor.

I dialed in an aperture of f/13 just to make sure I had plenty of depth of field to work with, focused on its eye, and fired off a couple clicks of the shutter. The result is what you see here, and while I’m pretty happy with it, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something not quite right here. Or maybe just not quite as good as it could be. On a technical level it’s pretty good: sharp, in focus, well-composed, with an interesting subject in a natural (i.e. not artificially-created or posed) state. It’s completely fine. But maybe that’s what I’m having trouble reconciling: it’s fine, but nothing more.

I think what bothers me a bit about this image is that I had hoped to get something much better. I often talk about how overcast mornings, especially after a night of rain, are some of my favorite shooting conditions and so when I grabbed my camera to se what I could find on this particular day I expected…more, I guess. Flowers, perhaps. Or anything with color. Or interesting animals aside from this butterfly which I have photographed many times before. When I see this shot I think I’m a little bummed that it was the best I could do.

But there’s another way to look at this, which is that this is evidence of how far I have come. For example, way back in 2013 I took this image of a similar butterfly resting on some flowers after a rainstorm. I was immensely proud of it at the time, especially since all I had was my 50mm f/1.8 lens mounted to an old Nikon D200, but today’s Weekly Fifty image is superior in nearly every regard. So, it’s clear that I have learned a lot since those early days of my photography, and that’s always a good thing. Even if the image didn’t reach the lofty heights I imagined it might, it’s still a good shot and I can look at it and see what I really have learned a lot about photography over the years. And that’s something worth noting :)

Of all the trees we have here in Oklahoma, the Redbud has become one of my favorites to photograph. Its green leaves take on extraordinary hues of red and yellow early in the yearly life cycle, and the textures highlighted by the morning sun make the valleys and contour of each individual heart-shaped leaf seem almost artificial. It really is something to behold, and it’s no wonder the Redbud is our official state tree. So when I walked past this one early in the morning, just outside my building on the Oklahoma State University campus, I couldn’t help but pause to see if I could capture a photo of it.

I shot this at what is becoming pretty standard fare for me lately: Nikon D750, 105mm macro lens, Auto-ISO with minimum shutter of 1/180 second, and a final exposure of f/11, 1/180, ISO 6400. Lightly edited in Lightroom, including AI Denoise, and just a bit of a crop to reframe slightly. Bam. That’s all there is to it. I sometimes get this weird notion in my head that in order to learn and grow as a photographer I have to be trying new things and pushing myself out of my comfort zone, but that’s not really the case at all. I mean, if that mentality is good for you, then go for it. But sometimes learning and growing is more about practicing and refining instead of constantly trying new things. Kind of like how some basketball players will shoot 10,000 free throws over the course of a summer–not 10,000 different shots, but free throws. Just to refine that skill. While I can’t shoot a basketball I can shoot a camera, and maybe I need to let go of the notion that I should always be trying new things and instead learn that it’s OK to spend time refining something I really want to.

There’s been a bit of a visual theme, or perhaps a sense of continuity and consistency, among many of the photos I have shared lately. The common thread, at least from a purely compositional standpoint, has been that of a subject in the center with blurry lights in the background, usually emanating from street lights far in the distance. I didn’t set out to do this on purpose, but maybe it was some kind of subconscious realization: if I look for photo opportunities just as the sun is coming up, even just between my parking spot and my office, there’s more to be had than I might realize. Neither this, nor any of the similar shots I have shared recently, have been anywhere but right in front of me as I walked the usual sidewalks and paved passageways I use to get to work. And yet, it wasn’t until now that I really took the time to see them in this light, both literally and figuratively. I dunno. Maybe there’s nothing more to see here than just a few flower photos. But maybe there’s also a lesson, one that I have learned over and over and over, about taking the time to see the things that are right in front of you. And that if I have fun taking this kind of photo, then might as well keep doing it. Who knows. I might keep refining and learning along the way :)

In 1998 two films came out that were remarkably similar in terms of their overall storylines. Deep Impact and Armageddon both involved humans banding together to overcome imminent worldwide catastrophe and destruction due to incoming asteroids. I saw both of them in the theater and, while distinctly different in tone and style, I’ve had a fondness for both movies ever since. What’s still, to this day, a little weird about the whole situation is how two huge entertainment properties, produced by two different studios, could share such striking resemblances to one another. In a way, this picture has some echoes of that movie phenomenon.

There is nothing, and I mean nothing, out of the ordinary or special going on in this picture: it’s a normal boxwood, the kind you see all over the place where I live in Oklahoma, on a normal morning. I didn’t set out to capture this image when I brought my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens to work, nor did I intend to compose the shot with a subject in the center and big blurry bright spots on either side. And yet, that’s exactly what happened–just like many other photos I have taken recently. One could view these in succession and assume I planned it all, or intended for each one to build on the previous one in some way or another, or infer some kind of through-line from one image to the next, but it’s not like that at all. It’s just a photo that, by sheer coincidence, happens to look a lot like a few others that have come before it.

And, I suppose, why not? This isn’t a complicated composition, and I find the general idea here pleasing to the eye and fun to photograph. I saw a sprig of green sticking up from the bush as I walked past, and also noticed some lights in the distance, so I figured…why not? Why shouldn’t I photograph it? I set my aperture to f/13, Auto-ISO to 1/180 minimum shutter (which then gave me a value of ISO 3600), and moved around until the green spire was neatly flanked by the lights behind it. I only spent a minute or two composing this, but am really happy with the result. It’s the kind of photo that doesn’t break any new ground, doesn’t make a grand artistic statement, and doesn’t really have much to say. But it makes me happy, and that’s reason enough :)

This is one of a pair of early morning tulip photographs that I took on my way to work one morning recently. I like both of them and wasn’t sure which one to feature here on Weekly Fifty, but eventually went with this one because it had a bit more…personality, I suppose you might say. (The other is right here, in case you’re curious.) It looks like the tulip just woke up from a long night’s rest, and is stretching its little green arms as high as can be as it readies itself for a big day ahead. It’s kind of whimsical, and presents a familiar subject in a fun new way that I don’t normally capture in my photography. Even though that wasn’t my goal when I shot this, it was a pleasant byproduct and something that I find myself enjoying more and more the longer I look at the picture.

I took this just outside my building at work on a mild morning just a few minutes after sunrise. I got to campus a few minutes early and had my camera with me, as I often do, and was looking for some photo opportunities as I waited for the facilities management team to unlock the doors. As I was walking westward around the south side of the Library, I saw this tulip in a gigantic planter along with some other plants including some flowers, grasses, and maybe some kind of ground cover? I’m not really sure, since I don’t know anything about horticulture. Whatever was in there, it looked kind of cool to have the tulip poking up amidst everything else and with the walkway lights in the distance still glowing before their scheduled switch-off time, I thought I would take a moment and see if I could capture an interesting photo.

I set the aperture on my 105mm f/2.8 macro lens to f/4.8, which gave me an exposure of 1/180 second at ISO 2200. (thanks Auto-ISO!) I focused on the flower, of course, and moved myself around just a bit until I got the composition just right. I really wanted the white petals in the center of the frame with glowing lights on either side, and the final result–without any cropping in Lightroom, I might add–is what you see here. One thing I found a little difficult, or perhaps just curious, about this photo is that the subject is essentially devoid of color. The only, or perhaps merely the easiest, way to get a plain white subject to stand out is to surround it with darker colors to create a sense of contrast, and as my dad might say, by golly it worked. The white flower draws the viewers’ attention immediately due to its placement within the frame, but also because it stands out against all the rest of the color. I like how it’s flanked on either side by lights far behind it, and the vertical blades of grass add a sense of texture and dimensionality to the image as well.

This was a fun photo to take, not just because of how it turned out but also because I pass by this flower pot almost every day but don’t really think about using it for a picture. The only thing I did differently was walk past in the early morning instead of mid-afternoon like normal, and that, as they say, made all the difference.