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

I don’t normally do this here on Weekly Fifty, but this week’s image is the first in a two-part series of directly connected images that build on one another in a very linear sense. I’m sharing this photo first because I took it first, and then next week I’ll post the follow-up as an illustration of how even in the span of a few minutes, learning and growth are possible. Maybe even essential. And hopefully this one-two combination will serve as an example and, perhaps, even a bit of inspiration.

I took this photo while I was out walking around the OSU campus one chilly afternoon, Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens in hand, on a quick break from work. (I really don’t take breaks in the traditional sense, such as the ol’ two 15’s and a Lunch that I was allowed back at the grocery store in college, but I do like to go on a walk every now and then to clear my mind and do a bit of a mental reset. And those walks are best enjoyed with a camera…) I saw this relatively unassuming cluster of four leaves jutting out from the plant from whence it came, and thought about how I might capture an interesting photo of it. After a couple of tries I realized the key that was missing: backlighting. Instead of putting the sun behind me, I repositioned myself with the sun overhead and in front of me and, as a result, behind the leaves. That one little maneuver made all the difference, and entirely transformed not just the subject but the entire composition.

Immediately the leaves went from dull to radiant, and the rest of the composition was transformed from rather dull, normal, and mostly uninteresting to a brilliant collection of light and shadow with a bit of foreground elements to add a sense of perspective and depth and dimension. I used an aperture of f/6.7 which I could have easily stopped down to f/8 to make the subject even sharper but it works well enough as-is. I put the leaves right in the center to immediately draw your eye, which is classic Weekly Fifty also. It’s a formula, but it works, and I like to use it :)

Still, even though a lot of this shot worked, there were some things that just didn’t. Even though from a technical perspective it gets the job done, from an artistic standpoint it’s just kind of…unfulfilling. But that’s where I’ll leave things, and to finish the story you’ll have to come back next week :)

This is another photo that I took when my brother and his family were visiting recently, and even though there’s some clear similarities to many other images I have shared there’s also something kind of unique about it that I really like. (Though my uncle would quibble with that phrasing: it is not possible, he would say, for something to be kind of unique. It is or it is not. There is no middle ground. But if language is merely a vehicle for transmitting meaning, then my reply would be simply “Yeah, but you get what I’m saying.” I digress.) It’s not necessarily the glowing leaf, or the color palette, or the overall composition with the bright orange/yellow subject in the middle standing out against the greens behind it. Those are all well and good, but what I find kind of fascinating about this image, in a way that keeps surprising me, is how the more I look at it the more I find in it.

Side note: I thought about writing the rest of this post in second-person, but the more I typed the more presumptuous it sounded. Who am I to say what you or anyone else might notice or glean from one of my photos? Instead, the traditional first-person narration not only suffices but fits quite well.

The first thing I noticed about this scene, which is also the first thing I see when I look at the image itself, is the bright yellow leaf in the center. Sure that sounds a bit obvious, but it’s true–and it’s also what serves to build a foundation for the rest of the image. The yellow contrasts quite nicely with the light green leaves and clear sky in the background, and it immediately drew me in as I looked around for photo opportunities in my neighbor’s field with my brother while our kids played makeshift disc golf. I dialed in an aperture of f/8, got close enough to fill a decent amount of the frame with the subject, and fired off a couple of shots. Bam! Done and done.

Later on, as I was looking through my photos in Lightroom, something changed. Not the picture itself, but the way in which I engaged with it: I started noticing all kinds of other elements that were already present, but hitherto unseen despite being right in front of me the whole time. The wispy lines of dark brown on the upper portion of the leaf. The bright glowing edges along the perimeter of orange. The circular spots of out-of-focus light speckled all throughout the right side of the background. The stick curving sharply up and to the right, coming ever so close to the leaf but not quite touching it. The vertical smears of burnt umber on the left, as if a pale imitation of Bob Ross had just let loose with sweeping whimsical brush strokes. And on and on.

Usually my photos are pretty simple: a subject, more often than not in the center or along a vertical third, with an out of focus background. Nothing too complicated, nothing to challenge the photographer or the viewer all that much. And by some metrics this one serves to maintain status quo. But then, upon closer inspection…well, I wonder if it does for you what it did for me :)

Side note: This publication of this photo coincides with the 13th anniversary of Weekly Fifty going online–give or take a day or two. Whether you’ve been following for years, months, weeks, or this is your first time here…thank you! I hope you enjoy my photos and the posts and/or audio messages, and here’s to many more to come.

I’ve learned over the past few years (or maybe less; I’m not sure. It feels like a while, but maybe it actually hasn’t been that long) that one type of image I really enjoy taking is that of a backlit leaf in the early morning or late afternoon, when the sun is shining through with such brilliance that it almost seems as though the leaf itself is its own light source. During midday, not so much, but if you can catch a leaf when the sun is low on the horizon, it’s basically the photography equivalent of a fireplace with a hot tiger tummy. There’s one small, subtle element in this picture I don’t often see though, and it elevates it beyond a lot of similar images I have taken in the past–I didn’t even notice it when I clicked the shutter button, but as I was going through my photo reel in Lightroom it was, in some ways, the only thing I could notice.

But I think I’m getting ahead of myself a bit.

Let’s start from the beginning here. I shot this when my brother and his kids were visiting recently, and we were all passing the afternoon together in my neighbor’s field. The kids were playing disc golf using trees and shrubs to score points, and the grownups were chatting and catching up on things–my brother and I with our cameras in hand. We came across a bush with some leaves still clinging to life and, with the sun lowering on the horizon, remarked at how they appeared radiant in a way that was simply not present earlier in the day. I crouched down, pointed my camera up just slightly, dialed in an aperture of f/8 on my 105mm macro lens, and fired off a dozen or so exposures of the green cluster you see in today’s photo. What really caught my eye was the transparent vertical slice on the main in-focus leaf; it gave me (and, hopefully, you the viewer) something to instantly draw my eye and, in a sense, command my attention. Other clusters of fully intact leaves weren’t as interesting, but this one with its bright spot in the middle caught my gaze in a way I didn’t really expect but very much appreciated.

What I didn’t notice, though, was the single strand of spider silk in the top-right corner. As I was looking through the shots after importing them into Lightroom, I noticed that almost all of them had a couple such threads–each catching the sunlight from a slightly different angle. I was surprised at how much those tiny, shiny slivers changed the entire composition. This one, in my opinion the best of the bunch, and I’m so happy with how that tiny line of light changes things. It makes the stillness of the leaves come alive, as if there is a bolt of microscopic lightning careening towards the greenery. Or a drop of rain falling from the sky. It’s just a strand of spider web, but it feels like so much more and I am so pleased to have been able to capture it in this picture.

I’m not sure how I feel about this picture.

There are some things I really like about it, and others, well, I just don’t quite know. Is it good? Sure, in a lot of ways it really is. But in some other ways it doesn’t quite work or fails entirely. It’s weird. I honestly can’t quite make up my mind on this one, and I’m really curious what you think.

At the risk of sounding a bit too self-deprecating (which is not my intention, mind you. I prefer to engage in introspection and reflection, and I hope that’s how this analysis comes across) let’s take a look at the things that I like about this picture. What works well, I suppose you might say, if this were some kind of customer-service survey :)

I really like the rich textures on display here. The subtle grooves and crevasses, the way the light bounces off the edges of the leaf and glistens on every little bump and indentation lend this dying specimen an entirely new life right in front of your eyes. Do yourself a favor and click through to the original on Flickr, view it at full resolution, and you’ll see what I mean. I also like how I was able to capture the subject as it hung delicately between the arms of some kind of native Oklahoma plant, caught on its way to the ground from the tree above as if it were saying I got you, man!

Also of note: the entirely out-of-focus background which almost seems like broad brush strokes, crossing the frame in wide swaths of dull earth tones. For that you can thank the f/8 aperture which I find myself using so often in my close-up photography, along with the AI noise reduction feature in Lightroom which transformed this ISO 5600 shot into one that looks as if it were taken at ISO 100. Whatever magic Adobe bakes into that algorithm, it just works. And finally, the pièce de résistance, if you will, is the drop of water hanging precariously from the base of the stem. It’s a subtle but meaningful touch that elevates the image beyond just a simple leaf stuck in a brown plant.

So what’s not to like? Why am I so harsh on this photo? As much as it succeeds in some important areas, it entirely collapses in others essential elements of photography. For one, the color. A yellow subject against a yellow-and-brown background does not a good image make, no matter how sharp the former and how blurry the latter. I have trouble distinguishing the subject from the other elements, and that’s not a good thing. I also don’t like the placement, with the leaf just a bit too far off center. There’s an odd gap on the right side that could have been easily alleviated had I just composed the image with the leaf scooted over just a bit. A rookie mistake, to be sure, but one that I’m clearly still learning to overcome even after all these years :)

Finally, I don’t like how the withered, dry branch juts down awkwardly from the left side of the leaf. If it was long enough to stick out the top it might work, but as it is…it just feels weird and unsettling.

And so I’ll close with this: I view this picture as an opportunity to learn and grow. The good things? Keep doing them. The things that didn’t quite work? Maybe find a way to avoid them next time. And through it all, just keep taking pictures and enjoying the process.

One of my favorite times to take photos is after a rain, especially if the weather is mild and not freezing, excessively windy, or other such adverse condition. Another ideal opportunity is in the morning when the sun is just peeking over the horizon. But when you combine the two, you can really see something special–as long as you’ve got your eyes open and are looking for it, that is. When I left for work on one such morning I made sure to bring my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens along with me, and on the short walk between my car and my office on the Oklahoma State University campus I made sure to keep my eyes peeled in an effort to actively seek out something to photograph: a subject, a scene, a mood, or anything else that might look good when captured with my camera.

I soon came across this small cluster of yellow leaves on a tree near the Library building, and two things immediately stood out to me: the shiny reflection cast by the sunlight behind me hitting the wet leaf in the middle, and the the bright spot of light in the background produced by a yellow lamp at the edge of a sidewalk. (Another nice thing about shooting photos in the early morning: lights such as that one haven’t yet been switched off for the day, which means it’s possible to get some really fun lighting conditions that simply are not present for the rest of the day.) Instead of shooting into the low sun, which I have done a few times recently on rainy mornings, I decided to put the sun to my back and use it to highlight the wet portion of the leaf while capturing the dim light shining from the lamp post across the way. It was a best-of-both-worlds situation and I think I did a pretty good job of capturing the scene in the way I hoped to.

I shot this at 105mm, of course, with a fairly wide aperture of f/4.8 partly to turn the lamp into a large blurry spot of yellow but also to get a relatively low ISO of 1600. Much smaller on the aperture front and this would have quickly gone up to 3200 or 6400 ISO which, while not unacceptable and certainly something I could deal with in Lightroom, would still have been less than ideal. I really wanted the richness of the colors and texture to show through in the final shot, and f/4.8 gave me just what I was looking for.

The other compositional element that proved to be a tad tricky was positioning myself such that the three main elements (green leaves, yellow leaves, and lamp light) were arranged just so. There wasn’t a lot I could do for the leaves, but I did put myself in a specific spot such that the blur of light was cradled neatly between two sharp points of yellow. I had to take a dozen shots to get one that looked just like this, but in the end I’m really happy with how it turned out and glad I was able to spend a minute or two taking this shot before the sun got higher, the lamps were turned off, and the magic of the scene gave way to what was, by probably anyone’s account including my own, just another normal day. But even normal days can be special too :)