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

One of the most incredible times of the day to take photos is early in the morning, just as the sun is coming up. Some of my favorite images I have ever taken were shot within mere minutes of the sun raising its deep red disk over the inky black edge of the horizon, bathing everything around in deep hues of amber, orange, and yellow that just don’t show up at any other time of day. Until recently, though, I had not thought much about taking photos before the sunrise. It made no sense to me: you can’t take a picture without light, so why take pictures when there is no light? Turns out that, like many times in my photography journey over the years, I had a lot to learn.

The thing is, you can take outdoor photos without sunlight as long as you have another source of light to compensate. Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation, but one of those connections that never quite got made in my mind. And so when I came across a magnolia tree near my building while walking to work before sunrise, I thought about how I could take a photo with a light source that was…well…not the sun. The result is the image you see here, which I am really happy to have been able to capture. The purple magnolia flower was bathed in a light glow not from a celestial body, but rather a few artificial lamps on the side of the brick wall off to the left of the image. I set my exposure to f/4.8, with an Auto-ISO minimum shutter of 1/160 second, which was lowered to 1/125 after hitting the ceiling of ISO 6400, and took about a dozen photos hoping that one would turn out. (Big shout-out to Adobe’s AI Denoise feature once again. It’s amazing.) I knew that f/4.8 was pushing it a little, since depth of field would be pretty shallow and the chance of ending up with a mostly-blurry flower was quite high, but much smaller than f/4.8 would have resulted in an even slower shutter speed which, when shooting handheld at 105mm, was not a risk I was willing to take.

I really tried to pay attention to the lights in the background as I subtly shifted my point of view when taking this picture. Some of the shots had the lights higher, and others off to one side, but this one just hit everything right: depth of field, lights in the background, bits of brown and green from the tree branches winding their way through the composition, and the purple flower like the flame of a candle right in the middle. Even the sky in the background shifting from black to blue worked out, as they say, just right. There were some elements of this image that I planned, but many that I certainly did not and happened to be fortunate enough to catch almost by accident, and the end result is a singular spot in time that I am still kind of amazed I was able to capture.

Every now and then I take a photo, edit it, upload it to Flickr, look at for a while…and then decide to not use it here on Weekly Fifty. I’m not sure exactly why, but some photos just don’t hit the same when I look at them later as they did in the moment when I took them, and other times it just feels like the image rings kind of hollow for some reason. Maybe I was attempting to get some kind of cool, neat, or interesting photo but it didn’t work out or didn’t quite meet my expectations, and while it might not be a bad photo it just doesn’t really merit 500 words of analysis along with audio commentary.

This was almost one of those images. I shot it while walking to my office on a rainy morning as the sun was coming up, and unlike some other times I really did have something specific that I was going for: I wanted to highlight the line of three drops of water on the left side of the purple petals, or at least make sure they were in focus so they would hopefully catch the eye of a casual viewer. And so I set about making that happen: Got out my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens, dialed in an F/13 aperture, positioned myself so that the flower was in the middle of the frame, focused on the drops, fired off a couple clicks of the shutter, checked focus by peeking at the image on my camera, and went away pleased at the image I was able to capture.

When I loaded the RAW file in Lightroom though, something didn’t quite hit me in the same way. Yes the drops were in focus, as was my goal, and I liked the bright yellow spots of light in the background, and the purple magnolia flower itself turned out pretty good…but something wasn’t quite right. The more I looked at the shot, the more I realized it was just too busy in the background. It’s full of crisscrossing lines, other flowers vying for viewers’ attention, flower buds that intrude on the image…it’s all just too much. At least for my taste, anyway. And because of that it almost went into the pile of “decent but not quite good enough for the blog.” I eventually decided to include it, of course, otherwise you would not see it here, because I’m genuinely curious what you think. Especially when you compare it to another similar shot I shared two weeks ago. Which one do you like, and why? I would love to have your thoughts in the comments, and maybe even mention what you would have done differently if you were in these situations.

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.