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

One theme I have kept consistent over the years here on Weekly Fifty is that of continuous improvement. Kaizen, if you will, at least to some extent. I always (and I use that word intentionally) try to examine my photography, find things to learn from it, and then explore ways to improve. In other words, the images I share here on the blog aren’t necessarily the best of the best but images that show evidence of growth, change, and development as a photographer. Some are great, while others are…well, let’s just say they’re evidence.

That’s this week’s image, anyway. It comes right on the heels of last week’s picture of a similar hallway in Fort Barrancas, though with a dollop of hubris on my part. As my wife and I went through the hallways of this brick and concrete structure on the southern side of Pensacola, I thought this scene would make an ideal black and white image because, just like the picture I took about twenty minutes prior, it was all light and shadow. A study in contrast, or so I thought, which was tailor-made for my Fuji X100F and its built-in Acros monochrome film simulation mode. In capturing this image I would take everything I had learned about black and white photography (which wasn’t all that much) and compose my masterpiece (which it most certainly is not) with the hall before me.

Yeah, not so much. The thing is, I’m slowly learning that to have good black and white photography you need light and shadow not just present in the frame, but playing off each other in order to create depth, presence, and a sense of time and place. This image does none of that. While it shares a few superficial similarities to last week’s shot, all the light parts of the frame are in the top third while the dark part, the floor, does nothing to draw your eye whatsoever. There’s no textures on the wall, no sense of scale, and not much to draw your eye, really. In the moment I thought this would be a great example of the power of black and white, but in viewing it afterward I see it as something else entirely: a run on the ladder, another step towards the goal of learning more about how to be a photographer. It’s a ladder I have been climbing for well over a decade, and one that I hope to never stop ascending.

Earlier this year I posted an image here on Weekly Fifty that was a bit of a foray into black-and-white photography, which is something I almost never do but am casually interested in exploring a bit more. Not in a serious manner, but being open making monochrome photographs when opportunities present themselves. That’s precisely the situation that led to this week’s image, which came about when my wife and I were touring Fort Barrancas with our kids on our road trip to Florida. We were walking through the brick halls, barracks, and fortifications of the old fort on a warm morning when not a lot of other tourists were around; upon rounding a corner we came upon a long window-lined hallway lined with the morning sunlight streaming through onto the centuries-old bricks. The contrast between light and dark, combined with the rich, detailed textures of the bricks, formed a scene that was ideal for a black-and-white picture. I put the X100F in Acros film simulation mode and got to work.

My wife went ahead with the kids while I stayed back for a few minutes to see if I could capture the scene with the little time and gear I had at my disposal. I didn’t have a tripod with me, which presented me with a few challenges that, looking back, I wish I didn’t have to deal with. Lesson learned: just bring the tripod next time. The X100F doesn’t have built-in image stabilization so I either had to set my camera down on a hard surface or use a shutter fast enough to minimize motion blur while shooting handheld. I tried first the former but, the only such surface being the concrete floor, was unsatisfied with the result. As such I had to resort to a technique I don’t generally prefer, but does tend to work more often than I care to admit: take a boat-load of pictures and hope one of them turns out.

Ideally, a small aperture would be best for an image like this in order to get a crisp, clean, detailed shot with as much fine detail as possible. Given the relatively dim light with which I was working, an aperture of f/8 or f/11 would have resulted in a shutter speed of…well, pretty slow. Much too slow to shoot handheld. I ended up settling on an exposure of f/4, ISO 6400, and 1/30 second shutter speed which, of course, is still too slow to get a great shot when shooting handheld at the 35mm equivalent focal length of a Fuji X100F. That’s when you (well, me) put the camera in continuous high-speed shooting, jam the shutter down, and hope for the best.

This is the result, and it’s not too bad if I do say so myself. I really like the interplay between light and shadow, the black vertical shadow on the right, the arches receding into the distance, and even the white light at the end–at the top of the stairs, no less. A smaller aperture would have been nice, but sometimes you have to just take what you can get and in this case I’m pretty pleased with what I got.

The final night of our vacation at the beach in Florida found all of us standing on the porch, our arms resting on the railing, waiting for the moon to rise over the watery horizon in the distance. Rather than sending the kids to bed on time, the adults let everyone stay up a bit longer, and then just a bit more, in order to see the full moon rise from the waters like Ares blazing his chariot across the daytime sky, though in place of a celestial furnace we beheld the moon, a dull hunk of rock lit to a bright flame by the same searing sun. The sky was dark, the waters warm, and the wind whispered in our ears when off in the distance the faintest sliver of light peeked out from the sea. The deep red light shone dimly at first, then grew to a bright brilliance on the nearly cloudless night as my wife and I, along with our kids, our friends, and their kids, watched the scene unfold before our eyes.

All this may sound just a tad melodramatic, but that really is how it felt to be there at the seashore watching the full moon rise on the last night of our vacation. It was not something I could recall having viewed at any other time in my life, and I don’t expect to have the opportunity to experience something like this for quite some time again. As we watched the moon climb higher in the sky our friends’ son asked if I might try to capture the moment with my camera. I hesitated, knowing that no photograph could hop to contain the sheer scale and wonder of what we were witnessing, but I told him I would at least be willing to try. I got my Fuji 100F and travel tripod, found a vantage point on the deck, set everything up, and took a picture: F/9, ISO 800, 26 seconds. Then another, and then a third. The child was grateful that I was willing to oblige; away went my camera, and we all returned to watch the moon rise just a bit more. And then just a bit more…

When I loaded the RAW file in Lightroom several days later, what I saw didn’t exactly knock my socks off.

While this was a bit more reflective of the reality of the scene, it in no way captured the essence of the experience. It didn’t even connect the image to a memory, since it hardly shows anything at all. I spent a while tweaking the RAW file–developing the film, one might say, in order to produce an image that would transport me, my wife, our friends, or any of our kids back to that moment in time on our last night at the beach. I even went to far at to use Lightroom’s AI Denoise feature to clean things up even more than I normally would, and the result is what you see at the top of this week’s post. It wasn’t a shot I planned or even wanted to take, but it ended up being one of my favorites from the whole trip.

Here’s to life, to family, to friends, and to taking chances :)

This is another first for me, kind of a follow-up of sorts to last week’s shot of a sunset at this very same location. Until this point in my life I had never taken a long-exposure picture of the moon rising over the ocean, and when this opportunity presented itself I was more than a little excited to take my little workhorse, the trusty ol’ Fuji X100F, out to the water’s edge and see what kinds of images I could capture. I had a few ideas in mind but, as a midwesterner who has only ever been to the ocean a few times in my life, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing or how to go about creating a good composition. I knew I wanted a long-exposure shot to make the wavy surface smooth, and I also wanted to capture the rising celestial body in the distance, but beyond that I wasn’t quite sure what exactly I was going for.

The thing I realized over the course of our time at the beach, which probably seems obvious to more seasoned photographers who take these kinds of images, is that it really helps to orient the viewer if there is something familiar for them to latch on to. Not necessarily a focal point per se, but more of a reference point so people looking at the image have a sense of time, place, scale, or other such defining characteristic. As I took pictures while the moon rose in the distance it occurred to me that if I had few seashells in the foreground I could not only use them to create that sense of context but balance out the color as well. I found a couple shells on the sand (it wasn’t hard, which was one of those things that kind of surprised me but is probably no big deal to people who spend any amount of time on the coast) and moved them in front of my camera, which was positioned atop my nearly completely-collapsed travel tripod. To get this image I focused on the large orange shell, set the aperture to f/13, the ISO to 200, and the shutter to 20 seconds. The waves crashed, the wind whispered, the shells stayed in place, and when it was done I had one of the most incredible images I have ever taken.

Sure there are things I could have done differently, like use a wide-angle lens to get even more of the seashore in the shot, or somehow placed my camera lower on the ground, but I can confidently say that never in my life had I taken a picture quite like this and even now it still kind of surprises me. The icing on the cake, the pièce de résistance if you will, is the reflection of the moon shimmering on the surface of the waters. It adds a sense of calm to the composition, and I consider myself immensely fortunate to have been able to be at this place, in this time, to create this composition.

Over the past decade or so that I have been taking photography more seriously as an artistic and, dare I say, intellectual pursuit, I have tried my hand at lots of different types of images: portrait, close-up, street, black and white, wildlife, landscape, and probably a lot more. One thing I haven’t attempted, because I honestly just have not had the opportunity, is an oceanside sunset. Those scenarios don’t come along too often when you live in Oklahoma, and most images at the edge of the water are taken by the side of a lake or pond and can’t come close to capturing the grandeur of being at the edge of an entire sea.

Until now 😊

This summer my family and I were able to take a trip that we had been talking about for years–a genuine beach vacation at the ocean. I brought only my Fuji X100F with me, leaving all my DSLRs and other gear, including my oft-used 105mm macro lens, at home and instead went with a much more minimalist approach. The only accessory in my bag was my trusty Peak Design Travel Tripod, which I can hardly recommend strongly enough for anyone who travels. I wanted to have with me everything I needed to take pictures of the trip, but not so much stuff that I was constantly thinking about which camera/lens combination to use or, worse, taking my attention away from my family and our friends with whom we shared the experience. And is often the case in these kinds of situations, my trusty little X100F, that diminutive photographic powerhouse, performed admirably.

I shot this the second night we were at the beach house, kind of as an experiment to see if I could capture even a fraction of the grandeur before me but also as a way of just getting some practice. Not living by the beach means I don’t have much experience with taking pictures like this, so while I had some things in mind as far as techniques and camera settings, I wasn’t sure how well it would all work.

In the end I think this image turned out pretty well considering the circumstances. (i.e. my inexperience, mostly.) I set my tripod on the sand with its legs fully collapsed, dialed in an exposure of f/16, ISO 200, and 28 second shutter, and took several shots as the sun was setting. Some were blurry because the ocean waves moved the sand beneath my tripod, but this one was sharp, colorful, and in my opinion the best of the bunch. I really like how the long exposure smoothed out the waves to a glassy shine, but I also wonder what it would look like if I would have been able to freeze the motion of a wave crashing on shore with a much faster shutter. Though given the light that would have necessitated a much larger aperture, and then I would have had depth of field problems, and…well, that’s how things go with photography. It’s all part of the fun :)