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

Years ago in the spring of 2015 I took this photo of a magnolia tree flower while out walking around Theta Pond on the OSU campus, and that started a decade-long infatuation with photographing these magnificent signs of spring that show up every May here in Oklahoma. I don’t take photos of magnolias as often, and as regularly, as crocus or Indian paintbrush flowers, but they are fun to shoot when I have the opportunity. Or when I just think of it, because let’s face it, I often don’t :) Another classic is this top-down view that I took a few years later in the spring of 2017, again with my 50mm lens but augmented by a set of close-up filters. (Maybe a +4, perhaps? I can’t remember, and the image EXIF data doesn’t have any information about filters.) Both images were fine and, to be honest, quite good considering my skill level and the relatively modest gear with which I was shooting. But now, with a proper macro lens, it sure is fun to revisit some of these types of shots to see how things have evolved over time.

While this week’s photo wouldn’t have happened without its earlier counterparts as stepping stones on the path of learning, there’s no denying that by almost all accounts I can think of it’s just a better image. It’s much cleaner and crisper than the others, with a nice sense of contrast between light and dark. It has foreground petals to create a sense of depth and context, and I intentionally used a small aperture of f/22 in order to get a good balance between depth of field and subject sharpness. The one thing I wish I could do differently, and hope to pull off someday, is alter the lighting so that it’s more even and less harsh. At first the sun was covered in a layer of clouds, but over the course of just two or three minutes that I was facing the flower and firing off some exposures, the clouds dissipated and the sun came out—lending a brighter and more vibrant, but at the same time slightly less pleasant, light over the scene. It’s not bad, just one of those things I couldn’t control but hope to plan around the next time I go out to a magnolia tree with my camera in hand.

I’m curious though…when you look at this image, what do you see? A friend of mine took one look and said it was gross and disgusting, like dozens of slimy worms or something similar. I never thought of it that way, but everyone is entitled to their own interpretation when it comes to art, so this does leave me wondering what others see here. Is it even clear that it’s a flower, or did you think it was something else entirely? Have you taken similar shots and, if so, how did they turn out?

This is a bit of a change from the spate of flower pictures I have been sharing recently, though I guess if you squint real hard you could possibly mistake it for a kind of blooming plant of some sort. While I’m not in the habit of using Weekly Fifty for some kind of photographic guessing game, I am curious to know what you thought this was when you first saw it. Some kind of composite image, perhaps? Maybe a bit of photoshopping to embellish an ornament? I wouldn’t blame you if you thought there was some level of AI-induced trickery going on, but I can assure you the real answer is much more simple, and instead of artificial image-generating algorithms you’re looking at a combination of light and physics–plain and simple or, perhaps one might say, elegant and profound. It all depends on your point of view, but at the end of the day this image is completely real and captured entirely in camera. It’s a glass sphere sitting on top of a multicolored fidget spinner my son brought home from school:

I bought the sphere at the suggestion of my brother Phil a few months ago, and while I don’t use it every single day I do enjoy seeing the different kinds of creative opportunities it affords. In this situation I think the fidget spinner itself would make for a compelling photo, but the sphere sitting on top of it elevated the composition to a new level that I find to be pretty compelling. The trickiest part of this shot wasn’t depth of field, as often is the case when shooting with my macro lens, but shutter speed. I gave the spinner a flick with my finger and then took several shots of it as it slowed down, and was continually surprised at how difficult it was to capture a sense of motion without turning the shot into nothing more than just a blur.

What you see here is a half-second shutter, but that by itself doesn’t tell much of a story. A half second doesn’t mean anything without knowing how fast the object you are photographing is moving, and in this case I can assure you the answer was slowly. Very slowly. The spinner had, by the time I took this photo, slowed to what I guess you could describe as a crawl or, in other words, barely moving at all. I tried this several times (flicking the spinner, taking lots of photos) and each time the slower it got the more I was surprised at just how slow it really needed to turn to get the shot I was aiming for. I could have just used a shorter shutter with a faster rotation, but that would have required a higher ISO to compensate and I’m really happy with the ISO 400 I was able to use here–it results in a crisp, clean, noise-free image that does just about everything I wanted it to do.

It’s interesting to me how my standards have changed and evolved over time. Back when I first started doing more serious photography, I would have never believed I could one day get a shot like this. Partly because I had no idea how to get a shot like this, but also because I simply didn’t have the gear either. My humble little Nikon D200 and 50mm lens, the combination that kicked off this entire Weekly Fifty project, simply could not produce this image nor anything even close to it. So if someone had told me over a decade ago that I would be capable, both on a technical level as well as an experience level, of getting a picture of an insect feeding on a flower like this I simply would have disregarded the entire premise altogether. It would be too far beyond my reach.

Fast forward to present day and here we are, a photo that would have blown my mind back in 2012 and yet, all I can seem to notice are slight imperfections and opportunities for improvement. I’m not trying to be self-deprecating, it’s just that I’m kind of stunned sometimes at how much my standards have shifted the more I learn and grow as a photographer. But one thing I try to do when reflecting on my past photos is criticize them, since they were the best I could do at the time. Instead I like to see current images as evidence of growth and progression, and if they aren’t pixel-perfect then it means I just have more learning and growing to do :)

What I mean by all this is that today’s photo is, by most accounts, pretty great. (I hope it doesn’t come across as arrogant to say that.) By that I mean it hits all the notes you would expect in a good photograph. There’s a clear subject centered in the frame, and the purple petals immediately draw your eye from the surrounding greenery. It’s sharp, in focus, and there’s something interesting going on with the insect (a small bee, perhaps? I dunno.) taking a few sips of nectar from the flower. There’s even some secondary elements to draw your attention like the subtle waves of color variation in the background, the purple protrusions on the stem, and the single blade of green extending off to the right. Clearly there’s a lot to like, and a lot that went right in the making of this image.

However, and you knew there would be a caveat coming, when see this image it’s hard for me not to notice the imperfections. The bee (or whatever it is) is facing just slightly away from the camera. The depth of field is just a bit too shallow. I wish I had gotten a few inches closer. And so on. What I need to do, and what this image helps remind me, is focus on things like how much I have learned and grown as a photographer and also appreciate this shot for what it is and what it represents. I need to not get weighed down by what this photo could have been, but instead appreciate it for what it is. Sure there’s a few things I could improve next time, but there’s a lot that went right this time, and that’s worth far more to me.

If you’re looking for something new to try with your camera, here’s a suggestion: go out the morning after a rainstorm, or perhaps the morning after the morning after a rainstorm, and look for some mushrooms. You’ll often find them in damp spots that get a mix of shadows and sunlight, and if conditions are still cloudy in the post-rain period then you could be in for a real treat. I’ve taken a handful of mushroom photos over the years and am rarely disappointed, and often impressed, with what I can find either in my own yard or just by taking a short walk.

That was the case here. I was out for a walk across campus to run an errand and, because I had my camera with me, thought I would take a stroll around Theta Pond on my way back to the office. It had rained the past few days and I thought I might find some flowers or leaves or other plant parts with a bit of that classic post-precipitation shine to them or perhaps some drops of water too. Turns out that prediction was somewhat unfounded, since most things had kind of dried up by that point. Not the soil, mind you, but the visible drops on leaves and petals had mostly evaporated. I did, however, spot this mushroom hiding somewhat underneath a shrubbery and immediately decided that it would make an interesting photo opportunity. I set my camera on the ground, enabled Live View, tilted the LCD screen up, dialed in an aperture of f/4, and took a few shots. They were fine, but nothing particularly spectacular–something was missing, or perhaps just not quite right, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. I stood up, circled the protruding fungus just a bit, and then it hit me: it wasn’t that anything was amiss regarding the mushroom. It was the background that proved to be problematic. In my original shots there were just too many distractions behind the mushroom, either colored flower petals or bits of light poking through the shallow canopy. It was cluttering up the shot, and dividing the viewer’s attention away from the subject.

The solution? Just move my perspective a bit. I scooched my camera over a bit, roughly 90 degrees from its original position, and took the shot you see here. It does a much better job of capturing the essence of a mushroom hidden in its own little world, poking up from the wet ground and tucked under an umbrella of green leaves. This image hasn’t been cropped and everything you see here was captured entirely in camera, and I really like the mood and feeling evoked by what you see. It was a fun photo to take, and a good reminder to me that if something isn’t working out (either in photography, or in life) it might help to just view it from a different angle or perspective. You never know what might happen.

Ok, so at this point Weekly Fifty might as well be called “Weekly Flower” because that’s pretty much all I’ve been posting lately. But to be fair, it’s also about all I’ve been photographing lately (not counting shots of people, like my wife and kids, which I don’t post online) so at least you know I come by it honestly :) I took this picture in my neighbor’s field not too far from many of the other flower photos I have shared here over the past month or so, but this one contains a key element that was missing from the others: condensation. Or perhaps precipitation, to put a fine point on it. I took this the morning after we got some pretty big thunderstorms in the area, and even though it only resulted in about an inch of rain in total where we live this field was still plenty wet the next day when the sun came up. It was still cloudy and pretty overcast after my family and I got home from church, so I grabbed my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 lens and walked across the street to Dave’s field to see if I could get a few shots. I didn’t have anything in mind per se, but it’s really fun to take pictures after a good spring rain–especially if your subjects are full of life and color like what you see here.

There’s two elements of this shot that really stand out to me, one of which I kind of caused to happen and the other which I was simply fortunate to be able to capture with my camera. The first, which I was more or less responsible for, is the way the subject almost duplicates the background objects. Not copies, exactly, but perhaps echoes. I didn’t move or alter the scene at all to make this happen, but I did position myself intentionally such that the flowers in the foreground were on the right and pointing upwards in a V-shape, and their counterparts a bit farther back were on the left side of the frame. In fact, on a really basic level, this image demonstrates the power of that age-old compositional device called “The rule of thirds.” It’s one of the first thing a new photographer learns, and with good reason: you can’t really go wrong with it. Sure there are lots of creative ways to compose an image but if you’re not really sure what to do, just bust out the good ol’ rule of thirds and you’re all set.

The other thing I didn’t really plan was the giant drops of water visible on the pink petals of the flower in the foreground. I mean, I did intentionally take this picture after it rained but I did not plan it such that there would be water on this particular flower. I didn’t even think of it while I was shooting the picture, and only noticed these drops after I was back on my computer going through the images in Lightroom. I like the added context and texture they give to the flower and, really, the entire image as a whole. Those two drops, despite being relatively small, serve to elevate the photo well beyond what it would be without them and are a good reminder of how much the subtle details matter when taking pictures.