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

Last week you met Tucker. This week I present to you his roommate Hildi, a capricious little pup who is actually much more advanced in years than what that adjective might imply. Still, her size and agility merit the description of a dog much younger than her actual age would imply, thus the three-letter description remains quite apt. She has lived with my in-laws for several years and, much like her white-haired counterpart, I wanted to take advantage of our Christmas visit to get a picture of her. Also like Tucker, I initially thought I might try to get some kind of close-up with my 105mm macro lens but soon realized that I don’t really know how to create a compelling image consisting of just the eye of a dog. Maybe one day I’ll get it figured out but for now, I was content to just scoot back a bit and do more of a traditional portrait as it were.

The trickiest part about getting a good shot of Hildi was finding a way to make sure she was well-lit, relatively still, and looking in my general direction. All three conditions, in ascending order, presented somewhat of a challenge. Finding a spot to take the picture wasn’t that difficult, though with the other activity in the house (mainly from my two kids who were running around with Nerf guns) it did take a bit of patience from both me and Hildi to find a spot where we could have a few minutes of solace to shoot the photo. We ended up in her favorite spot to sit and sleep: an old chair which has belonged to my wife’s mother for decades. A fitting place of repose, especially for a furry four-legged friend such as Hildi.

Since my wife and I don’t have any pets I am not in the habit of taking their photos, and thus when presented with a seemingly simple scenario such as this I found myself a bit confused: why didn’t Hildi remain in one spot long enough for me to take her picture? Why did she feel the need to constantly turn her head from side to side, shuffle around on the chair cushion, and occasionally jump down only to want to get right back up? Dog owners are probably used to this kind of behavior and might be chuckling at this post right now, but the experience did leave me just a bit flustered and confused, though I did enjoy it and tried to take it all in stride.

The final piece of the puzzle, then, involved finding a way to get Hildi’s attention such that she would look in my general direction long enough for me to snap the shutter. I tried whistling, calling her name, snapping my fingers, and even enlisting my kids for help. It ended up being an exercise in trial and error, mostly the latter as opposed to the former, but the result is a photo that I think works quite well. Her eyes are tack sharp and the pattern of the chair behind her lends a nice bit of color contrast to her dark fur. When the puppy portrait session was all done I patted her head, thanked her, and let her be with a few things to think about for next time :)

Before I go any farther with this post, I have to send a huge shout-out to my in-laws who we had the opportunity to visit over Christmas break. My wife and I don’t have pets of our own so whenever we have the opportunity of being around other people’s pets, I like to use them as photography subjects and see what kind of shots I can get. As such my pet (and, let’s be honest, my entire collection of animal-based photography) is not nearly as refined as that of other, more experienced, photographers. I’m not really sure what compositions work best, what focal lengths to use, or even how to get the animals to look where I want them to look in order to get an interesting picture of them. Not having pets of our own, I just don’t get much practice with these sorts of things.

So with that being said I present to you: Tucker. He’s a spry little fellow with a penchant for poking at, and picking up, any food one might happen to drop while cooking and a nose for endless curiosity that can sometimes take him just one step too far :) So how to photograph a dog like this? Good question. I don’t know if I got it right, but I did get something, and that’s what you see here. I tried sitting on the floor and making noises to get him to look in my direction with a window behind me to light up his eyes, to no avail whatsoever. He cared not for my camera and was not about to alter his agenda just so I could get a few photos with my macro lens. (Which was, I should probably say, the only lens I brought for my Nikon D750. Would a different lens have worked better? Perhaps. Maybe I’ll try something else on a future visit.)

Eventually I just asked my oldest son to hold Tucker while sitting on the sofa. It was an inelegant solution but it worked, and I think it does lend a bit of a compelling element to the photo: the blue fabric of my son’s coat (it was the day of that massive arctic blast we had shortly before Christmas and there was no escaping the cold, even indoors) tells a subtle story about the context of the photo and the nature of Tucker that could be described in words, but is somehow better when shown and not told.

Rainy days, or perhaps more accurately, post-rainy days, are some of my favorite times to take photos. Even before I got my macro lens I enjoyed going out after a storm when the world is drenched and dripping wet to see what kind of shots I could get. The overcast lighting, the wet sheen on everything around me, the raindrops hanging from leaves, branches, fences, or pretty much anything you look at…it all adds up to some really great conditions for taking photos. Shortly after I took last week’s picture of some drops on a curved blade of grass, I saw this similar scene and wanted to try it out as well to see if it would make for a compelling image-creation opportunity.

On its own this blade of grass would probably not be all that interesting of a photo subject, but when paired with the drops of water and even, overcast lighting it took on a whole new appearance. Rather than take a head-on approach like I did with last week’s shot, I used. a technique I tried a few weeks ago where I basically tried to look straight down from on top of my subject. It worked OK for some shots of leaves in the water, and I figured I might as well try it here too. I used my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens, and tried to position myself so as to point my camera as straight-down as possible. I honestly didn’t know what aperture to use but I did want the subject sharp and the background, which was only a few inches away, to be nice and blurry so I tried several options between f/4 and f/11. I ended up with a final aperture of f/4.2 which worked pretty well, and allowed me to get the drops on the left tack-sharp while the drops on the right were just barely out of focus despite only being a fraction of an inch out of the focal plane. And then the blades in the background basically disappearing entirely, which I thought was really cool.

What makes this image particularly interesting, at least in my opinion, are the colors. The palette is really just three colors: yellow, green, and brown and all of them have a rich, earthy tone that I really like. Combine that with the precipitation, and the whole image just feels alive even though it is clearly quite static. This is the third time in recent memory that I have attempted this macro-straight-down technique, and I must say I’m really happy with what I have seen so far. I hope I can keep exploring this and, as I often say here on Weekly Fifty, finding new ways of looking at the world around me.

In some ways, this is the photo I have wanted to take for years. Way back in 2014 I shot this image in my backyard of a single drop of water on a long blade of grass, and even way back then I recall being a little frustrated that the picture I was imagining in my mind was just not quite materializing. At the time I knew nothing about the physics of how lenses bend light and couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get a great shot of a single drop of water. I think I had the right idea in terms of some compositional elements, but all I had was my D7100 and 50mm lens (not even my set of close-up filters) so that picture was, quite literally, the best I could do.

In the years since then I have learned an awful lot about many different elements of photography, and acquired some cool new gear too. Like my 105mm macro lens, which is ideal for the kind of picture I was aiming for all the way back in 2014 when I went out to my back yard after a rainstorm. I have also learned a lot of new techniques too, one of which I put to use for the first time to get the shot you see above.

One issue with close-up photography that has come into play over and over again since I got my macro lens is the delicate balancing act that photographers must perform when trying to decide between a wide aperture and a wide depth of field. Wide apertures obviously let in more light and give a more blurry background, but the depth of field is so razor-thin when shooting close-up at f/2.8 or f/4 that it’s almost unusable. Even smaller apertures, like the f/9.5 I used when taking this picture, are still wide enough to produce depth of field that is just impractical. And that also makes shots like this literally impossible.

Thankfully, there’s a cool technique called focus stacking which allows you to get the best of both worlds: the blurry foregrounds and backgrounds of wide apertures, with the larger depth of field of smaller apertures. In other words, the image you are seeing this week is not one image but a composite of nine images stacked together in Photoshop where the in-focus elements are combined and the out-of-focus elements are blended together to produce the final result you see here. I also tweaked the resulting image in Lightroom a bit, with some alterations to exposure, saturation, highlights…the usual.

I have toyed around with focus stacking here and there over the past year, but this was my first time really putting it to the test and I must say I am very happy with the results. And this was just my first attempt—shot handheld, sans tripod—which makes me pretty optimistic for other similar shots I might take down the road.

We’ve just begun the new year and I’m already learning new things :)

If you looked at this picture and did a bit of a double-take, thinking that it bears more than a passing similarity to the image I used to close out 2022, you would not be incorrect. I used a very similar process to create both images, and while they are clearly related in terms of compositional elements, I think both are distinct enough from one another to use them as separate Weekly Fifty shots. I actually considered swapping the order such that this image would be used last week and vice versa, but in the end I’m just using them as-is and moving on with things. I really don’t like to over-analyze my photography that much :)

The techniques I used to create this shot are pretty similar to what I did last week: find a small Christmas Tree ornament and place it in front of my macro lens. Then find a few other ornaments to augment the background, adjust a couple of the small colored lights on the tree, adjust the aperture, set the self-timer, and take the shot. As I am wont to do when shooting close-up subjects, I adjusted the aperture from very large to moderately small in order to get just the right combination of subject sharpness and background blur, all while leaving my ISO set to 100 and using a shutter speed of as long as I needed in order to get a properly-exposed image. Even the overall setup, as you can see below, looks pretty similar to last week:

So why use both images, given that they share so many similarities? The answer lies in something I most certainly did not expect, but have really come to appreciate: this week’s photo looks entirely different when viewed on a small screen. I didn’t see it initially when I edited the RAW file on my 27″ iMac, but when I shrank this image down to just a few inches to send it to my brother Phil, I noticed an entirely new composition that was hidden right in front of me the whole time.

Initially, I just saw this as a cool shot of a tiny moon-shaped ornament with some blurred lights behind it. But when I looked at the same image on my iPhone instead of a giant computer monitor, it morphed into an interstellar scene complete with at least two planets and perhaps even a sun. The silver ball I hung in the background to create a lighting effect suddenly looked like a ringed planet–a miniature Jupiter or Neptune–and the colored lights dancing on its surface might as well be lightning storms in space. I was shocked, and thought about the many times that I have encouraged people to click through to Flickr from this website to look at the full-resolution version of an image but this might be the first time ever I am openly asking people to do the opposite and view a picture on a very small screen :)

Anyway, I thought this was a fun and unexpected moment of photographic serendipity, which would be a neat way to ring in the new year and think about other picture opportunities that lie ahead in the coming months.