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

The more I experiment with colored off-camera lighting, the more I find myself learning about light, shadows, and contrast in ways that I didn’t expect until now. This picture is similar in some ways to others I have been sharing recently, but also a radical departure into entirely new territory and one that gives me some interesting things to think about. Until now the overall theme for lots of my pictures has been light, light, and more light. Light from the front, light from the back, light on the sides…light everywhere, and in all sorts of colors. But when is it too much, and what happens when you go in the opposite direction?

That’s what I explored here, with my trusty Fuji X100F and a couple of pavotubes. As I try to apply the lessons I learned from my picture of an old cell phone, I wanted to see if I could create a shot that was more about showcasing an object rather than the lights and I think this worked out fairly well in that regard. Instead of looking at the entire camera, all you can see is the lens and a lever on the side which is used to switch between viewfinder modes. You don’t see any of the controls and dials on top, and much of the camera is also obscured due to the shallow depth of field. However, I think (and correct me if I’m wrong) you still do get a pretty good sense of what this is from a couple important clues including the circle shape, the reflective glass, the words “Fujinon Aspherical,” and even the number 2 at top which, if you are into photography, you probably recognize as an f/stop indicator. All of these were intentional choices on my part, and I think it worked out fairly well. Or, at least, much better than that picture of the cell phone :)

The one thing that really took a while here was the lights: where to put them, what colors to use, and how bright they should be. I ended up using two lights (one orange, the other purple) and holding them in my hands while moving them around slowly into different positions. I tried putting more light on various portions of the camera: top, left side, right side, and front, but ended up preferring what you see here with the far side of the camera showing a soft orange glow and the top of the adjustment ring with a bit of a purple sheen. It was much more subdued and contrast-ey than any of my earlier shots but also feels more intimate and even delicate at the same time.

Clearly I still have a lot to learn, but it sure is a fun journey :)

In Spring 2022 I took this close-up shot of my son’s eye with my macro lens, fascinated at the amount of detail I could capture while also playing around with the lighting a bit. We were outside and there wasn’t a lot I could do to actually control the light, since the sun kind of does its thing regardless of what we here on earth might prefer. Nonetheless he and I still found some creative ways to adjust a few parameters like where he was standing, what he was looking at, and the angle at which I took the picture and in the end I quite like how it turned out. A fun first attempt, at least, and it has stuck with me ever since.

Enter (what else?) my Pavotubes 😀 I thought it would be fun to revisit the original eye close-up with a bit more control over the lighting just to see what I could come up with. Both of my sons were kind enough to oblige their photo-obsessed father as I played around with the position, color, saturation, and intensity of three lights, each attached to the top of a separate tripod, arranged in a triangle shape in front of their faces. My first attempts involved setting each light to a different color, but like my brother Phil said it ended up looking like a weird sci-fi scanner effect from a movie and not the creative style I was really attempting to capture. Also, it was really difficult to get a close-up shot with both my camera and my sons’ heads moving around–even the slightest micro-movement threw the focus all out of whack.

Eventually we just paused the whole operation and went to go eat lunch with my wife, and in between bits of our grilled-cheese sandwiches it hit me: use one color of light instead of three, and find a way to stabilize my sons’ heads. The former was a matter of a couple simple adjustments on the light settings, and for the latter I just put a backward-facing chair in front of the lights so they could sit on it and rest their chin on the wooden chair back. Bingo.

The result you see here, then, is pretty much what I was aiming for though I’m not really sure what I was aiming for. You can see the reflection of the three lights around my youngest son’s eye, and I guess it’s kind of…different? I’m not really sure. Is it interesting? Maybe…I guess. I dunno. It was a fun experiment to try, and who knows, maybe it’ll give me some new ideas to consider at some point too.

This is it! This is the lens that started it all: my humble little Nikon 50mm f/1.8G that I purchased more than ten years ago so my wife and I could take better pictures of our nine-month-old son. The lens that, along with our old Nikon D200, got me going on this whole photographic journey that continues to this day and that I hope will continue as long as I’m capable of holding a camera in my hands. This lens inspired me to create Weekly Fifty, and even though I don’t use it for daily shooting nearly as often these days, it still has a valuable place in my gear bag and I still don’t think you can beat its unique combination of price and features. For anyone looking to level up their photography, a 50mm lens like this is, in my opinion, the single best purchase you can make.

So when I was thinking about some creative ways to use my Pavotube lights, it occurred to me that I could try to take a unique of my meek but mighty Nifty Fifty lens. I tried a couple things that didn’t work, then had a bit of an epiphany, and after more tweaking and experimentation I got the shot that you see here which, in my opinion, is pretty solid.

I started by taking the same approach as I have been doing on many of my recent pictures, but soon realized that setting this lens on our washing machine and lighting it from the side wasn’t going to work. It just wasn’t creating a compelling composition, and I didn’t really know why. Things weren’t clicking, and if you have been taking pictures for any length of time you can probably understand the feeling of not quite being able to make the shot work. I moved lights around, readjusted the position of my camera, changed the angle of view…nothing. No luck. It wasn’t happening.

Then something occurred to me: why not try an entirely different approach and take a shot of only the front of the lens. It could work, but how? The I put the lens on its side (still on the washing machine) and lowered my camera to face it head-on, but no dice. Like Luke said to Han when they were putting handcuffs on Chewie to pretend they were doing a prisoner transfer, “This is not going to work.”

That’s when I realized I was going about this all wrong. I needed to change everything about the shot in order to get something good. I put the lens on the floor, put my camera above it, adjusted my angle of view to be straight down, and placed the lights at 120-degree increments. Bingo. Now I had something I could work with.

After this it was simply a matter of fine-tuning everything. I needed to get closer to the lens, but couldn’t lower the camera so I raised the lens by putting it on my iPad that was enclosed in a black translucent case. I adjusted the colors of the lights. I played around with the aperture. And after much experimentation I got the final shot you see today. I also did some work in Lightroom to adjust colors and remove spots and imperfections, but the result is an image that I am extraordinarily proud to have taken that also tells a bit of a story–at least for me personally. It’s perhaps a bit of a metaphor too. This picture is a look at both past and future, at my beginnings as well as new horizons and new things to explore. This shot makes me thankful for the past, and excited for what is yet to come.

You might be looking at this picture and thinking that it bears a striking resemblance to the photos I’ve shared here the past few weeks, and you know what? You’re correct :) It’s all part of the learning process though, and while on the surface this shot of a classic video game controller does share much in common with its predecessors, there are some important differences that illustrate how I’m continuing to learn when it comes to manipulating off-camera colored lights. Like a lot of my pictures, this one builds on what I have already learned while introducing some important new elements as well, and the end result is an image that, at least to me, showcases yet another step in the never-ending journey of learning to be a better photographer.

First, the similarities. I lit the front of the controller with a single Nanlite Pavotube that was dialed in to a specific color temperature rather than a HSI (Hue/Saturation/Intensity) value. That was something I learned when photographing the Wii controller, and I wanted to apply it here too. I wanted to have the controller be lit primarily with a normal everyday kind of light source, and then have other colors serve as accents. Also, the bright red buttons and words just didn’t look right when lit primarily with any color other than white. This setup also helped create a sense of depth by adding shadows to the buttons and the top of the controller, which were only there because of the specific placement of the primary white light.

The other colors in the scene borrow quite liberally from earlier shots too, with one key difference. In this composition I intentionally placed the orange and purple lights so they would also be reflecting off the surface of the washing machine–something I specifically worked to avoid in earlier photos. It didn’t even occur to me, to be perfectly frank, but once I saw the dynamic elements that the light reflections added to the image (a discovery I made purely by accident as I was waving the lights around) I thought it would be a great way to complement the controller. And, as far as I can see, I think I was right :)

I’m really curious to see where all of this goes. Will I just keep taking pictures of retro-themed objects on top of my washing machine, or will I find something new to explore with the lights? I’m really not sure, but I’m eager to find out.

“Dad, get your camera!” my youngest son shouted from the back yard. I was inside cleaning up in the kitchen and he was out with my wife planting some strawberries he had brought home from his after-school gardening club, and I couldn’t imagine what on earth would need my attention, and my camera, so urgently. The tone of my son’s voice was all the justification I needed though, and I immediately dropped what I was doing, grabbed my D750 (with 105mm macro lens already attached, thankfully) and ran out to see what was going on. Much to my surprise, my son and my wife were standing just a few feet from what looked like hummingbirds floating from flower to flower in the corner of our yard. My son looked at them, looked at me, gave me a massive grin, and said “See if you can get a picture!”

There wasn’t much time to plan, but I knew I needed a fast shutter speed. And I mean fast. I set my auto-ISO to 1/1500 second, dialed in a pretty wide aperture of f/4, got down on the ground, and set to work. These little creatures were pretty skittish and didn’t stay in one place for more than a few seconds, so I kind of scooted around in a prone position and waited for one of them to come near to me rather than vice-versa. I fired off lots of shots but they were all from a pretty far distance, and I was sure that even if the subject looked interesting the shots would require a pretty fair amount of cropping. That’s how it goes sometimes, but I held out hope that one would eventually get close enough for a better shot.

It took about a minute, but eventually one of them did hover over to some purple blossoms near my camera at which point I stopped down the aperture to keep the depth of field under control, held my breath, and kept taking dozens of pictures. Soon this one positioned itself right in front of my lens. I could hardly believe my luck, and with my son practically squealing with excitement I was able to take the picture you see here.

It is not cropped.

I have taken lots of shots of bugs and insects over the years, and even some bees as they float from flower to flower, but this is far and away the best such photo I have ever been able to capture. The only part of the moth that’s in focus is exactly the part that should be, and its wings have just enough motion blur to let you know how fast they are moving. Its proboscis is about to uncurl to take a sip of nectar from the nearby plant, and everything that’s not the moth or the flower is completely blurred out but still gives a sense of context. Even the brown streak on the left side serves to complement the colors of the moth.

This is one of those shots that I just can’t quite believe I was able to capture, and I’m so glad I listened to my son and didn’t ask questions. I just grabbed my camera and made a run for it, and the result is one of my favorite pictures I have ever taken.