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

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.

I have said time and time again, and I continue to mean what I say, that I don’t make a habit of having posts on Weekly Fifty coincide with specific times of the year or other such milestones. That being said, I do still get a bit wistful near the end of December and maybe, just maybe, try to take a picture or two that hearkens to this particular season. Not always, mind you, but occasionally. Sometimes. Every now and then.

And this, as you can probably tell, is one of those such times. I don’t know that anything about this picture has to do with closing out the year 2022, but I do hope the subject matter, the colors, the contrast between light and dark…the whole composition, really…makes you think about chilly winter nights and maybe, just maybe, a cozy evening by the Christmas tree with family and friends.

Or maybe not. Maybe this doesn’t do anything for you at all, and if that’s the case, then that interpretation is completely valid and as good of a way of interpreting meaning from this image (if any is able to be gleaned at all) as any other. Anyway, what you’re looking at here is a close-up shot of a Christmas ornament hanging from our tree. The setup is pretty simple, as you can see here:

Just to be clear: this shot was no accident. I created the image using a specific combination of ornaments, lighting, and the position of my camera (as well as the usual exposure settings, of course) and also no small degree of patience. I don’t remember where we got this particular ornament but I enjoy its message, despite living in Oklahoma where we only rarely get snow and even more rarely have snow on Christmas. Perhaps it’s the Minnesotan in me still poking out every now and then :) In any case, the ornament by itself didn’t make for all that interesting of a picture. What I really tried to do here was craft a complete composition using other objects in the background—namely the red wire tree, but also a silver bell, of sorts, that is hanging just behind the red tree which you can’t really see in the shot. I positioned those background ornaments, as well as some of the lights on the tree, to create a scene that was full of multicolored points of light reflecting off the surface of the ornament and also creating something to look at besides just the main subject.

I shot this at f/11 on my 105mm macro lens, ISO 100, and a 2-second exposure which is where my patience really started to wear thin. The ornament had a habit of twisting back and forth at the smallest provocation, which meant that even my kids walking through the other room created enough vibration to sully the shot. However, it didn’t take long until I had the image I was going for and was able to put away my camera and get back to what really matters: my family.

And with that I hope you had a good Christmas and are looking forward to a 2023 full of new opportunities, surrounded by love from family and friends. May God bless you now and throughout the new year, whatever that may bring.