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

This is the first of a couple pictures I’ll be posting over the next few weeks which were all taken at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, Oklahoma. I’ve used a few shots from trips to this place here on Weekly Fifty in years past and it’s always fun to go down there with my family and a few cameras and take pictures that I can’t get anywhere else. Well, certainly not in the city where I live. Your mileage may vary :)

This year, as with last year, I only brought two cameras: My Fuji X100F, and my Nikon D500 with the 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. Based on my experiences in previous trips to the Wichita Mountains I didn’t think I would need multiple DSLRs or lots of lenses, since the Fuji/D500 combination would probably cover everything I wanted to do, and that turned out to be the right course of action. I didn’t even bring my macro lens since this was primarily a trip for me, my wife, and our two kids and not a photo-taking excursion. As such I wanted to make sure I spent as much time as possible with my family and not wandering off by myself taking pictures while they waited for me, but even so I did manage to come across a huge number of photo opportunities such as the one you see here.

These little collared lizards were everywhere down in the rocky terrain of the wildlife refuge, but most skittered away when we got close. This one was content to just hang out on a red rock while we walked by, and one of my kids spotted it and mentioned that it might make for a good picture. He was right! I used my D500 and zoomed in to 200mm while keeping the aperture locked at f/2.8, and crept ever closer while snapping pictures the whole time. I eventually got the shot you see here, with the lizard’s eye tack sharp while the rest of its body fades away into a blurry background.

This was a good reminder to me of the versatility of the 70-200 f/2.8 lens. It’s by no means useful for close-up macro-style shots, but it is far more versatile than just a sports and action lens. I could have used a zoom lens with a smaller (and variable) maximum aperture, like an 18-250, but without that f/2.8 it wouldn’t have given me a picture quite like this. I bought this lens a few years ago intending to use it for action shots of my kids, but it continues to impress me with how it can go way beyond that.

This is the kind of unplanned, serendipitous shot that I really appreciate being able to capture every now and then. I’ve taken a few pictures of moths and butterflies sitting on flowers before and it’s kind of fun because, like opening up a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get. Sometimes these little creatures hold still, and other times they scurry about, landing for one or two seconds before fluttering away on to seek out the next flower. There’s also weather-related complications like wind, rain, bumblebees, and even the direction of the sunlight to contend with. But every so often I have been able to take a picture kind of like what you see here, where everything is clear, sharp, and conveys something more than just a simple snapshot.

I took this at the Botanic Garden on the west side of town on a warm May evening while my kids played in the treehouse-slash-playground and I spent a few minutes looking for some photo opportunities I might not get in my normal daily life. I first noticed this small white moth (butterfly?) going from one clump of purple flowers to the next, but didn’t immediately think about how it would look in a photo. I mostly just wanted to watch it float around from one spot to the next. A minute later I got out my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens to see if maybe, just maybe, I could get a good picture from what I saw in front of me.

Soon the moth landed on the flowers you see in the shot and as luck would have it, the creature was perfectly perpendicular to my particular point of view. Yes! I knelt down, raised my camera, set the aperture to f/8, and fired off a series of shots in rapid succession before adjusting my view just a bit and repeating the process. I didn’t know if they would turn out or whether my depth of field would be too small to get good results, but when I reviewed the images in Lightoom I found that a good number of them really did look good. This was my favorite of the batch, because if you look really closely you can see its tiny little proboscis extending in a loop on its way down to drink some nectar from the flower. It’s a small detail, but it adds a lot to the image and turns it into something just a bit more special. And when you can capture a shot that goes even slightly above and beyond what you might expect, then I consider that a win.

One of my favorite spots to take pictures is our local botanic garden, which is on the west side of town tucked between a highway and a small creek. As much as I enjoy taking photos near Theta Pond, I mostly just go there because it’s convenient. The botanic garden is stuffed to the brim with flowers, plants, native grasses, decorations, artwork, and offers a huge variety of photo opportunities you can’t really get anywhere else. One evening in late May my wife was on the phone with her parents and our kids were getting a bit restless, as kids tend to do, so we hopped in the car and drove down to the garden where they played in the treehouse and I walked around with my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens to look for some photo opportunities.

Believe it or not, this is a cactus. A very close view of a cactus, but a cactus nonetheless. I don’t know what type or variety of cactus you’re looking at here, but my kids would probably describe it as “large and in charge.” It might be something called a Grafted Moon (which, in turn, sounds like something out of Elden Ring) but I’m not sure and, to be honest, it doesn’t matter a whole lot to me. What matters is that this is a pretty cool picture and I’m glad I got the chance to take it even though the particulars of the plant evade me at present. The orange bulb looks a bit like a flame frozen in time admist a sea of otherworldly spikes and spires, and while that’s a far cry from the truth it is fun to use photography to see somewhat normal sights in a slightly new light like this.

As for the particulars of the picture, I went back and forth between f/11 and f/18 (with a few at f/4 just for fun, and as you might imagine those did not look good at all since the depth of field turned the entire image into a blurry mess) and while my f/18 shots turned out nice and sharp, I did like the slightly thinner in-focus area of this shot compared to its smaller-aperture counterparts. The sun is behind me and to my right which gave everything a bright even lighting effect, though I do wonder what this scene would look like if I re-shot it late in the day when the sun is low on the horizon to get a backlit scene. I didn’t want to take too long getting this shot and eventually just went back to wandering around looking for more pictures and, of course, my kids who were happy to get a bit of unsupervised playtime :)

When I was a kid I worked at a grocery store called Russ’s Market. It was about a half mile from my house and I started there the same week the local newspaper quit doing the afternoon edition, which I had delivered, along with most of my siblings as well, throughout middle school and junior high. There weren’t too many places keen on employing 15-year-olds in the mid 1990’s, but somehow the grocery store was able to skirt regulations to some degree or other and as long as I didn’t work past 7pm or more than 20 hours in a single week, I was allowed to be gainfully employed receive a regular paycheck. I bagged groceries, ran the checkout, mopped floors, cleaned restrooms, brought in carts from the parking lot, and generally did whatever odd tasks needed doing on any given shift. Over the years I worked my way up the ranks a bit, eventually taking care of the dairy cooler, the customer service counter, and even the video rental department–a corner of the store where people could rent VHS tapes for a couple of bucks. I worked there for nearly nine years, paying my way through college and making some good friends along the way.

One of the coveted jobs at that grocery store was managing the Garden Tent, a pop-up operation that appeared every spring and lasted through the middle of summer before disappearing altogether with nary a trace of its existence to be found. I knew nothing about plants, flowers, shrubberies, soil, or anything related to gardening but volunteered to take care of the tent every opportunity I had since it meant I could spend my shift outdoors watering flowers and chatting with customers and, most importantly, wear ratty jeans and worn-out sneakers instead of the usual khakis-and-blue-shirt uniform. I don’t miss much about working at the grocery store but if I had to make a list, the Garden Tent would be on it.

When I bike to work I usually ride past a grocery store at roughly the halfway mark, and like clockwork there is a Garden Tent that shows up each spring just like the one I used to work at back in the day. One morning in late April I decided to stop and see if I could use all the flowers, along with the morning sun, to get an interesting picture. I knew I wanted to get a backlit image of one of the flowers…but which one? And what else should be in the frame? What angle should I shoot it from? What about other light sources aside from just the sun? So many questions to consider, and since I was en route to my office I didn’t want to spend more than a minute or two pondering the possibilities. I took several pictures as I wandered around the outskirts of the tent, and then realized I could make use of a trick that I have really come to appreciate more and more: taking advantage of the sun reflecting off of passing cars. While the overhead sun gave this orange and yellow flower a brilliant glow, it was an automobile driving on the nearby road that provided the bright yellow circle of light that adds a much-needed dynamic element to the image. That added touch, the pièce de résistance, is what transforms this from an ordinary image into something really special and I’m glad I got the chance to take this photo.

I don’t have a clue what these flowers are, but I do know that they are small. Very small. Each of the little white pods you see here is about 1/4inch from front to back, and this plant was absolutely full of similar clusters like the one in the picture. When I saw them I immediate knew I wanted to take a picture but I wasn’t really sure how to go about making that picture look particularly interesting. I mean, it’s a bunch of white flowers. What am I trying to get you, the viewer, to look at? Is the subject of this image the whole bunch of flowers or just one single flower? Where should I focus: the flowers in front, the flowers on the side, the green stalk holding everything up, or something else? And, perhaps most importantly when shooting close-up, what aperture should I use to get the right depth of field?

So many questions, so little time. Seriously. I didn’t want to spend an hour contemplating all of this! I just wanted to take a picture and get back to doing other things.

I quickly decided that I wanted to get the frontmost flower in focus, and shot with an aperture of f/22 in order to err on the side of caution and also make sure enough of the flowers were sharp and easy to see. And even at f/22 the depth of field was still pretty shallow, enough that the front of the flower in the middle is tack sharp but the back is not despite the entire flower being smaller than my little fingernail. I am pretty happy with how this turned out and I quite like that you can see right down the middle of the flower in front.

Editing this image in Lightroom proved surprisingly easy, thanks to the new Select Subject feature that debuted about six months ago. Originally the sky was kind of a dull gray but I wanted to add a bit of vibrance to the image, so I clicked the “Select Sky” option and…well, it really was that simple. It immediately gave me an editing mask for just the sky, and a few quick adjustments of the White Balance slider gave me the final result you see here. Note that I’m not shilling for Lightroom here, but as someone who has been using that program for about six years I continue to be impressed with how well it fits my particular workflow.