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

This is one of those photos that’s not so much about the image, but the story behind the image. It’s a gingerbread house, and not a super fancy or extraordinary one at that, but what you’re actually seeing here is the end result of a fun project that our kids got to do with their grandparents when we went up to visit them over Christmas break. They had been given a gingerbread house kit by a friend who knew their grandchildren were coming for a visit and might want a fun project to do, and it ended up being exactly that: an enjoyable activity for, and I’m not even kidding about this, the whole family to enjoy. I realize that might seem slightly cheesy to say (and read, in your case) but it’s true: my kids had a great time assembling this decoration with their grandparents over the course of a few days. As a bit of caution to errant passers-by one of my kids put the warning phrase “Don’t eat” on top, spelled out in icing and candy. Not that anyone was in the house aside from us, but still, eight-year-olds sometimes have their own sense of logic and you have to just go with it every now and then. When I see this picture, what makes it meaningful isn’t the colors or the lighting or the composition, but the memories. And that, it seems to me, is one of the best gifts that photography has given to all of us.

I brought my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens along for the trip even though I knew there probably wouldn’t be too many opportunities to use it, but the beauty of driving instead of flying when you go on any sort of trip is that you have a lot more luggage-related wiggle room compared to flying. Though that camera and lens mostly stayed in my bag for much of our visit, I thought this gingerbread house would be a great opportunity to use and I wasn’t at all disappointed with the results. Quite the opposite, in fact. Even though this is hardly a macro photo, that’s kind of beside the point: macro lenses are great for much more than just close-ups! I couldn’t do much in the way of customizing the lighting or even the background, but I thought that if I set this confection on a small table with the fireplace in the background it would make for at least a slightly more interesting overall composition. I shot this in manual with ISO 100 and a few different apertures values with my camera firmly mounted on a tripod so as to make shutter speed more or less irrelevant.

As usual my first instinct was to shoot wide open but, of course, the depth of field I was getting was simply far too shallow even with my camera being several feet away from the gingerbread house. (That’s what you get when you shoot with a 105mm lens, after all😁) I honestly didn’t even know what to focus on–the green window trim, the colored candy on top, the roof line, or even the candy cane fence protruding from the front. F/8 kind of took care of most of those issues for me, thankfully. I focused on the big green rectangular blobs that my youngest son put on as windows and doors and enough of the house was sharp to make for a quality end result.

I’m not sure about this picture. I mean, it’s not a bad shot but it feels like there’s a much better image hiding underneath or just out of reach. In recent weeks I have posted a lot of shots taken with my macro lens that I am proud of, but this…well, it’s not one of them. Still, this picture was part of my photography journey so that alone is all the reason I need to share it here.

Here’s what I was going for when I took this shot: I wanted an image of this red flower as the subject, and the fountain in the background as sort of a secondary subject. What’s that…you don’t see a fountain? Well look again! It’s that white blob just to the right side of the red flower. I mean, maybe this could have been an interesting image but it just doesn’t quite get there. The flower and the fountain are too close, almost like they are competing to occupy the center of the frame. The horizon is tilted just enough to look like an accident instead of intentional. The lighting is harsh and uninviting. I could go on. And yet, it’s not entirely a lost cause because I did learn something when I took this shot.

It was really tricky to get the aperture just right, and in the end I don’t think I quite got there. I wanted the flower to be sharp and the fountain to be blurry, but still actually look like a fountain. I succeeded at making the flower sharp but I think I could have stopped down a bit more to make the fountain a little clearer. What I learned was that I need to be a bit more intentional when taking shots like this, and to stop down more than I might think is necessary. F/22, as opposed to f/13, would have probably resulted in a better image and of course shooting at a different time of day (or on a different day altogether, one with more clouds) would have no doubt helped with the lighting. While this won’t be anywhere in my top images of the year, it is a shot I’m glad I was able to take and I think it will help me improve my future photos–and sometimes that’s worth more than having an image turn out spectacularly.

One thing I’m enjoying about my Macro lens is looking for photo opportunities close to the ground. Not necessarily finding things that are hidden or unseen, but things that I would normally just kind of overlook on a day-to-day basis. Not that such subjects are inherently more interesting or valuable or special than anything else, but just that it’s kind of fun to see what there is to see at your feet instead of at normal eye level. That’s how I came across this shot, which is some kind of plant (obviously) just poking out from a covering of leaves and wood chips on the south end of the Oklahoma State University campus.

Longtime Weekly Fifty readers know how often I have posted photos that I took while walking around Theta Pond, and this one continues the tradition quite nicely. I took this picture on a warm December afternoon when I needed to get out of my office and stretch my legs for a bit, so I put on a podcast (probably an episode of The Delta Flyers) and grabbed my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens and went for a bit of a stroll. As usual I just sort of ended up at the pond because it’s one of my favorite spots on campus, and noticed a patch of these brown-colored plants and thought I might be able to get a good shot of them.

One thing I’m still learning about my macro lens is how to effectively utilize and manipulate the aperture of my lens to get the shot I want. The 105mm focal length lets me get very close to subjects which means I have to be very careful when shooting wide open. Not necessarily for sharpness, but for depth of field–though sharpness too, but kind of as a byproduct of DOF since this lens is really sharp even wide open. I put my camera on the ground, flipped out the rear screen, set the aperture to f/8, focused on the red leaf in the center, and took a few photos.

No good. Depth of field was simply too shallow.

I ended up with an aperture of f/16 which I almost never shoot at on my 50mm lens, but I’m finding is much more reasonable on this macro lens than shooting at f/4 or f/2.8. I really like the colors, the leaves in the foreground, the white-and-brown background, and the overall mood and tone of this shot. It just feels like autumn and yet, also feels like something new and exciting is just around the corner too.

One of the reasons I bought a macro lens was to take close-up shots of bugs, insects, and other small animals. It’s a little tricky to do that during the winter though, because much of that kind of wildlife just isn’t around too often. Or, at least it’s not around too often where I live or where I am currently looking–maybe there’s lots of animals and I’m just not seeing them! In any case, I did happen to see this little fly sitting on a leaf while out walking around campus one chilly December afternoon and thought it might make an interesting image. In retrospect…I’m not really sure about this picture.

I don’t know what it was that I hoped to capture in this shot but something about the final image just doesn’t really work right for me. Maybe it’s the fact that the fly, while larger than most images of a fly I can recall capturing, just isn’t that interesting or compelling to look at. Its silhouette on the leaf is fine but unremarkable, and the yellow-and-green color palette is kind of bland and boring. I do like the highlights in the background and overall I don’t think this is a bad shot, just not a super good shot. It seems like the kind of picture someone would take while out wandering around with a macro lens without much to shoot. And it probably seems that way because that’s basically what happened :)

I do think it’s kind of neat that the fly opted to stick around for a few seconds before buzzing away, and whether that was due to the cold temperatures or something else (maybe it was more interested in something besides my giant honking camera lens) it is not lost on me that the situation that arose to make this photo possible was kind of unique even though the end result is somewhat pedestrian. If anything, this just gives me hope for spring and summer as I look for more opportunities to shoot with this macro lens.

At this point you have probably seen several images here on Weekly Fifty that follow this same basic setup: a single subject sitting on a reflective base in front of a blurry background. It’s a simple composition but it’s just so much fun to shoot these kinds of pictures that I wouldn’t be surprised if more show up in the future. So if you like them, great! But if you’re tired of these kinds of images…well, just be forewarned that there may or may not be more on the way. I honestly don’t know as I’m writing this post, but all I’m saying is it’s a super fun and creative style that takes very little effort. (Though it doesn’t hurt to have a good macro lens too!)

As you might have guessed this is an ornament from our Christmas tree which also gives you an idea of the scale of the image. It’s not super small–about 3 inches from top to bottom–so you might be wondering why I shot it with a macro lens. Why not a normal lens? The answer lies not in the idea of making small subjects appear large (or, rather, normal size) but in being able to focus very close to any subject you choose. Most lenses have a minimum focusing distance of about one to two feet depending on the focal length and other optical properties of the lens. That means that you cannot physically focus on objects that are closer than your outstretched hand, give or take a few inches. To get this shot I had to be able to focus much closer than that, in order to make the image just how I wanted.

Shooting at such close distance meant that the depth of field was insanely small–the figure’s eyes are sharp but the tassel on his hat is not, and the background of the miniature diorama is blurry even though it is less than an inch away. The background of the entire composition is, of course, just some crumpled-up aluminum foil but it appears bright and colorful because directly behind the camera is our Christmas tree, and nearly all other lights in the house were turned out which meant that the light you see here is almost entirely coming from a hundred tiny little colored bulbs.

While I have certainly shot images like this before, none of them had this degree of color and vibrancy, and I think this could very well end up being one of my favorite images that I have shot with my macro lens. It captures something unique that I don’t think I could get any other way, and it shows a certain point in time, Christmas, in a fun and interesting way. I am learning so much with this macro lens and I can’t wait to see what this new year holds for it and for my photography :)