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

I shot this in mid February when Oklahoma was in the middle of one of the longest and harshest cold snaps in recent memory. We had a near-record number of days below freezing, some with a high hovering around Zero. (If you live in the midwest United States you know what I’m talking about–we had it easy compared to states farther north!) My wife and I didn’t leave the house for a few days, and neither did our kids, but I really wanted to find a way to document the cold and snow and generally really bad weather conditions. I wasn’t about to spend more than two minutes outside in order to do it though! Then one evening I noticed this thing in the backyard and realized it might have the answer.

What you’re looking at here is a simple weather vane my youngest son did as a school project back in October. The idea was that with a pencil, a pin, a straw, and some cardstock he could create a basic weather vane to show wind direction. It was one of those simple school projects that I would never have thought of on my own, but ended up being a pretty cool demonstration of some basic science principles. He stuck this thing in the ground, recorded a few measurements, and then just sort of left it sit.

And sit it most certainly has. This weird little school project has survived rain, wind, ice storms, snow, and record freezing temperatures and (as my dad would say) by golly it still works. And I’ll be darned (another dad-ism) if that straw doesn’t keep on rotating to show wind direction even after all this time. For whatever reason this thing is like a Timex watch (have I shown my age yet?) and I’m curious just how long it will hang in there. So it made sense to me to use it as a way of showing a bit about the strange winter we have been having.

To get this shot I grabbed my D750 and 50mm lens, ran outside with the sun at my back, angled myself so my own shadow wouldn’t be in the picture, flipped down the rear screen, turned on Live View, and started shooting before my fingers froze into little pink popsicles. I didn’t really think too much about creating a compelling composition–mostly I just wanted to get back inside. I did wait just a few seconds for the wind to aim the arrow sideways because the other shots where it was facing towards or away from the camera just didn’t seem all that interesting. I shot at f/2.8 to balance sharpness and depth of field, and used continuous high-speed shooting in the hope that something would turn out. And I’ll be a monkey’s uncle (I’m now officially my dad) if this photo wasn’t almost exactly what I hoped it would be.

Something kind of interesting happened as I was out shooting with my 10-stop ND filter on a chilly February morning. I didn’t have anything specific in mind other than to shoot a picture of this particular fountain on campus, but once I got there and set up my tripod I wondered if there might be a way to incorporate geese into the shot. I took a few shots and liked how the swimming geese added some interesting streaks across the image, but something about the end result just seemed cheap and boring. I thought I could do better. Trouble is, geese aren’t really known for cooperating or doing what you want them to do at all. They mostly just kind of ignore you, hiss at you, or run away. Still, I did think I could get something if I worked at it for a bit.

As I reviewed my images briefly on the back of my camera I thought it would be kind of neat if I could get a shot where one goose was frozen (not literally, but you know what I mean) but everything else was smooth and showed motion. I didn’t know what I could really do to make that kind of a shot happen though, but after some experimenting I realized I would need to strike a balance with my shutter speed: too long and there’s no way a goose would be still in the image. Too short and the picture wouldn’t show movement the way I was hoping. And then there’s the matter of the animals, and trying to work around their obtuse agenda in order to get a shot.

Finally one goose did swim by and, as luck would have it, actually held still for a bit. I quickly dialed in a shutter speed of four seconds and an aperture of f/4.8, and hoped for the best. I pretty much just sat there and held my breath while the shutter was open, hoping against all odds that the goose would remain still. And I’m telling you, not one second after the shutter clicked and the exposure ended that goose in the foreground turned and swam away. It was almost like it was staring at me as I stared back, or maybe it was even posing for the shot. Whatever the case may have been, it resulted in a shot that that, while not perfect, does fill me with a sense of pride and gives me some new techniques to try as I explore the concept of long exposures.

Also on an unrelated note, this post marks the completion of eight years of doing this blog. Eight years, gone in a flash. I’ve learned an awful lot and I appreciate all the comments and questions from you, my readers, and look forward to many many more years of doing Weekly Fifty.

So after last week’s grandiose pontifications about a years-long photography improvement project involving fountains and filters, this image is pretty much the opposite end of the spectrum. I mean, it’s a pumpkin covered with snow. That’s pretty much it folks. Nothing to see here, move along.

Actually that’s not entirely accurate. This picture isn’t anything to write home about, but it does have a bit of a story behind it. Over the past several months many of my Weekly Fifty pictures have been taken along the route that my wife and I walk every day with our kids, who either ride their bikes or putt along on scooters. At some point we noticed this pumpkin sitting in a field all by itself, and it was a little…strange, I guess. It clearly did not grow there, but who put it there? And why? And were they going to come back for it? It was fully intact so it didn’t appear to have been tossed from a car or ejected off a truck. It seemed like someone walked out to the middle of a field, carefully set down a pumpkin, and walked away.

We didn’t really pay much attention other than to remark every day or so as we walked past. “Hmm. Looks like that pumpkin’s still there.” Every now and then I thought about bringing my camera on our walk so I could take a picture, but didn’t really have much in mind for what that picture would look like or why I would even want to take it. Then in late December we had a couple inches of snow, and because we don’t stop our daily walk even in bad weather I thought I would bring my D7100 and 50mm lens to finally get a picture of our little pumpkin friend. I ran out, shot this at f/2.8 with my camera basically sitting on the snow, and ran back to my wife and kids to continue the walk.

There wasn’t much to this photo, really, but I still kind of get a kick out of it. We don’t normally see pumpkins sitting in a field all by their lonesome, and we don’t get a lot of snow here in Oklahoma, so I guess you could say this was a confluence of a couple of odd events. It’s not the kind of picture I’ll be printing to hang on a wall or anything, but it does bring back a fun memory of an interesting time in our lives. One of those artifacts, so to speak, that I’ll probably look back on one day and remember this strange time of living through a global pandemic.

hen I did my 2020 In Review video one of the things I mentioned as a goal for 2021 is to do more long exposures, especially with ND filters. Soon afterwards I decided to bite the bullet and get a nice 10-stop ND filter (or, as my wife calls it, a very dark circle) for my 50mm lens and the first thing I wanted to do was go down to the OSU campus and take a picture of the rainbow at Theta Pond.

In the winter when the sun is low on the horizon there’s a good chance of seeing a rainbow in the fountains, but you have to catch it at the right time of day when looking at the fountains from just the right angle. It’s a really cool sight, and not difficult to capture with a camera, but usually you end up with a picture that looks like this:

It’s not bad, but it looks kind of messy with the droplets frozen in midair while the pockmarked surface of the water gives a sense of messiness to the overall composition. When I shot this picture (the one you see directly above) I wanted to create motion trails, but all I could do was lower the ISO to 100 and close the aperture to f/16, but even then the shutter speed was 1/15 second which is nowhere close to long enough if you want to show motion trails in a fountain.

Enter the 10-stop ND Filter!

After getting the filter I raced down to campus with my kids and let them run around while I fiddled with my camera for a while. The result is what you see at the top: a much smoother pond surface, silky-smooth motion trails from the fountain, and a sense of peace and calm that doesn’t exist in the other image. The key difference between the two images is shutter speed: 15 seconds vs 1/15 second. Letting the shutter stay open for so long during a bright afternoon day lets you capture images like this, and I’m thrilled to find out what else I can do with this ND filter in the coming months.

If anyone ever asks me to define the word serendipity I’m just going to point them in the direction of this image. Nothing was planned about this in anyway, and I’m so happy with the results for so many reasons. Before we moved to Oklahoma years ago I had never seen an armadillo in the wild. At a zoo, perhaps, but never just running around like a squirrel or possum or other such creature. While you don’t see these things every single day in urban areas, they really are quite a common fixture out in the country–so much so that they have earned the unfortunate nickname of Texas Speedbumps. We live in Stillwater which isn’t a huge city but not exactly a small town either, and as such it’s not out of the ordinary to see these wandering across someone’s yard or hear them rustling around in the bushes when out walking around Boomer Lake. Or out at Lake Carl Blackwell, where we found this guy.

During the pandemic we have been going on walks out on the equestrian trails at Lake Carl, as it’s known around here, and it’s a really fun way to spend the afternoon with our boys exploring new territory and just getting out in nature a bit. We headed out there on a warm afternoon in late December and I made sure to bring the closest setup I have that resembles any type of wildlife photography gear: My Nikon D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens. For actual wildlife photography you would want a much longer lens, but the 70-200 will suffice in a pinch especially when paired with a crop-sensor camera like the D500 to get a little extra reach out of the glass. I didn’t really expect to shoot any particular photos that day, but wanted to be ready in case an opportunity presented itself.

We actually ran across several armadillos during our hike that afternoon, either scampering across the muddy path or off in the distance, but I wasn’t able to get any great photos. Our kids sure enjoyed seeing them, and excitedly pointing out their features like the long snouts and hard shells. As we were nearing the end of the hike, only about a quarter mile from the trailhead, we saw this one armadillo scrounging for grubs in a patch of short grass and I had the thought that this could turn out to be a decent photo opportunity.

I carefully walked towards it, circling wide and making sure the sun was at my back in order to get a nicely-lit image. I crouched down, fired off several shots, stood up, crept forward, and repeated the same pattern. I had my camera on continuous high-speed shooting which fired off 10 frames each second, which was certainly overkill but didn’t exactly hurt either. I set my aperture to f/4 instead of f/2.8 to avoid temping the depth-of-field fates, and a minimum shutter speed of 1/500 second. Mostly this armadillo just ignored me but every now and again would pop his head up, check things out, and then go back to rooting and munching.

And then he stopped. He lifted himself up on his hind legs, and looked right at me for a split second. I jammed the shutter button and held it down until he turned away and scampered off. I took about 150 shots in those few minutes and there was one, exactly one, that turned out how I was hoping which is the one you see here. And the key to this image? The tiny white glint of sunlight reflected in his eye. That one little dot makes the whole photo, and it only happened because I was in the right spot and his head was tilted at just the right angle. I didn’t set out to get this photo when we went on our walk, but I’m so glad everything worked out to make this shot happen.

And that, my friends, is yet another example of why I enjoy photography so much.