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

This was a photo I didn’t plan, didn’t prepare for, and didn’t even think I could take. It was a nice moment of photographic serendipity that served as a good reminder of why I like this hobby so much, and something I’d like to try again in the future. You’re looking at a small patch of purple flowers in the corner of my backyard, and even though these things show up every year I still don’t know what they are or how to get a good picture of them. It’s not like last week’s shot where you can just point your camera at one of these and get a nice picture almost every time. Instead, these purple flowers are grouped together in tight masses, and what you usually end up with is a mass of muddy purple instead of a well-composed photograph. Nonetheless, on a warm April evening while my wife was reading to our youngest son in the backyard I thought I would grab my camera and see if I could wrest a photograph from this patch of purple flowers somehow.

I got down low, activated Live View on my Nikon D750, put a +2 close-up filter on my 50mm lens, tilted the rear screen up, and took a few pictures. It wasn’t really working out though, and as I reviewed my images I just wasn’t happy with what I was getting. It was, as I expected, mostly just a purple blob in the lower half with a light brown blob (i.e. my fence) in the top half. I kept at it though, and soon stumbled across another element I had not considered: the setting sun.

Turns out that the light streaming through the small spaces between my fence boards created a brilliant bokeh effect, but I didn’t realize it at first because (and I know this sounds dumb but it’s true) I was facing the wrong direction. I never considered composing my shots such that the sunlight was in the background, and as soon as I tried this new approach everything changed. I’m thrilled with the vertical out-of-focus light strips in the background, which look almost otherworldly and give this simple picture a mood that I would have never predicted. The one thing I’d like to re-do in the future, if I get the opportunity before these plants wilt, is find a way to isolate one single flower much like last week’s image of an Indian Paintbrush. This picture isn’t great in its own right, but it hints at greatness and gives me some fun new things to think about for future photos that I had not previously considered.

Another Spring, another photo of a Castilleja flower. Known as an Indian Paintbrush around here, these things show up all over the place in April and May, but their beauty is in no way lessened due to their prominence. This, like other similar photos I have taken and shared in the past, was shot in my neighbor’s field right across the street. It was early evening and I was outside with my two boys, mostly just passing the time with some unicycle-riding before bed, when I suggested we go over to the field and take some pictures. I had my D750 and close-up filters, just in case I wanted to do something slightly different than in the past. My oldest son grabbed his little Canon Powershot pocket camera while my youngest was content to just come with and look at the flowers, and the three of us ran across the street to see what we could find.

It’s not hard to take a great picture of these flowers. It’s really just a matter of finding one (or several, depending on the shot you are going for) and pointing your camera and pressing the shutter button. You’ll get a winner almost every time. And honestly, I think that’s part of the appeal for me: with very little effort anyone can take a beautiful flower picture, even if all you have is a simple mobile phone. In this case I show a few frames at f/2.8 and was decently happy with the result, but then I wondered what would happen if I got just a bit closer. The minimum focusing distance on my 50mm lens is about a foot and a half (I think, anyway. I haven’t checked in a while) which means to get a ton of background blur you have to use a super-wide aperture, which means the depth of field is really shallow, which means the flower isn’t as sharp as you might like.

Enter the magic world of close-up photography :)

I think I used a +2 filter on this, which made the minimum focusing distance much closer and gave me a ton of background blur and subject separation while also giving me some latitude to work with a smaller aperture and make the subject sharper. I shot this at f/6.7, even though it looks like it was f/1.8. That’s entirely due to the close-up filter, and even with such a small aperture you can still see that some parts of the flower are not in focus. The critical parts are though, and that’s what matters to me.

It took some experimentation and several attempts to get what is, at the end of the day, a really basic photo, but it’s one that I really like and a good reminder that photography doesn’t have to be complicated or produce wall-worthy artwork to be rewarding. If you can get a shot you like and learn something in the process, then that’s all you need.

I’m still finding out interesting ways to use my 10-stop ND filter, and most of them involve running water. Not that there’s a ton of that sort of thing where I live, but the opportunities I do have often give me some interesting results or at least some things to think about. Aside from the fountains in Theta Pond, the other easily accessible scene on campus that lends itself to long-exposure photography is the fountain at the south entrance to Low Library. I walk or bike past it most days, but it runs dry during the winter months because freezing water is pretty bad for pipes. In early April the powers-that-be decided to unleash the circulating torrent for the season, and once I saw that the fountain had been turned on I immediately thought about getting a long-exposure shot of it.

Initially I was going to use my D7100 but thought that its 75mm equivalent field of view would be too constricting, so when I did get the opportunity to take this shot I made sure to bring my full-frame D750 instead. I thought about shooting this scene during the early morning hours as I biked across campus, but thought that a picture later in the day would be more interesting. There’s a light pole just outside my window at my office and as the morning passed I waited until its shadow was pointing due north, and then grabbed my camera, tripod, ND filter, and went to the library to get to work.

I had a pretty good understanding of what I was aiming for, but there were some variables I couldn’t plan for or control. For one, pedestrians. The lawn in front of the fountain is usually full of students but on this particular day it was relatively empty. So that was definitely a win. Also, plentiful passers-by posed a problem but that was partly mitigated by the six-second shutter speed; unless someone stood still or walked very slowly, they were unlikely to leave their imprint on the image. Fortunately when I shot this there was an honest-to-goodness break in foot traffic, which was another unexpected win. Finally, the element of positioning: where to place my camera? I went as far back as I could without running into the steps leading up to the main doors, and tried to center the fountain in the frame as evenly as possible. In hindsight I wish I would have scooted over juuuuuuust a bit to the right, as my slight OCD tendencies cause me to clam up a bit when I look at this photo and realize that the fountain is ever so slightly off-center. However, I partially blame the landscape planners for that one: the footpath through the formal gardens in the background isn’t actually centered with the library. Still, it would have been nice if everything lined up just so.

I got about five images (all at f/16, ISO 100, 6 second shutter speed) but this one stood out for one reason: the lack of wind. In each of the other images a gust of wind blew the water to the left which looked kind of neat at first, but the more I looked at this picture the more I appreciated its simplicity and symmetry. I like the pillar of water in the middle and the slight skirt of water gently cascading off the pedestal, and it gives the scene just a hint of movement while also appearing calm and serene at the same time. The clear blue sky, green grass free of people, and smooth surface of the square collecting pool were icing on the cake, and in the end this is probably one of my favorite photos I have taken of this view of the OSU campus.

One fun thing I enjoy shooting from time to time is backlighting. It’s not that I don’t have the opportunity, just that I forget to take these kinds of shots even when they are right before my eyes. I especially enjoy photos of backlit flowers, but since we don’t really have any in our yard I like to keep my eyes open for situations like this and be ready when they arise. These flowers are just down the street from my house in the same field where my wife and I take our kids sledding in the winter, and each spring there is a patch of tulips and…um…other flowers that is fun to go look at. Two years ago I went down to this spot with my niece to help her understand some basic elements of exposure and depth of field, and sometimes it’s hard not to get a great shot when you have flowers like this. Still, it’s always worth trying to find a way of shooting familiar subjects in a bit more of a creative manner, and backlighting is a great tool to make that happen.

I shot this in the early evening on the first day of Spring, and while my wife was playing with our youngest son I asked our older son if he would want to bike down to this small field for some photos. He happily obliged, and we raced down the street to this spot where I quickly found myself on the ground and contorting myself in strange ways to get some photos. This was my favorite of the bunch for a couple of reasons. First of all, the backlighting. (Naturally.) The sun was just out of the top-right corner of the frame which gave these flowers a brilliant translucent glow, and I like how the five flowers display this to varying degrees. The foremost is almost transparent, and as you look farther back in the image you see others that are different degrees of opacity. It adds a three-dimensional feel to the image that I quite enjoy.

The one thing that really makes this image, though, is the tree branch arching over the top of the scene. That was most definitely intentional, though quite difficult to frame since I was working with the rear LCD screen on my Nikon D750 and it was not exactly easy to see with the bright light. Still, I am mostly satisfied with the way the tree feels like a protective arm covering the scene and telling the flowers Nothing bad’s going to happen to you. Not on my watch.

Longtime Weekly Fifty readers know I rarely post pictures of my kids, and when I do you can’t see their faces. That’s because this blog isn’t for me to show off my family, but to share my love of photography and my journey to continually learn more about it. However, every now and then a picture comes along that happens to have my kids in it that I feel justified in sharing here. So that’s one fairly unique thing about this photo.

The other singular characteristic of this picture is how it was shot. I took it with my iPhone, and I can count on one hand the number of times I have posted a mobile phone photo here. Not that mobile phone cameras are any less worthy of being counted among their large-sensor brethren; I just find my particular photographic learning path to involve more DSLRs and fewer iPhones. That’s just me though.

With that out of the way, let me take a minute and explain what’s going on here. This is the fourth week in a row that I’m sharing a picture taken from a very frozen Lake Carl Blackwell when it froze solid back in February. If you’re tired of seeing shots of frozen lakes, maybe next week’s image will be more to your taste. But I’m not, especially since this so rarely happens here in Oklahoma :) As we were out walking around near (but never on) the lake we came across a bit of an outcropping–a mini promontory, if you will–and I thought it would make for a really interesting photo with the boys’ backs to my camera. It’s all about context, after all: the same picture without my kids would look uninteresting, with no sense of size or place to help orient you, the viewer. But with these two kids looking out you get a sense of scale, and their stances impart a bit of emotion and feeling onto whoever sees the image. Or at least, I hope they do. I didn’t tell them to pose or do anything at all except just stand there and look out at the lake, and this was the result. I didn’t spend more than five seconds taking this picture but I’m pleased with the result, with one exception: I should have held my phone about two inches higher to eliminate the awkward intersection of the horizon line with the head of my son on the right. It’s such an obvious mistake and would have been so simple to remedy, but alas, it is what is. And I’m not going to spend my time picking that particular nit lest it ruin my enjoyment of the image.

This photo is unedited too–no cropping, color adjustment, or even straightening of the horizon. It is how it was shot, and it’s a good reminder that the right composition with the right light can allow mobile phones to work wonders. You’d never be able to get the depth of field in a shot like this from an iPhone that you could get with a dedicated camera, a wide (but not too wide) lens, and a big aperture, but then again, you can’t fit that setup in your pocket either. And sometimes convenience just wins.