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

Look, I get it. On first glance this looks like kind of a gross photo. It’s a dirty brown tennis ball in the middle of a grassy field. But bear with me a second: I think it’s kind of interesting and you might too.

It starts about an hour before this photo was taken, when my wife and I were out on a walk with our kids after it rained one morning back in April. The world had ground to a halt with coronavirus-related quarantines and social distancing, so even it was just a little bit warm out we took any chance we could to get the kids outside and running around. It was probably 60 degrees and cloudy but the rain had abated so were like “Get your boots on boys, we’re outta here.” Not a hundred yards from our house our progress ground to a halt when they saw a fuzzy caterpillar crawling around on the curb, and they watched it for at least five minutes while my wife and I chatted with a neighbor. I had my D7100 and 50mm lens with me and I wanted to get a shot of said caterpillar, but at the same time I didn’t want to crowd out my boys who were entranced with its undulating movement across the concrete.

So I left it alone, and after a little while we went on our way on the four-mile walk that had become a daily ritual for our family as a way to get the blood moving and enjoy a little change of scenery from the interior of our house in which we found ourselves far more often than before all the coronavirus mess hit. The boys jumped in puddles, my wife and I talked, and I had my camera at the ready in case any photo opportunities hit.

Sadly, nothing really presented itself (or perhaps I just wasn’t looking close enough) and by the time we got back home I think I might have shot, perhaps, three or four photos. No big deal though, there’s always next time. But then I noticed a caterpillar, possibly the same one from earlier, on the other side of the street. (Was it the unwitting subject of a children’s joke? The world may never know.) Our boys were no longer interested in creepy crawlies, having gone on to play with a soccer ball and tennis racquet, so I spent a minute photographing the caterpillar while my wife talked (at least six feet away!) with our neighbor.

I soon realized that the non-flip-out screen of my D7100 was going to make a photo of said caterpillar a little challenging, and that’s when I noticed this dirty, nasty tennis ball in the gutter. I held it near the caterpillar and, much to my surprise, it crawled right up onto the ball. Bingo. Now this was something I could work with. I took a few shots while holding it with my hand but didn’t like seeing my thumb protruding up from the bottom of the frame, so I set the ball on the wet grass and kept rotating it with my left hand while firing off pictures with my right hand. I wanted to get a picture with the caterpillar cresting the ball, ideally with its head held up, and though I don’t think I quite got the shot I was looking for I am really pleased with what I did get. I took several at f/1.8 (because depth of field!) but eventually had the sense to stop down to 2.8, though perhaps I should have gone even smaller because in this shot, which was indeed at f/2.8, the front of the ball is a little too blurry for my taste. Shallow depth of field isn’t everything, folks. Sometimes you just need things in focus.

This picture was a nice bookend to our walk and a nice way to spend a few minutes doing something fun and creative in the midst of so much gloom and anxiety. I’m writing this post on April 16 when so much of the future is uncertain, and that’s when it feels like the moments to search for that spark of inspiration are more important than ever.

I wasn’t going to post this picture. I almost didn’t even take this picture. It’s not my favorite photo, and in fact I would say I don’t even like it that much at all. However, despite everything I don’t really care for in this image I thought I would share it here anyway as kind of a progress pic. Sort of.

Here’s the deal. Or the background, rather. In June of 2014 I took this shot of a honeybee approaching a magnolia flower which was the first of its kind I was ever able to get. I got it with nothing more than my humble little D200 and 50mm f/1.8 lens in a mostly unexpected act of photographic serendipity. It’s kind of a neat photo, but one thing I wish I could have gotten better was a full image of the bee. That picture was almost the shot I wish I could have gotten. Almost, almost…but not quite.

Ever since then I have thought about how cool it would be to get a shot of a bee sipping nectar from a flower, or hovering close to a flower, or something, anything, involving a bee and a flower. But man, those shots are difficult! Or at least they are for me, since there’s probably more I could do to get those types of shots that I just don’t know about. Or, more accurately, am too lazy to do on a regular basis :)

Anyway, if I ever see flowers and bees and happen to have my camera I always try to catch that white whale, photographically speaking, and while it’s never really happened to my satisfaction I keep trying hoping to one day get the shot I’ve been thinking about for years. In the meantime I need to learn to keep practicing, and also be happy with the pictures I am able to get even if they’re not what I would consider ideal or even all that great. They’re pictures that I made, and that’s not nothing :)

I kind of wish I had a photo shot with a normal camera, with a regular lens, to give you some perspective here. What you’re seeing is a very close-up shot of a flowering redbud, a tree quite common where we live in Oklahoma. I don’t know if it’s a native plant or not, but these things are everywhere in my city and it’s really cool to see the landscape explode in a sea of purple each spring. I’ve taken a few shots of these trees over the years but it’s always neat to revisit them as subjects each year. There’s just something kind of special about seeing such rich hues of purple on so many tree branches.

I shot this one evening in late March after playing a game of kickball in my neighbor’s field with my kids. My wife took the boys inside for their baths and I had a few minutes to walk across the street and shoot some close-ups with my D7100, 50mm f/1.8 lens, and a few close-up filters. This was taken with a combination I almost never use: a +10 filter screwed on top of a +4 filter, which results in a really close-up shot that’s a lot of fun but super unwieldy unless you’re really careful.

To wit: the green tree bud is about 1/8″ in diameter. Depth of field could probably be measured in millimeters on this shot, and yet my aperture was set to f/8. That’s how crazy things get when shooting at close-up distances, and this wasn’t even with a real macro setup. A true macro lens would produce a picture much richer in detail and sharpness, but alas, a true macro lens costs a lot of money that I don’t really want to spend :)

I played around with a few different angles on this shot, eventually settling on what you see here because I quite liked the green bud emerging from what looks like a thick velvet haze. Or, as the old man with the ladder might say, a purple mist :)

Look back through my posts here on Weekly Fifty and you’ll probably see a handful that look a lot like this: yellow crocuses (croci?) poking through the brown grass. This is the first one I can remember sharing back in 2013 and it’s a scene I enjoy revisiting each year for a few reasons, even though I’m not sure that any subsequent photos really have a lot to add to the collective conversation. For one, I think shots like this are pretty. It’s enjoyable and somewhat reassuring to see the same sight each spring–as long as these flowers make their annual appearance it’s a sign that all is right in the world. I also enjoy experimenting with different ways to present this scene in terms of lighting, angle of view, closeness to subject, backlighting, even my editing choices. Is today’s picture any more or less interesting, or valuable, than any similar photos I have taken in years past? Maybe, but maybe not. Was it a fun picture to take? Absolutely, which is all the reason I need to post it here :)

The gear I used for this shot is nothing special: D7100 that I got in fall of 2013 and the same 50mm lens I’ve had since spring of 2012. I took this at f/2 in the late afternoon which gave the backlit flower a bit of a sunny glow. What I did differently this time around was pay careful attention to the whole composition. Not just the flower in front, but the other flowers in the background, the green blades of grass, even the white highlights on the right side. By looking at the entire scene and not just the main subject I was able to create a picture that is, in my opinion, a lot more visually appealing than some other similar photos I have shot.

It’s a good reminder to me of why I like learning from my past pictures. I used to get embarrassed by some of the photos I have taken, even ones here on Weekly Fifty, but I’ve really tried to see my old pictures as learning opportunities. It makes scrolling through my photo stream a lot more interesting and, even at times, inspiring.

I don’t know if these types of photos are cheating or not. All it takes to create an image like this is this simple process:

• Find a small object sitting on the ground.
• Set your camera to Aperture Priority
• Open up your aperture as wide as it will go
• Take a picture

Of course it helps to pay attention to lighting, composition, contrast, and a lot of other elements as well. But if you just want a cool-looking photo to share on your Instagram, this process works almost every time and that’s why it almost feels like cheating.

And yet, that doesn’t mean that these kinds of photos aren’t fun to take :)

I like it when I can find photo opportunities like this instead of create them artificially, and this feather sitting on the ground is a good example. I was walking around Theta Pond in February and saw this white feather sitting on the dark ground, and that type of contrast is nice because your eye is immediately drawn to the subject and then, later, to the surroundings. The sun was already kind of low on the horizon because that’s what happens in the afternoon in February, and I knew my 50mm lens would capture the scene pretty well.

I set my D7100 on the ground, enabled Live View, and took a few shots at f/1.8. I always like to stop down a bit after getting some shots at 1.8 just in case the depth of field is too shallow or the image is a bit soft, but in this case it was the wider-aperture version I liked best. Even though the 50mm f/1.8 lens isn’t a top optical performer the sharpness of the feather was pretty solid in this image, and there was a very slight breeze that had lifted it up just a bit to add a sense of weightlessness to the picture that I quite enjoyed.