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

So…recently I shared a few pictures of bees here on the blog and in my descriptions for each one I wrote about how I liked those photos but they weren’t quite what I had hoped for. This picture is the polar opposite. Not only is it what I was hoping to get, it’s actually better. It’s probably the best shot of a bird I have ever taken, and it carries some really cool memories along with it too.

But first, as usual, a bit of background.

Each year we have the pleasure of hearing, and sometimes seeing, cardinals in our back yard. The bright plumage on the males is really something special, especially up close, but even if you can’t see them it’s really fun to hear their songs in the morning. This year in early May I was out with my kids climbing the tree and swinging on ropes in our back yard and I noticed this particular cardinal flying back and forth quite a bit over the course of the afternoon. Then I noticed he was flying into one of our small trees quite a bit, and soon my kids and I put two and two together and figured there must be a nest in that tree. So we waited until he flew away, poked our heads in, and saw two tiny baby birds, newly hatched, lost in sleep while waiting for their next meal.

The boys ran inside to tell my wife and I started thinking about how to get a picture of the bright red bird. I knew I would need my 70-200 f/2.8 lens since it’s the longest zoom I have, and my crop-sensor Nikon D500 too. A longer focal length like 300, 400, or more would give me a lot more freedom and options but alas, I don’t have anything longer than 200mm, so I knew I would have to make do with what was available. I got my camera gear, returned to the back yard, and waited.

And waited.

And waited more. Soon my kids returned and went back to swinging and climbing, and I had to find a way to walk a line between amateur birdwatcher and attentive father. The cardinal did come out of the tree and I was able to get a couple shots, but nothing special. I went back and forth between shooting photos and running around with my kids, but ended the day without much success at the former. (But great success at the latter, so it’s all good.)

The same pattern repeated itself over the next few days: we had some bird sightings while playing in the yard, of both Papa and Mama cardinal, but I was never able to get a really good picture. I was too far away, or the birds were too high in the tree, or they flew off before I could press the shutter…you know how it goes. The birds came and went, and their babies got louder and larger, and I kept trying to get The Shot with no good results.

That is, until about a week later when I took the picture you see above. It was about 7pm on a mild evening in April. The sun was on its way down and both cardinal parents were spending a great deal of time hanging around on our backyard fence. That’s when I had the idea to stand close to the small tree with their nest and just wait. I thought maybe the birds were used to seeing me by now, and might not freak out at the sight of this human with a gigantic camera lens pointed right at them.

And that’s when the magic started to happen. I slowly, carefully, stepped closer to the fence with my camera firing away. Papa Cardinal alighted on the fence, hopped around, flew off, returned, and repeated that pattern over and over. All the while I was shooting at 10FPS in 12-bit RAW while slowly creeping closer and hoping one of the pictures would turn out. I was probably out there for 45 minutes and ended up taking over 700 shots, but got some real winners including this one.

I got this at 200mm, f/2.8, 1/400 second, ISO 1600. A longer lens would have helped, as I mentioned before, but I did appreciate the nice blurry background courtesy of the extra-large aperture of my lens. I did have to crop this image a lot, but shooting at 20 megapixels gives a lot of room for that so it wasn’t a big deal. In the end I got a picture I’m very proud of, and along the way my kids and I got to learn a little something about birds and their babies too.

Who knew that a few weeks after posting a photo of a bee on a flower I would end up with another one to share? Not me, certainly, though I must admit that a few of the pictures I have taken recently have certainly got me thinking about purchasing an actual macro lens and getting rid of my set of cheap close-up filters. Part of me enjoys the challenge of shooting with these simple screw-on adapters, but another part of me sure would like to have an actual macro lens to make shots like this so much less hassle. Still, I do enjoy a challenge and it is fun to see what I can capture with a set of limited gear.

They say you can take great photos in your own backyard, and this illustrates that age-old maxim quite well. We’ve had a few small bushes right off our porch that were here when we bought our house years ago and, though we never do anything but trim them in the spring and fall, they keep growing back like clockwork each year. And just like the summer storms that follow close behind a sudden drop in temperature, large yellow bees invariable come to these violet flowers in search of nectar every April and May. I have tried to take photos of them over the years to little avail, but this year I had my Nikon D500 instead of my old D7100, the critical difference being the 10fps shutter on the former (along with near-unlimited buffer) compared to the paltry offering of the latter. I forget what exactly it shoots–perhaps 5 or 6 fps with a buffer that fills before you can blink, thus making fast-action shots well-nigh impossible. And since these bees barely stay in one place for more than a heartbeat, the D500 was a much better tool for taking photos than any of my other cameras.*

So here’s what I did to get this shot: 50mm lens with +4 close-up filter. F/5.6. Auto-ISO with minimum shutter speed of 1/250 second. AF-C with back-button focus. Then I pushed myself through the flowers to get super close to the bee, holding the back button to continue focusing the whole time, and the instant the bee (which was constantly moving from flower to flower) was in my sights I fired off a burst of images. I repeated that process many times over the course of a few days and eventually got this image which was one out of exactly two that came close to turning out, and even those two weren’t as good as I would have liked. I’m still chasing my white whale of bee photography: a ball of black and yellow fuzz hovering in front of a flower, right before going in for a landing. I’ll get that shot someday, and in the meantime it’s fun to have these learning opportunities.

Of course the best part of this shot was that I got to share it with my six-year-old son who was with me the whole time. He was taking pictures of the same bee with his little Canon PowerShot 3 megapixel pocket camera, and was so excited to show me the shots he was able to get with it. I wouldn’t have cared if I got no usable shots at all–photography wasn’t really the point. Spending time with my kids (or, in this case, one kid while the other was riding his bike) was the real goal.

Mission accomplished :)

*The crop factor of a DX camera really comes in handy with shots like this, so I’m a bit reluctant to use my D750. And the Fuji X100F…forget it. That camera is awesome, but not for shots like this :)

Maybe it’s my own impatience, maybe it’s me getting stir-crazy from the pandemic, but for whatever the reason I decided I didn’t want to wait until the end of the year to do another update video :)

“The moon is supposed to be really good tonight,” my wife said as we were getting ready to put the kids to bed. I stepped out on the back porch to check, but the white ball that governs the night was still below the horizon as the sun was beginning its final descent for the day so there wasn’t really a whole lot to see. Fast forward to about 8pm and my wife and I were standing out in the front yard looking at the brilliant ball of light poking over the treetops as dusk transitioned to twilight. She was right–it was a gorgeous full moon, the kind that you only get to see a few times a year, and combined with the mild weather it was one of those evenings you just hate to let slip by. I ran inside, grabbed my Nikon D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and went back to get some shots.

A few minutes later I found myself halfway down the street in search of a good vantage point from which to take a photo of our little celestial brother but it seemed like I just couldn’t get a good shot without power lines or trees in the way. I was able to get a couple, sure, but nothing that really stood out to me. It was a fun experience though, and after a few minutes I walked back to our house where my wife and my oldest son were in the driveway looking at the moon. He was in his jammies and should have been in bed, but my wife said he could stay up and see the moon. He even had his little pocket camera with him to take a few shots of his own.

I told my wife that I wasn’t able to get a great photo and she mentioned I could try shooting from the vacant lot down the road. I hadn’t thought about that so I quickly ran inside, got my license, and hopped into the car. As I was pulling out the driveway I motioned to my son to get in with me, and that’s what made this little picture opportunity way more special than it would have been otherwise.

The two of us, me in a pair of old flip flops and he in his pajamas, high-tailed it down to the lot. We parked the car and ran into the field, our cameras in tow, excitedly talking about where to shoot from and sharing the back of our camera screens with each other. I forget the exact exposure values I used, but I dialed in a -3EV exposure compensation to get the moon just right without overexposing, knowing I could adjust the shadows in Lightroom afterwards. I really like how the moon is shrouded in a veil of clouds and framed by leaves and branches, but the best part of this picture was the impromptu opportunity I got to have with my son. You can take all the pictures you want, but it’s moments like these which elevate them to something really special.

Dandelions. They’re like sand. They are a nuisance, and they don’t seem to go away no matter how many you pull up. They’re not special, and most homeowners like myself see them as one of the last things worth photographing. But sometimes, even the most mundane things can make you look twice and think about something beautiful. That’s what happened here, when my wife and I were out on a walk with our boys and I noticed this rather ordinary dandelion in the middle of a rather ordinary field on a rather ordinary street, on the edge of a simple midwestern town.

We walk down this particular street several times a week, and I often bring my D7100 and 50mm lens just in case something happens to catch my eye. Usually not much does, which tends to happen when you trod the same route with such regular frequency, but as we were walking south one day in mid April I looked down and saw this puff of white all by itself and I thought it would be an interesting photo. So on our way back I told my wife to go on ahead with the kids while I lay down on the grass with my camera to take this picture.

As I often do I shot several wide open at f/1.8 only to come to my senses and make sure to grab a few at f/2.8 just in case the 1.8 versions weren’t to my liking. It’s a good thing too, since the depth of field on the former was just a little too shallow. (Which is a refrain that is all-too-common here on Weekly Fifty. You’d think I would learn, but I never do.) This was the last one in the series, out of maybe 20 or 30 shots (all fired in pretty rapid succession) and the one that just nailed it. You know why?

It’s all about the background. Or, specifically, the giant tree in the background that makes the white cloud sitting atop the slender stem stand out so much. That was completely intentional on my part, and I’m so glad it worked out the way I hoped it would. I mean, how do you get a white dandelion to stand out against a blue sky? You can’t, not really, unless you shoot from a higher angle so it’s against the green grass. But then the photo isn’t very interesting. So as I lined up my shot I shuffled myself around just so, making sure to position the head of the dandelion right inside the greenery in the background. I also made sure no other dandelions were in the shot, which was one thing that stood out to me about this particular plant in the first place. By isolating the subject, and positioning the subject against a contrasting background, I was able to take a simple weed and turn it into a photograph I quite like.