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

Every now and then after it rains we get toads crawling up the glass door on the back of our house, and it’s fun to go out and take their pictures if circumstances allow. I’ve put one or two of these images here on Weekly Fifty in years past, but this one is markedly different because it was the first time I shot one with a close-up filter. I got the idea from my brother Phil who, the day before, showed me some pictures of a cicada shell in his back yard that he shot with a +10 filter on his 35mm lens. He used a tripod to get the shot just the way he wanted and it turned out beautifully, so when I saw this frog perched on our back door at 10pm after a rainstorm I thought I would borrow his technique to get a picture.

First of all, you might not be able to tell from the picture but this toad is in fact vertical, not horizontal. It’s about a foot off the ground on our glass door, staring up at the porch light. My wife noticed it as we were on our way to bed because she could see a toad-shaped silhouette on the door, so I went outside with my Nikon D750, set of close-up filters, and a flashlight. Initially I tried some shots with the +4 filter but I couldn’t get close enough to the toad to really get an interesting shot. I also didn’t know how to light the creature, which was turning out to be problematic. After some experimenting I ended up setting the flash light on our barbecue on the other side of the porch and aiming it directly at the toad, which gave it a nice glow from one side.

Then I took my camera and pressed it against the window to hold it steady, and took a few shots with the +10 filter. I had to use Live View because there was no way I could get my eyes in the right position to look through the viewfinder, and focusing was a bit tricky also. I ended up focusing manually and literally moving my camera up and down against the pane of glass until the eyes of the toad were sharp. Live View enabled me to zoom in as I was doing this in order to check focus, and I shot this at f/8 to get a good balance between shutter speed and depth of field. Even then I had to use a 1/90 second shutter which isn’t all that fast, but by holding my camera against the glass I was able to steady it enough to get a decent shot.

This was a super fun picture to take and I’m enormously proud of the result, having never taken anything like it before. So Phil, if you’re reading this, thank you for the inspiration :)

Some days you’re in the right place at the right time, and that’s definitely what happened here. This was on a hot Sunday morning in mid August and my wife and I were doing our best to shoo the kids outside, load them in the car, and head off to church without being too late. The boys and I made it out to the driveway while my wife was wrapping up a few last-minute things inside when I spotted this tiny little mushroom right next to the driveway. The top was no bigger than a dime, and with the sun poking over the horizon (as well as our departure for church being imminent) I ran through a couple scenarios in my head: ignore it and go about my day, grab my camera, or hope it was still there after church.

I chose Option 2, and ran inside to grab whatever camera my 50mm lens happened to be attached to. Turns out it was my D7100 which was fine, even though I like the tilt-up screen on my D750 for low-to-the-ground shots like this, but I didn’t want to take 30 seconds and switch lenses. The clock was ticking! I quickly screwed my +10 close-up filter on to the lens and ran (literally) back outside to see if I could grab a picture before it was time to leave.

I knew that shooting with a +10 filter was going to be a bit problematic in terms of depth of field, and I also knew I had to think quickly about composition and lighting, so I didn’t get to sit and ponder this shot as long as I would have preferred but I think it turned out fine in the end. I took a few shots at f/8 and then, after reviewing them on the camera, realized that I’d need an even smaller aperture to get enough of the mushroom in focus. I stopped down to f/11 and, since I was using Aperture Priority with Auto-ISO and a minimum shutter speed of 1/200 second, ended up with ISO 400 which looks great on a D7100. My boys helped me with picking an angle to shoot from and as luck (or perhaps divine intervention) would have it we got a few more shots, hopped into the car, and made it to church before the opening hymn.

After we got home my kids and I reviewed the shots and I found this one to be my favorite, partly because of the lighting but partly because of the blue in the background that helped the mushroom top to really stand out. It’s quite similar to another photo I posted earlier this year with a similar blue color in the background which, in both images, is our 2007 Toyota Matrix. Originally I didn’t really like the idea of my car in the background but after looking at the picture closer, especially on a smaller screen, I thought it did a real nice job of bringing out the subject in the center. I think the bright spots and dew drops in this other image are visually compelling as well, but the mushroom blended in a bit too much with the streak of yellow in the background.

I shot this photo on the morning of August 7, 2019, which was exactly 12 days before the start of the Fall semester at OSU. Things are always so interesting on campus at this time of year, with the excitement and activity of a new semester just around the corner while the last wisps of summer begin to slowly evaporate in 95-degree yeat. You can almost feel the impending return of students to school and yet, the day I made this image, it was just like most days for the past few months: relatively quiet, mostly empty, and generally kind of low-key and relaxed. But not for long.

As I stepped out the door to hop on my bike this morning I turned around and grabbed my D7100 and 50mm lens just in case I ran across a photo opportunity. And would you know it, I did! Or, rather, with my mind and eyes actively seeking out a photo opportunity I ended up encountering not one but two. Both were right on campus near my building, and while I’m not sure if the other one is worth posting here I did quite like the results of this picture.

One of the fun things about shooting pictures in the early morning is the way the light takes on an entirely ethereal quality for a very short window. The sun had just crept over the horizon and was poking through the leaves of the cypress trees, which you can see in that blob of bubbly bokeh in the top-middle part of this image. The bright spot of light at the end of the purple plant is a light near the edge of the path by Theta Pond, as is the other yellow spot just to the left-of-center. Ten minutes later and the sun was too bright, and too high in the sky, to get the background like this and the lamps were turned off as well. So while the subject of this image isn’t all that interesting, the background and overall lighting kind of elevate it to something else altogether.

And that’s the fun of photography–you can take familiar things and see them transformed before your very eyes :)

This picture is a good example of why I set up this blog so many years ago. The photo isn’t all that remarkable on a technical level, nor is it going to win any awards for creativity, but when I saw this little grasshopper sitting on top of a roll of painter’s tape I knew I had two options:

1. Leave it be, and go on with my work
2. Get my camera and take a picture

The first option is much easier and requires almost nothing in the way of added effort, whereas Option 2 would mean putting down my painting supplies, going inside, getting my camera, attaching a close-up filter, and actually taking some photos. It’s not a lot, but things like that are enough of a barrier for me to, more often than not, choose solutions like Option 1.

So I chose Option 2.

While this isn’t a life-changing photograph or anything really noteworthy of its own accord, the simple act of taking it was a fun, quick experiment with close-up photography and, it turned out, a brief but welcome distraction from my work in the garage. The grasshopper didn’t seem to mind my (relatively) gigantic camera and lens being thrust in its face, and was mostly content to just hang out on his blue perch for a minute while I fiddled with some settings to get the shot. I think I used the +10 filter for this, but I don’t remember for certain, and shot at f/8 to get a depth of field that was wide enough to clearly see the subject but shallow enough to have a bit of background, and foreground, blur. Shutter speed was 1/30 and ISO was 6400, which still impresses me on my D750 even years after getting that camera.

A few heartbeats later and this grasshopper had clearly had enough of my photographic shenanigans, so he/she/it hopped away leaving me to return to my painting. Thanks little buddy for letting me take your photo. It was fun :)

In September 2018 a new park opened up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called The Gathering Place. It was the culmination of years of work to turn a blighted stretch of riverfront into a center for kids to play, adults to walk, and people of all ages to learn, grow, and explore. It wasn’t until the summer of 2019 that we finally made it to this park and we were certainly not disappointed. My family was there for several hours and I would guess we saw about one-third of the park, and we are already looking forward to our next trip where we can hopefully experience a lot more of what The Gathering Place has to offer.

That brings me to this week’s photo, which you would never know was shot at this particular location. It could have been taken almost anywhere and nothing about this indicates that it’s part of a much larger recreation area, but I think that’s what I like about it. The picture is kind of a metaphor for the park as a whole: it’s a spot of calm in the midst of a sea of urban activity, and within that park this little butterfly (moth, perhaps?) found its own little nexus of peace and quiet.

As I often do, I had my Fuji X100F with me and immediately put it in “kind of close-up” mode, which is to say I dialed the aperture to f/2.8, made sure the Manual+Electronic shutter was engaged so I could shoot with as fast of a shutter speed as I needed to, and made sure Auto-ISO was set with the proper minimum shutter speed (just in case!) to freeze motion. I learned a while ago that shooting close subjects at f/2 on the X100F is kind of a nonstarter because the lens loses a lot of its sharpness, and f/2.8 mitigates most of that while still giving you plenty of background blur so you can focus on your subject. While this is certainly no macro lens, it does let you get decent shots like this without too much effort.