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

This is the kind of picture that, if you don’t live in the midwest, you might think anyone in Nebraska, Kansas, or Oklahoma could take any time they wanted to. After all what could be more emblematic of the Great Plains than a dirt road, corn fields, and an endless blue sky? Interestingly, scenes like this are not actually all that common here and most of the time a picture like this would also include farm houses, silos, tractors, barns, or even buildings and cities on the horizon. You’ll also notice that the scene here isn’t exactly flat either. Rather it’s a slow undulation of earth that feels casual, homely, and downright comfortable.

True, there are plenty of flat spots in the midwest United States but there’s a lot of variation too which is why I stopped to take this photo on a recent trip from Minnesota to Oklahoma. It kind of hits several Midwestern stereotypes in a single frame, none of which are a true representation of what we’re all about here but all of which are parts of the whole. We’ve got corn and dirt roads but that’s not all there is. Though no matter where you go up and down and across these plains you’re sure to find a great blue sky, provided it’s not storming at the time :)

I shot this with my Fuji X100F which is great for many different purposes but perhaps not quite ideal for landscapes as you can see here. A wider lens would have been nice but alas, the Fuji is stuck firmly at 23mm (unless you have a wide-angle adapter, which I do not) and as such I had to make the best out of what I had available. The bigger questions for me when taking this shot were what angle do I shoot at, what height do I position the camera, and how far down the road do I travel? Truth be told I didn’t really consider the final issue that much since I just wanted to get on with my trip (Highway 75 is about 1/4 mile behind me in this shot) but I did take a handful of shots at different angles and positions before getting one I was really happy with.

Every time we go on a trip out of town I like to keep my eye open for possible photo opportunities beyond just taking snapshots of friends and family. Sometimes they present themselves plain as day, but other times I have to look just a bit harder which was the case here. This is a small wire tree at my in-laws’ house where we spent a few days this summer reading, relaxing, watching the kids play, and solving a communal crossword puzzle too :) We mostly spent time at their house with the exception of going out to eat, attending church, and taking some walks around the neighborhood and after a little while I was starting to wonder if I would be able to spot any potential Weekly Fifty images.

The last evening we were at their house I took note of this little wireframe creation on a table in their living room and wondered if it might make for an interesting photo, so I took a few minutes to play around with the idea. I tried not to alter the scene except for just scooting the glass paperweight over a few inches, lest it come across as blatantly artificial. It would have been fun to shoot this with a 50mm lens but all I had was my X100F so I did what I could to make that work.

I used my Gorillapod tripod with its legs wrapped around the back of a kitchen chair which allowed me to use a slightly longer shutter speed of 1/30 second. Depth of field was an issue because I wanted a bit of foreground and background blur but also wanted as much of the tree branches in focus as possible, and after trying a couple different aperture values I settled on f/2.8 which turned out to be a decent compromise. Focus was entirely manual but the focus peaking on this camera (which is also available on a lot of other cameras–check your manual to see if you have it too) helped mitigate some of the issues I might have had otherwise. ISO was as low as I could get it in order to give me as smooth and noise-free of an image as possible.

I don’t have a grand story to tell about this photo, though perhaps my mother-in-law (who is a frequent reader of this blog) might leave some information in the comments :) I just thought it would be a cool picture given the interesting subject and late-night lighting, and overall I quite like the results.

Note: If you’re sick of me talking about my Fuji X100F and have gotten into the habit of rolling your eyes whenever you see it mentioned here…get ready to scroll past this post entirely and move on to a different blog :)

This photo was taken along the Historic Cave Tour in Mammoth Cave National Park during our 10-day family trip across the midwest United States earlier this year. As I mentioned in last week’s post the only camera I brought with me on this vacation was my Fuji X100F because I knew it would be small enough to bring everywhere we went but capable of handling almost anything I would want to take pictures of. Including, as it turned out, photos of near-dark caves hundreds of feet underground.

I’ve been in the habit of shooting in JPG mode on my X100F because I quite like the Classic Chrome film simulation and found that if I get my exposure right in camera (which is easier to do thanks to an electronic viewfinder) I don’t really need to adjust anything in Lightroom. But walking in caves would require something more so I shot in RAW the whole time we were on these tours. There was almost no light at all down in those ancient tunnels save for some sparsely-placed incandescent bulbs at intermittent spots along the way, which meant I shot almost every picture with very little light at all. I took every picture at f/2.0, ISO 6400, and even then most of the images needed shutter speeds of 1/20 or slower just to get something even worth salvaging. This picture, for instance, required a +.8 exposure adjustment along with shadows lifted by nearly 100 and it still looks dim.

Probably the trickiest part of shooting in the caves was the focusing, or lack thereof. Autofocus is not the X100F’s strong point and even in good light it can be a bit slow. (At least compared to my Nikons or pretty much every other camera available.) In the labyrinth of underground passages it was nearly useless and I had to focus manually at times which was also a bit of a sticky wicket because even looking through the viewfinder I could barely see anything. Most of the time I found myself autofocusing on anything even remotely bright which is what I did here–I focused on the white patch of light in the distance and hoped for the best. The results ranged from fair to midland with a couple standouts like this one here which I liked because the people (i.e. my son and his cousin) help give a sense of scale to the surroundings.

This is from a vacation my family took recently to several different locations in the midwest in order to visit family and friends, some of whom we had not seen for years. It was more of a 10-day midwest road trip and less of a vacation in the sense that it’s not like we spent a week and a half chilling out on a tropical beach or exploring exotic cities, but it was just the sort of trip my wife and I really like to take when we have the opportunity. With family and friends scattered around several different states sometimes the best way to see a lot of people at one time is to load up the kids and a bunch of supplies and just hit the road for a while, and even though the locations might not be all that special the people sure are. And that’s what really matters to us.

Ever since January of this past year I’ve been moving my Fuji X100F up a few notches in terms of its daily usefulness while my Nikon bodies are, more and more, occupying a spot on the shelf that is more specialized in nature. I’m using them for portrait sessions and unique shots of my own kids as opposed to daily drivers per se, and instead find myself using my X100F for just about everything else. When we left for our big family visiting extravaganza it was literally the only camera I took with me, aside from my iPhone, and instead of a bag full of cameras and lenses I only brought this one little pocket-sized beast. And man oh man did it ever deliver.

While most of the pictures I took were of family and friends, as one might expect, I did find a few opportunities to take shots of nature and man-made structures that I thought were interesting or otherwise somewhat noteworthy. This bridge, as an example, is in the middle of a nature preserve in St. Louis we visited with some college friends and their kids. I thought it looked like something out of a Tom Frye story so I hung back a bit while everyone else went on down the path and fired off a few shots with my Fuji.

I should pause here and say that none of this is a paid advertisement. There’s no way Fuji even knows about my blog and if they did there’s no way they would bother to have me write about their cameras. I bought my camera with my own money and happen to really really like it.

Even though this is a man-made bridge on a man-made path in a swath of nature specifically maintained and cared for by people, something about the scene just seemed emblematic of maybe a simpler time. This was a peaceful place of repose in the middle of a busy city and I hope I captured just a bit of the serenity of the scene.

Ah yes, another Theta Pond Squirrel photo. What can I say…I like taking (and sharing) these! One thing I’ve realized as I take squirrel photos is that they’re more interesting, to me anyway, if the subject in question is actually doing something. I’ve got plenty of squirrel photos where the little Sciuridaes are sitting or staring but while the images might be technically competent they aren’t as visually compelling. To wit: a sharp, focused, well-composed image of a squirrel just sitting around is, at the end of the day, just a shot of a squirrel sitting around. It’s not interesting or compelling and certainly doesn’t tell a story.

This picture though, with a squirrel in a tree holding a crust of bread, is compelling for a couple of reasons. First, the critter is in a tree and not on the ground which…I dunno. It seems more interesting to me somehow. Second, he (she? I have no idea) isn’t holding an acorn but a bit of bread so clearly he (I’m just going to run with it) must have got it from a person. Since this is Theta Pond and geese are everywhere, clearly this little guy had to act quick before an avian friend swooped in to snatch his prize. Finally, the bright green and white behind the squirrel make it stand out much more than if it were on the ground or set against some leaves. I shot this at 200mm with an f/2.8 aperture and was quite pleased with how sharp the resulting image ended up, though perhaps I should have erred on the side of caution just a bit and went with f/4. But all’s well that ends well, right?

One other aspect of this photo that you wouldn’t know just by looking at the image is that the person who gave the bread to the animal was, in fact, my six-year-old son. I was taking some photos of people and he was hanging out at the pond with me, and he was ecstatic at the opportunity to engage with some of the local fauna by way of a hot dog bun. He asked if I could take some shots of squirrels and I gladly obliged, and even let him take a few of his own which I normally don’t do when using the big camera and lens, but sometimes you just gotta go for it and let the kids experiment. All this results in a picture that hits all my check marks while also reminding me of a fun time I spent with my child, which is a nice bit of extra icing on the photographic cake :)