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

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 :)

So…you know how it’s not too uncommon for me to talk about pictures I’ve posted here on the blog that were taken right near my building at work? This one kind of takes that concept to a new level: these birds are literally just outside of my building. Those bricks in the background are the outer wall of where I work :)

I shot this on a Thursday morning in June, which was the fourth day in a row that these two birds (doves, perhaps?) were sitting in this little shaded area together. I had seem there since Monday, sometimes with their mother, and I don’t know why she would choose this particular location for her babies but I’m just hoping everyone is OK. I saw them every day the rest of the week and while they do move around a lot, and tend to shift from one spot to another during the day, they don’t seem to be doing much actual flying. Why are there on the ground and not in a nest? Why aren’t they flying? Why are they so close to a place that clearly has people going in and out all day long? Who knows, but at the end of the day I just hope these little flyers are alright.

I took this with my D750 and 70-200 lens and even though I shot this at 200mm I still had to crop in quite a bit to get the final result. I really didn’t want to scare them away by getting any closer and even though 200mm isn’t a lot of zoom it was enough to get a sharp image of these two fledgling flyers.

Each year my family takes a vacation at Milford Lake in Kansas and each year I try to take a couple of images that would work well here on the blog. In the past I’ve made it a point to bring my 50mm lens, sometimes with accompanying close-up filters, to get shots of nature that are a bit different from my usual slew of Theta Pond pictures but for our 2018 trip I used (what else?) my Fuji X100F almost exclusively. Once again the 35mm (equivalent) focal length proved to be ideal for shots of what really matters: my wife, my kids, my siblings, all the nieces an nephews, and of course my parents and it was nice being able to use the same camera for pictures that would go here on the blog now that I’ve opened myself up to other focal lengths.

Last year my brother Andy and I went down to the boat launch as a storm rolled in and I was able to get this shot of some lightning with my 50mm lens. I thought it worked out pretty well and the longer focal length was nice since the clouds were so far away, but this year a few conditions gave me a little different photographic opportunity that resulted in a photo I think is much more interesting. For one, the storm was much closer than last year and a bunch of us just stood outside our cabins looking straight up at the sky to see a brilliant display of lightning overhead. Also because I had my X100F instead of a 50mm lens I was able to get a much broader view of the scene that simply would not have been possible otherwise. I used a Gorillapod instead of a standard tripod which turned out to work pretty well and actually kept my camera quite stable during longer exposures.

I shot about ten images of the clouds and lightning with shutter speeds around 30 seconds but then I decided to angle my camera down to get some trees at the bottom of the image as a way of providing a sense of scale and context. My shots of clouds with lightning bolts searing through the sky were interesting but not all that compelling because there was nothing to provide a sense of where this was happening in relation to the viewer, whereas this one and a couple others like it did a lot more to make the image seem more personal and relatable. I shot at f/14 to get a super wide depth of field, ISO 200 for a nice clean image, and held the shutter button down with my finger for about a minute in order to get several lightning bolts in a single image.

The one downside to this technique was that successive lightning strikes illuminated the clouds at different times which shows up in the final image as a kind of ghosting, especially with the clouds on the left. It’s not something I noticed initially and while I kind of wish it wasn’t there, I do think the tradeoff is well worth it. Shorter shutter speeds resulted in images that just weren’t all that interesting because they only contained one or two lightning bolts, and if longer shutters meant some ghosting artifacts…well, it’s all part of the fun :)

I didn’t think a whole lot of this photo when I originally took it, but over time I’ve come to like it quite a bit. It was almost an afterthought really, and not planned in any way, but I think it’s one of the better motion-capture images (is that a real thing?) I have taken. Not necessarily because of the technique or composition or anything like that, but because of the colors and the way the image implies a movement that’s not really present at all.

One rainy Friday morning in May I brought my camera to work to see if I could get some shots in the drippy overcast weather and made a deliberate choice to bring my X100F instead of my Nikon for a couple reasons. First, it has a built-in 3-stop ND filter that is perfect for situations like this, as it cuts down the existing light even more which allows for really slow shutter speeds in broad daylight. Or, in this case, broad overcastlight :) Also, the sheer size and weight (or lack thereof) combined with my little Gorillapod (aka small flexible tripod) meant that I knew I would be able to get up close and personal with a particular channel of water near Theta Pond. I thought this particular gear setup would help me get some fun pictures that I don’t normally get to take, and things ended up working out pretty well to that end.

After the rain let up I took a quick jaunt over to the pond and found the spot I was looking for, and took a couple pictures with my lens stopped down to f/11, shutter set to 1 second, ISO set to 200, and ND filter activated which resulted in some pictures where the water was silky-smooth as it rushed over the rocks. Then I saw this particular yellow magnolia leaf and thought it would look good as the focal point of one of these types of pictures, and I really like how it turned out. It was a fun little experiment to try and it makes me want to do more shots like this in the future.