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

If I had to define the word serendipity I would use this picture as an example. I shot this when I was on my way to Nebraska recently to see family, and as I often prefer to do I took back roads and highways instead of main roads and interstates. Those routes are often more direct as the crow flies but take a little longer due to reduced speed limits and small towns, but they more than make up for it (in my opinion) simply due to the scenic nature of the drive. Case in point: I had no idea that my trip through Kansas would end up taking me past a vast field of sunflowers, and because I was on a barely-paved two-lane highway I was able to easily stop, get out, and shoot some photos.

First off: I don’t really want to say exactly where in Kansas I got this picture because of stories like this where tourists and Instagrammers overwhelmed and basically destroyed a similar location in Ontario. But it was definitely off the proverbial beaten path, and not at all something that most people would end up driving past. And as I got out my camera I quickly realized one problem: I had no idea how to capture this scene.

When I first drove past the field on my way to Nebraska I got out my D750 + 70-200 lens because…well, I don’t really know why. I thought that it would be a way to capture the vast scene in front of me but when I got to my parents’ house and looked through some of my images I realized that even shooting at 70mm was far too narrow to really showcase the scope of the sunflowers, and my shots at longer focal lengths mostly looked like a yellow and green mess. Depth of field was all weird too, and even shooting at f/11 the DOF was so narrow that much of the sunflower field looked blurry and uninspiring.

On my return trip to Oklahoma I made a point of driving past the same field but this time used my Fuji X100F and was able to get what were, in my opinion, some much better images. I had to move physically closer to the sunflowers but this gave me the best of both worlds: I realized that I could make one single sunflower the focal point of the image while still showing the vastness of the sunflower field as a whole. Or, at least that was my goal here. I expect the next time I drive past this scene the flowers will be long gone, but it’s kind of cool knowing where to find this spot for similar shots years down the proverbial road…

I don’t know quite what I was going for here, so I can’t say if it worked or not, but I do kind of like the image I was able to capture. I shot this right before the autumnal equinox (almost exactly one year after I captured this similar photo) and didn’t plan on taking any pictures at all until I was out the door on my bike and heading to work. As soon as I got to the end of my driveway I looked to the east and saw a fantastic sunrise just beginning, with nary a camera on me. I quickly turned around, ran back inside, and grabbed my D750 + 70-200mm lens to see if I could capture even the faintest hint of what this scene looked like in real life.

In the one minute it took me to get my camera and return to my bike the sun was already well over the horizon, and the view I saw from my driveway was already subsiding so I frantically rode my bike south a few blocks and was able to take some pictures looking down the east/west road that I take to campus. I don’t like that there’s so many power lines crisscrossing the entire image but after a few shots I tried to embrace the urban elements a little bit since there was no way to actually get rid of them. To that end I specifically tried to take some pictures with cars in them, as a way of adding a bit of life and activity to the sunrise. I mean, if it’s clearly an urban scene anyway (power lines, street signs, etc.) then why not embrace it all the way?

I underexposed the image while shooting at f/2.8 and ISO 100 in order to get a clean picture, not overexpose the sun, and add a bit of foreground blur just for fun. Shooting at a smaller aperture might have resulted in a bit sharper image overall but it would have made the Jeep more in-focus, and I like that it ended up being just a bit blurry in the final image. If you click on the picture and view the full-size original you might notice a glow on the undulating power lines extending to the horizon which was certainly not intended on my part but ended up being kind of interesting as well.

It’s always fascinating to me how quickly scenes like this disappear. Five minutes later this was entirely gone and it was just another sunny morning like any other, but for a brief window it was downright inspirational and a great way to start the day. It’s a good reminder that from the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord God is to be praised.

Sometimes you will hear people talk about how it’s possible to get great pictures in your own backyard, but the term backyard is used somewhat loosely and what people really mean is you don’t have to travel very far outsize of your normal daily travels. In this case though, I was able to get what I think is kind of a cool picture literally in my own back yard. Or, my back porch to be more specific.

Every morning my routine follows a somewhat similar pattern: Get up, shower, and sit in a particular spot in our living room to spend some time in prayer before making breakfast. Two days before taking this picture I was praying while looking at the night sky through the sliding glass door to the back porch and noticed that I could clearly see the Orion constellation hanging low above the neighbor’s tree. The temperature was mild, the wind was quiet, and the sky was crystal clear which, I thought, would make for a cool photo. I brought my X100F and tripod outside, took a few shots, and wasn’t really happy with the results. It seemed kind of boring and uninteresting, which was kind of the opposite of what I was aiming for.

The solution, I realized, was to take a long-exposure shot of the same scene with clouds moving across the sky to add a sense of motion and scale to the image. The next morning I set out to do just that, but was foiled due to the total lack of clouds for the second day in a row. While normally it’s kind of neat to be able to see a clear late-summer sky and gaze up at the stars, I was hoping for some clouds to obscure things just a bit. Thankfully the third day, the morning of September 13, I got just what I was hoping for.

After experimenting with a couple different exposure settings I found that 15 seconds at f/8 and ISO 1250 was giving me an ideal mix of starry sky and cloud movement. Much longer and the trees started to show too much motion blur, while much shorter shutter speeds didn’t give me the kind of cloudy streaks I was aiming for. Of the ten images I shot on my back porch I liked this one the best because it seemed as though the clouds were drawing my attention to Orion while also showing the silhouettes of the two trees for a sense of space and context. When I processed this image in Lightroom I found that the clouds were a bit too noisy for my taste so I moved the Luminance slider all the way to 100 (which I almost never do as it gets rid of far too much detail and texture) and that gave the clouds a smooth, dreamlike quality that I thought was really cool.

I’m not the biggest football fan in the world, and if there were a sliding scale of total apathy to insane fandom I would definitely be closer to the former than the latter. I do think it’s fun to watch and I admire the strategy inherent in the game, and I’ll watch a game if it’s on TV but I don’t really go out of my way to cheer for a particular team or deck myself out for tailgating. That being said, there is something cool about working on a college campus and being a part of the excitement and hubbub that starts to swell soon after the school year begins. And yet, none of that sense of activity is captured here at all.

Instead we have a serene scene not with the football stadium but the Spears School of Business building which is just south of where the Cowboys toss the pigskin around. Truth be told as I biked around the west side of the stadium on the morning of August 30, the day of our football season opener, I wasn’t thinking about a picture at all. I was just heading to work like any other Thursday with the exception that on this particular day there were already signs that game day fever would soon be felt around campus. For the moment, however, things were calm and the sun was rising and the weather was a mild late-summer 75 degrees Fahrenheit.

So when I saw the Business Building basking in the morning glow of the sunrise I stopped, hopped off my bike, and shot a few pictures to try and capture the sense of calm-before-the-storm. Or maybe not even that, but just a sense of calm and peace. It felt still on that summer morning and even though it wouldn’t be long before the whole campus (and this spot in particular) would be buzzing with activity, here was a slice of time that was just kind of tranquil. I did just a bit of retouching on the file to get a slightly bluer sky and slightly richer red on the building, but otherwise what you see here is a good reflection of the morning as I saw it. Hopefully the orange glow and long shadows give you a sense that a new day has just begun, and hopefully this picture might even bring just a tad bit of peace to your Wednesday before things get hectic with life.

Even though I often talk about living in Oklahoma, I’m actually a transplant to the state. I was born in central Minnesota and lived most of my childhood in Nebraska, but once or twice a year my family would load up the minivan and head north to see relatives and go fishing at the lake. Back in the early 90’s most of the roads we took on that trip were two-lane undivided highways which meant the drive would take about 8 hours on a good day, and a lot longer in the winter.

On these trips there was a stretch of Highway 60 between Le Mars, Iowa, and Worthington, Minnesota that held a bit of a special place in my heart because it was on this road that we passed the border between those two states. It was a milestone of sorts, and even though nothing about the road or scenery was any different all of us kids knew were were just that much closer to seeing our cousins and playing in the lake. Just across that imaginary line was a tiny little town called Bigelow that we never stopped in, but always thought was kind of cool simply because of its proximity to the border.

The last time I took that stretch of road was probably 15 years ago on a drive up north from Nebraska, and I haven’t really thought about it much in the years since. But on my way back from a recent visit to my hometown I found myself driving southbound on Highway 60 and when I saw a green road sign informing me that Bigelow was a few miles ahead, I knew it would be a good opportunity for a picture.

From a technical standpoint this image was a little tricky because, as you can tell, I was shooting almost directly into the sun. I shot at f/8 and underexposed by -1EV so as to not blow out the sky entirely, but that meant the sign itself was really dark and underexposed. No problem though, that’s what RAW is for :) I played around with the file in Lightroom for a while and got it to be about 90% of the way to where I wanted it, but struggled to get that last 10% which you can still see in the image here. If you look at the edges of the grass you’ll notice a white haze of sorts that extends into the sky and makes the picture look kind of…well, photoshopped I guess. And that’s because it is. I played around with auto-masking and other tools in Lightroom and eventually just decided that I was fine with the image as-is, even though it’s not perfect. It works fine for me and it gets the point across, and that’s plenty good for Flickr and this blog :)