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

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 :)

Yet another picture in the long line tradition of finding photo opportunities on my way to work. This one was just off the sidewalk between two buildings on campus about 7:25am as the sun was just peeking over the horizon and the grass was still wet with morning dew. I had my Fuji X100F with me in case the chance to take a picture arose, and wouldn’t you know it, I straight-up ignored this one that was right in front of my eyes. I saw this patch of grass, thought about taking a picture for roughly one and a half seconds, and then kept on walking because…well, I don’t really know why.

A little while later I thought to myself Why didn’t I just take a picture? and since I had no good answer, I turned around, pulled out my camera, and fired off a couple of shots. I was using the Classic Chrome film simulation which is why the greens look a little cold and, dare I say it, washed-out compared to if I had shot this with my Nikon and edited the RAW file in Lightroom. Though I might have made different choices regarding color rendition using the latter process, I’ve really tried to embrace the simplicity of shooting JPG and have appreciated spending less time fiddling with sliders on my computer than I used to. And so, what you see is what you get and I’m fine with that.

I really wanted to get some shallow depth of field with this, but when shooting with a 23mm lens you have to a) use a really wide aperture and b) get pretty close to your subject. Thankfully I was able to do both but that meant a trade-off in overall sharpness because using the X100F at its maximum aperture of f/2 gives close-up subjects a bit of a wistful, dreamy quality. Or as a lot of internet reviewers point out, a lack of sharpness. It doesn’t bother me that much since you have to zoom way in to see that the edges of the piece of grass in the center aren’t razor sharp, but it’s something that most people (myself included) probably won’t notice.

What makes this image unique for me is the dew in the foreground and the yellow sunlight glow in the background, both of which create a sense of calm and peacefulness and hopefully help the viewer feel, in some small way, something similar to what I felt on that chilly humid morning in late August when I shot this. A few seconds later I was back on my way to work but it felt nice knowing I was able to capture a small slice of what the morning had to offer :)

In some ways this is a picture I’ve been trying to take for quite some time. I’ve long been a fan of looking at the giant wind turbines that dot the landscape in the midwest, but it’s hard to realize just how massive they are when you pass them on the freeway doing 75mph. Occasionally we’ll find ourselves at a rest stop or gas station with wind turbines on the horizon, but it’s not really easy to get up close and personal. However when I drove from Oklahoma to Minnesota earlier this year I was able to do just that and thankfully I had my camera with me to document the occasion.

I shot this on a stretch of Highway 36 between St. Joseph, Missouri, and I-35 going through Iowa and it really was a spur-of-the-moment picture. Unlike interstates you can leave state highways just about any time you want (as opposed to waiting for the nearest exit which could be several miles down the road) and when I saw this turbine looming ahead of me on the south side of the highway I turned off on a dirt road and drove about a quarter mile until I was within spitting distance of this massive monolithic energy-harnessing machine.

I actually didn’t get super close to these turbines because my goal was to take a picture of them, not to literally touch them (which I’m fairly certain would have been trespassing) but it was neat hearing the creaks and moans of the turbines as a slow breeze turned the giant blades. Since the only camera I had with me was my Fuji X100F I couldn’t exactly zoom in or out so instead I had to drive up and down the dirt road just a little in order to find a spot that would let me get the shot I was looking for.

I took dozens of pictures on burst mode because I wasn’t sure what would look best in terms of the position of the blades, and of all my images this one turned out to be my favorite. It captures a lot of what makes these turbines so interesting: the sheer size, the quantity (especially if you look towards the horizon) and the fact that they often just protrude hundreds of feet from the middle of a cornfield. Or, whatever kind of field this is :)

I know there are disagreements about the usefulness of these turbines, the noise they create on windy days, the eyesore that they can be, and even the way in which they can harm birds and other wildlife, but it is cool to see such massive machines turning air into energy that powers our homes and businesses. Also, they’re just really huge which makes taking pictures of them kind of neat.

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.