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

Sometimes you never know what you’re gonna get, whether you’re eating a box of chocolates or going out for a quick walk with your camera. In fact I think by this point I should probably consider changing the name of this site from “Weekly Fifty” to “Five Minute Walks Around Theta Pond” since that seems to be where so many of these pictures come from. I took this on a particularly pleasant afternoon in February when the weather was in the mid 60’s, and it was one of those times that seems as though it’s tailor-made for snapping a few pictures. Armed with my D7100, 50mm lens, and a few close-up filters I was determined to get a few good shots while the sun was shining.

After a few minutes of walking, which also included a couple pictures of some yellow flowers I might post here in the coming weeks, I saw this purple…um…something-or-other. Perhaps it’s a tulip? No, that’s not right. A lily? I honestly have no idea. To me it looked like the monster in the sarlacc pit in the special edition of Return of the Jedi. (A version I own, have seen, but refuse to watch anymore due to the inclusion of the heinous Jedi Rocks scene in Jabba’s palace. #maxreboband #sysnootles #neverforget #despecializedtrilogyftw.) Whatever it was, I wanted to get a picture so there were a few things to think about:

• Regular 50mm lens, or filter?

• What angle do I shoot from?

• What do I focus on?

• What aperture do I use to get the desired depth of field and sharpness?

• What do I want in the foreground and background for context?

On a shot like this shutter speed and ISO are mostly irrelevant because there is so much light, but it was still a lot to consider in just a few seconds of time. I knew I wanted the viewer’s attention to be drawn to the bright purple flower but if I shot it straight on it would lose a sense of depth and context. However if I stood too far to the side the leaves would get in the way. I chose this particular composition because it not only contains a bit of foreground and background elements, but also another flower on the side to add a bit of additional color to the scene and make the central flower feel less isolated.

I used my +4 filter at f/4 (seriously, the 50mm lens, +4 filter, at f/4 is magical. Give this combination a try if you are able to.) and got a picture that was almost exactly what I was hoping for, which isn’t always the case when I go out shooting. I’m super pleased with how sharp everything turned out, and if you pixel peep at 100% you’ll even notice little drops of condensation on the leaf at the bottom of the frame. Sometimes when I shoot subjects close up I find myself having to use live view to get the focus right, but this was either using the in-viewfinder autofocus or me just focusing manually. I honestly don’t remember but either way I like the result and I hope you do too :)

Every now and then when I make it back to Nebraska I like to take a route that’s a bit slower than the interstate. Maybe I’m old, or maybe I just like looking for photo opportunities, but when I was younger I took the Ian Malcolm approach of “must go faster.” Nowadays I like to go with a journey-is-the-reward approach and take my sweet time, and one of my favorite roads to travel is Highway 77 which winds north through Kansas among lots of small towns and even a few lakes. It’s not the quickest route but I think it’s only about 20 minutes shorter than Interstate 35, though that’s if you don’t get stuck behind a John Deere tractor along the way :)

When I was up north (which, to an Oklahoman, means some place like Nebraska) several weeks ago I once again drove-slash-ambled along 77 on the way there as well as the return trip, except on the way back home I left town at 6:30am so I could still have some time with my wife and our kids before the little ones went to bed. As I watched the sky change from inky black to burnt orange over the course of the first hour of my trip I kept wanting to stop to take pictures of the wee hours before sunrise, but nothing was really working out how I wanted it to. (I also didn’t want to dilly-dally too much or else I’d be wasting my early rise.) Trees obscured the horizon, buildings and power lines ended up jutting through the frame, and as the sky got lighter and lighter my chances got slimmer and slimmer. I was just south of Beatrice, right about here in fact, when I saw the sun juuuust starting to peek over the horizon in front of me and knew that this was my chance. I quickly pulled off the road, grabbed my D750 + 50mm lens, and ran off to the side of my car to snap a few frames. I shot several at f/8 and a couple more at f/11, all while maintaining an ISO of 100 in order to get the richest colors possible, and in the space of about a minute and a half I was able to get a few that I liked before the sun rose too high and ruined the moment.

It was a bit of a tricky situation for one reason, really: composition. I didn’t want the sun to be in the center because those shots (imho) are a little boring, but I didn’t want it too far off to the side or it would seem weird. I also looked for some other elements to feature in the frame but wasn’t sure how high or low to place the horizon itself. What I’ve ended up with is a near textbook example of the efficacy of the Rule of Thirds: the horizon, the sun, the radio tower…it’s just about as Rule of Thirds-ey as you can get. And to be honest, that’s not a bad thing. Sure you can always try new things and break the old conventions to get interesting and exciting shots, but with just a minute to get the shot I went with the same old tried-and-true compositional method that always just gets the job done. This shot won’t win any awards but I like it, and as I’ve mentioned here before, that’s really all that matters to me :)

One thing I really like about using my close-up filters is that it’s helping me to see the world around me in a whole new light, especially the types of things I have photographed before. For instance, each year around February or early March I see all sorts of signs of life after a chilly winter, and one of my favorites to watch out for is rose bushes that are just starting to spring forth from their crispy brown cocoons. I’ve tried photographing this phenomenon before, but the results have been mixed as you can see here:

That was taken in my back yard with my 50mm lens on a Nikon D200 and focusing as close as I could get it. The bud itself is the same physical size as the one in this week’s post, and yet because I simply couldn’t get very close to it without my lens being able to focus on it, the entire picture feels different. You see a giant chunky thorny green branch from a rose bush…and wait a minute, there’s a little red thing peeking out. Indeed some viewers might not even notice the bud, and this is addition to the relatively poor composition of the picture in general. Oh well, you live and learn right? :)

Contrast that image, taken in March of 2014, to this week’s picture which I took nearly three years later. Not only have I learned a lot more about creating a well-composed photograph but I was, thanks to my +10 close-up filter, able to get much closer to the little red bud. So much that it nearly fills the frame and is obviously the clear subject of the image. The second picture is so much better (in my opinion) that it’s not even close, and I’m constantly amazed at how using a close-up filter is able to bring out so many rich details that are all around us but often go unnoticed.

Focusing this image was tricky as all get out, since shooting an object a few inches away results in a depth of field that is downright unwieldy. I initially took some shots at f/4 but then stopped down to f/8 to not only get a sharper image but to get a slightly wider area in focus too. The f/4 shots also lacked a sense of context, as the background was just a blurry cloudy mess whereas in the f/8 iteration you can (sort of) see a thorn extending from the branch which hopefully sends a signal that this is on a rose bush and also gives a sense of scale for the bud.

So yeah…maybe I’ll make a whole series out of this. “Re-taking shots I couldn’t get before I had close-up filters.” Hmm :)

Before you ask…yes, the title of this picture was taken from an Ed Sheeran song :) The song itself didn’t inspire the photo though, and in fact this was a picture that, contrary to many of the pictures I put here on the blog, was deliberately planned in advance. On a chilly weekend in January my wife and I loaded up the kids in our car to take a little drive so our youngest would hopefully fall asleep and take a nap…which actually worked. Woohoo! As we headed south out of town we drove past this dilapidated, um, barn? Shed? Workshop? I’m not even sure. But whatever it once was, it had clearly fallen on hard times and as we drove past I had the distinct though that it would make for a good picture. So a few days later I returned to the scene on my way to work in an attempt to make good on my vision.

Going in to the shoot I knew I would need a couple of specific pieces of gear. Based on the proximity of the building to the main road, and the fact that right in front of where I stood to take this image there was a barbed-wire fence to keep out any trespassers, I knew I would need to use my D750 if I shot this with my 50mm lens. I could get no closer and no farther from the building than what you see here and I knew that if I shot this with my crop-sensor D7100 it would be much too tight and I wouldn’t be able to capture a sense that this building was part of a much larger landscape. I also knew I would need a tripod since I was going to shoot this early in the morning, and finally I understood that I would have to shoot in manual without Auto-ISO in order to get precisely the end result I was hoping for.

That advance mental preparation paid off quite well and on the morning I took this shot the sky was quite overcast which provided a nice even, and rather somber, light to the scene. I hopped out of the car, grabbed my D750 and tripod, and walked right up to the fence to take a few pictures. I shot this at f/8, ISO 100 to get everything nice and sharp and this particular image required 0.3 seconds to get a properly-exposed photo. (Bonus tip: if you’re doing shots like this with a tripod, use a delay timer so your picture isn’t affected by your finger wobbling the camera when you press the shutter button.) There was not much room to move around laterally either, which was fine because the spot I was standing gave me pretty much the exact view I was hoping for. I also composed the shot specifically with the pine tree on the right and the other two trees, sans leaves, on the left. I tried shifting my view a bit to the north but other trees soon entered the frame in the foreground which wasn’t what I wanted at all.

In the end I’m happy with how this turned out and part of me wonders what the history of this place is like. Since I don’t know, I like to make up my own stories which can be a lot more interesting than finding out what really happened. I’m also reminded of how, even though I’m a big proponent of spontaneous photography, it’s also a good thing to plan your shots and create a deliberate composition from time to time.

When my wife and I moved to Oklahoma several years ago we were told a couple things about the weather that we were cautioned to keep in mind. The first, regarding tornados, was obvious and we soon followed through on getting an underground storm shelter installed on our property. The second was something we didn’t expect, which was that Oklahoma, apparently, doesn’t get a lot of snow in the winter but can get a lot of ice. I don’t know if we objectively get more or less ice than, say, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Kansas, but I certainly can confirm we get far less snow. Nonetheless, when we do get ice storms here they tend to be pretty bad and such was the case, or so we thought, on a chilly weekend in January when Winter Storm Jupiter made its way slowly across the midwestern plains.

Though the weather conditions didn’t quite materialize how meteorologists were predicting, we did get a fair amount of ice here in town and when my kids and I woke up on Saturday morning (I like to let my wife sleep in on the weekends) we saw that the whole world outside was covered in a thin sheet of frozen water that glistened in the morning sunlight. I quickly grabbed my camera and walked around the yard for about five minutes attempting to take a few shots before things started to melt, and came back with a few dozen pictures of branches, leaves, icicles dangling from fences, and crepe myrtle buds like what you see in this week’s picture above. I shot most of the pictures with my +4 filter at f/4 or smaller in order to get things as sharp as they could be, and this one was my favorite of the bunch.

This picture could also be seen as some kind of tangible evidence of my own progression as a photographer. The last time I remember having the opportunity to take pictures on the morning after an ice storm I made an image called Winter Berries that I posted to Weekly Fifty. I like the colors of that photo but looking back on it I think it’s far too cluttered, with a depth of field that is way too shallow given the foreground elements, and generally leaves the viewer with a sense of relative confusion. This week’s image, by comparison, is much more focused with a cleaner overall composition, and the viewer’s eye is specifically directed to just one or two elements. Now of course all this is a matter of personal taste and some might prefer the original over this one, but in my opinion this week’s image shows how my approach to photography has changed over the years and is, to be honest, much better than it used to be. And I’m sure a couple years from now I’ll look back at this picture and shake my head, wondering just what in the world I was thinking. But that’s good! And if it weren’t for the early steps we would never have the later ones.

Incidentally, this post comes almost exactly four years after I started Weekly Fifty. It sure has been a fun ride, and I want all of you to know how much I appreciate you taking time out of your days to read these posts, listen to the commentary, and even leave feedback. You are all part of why this blog is so special to me, and I hope it has helped you learn and grow as photographers too. Thank you, and I’m excited for what the next four years (and many more) have in store.

Here’s to the journey, folks :)