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

Well folks, here it is. This is, and I mean this without any exaggeration and with all possible sincerity, the best shot of a bee I have ever taken. It’s the kind of picture I have been trying to get for years. This quest, you might say, say back in June of 2024 I got a picture of a bee going in for some nectar from a magnolia flower near my office on the OSU campus. I since snagged others like this one but never quite got what I was hoping for, which is a profile shot of a bee hovering near a flower. Not a butterfly, not a hummingbird…a bee, bumble or otherwise, about to have itself a snack while simultaneously picking up some pollen. The thing about this kind of shot is you can’t really plan it or create it. You just have to be in the right situation, with the right gear and, most importantly, a healthy dose of patience and preparedness…and hope something comes along.

And every once in a while, it does :)

Ironically, I guess you could say, I wasn’t even trying to take this picture. It was a pretty normal afternoon following a morning of light storms, and I went out for a walk while on a short break at work. I had my camera in hand, thinking I might come across something interesting that would be good to photograph, and I happened upon these large purple plants with bright violet blossoms, many of which contained huge drops of water that had pooled during the rain. These subjects were entirely static, so I had more than enough time (measured in seconds, perhaps minutes, mind you. I was on a quick break! Not out for an hours-long leisurely stroll) to adjust my exposure, play around with my point of view, and fire off several clicks of the shutter. It was a thoughtful, kind of contemplative exercise that made me appreciate being outdoors in mild temps after the earth had washed itself clean.

And then I saw the bees. Many of them that were probably there all along but didn’t really catch my eye, flitting from flower to flower and pausing only a few breaths before heading to the next one. I tried to follow a few of them but that’s kind of an exercise in futility since they are so quick and nimble and there’s only so much you can do with a 105mm prime lens when trying to capture subjects like this. So instead I took kind of the opposite approach: I pointed my camera not at a bee but at a flower, hoping the former would come along and alight on the latter.

And by golly, as my dad would say, that’s just what happened. I had my exposure set to f/8, Auto ISO with 1/200 minimum shutter speed and I popped off a small burst of photos (continuous high-speed shooting on my D750 is something like 6 or maybe 7 frames per second, so make of that what you will) and one of them was, I am fortunate to say, just about right.

Everything about this image just works. The leaves fill the frame from top-left to bottom-right, while the flower in the center commands your attention the instant you see it. The bee is frozen in time except for its wings, which are a beautiful blur of motion as they keep it neatly positioned above its target so as to collect a bit of nourishment and pick up some pollen at the same time. The bee is sharp and in focus, its compound eye clear and unmistakable, and the angle of view draws you, the viewer, into the scene as if you were right there next to it.

I’m so happy with how this turned out, and yet still I am looking forward to what lies ahead. If I can do this once I can do it again, and who knows, maybe next time will be even better. Because in photography there’s always something new to learn, something fun to try, and some new horizons to explore if you’re willing to go for them.

When I was a kid my friends and I would spend entire recess periods in elementary school throwing these things, which we, and probably many others, affectionately termed helicopter seeds, up in the air and chase them down as they spun to the ground or even, if we were lucky, into our outstretched hands. It was super fun, especially on windy days, but something I just don’t see a lot of kids doing these days. Though that’s probably because where I live in Oklahoma we don’t really have many trees around that produce these kinds of seeds :) Every now and then you can find one though, like this one on the OSU campus near Theta Pond, and I was fortunate enough to come across this group of seeds on a cloudy, overcast day when the light was really good for this kind of picture. Almost too good, I might say, because the, uhm…wings? Rotors? Fins? I dunno what you call them, but the whirly-things on some of the seeds are just a bit too bright for my taste. Not a dealbreaker by any means, but maybe something that I could have at least mitigated by underexposing a bit and then bringing up the shadows in Lightroom. That’s pretty nitpicky though, and at the end of the day I’m really happy with how this turned out. So let’s just focus on that :)

I shot this at f/13 after trying various larger apertures because, you know, gotta get that sweet background blur, right? Well, not really, and this is a good example of why less (aperture) can be more (photo). The subject is separated from the background by such a great distance that I probably could have used a much smaller aperture and still gotten a good shot, with even more of the seeds in focus and the background would have still been a big green blur. No sweat. But, there was one consideration here that I don’t normally think about: ISO. I almost never think about ISO, since my full-frame Nikon D750, despite being over a decade old, produces great results even up to ISO 6400, but even so, at ISO 1800 I was starting to lose just a bit of the detail in the texture of the seed…extension thingeys. F/13 gave me a good combination of everything I care about in a shot like this, and I really like the foreground elements just barely intruding on the subject. It gives the viewer a sense that you’re peeking into a hidden world, uncovering some cool discovery that others might have missed entirely. At least, that’s what I hope you feel. Or maybe, if nothing else, you get the slight urge to pick up one of these seeds the next time you see it on the ground, toss it in the air, and marvel as it spins to the ground while you try to run and catch it.

For as long as I have owned DSLR cameras, all the way back to the good ol’ Nikon D200, I have enjoyed taking pictures of a few specific subjects around the same time each year. Crocus and magnolia flowers in spring, butterflies in the fall, squirrels and geese near Theta Pond…anyone who has been following Weekly Fifty for any length of time has no doubt seen pictures of such things and, hopefully, enjoyed looking at them as much as I enjoyed taking them. Add to the list the seed pods of the Golden Raintree that you see here, which are fascinating on a normal day but particularly mesmerizing after a good soaking from above with cloudy, overcast skies casting even, diffused lighting as far as the eye can see. Such was the case way back in Summer 2013 with this picture, and these little balloonlike structures continue to be one of my favorite photography subjects today.

I saw this scene, the one featured above, while walking across the OSU campus with my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens the day after a mild thunderstorm blew through the area. Conditions were just about perfect for outdoor photography, and as I walked past this tree I could not help but stop and snap a couple shots with my camera. I went with a tried-and-true, simple-yet-effective rule-of-thirds setup here, with the main subject on the right and another seed pod in the background roughly along the left vertical. I shot this at f/6.7 to get a good combination of subject sharpness and background blur, though I think my go-to macro aperture of f/8 might have yielded better results…though probably not by much. (Read: I am very happy with how this turned out, and don’t mean to let my small nitpicks overshadow the rest of the image.) The rich, deep reds and bright yellows nicely complement each other, with the dark greens lending a sense of texture and context to the background.

It’s a good photo to be sure, but to really see what I like about it, and what makes it vault to very near the top of my favorite shots of golden raintree seeds, is the tiny, almost microscopic water droplets on the leaf in the foreground. If you don’t see them, I recommend clicking or tapping the shot so you can see the full-size original on Flickr, and then view it at the largest possible size. The minuscule drops clinging like velcro to the red vertical wall of the seed pod are something I almost never see, and even more rarely, take the time to notice or consider. Those drops encapsulate many things that I enjoy about taking close-up shots, and they serve as a good reminder to stop and ponder the world around me, and remember that there really are wonders of creation as far, or as close, as the eye can see.

Most of the pictures I take, and then share here on Weekly Fifty, are pretty straightforward: what you see is, as the saying goes, what you get. I don’t much dabble in abstract artwork and my images generally don’t present much in the way of deeper meaning, nor are they designed to promote introspection, contemplation, or much else aside from a passing “Hey, that’s kind of neat.” I do this to learn and grow as a photographer, and help me keep my camera in my hands and off the shelf where it might otherwise sit collecting dust. But every now and then something shows up in front of me, and then, susbequently, in front of my camera lens, that does prompt me, and now you, the viewer, to think just a bit deeper or perhaps use your imagination. That’s what we’ve got going on here :)

This is, on one level, naught but a simple leaf. Nothing much else…just a plain, simple, ordinary leaf. And if that’s all you take away from this picture, great! No worries at all; feel free to go about your day. All is well.

But perhaps there is something more here. Take, for example, the fact that the leaf is not fully intact. It’s broken and bowed, drawn downward under the weight of the passage of time as it is no longer capable of pointing upwards to the life-giving sun in the sky above. And whither the sun? It is obscured behind a veil of gray clouds, as one can deduce by the even, diffused lighting throughout the frame. The colors of the leaf, no longer healthy and green, are instead shades of orange and red, a brilliant beauty that only shines forth in the fading final portion of the leaf’s short life.

And yet all is not despair, for the leaf is not dying but rather departing, taking flight on wings to the great adventure that lies ahead. It’s not sighing with defeat, but soaring with victory while leading the leaves behind it into the unknown that lies ahead, soaring high above a stormy sea of green and white.

Or perhaps not. Sometimes a cake is just a cake, and a leaf is just a leaf. I try not to wade too deep into the deep end of the pool when it comes to interpreting visual art, even my own, but I do think it’s fun to dip a toe in these kinds of waters every now and then.

This picture is somewhat of a return to form, you might say, albeit not exactly intentionally. It’s not like I threw away my full-frame camera and macro lens, in order to recapture my roots with my original 50mm lens and Nikon D200 body, but the idea here isn’t too far (literally as well as geographically) from some of the pictures I took years and years ago. Like many of my earlier images I shot this right in my own back yard, and there wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy that went into the planning of this photo. It wasn’t planned at all, really. But the end result is an image that I like quite a bit, and more than that, really enjoyed taking.

One recent evening after a few hours of rain had quenched the parched ground, I found myself with a bit of time while my kids were playing video games and my wife was out with a friend. I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired or even fully lucid, having not slept all that well the previous night, but I thought I would grab my camera and walk around the yard just to see what I might capture despite my somewhat wan frame of mind. I’m sure glad I did, as often this kind of simple act can, in and of itself, provide just the kind of revival, to to speak, that might be needed.

I had my eye out for color, or at least contrast, that stood out in the overcast evening. Much of our yard was varying shades of earth tones–green, brown, and a little red in the dirt which is not unusual for our modest residential property here in Oklahoma–so when I saw this leaf, and several others like it, I thought it might make an interesting picture. It’s not that this single individual leaf stood out from the rest in any particular way; it just kind of looked good, if you know what I mean. I saw it and though I bet that would make for a good photograph. So that’s what I tried to do.

I squatted down on the somewhat soggy grass, put my camera in Live View, flipped up the screen just a bit, dialed in an aperture of f/11 with minimum shutter speed of 1/180 second, and fired off a couple of shots. (My aging D750, as I have written about before, still stands toe-to-toe with any modern camera in terms of straight-up image quality, but when it comes to composing in Live View…well, let’s just say it’s pretty outdated. It works great if the subject is still though, which this leaf most certainly was.) This one ended up as my favorite from the bunch: the leaf is sharp, detailed, and stands out from the foreground and background. It even has a cool purple fringe on the lower portion which is not, as one might assume, an optical artifact from light bouncing around in the lens, but just the natural color of the leaf as it withers away.

There’s one other feature of this photo that I wanted to share, or rather, a bit of information (disclosure, perhaps?) about how it was processed. As with most of my Nikon D750 photos I shot this in RAW, and here you can see a closeup the original image:

It’s darker, of course, and the colors are not as pronounced, but that’s to be expected on an undeveloped RAW file. It’s also quite noisy, since it was shot at ISO 2200. But here’s the same section of the final image:

This is entirely due to the AI Noise Removal tool in Lightroom, which I have found myself using more and more thanks to the incredible quality of its results. I don’t know exactly how it works, all I know is that it sure does work. It’s so much nicer than fiddling with the Color and Luminance sliders that I used for years, and does an outstanding job of preserving details that would otherwise be lost with the old way of removing noise.

Anyway, just thought I’d share :)