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

Not long ago we met up with some friends for a weekend in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, roughly halfway between our respective home bases in Nebraska and Oklahoma. We got a big Airbnb with plenty of room to spread out, make meals, play games, and just catch up on life while the kids hung out together. The town was small, the weather was warm, the entire experience was one that, in some ways, felt like something out of a postcard. Not long after dinner we all walked down the cobblestone-paved Main Street over to the eponymous Falls, and then continued on for a bit of geocaching. (We found one!) Before heading back to the Airbnb we all just kind of hung out on the bridge near the falls, which had long ago been transformed from a road into a pedestrian area, and after getting some shots of my family and our friends I set about seeing what I could capture of the falls themselves.

I set up my Fuji X100F on a tripod and, in an effort to smooth out the water a bit, I dialed in an exposure setting of f/16, ISO 200, and 1-second shutter. (Which, now that I think about it as I type this, I could have increased by a few seconds if I had activated my camera’s built-in ND filter. I forgot about it!) I didn’t spend too long trying to get an ideal picture here; mostly I just wanted something that would capture the scene and, hopefully, convey a sense of mood, feeling, or emotion to the viewer. The calm air, the smooth surface of the river, the aging concrete structure holding it back, and the clear sky in the background. But there’s something else going on in this picture if you look a bit closer…

Did you see it? Look on the left side of the frame, on top of the dam just near the water.

That guy is the missing piece of the photographic puzzle, the key to all of this, one might say. He provides the much-needed element of context and perspective, immediately giving viewers a sense of scale while also serving as a point of calm and serenity next to the swirling waters coming off the dam. I don’t know who he was, but until he showed up with his fishing pole the scene, while interesting, also felt a bit hollow and empty. I’m just glad he didn’t move much in the one second it took to take this picture! So to that fisherman dude: thank you, whoever you are.

The phenomenon you see illustrated here, with points of light radiating out from a bright center, is one of my favorite photography tricks to pull off. Though it’s not actually a trick at all, just a matter of understanding some fundamentals of how pictures are captured by cameras and the importance of exercising control over exposure. Also, you can’t get this kind of shot with a phone so it’s kind of a fun, if perhaps slightly vain, flex for anyone who shoots with a dedicated camera and knows what they are doing. But more than all that, this picture is among my favorites from our entire trip to the Black Hills and Badlands over the summer, which is why it most certainly deserves a spot here on Weekly Fifty.

I shot this with my Fuji X100F at f/16, 1/80 second, ISO 1250, and while that ISO is a bit higher than I normally use with that camera it was a tradeoff I was more than happy to make here. Usually my primary consideration when taking pictures is aperture because I like to control the depth of field, but here it was aperture for a different reason entirely. My choice here had nothing to do with depth of field and everything to do with the beams of light: You can only get a starburst like this if you shoot with a small aperture, since the light bouncing off the physical blades is what produces the desired effect. It’s also why you can’t do this on a mobile phone–they all* have fixed-aperture lenses.

You also can’t get a shot like this unless the bright point of light is just that: a point. When the sun is out and about during the day it’s just too large and bright to produce starbursts, which is why you can only get these if you compose your shot so that the sun is almost entirely obscured behind a tree, building, mountain, or other such object. So basically, conditions have to be just right to get a picture like this, and I consider myself exceedingly fortunate to be able to capture this image at such an incredible place as the Badlands. While our road trip was not over, our time in the park was, and the next day we left the park to continue on to more sights while also making our way back home.

Looking at this picture reminds me of not just the incredible scenery, but the time spent with my wife and kids over the course of the ten days we were on the trip, and that says quite a lot about the real magic of photography.

*To be fair, there are a few models that use variable-aperture lenses but they are by far the minority. All phones from major manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, Google, etc. have fixed-aperture lenses.

Note: This sunset time-lapse was taken at the same time I shot the photo above, but with a different camera and from a slightly different location. I used my GoPro Hero 12 Black for the time-lapse, and positioned it just down the boardwalk from where I shot this week’s featured image. I figured the two photos were close enough that it counts :)

One conclusion I kept coming back to during our trip to to the Black Hills and Badlands was that no picture seemed to adequately capture the vastness of the scenes we were witnessing. It didn’t seem to matter what focal length I used, what angle I shot from, what I included in the foreground or background…few things ever really captured the sheer scale of the western wilderness stretched out before us. It’s not that such a thing isn’t possible, just that I found myself continually outside my area of expertise. That said, I was certainly willing to try and ended up with a few photos such as this one that, while not quite A+ level, could certainly be described as not bad. Not too bad at all.

I took this photo looking south from Bigfoot Pass Overlook while the sun was setting just out of frame on the right, with the intention of capturing the brilliant colors of the clouds overhead while also getting the rich red strata layers in the rocky terrain in the foreground. While I’ve seen many beautiful sunsets over the years, I don’t think I have ever seen one quite like this, and even though my Fuji X100F was probably not the ideal camera for this scene it was the one I had with me so I gave it a shot.

I had to think carefully about my exposure settings since there simply wasn’t much light to work with; the sun had actually just dipped below the horizon a few minutes before taking this picture. Though smaller apertures are usually better for scenes like this so you can an ultra-wide depth of field with maximum overall sharpness, while still letting in plenty of light, that just wasn’t going to work here especially since I was shooting handheld. I used a 1/80 shutter at ISO 400 and, of course, shot in RAW to get as much color information as possible.

Unlike my photos from the past few weeks I didn’t put anything in the foreground to give a sense of scale and perspective, but that wasn’t what I was really going for here so I don’t mind too much. I kind of like the elevated shooting position I was in, and if you look carefully at the left side of the frame you will see a truck driving on the road if you really do want a sense of how big the scene is. Not that it’s the Rocky Mountains or anything, but the view isn’t exactly tiny either.

So in the end, I guess the question is: does this photo work? I think so, but that’s kind of up to the viewer to decide. Do I like it? Absolutely.

Last week I shared a picture from Agate Fossil Beds National Monument that wasn’t so much about long-deceased animals as it was about my attempt to capture the vast landscape with my rather diminutive little Fuji X100F–not exactly an easy task for that camera, or any camera, really. It’s a difficult thing to impart a sense of what it feels like to bear witness to miles and miles of sweeping vistas in a single still image, but one technique that often helps is to give viewers something familiar to use as a reference point. Another option is to compose your shot with something in the foreground, like the little yellow flower from last week’s shot. The issue I had with that one, though, was that there were hundreds or even thousands of other flowers in the frame as well, which muddied the foreground a bit and made it a little difficult to suss out the subject. Not so with this picture.

I took this a few days after last week’s photo when we had gone on from the grassy prairie and rolling hills of western Nebraska to the rocky, worn, and weathered terrain of Badlands National Park. (There’s a reason it was used as a filming location for alien planets in Starship Troopers.) I had never been to this part of the country before and, of course, I took a lot of photos while we drove, hiked, and climbed our way across the landscape over the course of a couple days. But one thing became clear pretty quickly: very few of my photos really imparted a sense of just how huge, dry, and desolate these locations really were. I think part of it had to do with the colors: when everything is a similar shade of dull brown, contours blend together and distinguishing characteristics that separate one ridge from another tend to disappear when captured in a picture.

Alas, what’s a photographer to do? While I’m not sure I know the answer, I did try two things here, and I’m curious whether you think it worked or not. The first is to take a cue from the Agate Fossil Beds photo and put something familiar in the foreground. With no flowers to be found, I instead focused on this stalk of grass that was shooting skyward from the dry, dusty ground.

The other way in which this photo attempts to capture perspective is through a more intentional use of light and shadow. The subject in the foreground is bright, almost glowing, against the darker rocky terrain behind it which not only draws the viewer’s eye to a specific point of the photo but also invites them to consider the distance between that point and the background far away. To create this effect I did not alter anything in the scene, but rather repositioned myself so as to put the sun off to the right side of the frame and thus lighting my subject (the grass) from the side while also capturing the undulations behind it in shadow.

What I like most about this shot is the memories it brings back, of a special trip that my family and I were able to take together. Sure it’s a fun scene to look at as-is, but for me, the personal stories this tells are memories that I will not soon forget. And hopefully not ever.

If you think this week’s photo bears some striking similarities to the one I shared last week, you would be spot-on. Or, at least, I would be inclined to agree with your assessment and also argue that such similitude is quite intentional. Most of the photos I take in familiar surrounds, such as the OSU campus or my own neighborhood, don’t exactly showcase vast landscapes and distant horizons such as the ones you see here. So, on our trip out west this summer, I wanted to challenge myself to do exactly that: find a way to, hopefully, capture some of the grandeur of the areas we were visiting with my little 35-mm equivalent Fuji X100F. That lens isn’t wide enough to truly present a sense of scale compared to, say, a 14mm lens on a proper landscape camera like the Nikon D810. Or whatever the modern mirrorless equivalent would be :)

Last week’s exercise, if you want to call it that was relatively simple, because Chimney Rock itself conveys a sense of scale naturally, all by itself. It’s such a familiar sight (well, around the Midwest anyway) that it doesn’t necessarily need any help in terms of helping viewers understand how big it is. I mean, to some extent of course, but for the most part when someone looks at a picture of Chimney Rock there’s almost an intuitive understanding of size, shape, and scale.

That’s not really the case with this week’s picture of a hill at Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, a few hours down the road from the Scottsbluff area where I took last week’s picture. I stood by a walking path, camera in hand, and took a couple pictures of the scene you see here (minus the foreground) and it just didn’t really work. All you could see was just a grass-covered mound rising from a sea of green and yellow, but there wasn’t anything to convey just how vast the landscape really was. I was kind of stuck, until I thought about a way I could show perspective by using a different one of my own.

Most people understand the size of a common flower, like the one you see here in the foreground, and so I wondered what would happen if I knelt down and used one of them as the subject and composed the shot so that the fossil bed mound was in the background and also just a little blurry. My idea, and you’ll have to tell me if it worked or not, was to give viewers something familiar in the foreground in order to put the background in a broader context that helped illustrate just how big the entire scene really was. I shot at f/8, which might have actually been a bit too small, as the fossil bed mound might be just a bit too blurry, but I didn’t want to spend so much time fiddling with my camera that I ended up forgetting the whole point of being here in the first place: to spend time with my family. Because in the end, that matters way more than a couple of pictures :)