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

About a year and a half ago, my wife was gifted a very nice orchid that she has been happily caring for ever since. Neither one of us are what you might call plant people, but when we do come into possession of a pothos, potted cactus, or other such green growing thing we try to keep it around for as long as we can, as best we can. Sometimes it works, every now and then it doesn’t, but these plants are a fun to have around and a lot less work than a pet and that’s a good thing :) This orchid, which I have photographed before, has always presented a bit of a challenge: how to adequately take a picture of a flower that is mostly white, with the only color tucked away in the middle surrounded by petals on all sides? My previous images have been fine, but never quite worked how I wanted or envisioned them to be in my mind when I composed the shots. Something just didn’t quite work right, and it was tough to put my finger on it.

And then the flower went dormant. Its flowers fell and it just kind of sat there in its pot for months on end, not doing much of anything but not really dying either. Just…existing. My wife diligently maintained it though, with regular watering (soaking?) along with plenty of sunlight and then, one day, we noticed several green buds start to appear all around it. Not long after that they began opening and unfolding into brilliant flower petals, and that’s when I thought I would try my hand at another picture. Boy howdy did it ever work this time :)

The key to taking a picture of a white flower, I realized, was to just let it be what it is. Don’t try to change the color of the flower with light–instead, use light to enhance the location where the flower exists. I shot this after the sun went down, and the large frosted window behind the flower was completely dark. That meant I could control all the light, and create exactly the kind of scene I was hoping for. The color here comes from several Nanlite Pavotubes, all set to specific color and brightness values to get the shot I wanted.

On the left: three set to a deep orange/red mounted on a triangle metal frame, aimed not at the flower but at the frosted glass.

On the right: one set to dark blue, held in my hand and aimed once again not at the flower but at the background.

Behind the flower: one set to 2700K white light, aimed up for just a hint of translucence in the petals.

In front of the flower: one set to 2700K white light, held in my other hand and aimed at the flower to make the petals shine while also casting just a bit of shadow where the edges curved.

To create the photograph I used my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens on a tripod, with manual exposure (f/8, 1/15 second, ISO 100). I used a 10-second timer so I could press the shutter and then position the to handheld lights right where I wanted them. I took about two dozen shots, each one with minor alterations to the light and even the angle at which I was taking the picture, and in the end this emerged as my favorite. What works so well, in my opinion, are all the subtleties: rim lighting on the lower-left, shiny orange on the green buds, the gradient from blue to orange/red in the background, the petals at top just slightly out of focus to create a sense of depth, even the texture of the petal on the top right that’s only visible if you zoom way in. It’s my third time attempting a photograph of this orchid, and this time, indeed, was the charm.

This is one of those images for which I really had trouble coming up with a title. I usually don’t dwell on the title for more than a few seconds since it doesn’t really matter that much to me, and in the end just went for function over form. It happens :)

Every now and then I take a picture that fills me with an odd sense of deja vu. I can’t help but shake the feeling that I’ve seen it somewhere before, and that definitely happened here. I couldn’t quite place it though, and then after a while it hit me: It was strikingly similar to this shot I took way back on May 10, 2013, with my Nikon D200 and the same 50mm lens I use to this day. (Though perhaps not as much as back then, when it was the only lens I owned.) I liked the original so much that I used it as the masthead for Weekly Fifty, which you can still see if you go rooting around on the Wayback Machine :)

On some unconscious level I think I must have been channeling my younger self when I came across the scene you see on this week’s photo. I was on the OSU campus the morning after a long night of rain, hoping to take some photos of glossy greenery under overcast skies…but that luck simply did not pan out. By the time I went out with my camera nearly all signs of precipitation had evaporated, and instead of grey clouds there was a bright yellow sun and more than a bit of wind. It was, as one might charitably describe the situation, not ideal. And yet even in these kinds of circumstances it behooves one to keep his or her eye open and see what can be captured with a camera anyway. And when I saw this large brown leaf hanging down amidst a sea of yellow and orange, I knew I had found something worth photographing.

I tried to take my time and consider a few things when composing this photo, and I think it worked out pretty well. Of course I considered the basics of exposure: aperture, shutter, and ISO (though the latter are largely handled by Auto-ISO, but still…) as well as depth of field, sharpness, lighting, etc. You know–the fundamentals. But beyond that I really tried to pay close attention not just to the leaf on the left but the two on the right. I wanted them in the frame but blurry, and positioned such that they did not intrude on the subject or any other elements of the photograph. I also wanted an aperture that gave me just enough blurriness, but not too much. Basically, I knew I wanted the background to be just as important as the subject, and I adjusted my camera and composed the shot accordingly. And I think it worked. I quite like how everything came together in this photo, and the multiple layers work to create a composition that’s more than what you might see initially. (i.e. just a leaf.) I also like that I didn’t crop this at all: what you see here is what I shot, nothing more and nothing less. Things don’t always work out that way, but when they do it sure does feel good :)

And now I’m wondering if a decade from now I’ll take a picture of a leaf and think to myself “This reminds me of something…”

You know how anglers will sometimes tell the tale of the one that got away? How even though they might head home with an impressive haul, there’s till the story of the fish that they almost reeled in but managed to wriggle free at the last second? That’s this week’s image, in a manner of speaking. It bears some similarities to other photos I have posted recently, most notably this shot of a green cypress sprig lifting itself high in the early morning sun. when I came upon the scene you see here in early March I thought it would present an interesting opportunity to build on the original, as I am often wont to do, and even perhaps improve it in a couple of ways.

I liked how the rich yellow and gold color palette were distinctly different from the greens and browns one might expect in a shot like this. I also thought the angle of the foreground, going from lower-left to upper-right, presented a somewhat unique take on this type of composition compared to what I might normally do. And finally, the burnt umber bricks of the buildings in the background would, I thought, add an enticing element to the shot. Tie it together, in a sense, much like the Dude’s rug.

Even though I did take some care and attention to create this image, in the end it just didn’t work out how I expected. When I was editing it on my large iMac screen it looked fine, but when I saw it on my mobile phone I realized the problem: the subject in the center was nearly indistinguishable from the mess of oranges and dull reds that dominated the rest of the frame. It ceased to be interesting and became muddy and confusing, and what I thought would be a decent photograph ended up being somewhat of a counterexample–essentially, what not to do.

I know this all runs the risk of sounding a bit self-deprecating, but that’s not my intent. It’s just me giving an honest assessment of the photo, and trying to learn from what worked or, in this case, didn’t work as well as I had hoped. Lots of things were fine on a technical level (the subject is sharp, the colors are good, etc.) but the overall composition just falls short of where I want it to be. No matter though, I’ll keep at it and hopefully get a better image next time!

One evening recently, when my wife and I were walking up our street as the sun was setting and the world was calming down for the night, she pointed up to the sky and remarked at how beautiful the thin crescent moon looked with one lone star hovering next to it. It was a singular scene that doesn’t come along very often, and we both discussed it as we continued the few blocks left in our walk before turning up our driveway. Conditions have to be just right to see something like this in the sky–not just the waxing crescent moon, but the brilliance of a small secondary star (in this case, the planet Venus) right nearby as if stopping by to say goodnight as well as the diminishing daylight that leaves just enough of the surrounding scenery visible to put everything into context.

As soon as we got home I asked her, knowing that we had chores to do and kids to start getting ready for bed, if she minded me riding my bike down the block to take a picture. She did not :) I grabbed my D750 and 70-200mm lens, hopped on my bike, and rook off eastward to the corner by my neighbor’s field. That, of course, might make one wonder: why not just take a picture from my driveway? Why bother biking a few blocks away? The answer, as you might have guessed if you have been reading this blog for any length of time, lies in the concept I alluded to a few sentences ago: context.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that anyone can take a camera, point it at the sky, and snap a picture of the moon. A basic shot of the moon isn’t that difficult, and even many mobile phones with a zoom lens can do a fairly good job of taking a picture of our nearest celestial neighbor. (Though who knows if the results you get from a mobile phone are real or just pretend to be real.) What helps elevate a lunar image is a sense of context: where is it in relation to the viewer? The surrounding scenery? The rest of the sky? What about weather, time of day, cloud cover, birds, airplanes, or anything else that might help put the image of the moon in some kind of space that the viewer can relate to?

The answer for me, and the reason I hopped on my Salsa Timberjack and went down the road to get a picture, was my neighbor’s tree. An empty dark blue sky with nothing but the thin crescent moon and its planetary counterpart would have been fine, but not all that interesting. But the same shot with a tree in the corner, to help give a sense of place for the viewer, is something else entirely. The tree helps the viewer understand that the moon and Venus are low on the horizon–without it they could be anywhere in the sky. It creates a mood of peace and even slight isolation since there’s not a field of trees but one lone tree all by itself. Basically, even though the moon and Venus are obviously playing the main roles, the tree gets its own star as Best Supporting Actor.

All this goes to show the importance of extra elements aside from the main subject when taking a picture. It’s a lesson that took me years to learn, but has dramatically increased the quality of my photos since this whole journey started.

This is one of those photos that’s part experiment, part education, part abstract, and part just messing around. It was also a good reminder of how effective it is to just focus on the fundamentals of photography, practice the basics of exposure, and do just a tiny bit of editing in order to produce an interesting image. I didn’t have any grand designs on this one or a bigger picture in mind, and even though the title might suggest some kind of deeper meaning or implication, it’s really just a Star Trek TNG reference. I mean, if you squint real hard and hold your phone in just such a way, you could maybe mistake this for…um…a stick-dude holding his arms out? I dunno. Look, sometimes I just need a title :)

Anyway, the basic idea here was pretty simple. I wanted to get a shot of these tiny branches sticking out from a larger branch, but show the little ones receding into the background while the image gets progressively blurrier. The two main things I had to consider were aperture and angle, and I spent a few minutes experimenting with both to get the shot. For the aperture I ended up using f/11 since it gave me just the right amount of falloff between the subject and the background: f/8 was too blurry, and f/16 wasn’t blurry enough. F/4 was just a disaster–the entire image was basically a grey mess with some spots of red, and a good reminder that when it comes to depth of field sometimes more is more. The angle was a little tricky because I had to kind of stand on my tiptoes to get the shot, but I really wanted the two small branches on the right to be bisected by the large branch…and it worked.

What didn’t work so well, as I discovered in the process of taking this picture, was nailing the focus. Since the focusing target was so small, and the depth of field so shallow, I couldn’t trust my D750’s autofocus to get it exactly right. It did a good job, to be sure, but I took several shots that were just a bit front- or back-focused, and didn’t quite land the shot how I wanted. I ended up just firing off a burst while I slowly rotated the focusing ring on my lens, and while this approach was somewhat crude it definitely worked. Out of a dozen photos all I needed was a single image that was focused correctly, and I got it.

This is, then, perhaps an illustration of one of the not-insignificant weak points of my aging camera system. Aside from my Fuji X100F, I shoot with a small slew of Nikon DSLRs: D750, D500, and occasionally a D7100. My favorite, the D750, is over a decade old and easily eclipsed by virtually any modern full-frame camera when you compare features on a bulleted list. However, in terms of image quality the D750 still holds up against modern mirrorless cameras like the Nikon Z6iii–it’s astonishing, really. Would I like the convenience of a modern mirrorless camera for a photo like today’s? Absolutely. I would definitely not turn it down. But while a Z6iii (or something similar) would be nice to have, I don’t really need it and in the meantime I continue to find ways to enjoy and appreciate my old gear :)