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

Before I go any farther with this post, I have to send a huge shout-out to my in-laws who we had the opportunity to visit over Christmas break. My wife and I don’t have pets of our own so whenever we have the opportunity of being around other people’s pets, I like to use them as photography subjects and see what kind of shots I can get. As such my pet (and, let’s be honest, my entire collection of animal-based photography) is not nearly as refined as that of other, more experienced, photographers. I’m not really sure what compositions work best, what focal lengths to use, or even how to get the animals to look where I want them to look in order to get an interesting picture of them. Not having pets of our own, I just don’t get much practice with these sorts of things.

So with that being said I present to you: Tucker. He’s a spry little fellow with a penchant for poking at, and picking up, any food one might happen to drop while cooking and a nose for endless curiosity that can sometimes take him just one step too far :) So how to photograph a dog like this? Good question. I don’t know if I got it right, but I did get something, and that’s what you see here. I tried sitting on the floor and making noises to get him to look in my direction with a window behind me to light up his eyes, to no avail whatsoever. He cared not for my camera and was not about to alter his agenda just so I could get a few photos with my macro lens. (Which was, I should probably say, the only lens I brought for my Nikon D750. Would a different lens have worked better? Perhaps. Maybe I’ll try something else on a future visit.)

Eventually I just asked my oldest son to hold Tucker while sitting on the sofa. It was an inelegant solution but it worked, and I think it does lend a bit of a compelling element to the photo: the blue fabric of my son’s coat (it was the day of that massive arctic blast we had shortly before Christmas and there was no escaping the cold, even indoors) tells a subtle story about the context of the photo and the nature of Tucker that could be described in words, but is somehow better when shown and not told.

Rainy days, or perhaps more accurately, post-rainy days, are some of my favorite times to take photos. Even before I got my macro lens I enjoyed going out after a storm when the world is drenched and dripping wet to see what kind of shots I could get. The overcast lighting, the wet sheen on everything around me, the raindrops hanging from leaves, branches, fences, or pretty much anything you look at…it all adds up to some really great conditions for taking photos. Shortly after I took last week’s picture of some drops on a curved blade of grass, I saw this similar scene and wanted to try it out as well to see if it would make for a compelling image-creation opportunity.

On its own this blade of grass would probably not be all that interesting of a photo subject, but when paired with the drops of water and even, overcast lighting it took on a whole new appearance. Rather than take a head-on approach like I did with last week’s shot, I used. a technique I tried a few weeks ago where I basically tried to look straight down from on top of my subject. It worked OK for some shots of leaves in the water, and I figured I might as well try it here too. I used my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens, and tried to position myself so as to point my camera as straight-down as possible. I honestly didn’t know what aperture to use but I did want the subject sharp and the background, which was only a few inches away, to be nice and blurry so I tried several options between f/4 and f/11. I ended up with a final aperture of f/4.2 which worked pretty well, and allowed me to get the drops on the left tack-sharp while the drops on the right were just barely out of focus despite only being a fraction of an inch out of the focal plane. And then the blades in the background basically disappearing entirely, which I thought was really cool.

What makes this image particularly interesting, at least in my opinion, are the colors. The palette is really just three colors: yellow, green, and brown and all of them have a rich, earthy tone that I really like. Combine that with the precipitation, and the whole image just feels alive even though it is clearly quite static. This is the third time in recent memory that I have attempted this macro-straight-down technique, and I must say I’m really happy with what I have seen so far. I hope I can keep exploring this and, as I often say here on Weekly Fifty, finding new ways of looking at the world around me.

In some ways, this is the photo I have wanted to take for years. Way back in 2014 I shot this image in my backyard of a single drop of water on a long blade of grass, and even way back then I recall being a little frustrated that the picture I was imagining in my mind was just not quite materializing. At the time I knew nothing about the physics of how lenses bend light and couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get a great shot of a single drop of water. I think I had the right idea in terms of some compositional elements, but all I had was my D7100 and 50mm lens (not even my set of close-up filters) so that picture was, quite literally, the best I could do.

In the years since then I have learned an awful lot about many different elements of photography, and acquired some cool new gear too. Like my 105mm macro lens, which is ideal for the kind of picture I was aiming for all the way back in 2014 when I went out to my back yard after a rainstorm. I have also learned a lot of new techniques too, one of which I put to use for the first time to get the shot you see above.

One issue with close-up photography that has come into play over and over again since I got my macro lens is the delicate balancing act that photographers must perform when trying to decide between a wide aperture and a wide depth of field. Wide apertures obviously let in more light and give a more blurry background, but the depth of field is so razor-thin when shooting close-up at f/2.8 or f/4 that it’s almost unusable. Even smaller apertures, like the f/9.5 I used when taking this picture, are still wide enough to produce depth of field that is just impractical. And that also makes shots like this literally impossible.

Thankfully, there’s a cool technique called focus stacking which allows you to get the best of both worlds: the blurry foregrounds and backgrounds of wide apertures, with the larger depth of field of smaller apertures. In other words, the image you are seeing this week is not one image but a composite of nine images stacked together in Photoshop where the in-focus elements are combined and the out-of-focus elements are blended together to produce the final result you see here. I also tweaked the resulting image in Lightroom a bit, with some alterations to exposure, saturation, highlights…the usual.

I have toyed around with focus stacking here and there over the past year, but this was my first time really putting it to the test and I must say I am very happy with the results. And this was just my first attempt—shot handheld, sans tripod—which makes me pretty optimistic for other similar shots I might take down the road.

We’ve just begun the new year and I’m already learning new things :)

If you looked at this picture and did a bit of a double-take, thinking that it bears more than a passing similarity to the image I used to close out 2022, you would not be incorrect. I used a very similar process to create both images, and while they are clearly related in terms of compositional elements, I think both are distinct enough from one another to use them as separate Weekly Fifty shots. I actually considered swapping the order such that this image would be used last week and vice versa, but in the end I’m just using them as-is and moving on with things. I really don’t like to over-analyze my photography that much :)

The techniques I used to create this shot are pretty similar to what I did last week: find a small Christmas Tree ornament and place it in front of my macro lens. Then find a few other ornaments to augment the background, adjust a couple of the small colored lights on the tree, adjust the aperture, set the self-timer, and take the shot. As I am wont to do when shooting close-up subjects, I adjusted the aperture from very large to moderately small in order to get just the right combination of subject sharpness and background blur, all while leaving my ISO set to 100 and using a shutter speed of as long as I needed in order to get a properly-exposed image. Even the overall setup, as you can see below, looks pretty similar to last week:

So why use both images, given that they share so many similarities? The answer lies in something I most certainly did not expect, but have really come to appreciate: this week’s photo looks entirely different when viewed on a small screen. I didn’t see it initially when I edited the RAW file on my 27″ iMac, but when I shrank this image down to just a few inches to send it to my brother Phil, I noticed an entirely new composition that was hidden right in front of me the whole time.

Initially, I just saw this as a cool shot of a tiny moon-shaped ornament with some blurred lights behind it. But when I looked at the same image on my iPhone instead of a giant computer monitor, it morphed into an interstellar scene complete with at least two planets and perhaps even a sun. The silver ball I hung in the background to create a lighting effect suddenly looked like a ringed planet–a miniature Jupiter or Neptune–and the colored lights dancing on its surface might as well be lightning storms in space. I was shocked, and thought about the many times that I have encouraged people to click through to Flickr from this website to look at the full-resolution version of an image but this might be the first time ever I am openly asking people to do the opposite and view a picture on a very small screen :)

Anyway, I thought this was a fun and unexpected moment of photographic serendipity, which would be a neat way to ring in the new year and think about other picture opportunities that lie ahead in the coming months.

https://youtu.be/AF0gwHJ6jRk

I have said time and time again, and I continue to mean what I say, that I don’t make a habit of having posts on Weekly Fifty coincide with specific times of the year or other such milestones. That being said, I do still get a bit wistful near the end of December and maybe, just maybe, try to take a picture or two that hearkens to this particular season. Not always, mind you, but occasionally. Sometimes. Every now and then.

And this, as you can probably tell, is one of those such times. I don’t know that anything about this picture has to do with closing out the year 2022, but I do hope the subject matter, the colors, the contrast between light and dark…the whole composition, really…makes you think about chilly winter nights and maybe, just maybe, a cozy evening by the Christmas tree with family and friends.

Or maybe not. Maybe this doesn’t do anything for you at all, and if that’s the case, then that interpretation is completely valid and as good of a way of interpreting meaning from this image (if any is able to be gleaned at all) as any other. Anyway, what you’re looking at here is a close-up shot of a Christmas ornament hanging from our tree. The setup is pretty simple, as you can see here:

Just to be clear: this shot was no accident. I created the image using a specific combination of ornaments, lighting, and the position of my camera (as well as the usual exposure settings, of course) and also no small degree of patience. I don’t remember where we got this particular ornament but I enjoy its message, despite living in Oklahoma where we only rarely get snow and even more rarely have snow on Christmas. Perhaps it’s the Minnesotan in me still poking out every now and then :) In any case, the ornament by itself didn’t make for all that interesting of a picture. What I really tried to do here was craft a complete composition using other objects in the background—namely the red wire tree, but also a silver bell, of sorts, that is hanging just behind the red tree which you can’t really see in the shot. I positioned those background ornaments, as well as some of the lights on the tree, to create a scene that was full of multicolored points of light reflecting off the surface of the ornament and also creating something to look at besides just the main subject.

I shot this at f/11 on my 105mm macro lens, ISO 100, and a 2-second exposure which is where my patience really started to wear thin. The ornament had a habit of twisting back and forth at the smallest provocation, which meant that even my kids walking through the other room created enough vibration to sully the shot. However, it didn’t take long until I had the image I was going for and was able to put away my camera and get back to what really matters: my family.

And with that I hope you had a good Christmas and are looking forward to a 2023 full of new opportunities, surrounded by love from family and friends. May God bless you now and throughout the new year, whatever that may bring.

If you saw last week’s photo, this shot of a leaf on the water should be pretty familiar to you. And to be honest, I thought about not using it at all for this week’s picture because not only is it so similar to last week’s, but I shot it about five minutes after taking the other one too. Is it really fair to put up two photos that are so alike, taken in such close (physical and temporal) proximity? Well it is my blog, and I do get to decide…so why not? :) Also, though this post is coming a mere four days before Christmas, the theme of the photo is decidedly unrelated to the impending holiday. Read nothing into that! I schedule my Weekly Fifty posts several weeks in advance, and as I write this on November 11, there just isn’t too many Christmas-related photo opportunities around me.

Anyway, on to the photo. Though it bears more than a passing resemblance to its counterpart from last week, it also contains some notable differences. The first, and most noticeable, is obviously the presence of many other objects on the surface of the water. Namely, several brown cypress needles along with one bit of greenery that hasn’t quite given up the ghost. Or, at least, had not as of the time I took the photo. There’s clearly one main subject–the yellow leaf–but lots of other things on the same focal plane almost as if to complement the subject or at least add some context and visual flair to the photo. Subtle indentations in the surface tension are a bit more abundant in this image as well, and one thing you don’t see are the (probably more than one hundred) bits of dirt and dust that I removed from the image in Lightroom. There’s always more, but at some point it becomes a bit reductive, and at some point I just said “enough is enough” and uploaded the picture to Flickr in the state that you see it here.

Just like last week’s, this was a lot of fun to take. I bent out over the bank of Theta Pond with my D750 and macro lens held up to my eye, used my traditional technique of back-button-focusing to keep the leaf nice and sharp, and fired off a couple dozen shots as the scene shifted and changed below me right before my eyes. I like that this shot has basically two distinct layers: the surface of the water and everything underneath, which was only a few inches away but very blurry due to the ultra-shallow depth of field inherent when taking close-up shots like this.

Since taking this shot the weather has shifted and I think the throngs of winter might finally be here to stay, though doubtless we will still see plenty of pleasant days over the next several months. Even so, I think the photo opportunities around me will start to change dramatically, and as always at this time of year I’m excited to see what’s coming just around the corner.

Merry Christmas, everyone. God bless you all :)

I have written a few times about how one of my favorite types of photos to take is also one of the simplest possible in terms of composition: a clear subject against a blurry background. These kinds of pictures are not going to rock the boat or win any awards for creativity, but they are supremely fun and rewarding to take and I feel like every time I shoot a picture like this I learn something from it. This one is a slightly different take on that same theme because the subject isn’t really in front of the background, but more on top of the background. Perhaps that’s just some silly semantic fiddling, but while it might not matter in terms of the final result it mattered a great deal for how I arrived at the final result.

I took this photo while out on a walk around Theta Pond at Oklahoma State University about two days before we were hit with a really bad cold front. It was a rather warm Tuesday afternoon and I had my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens with me, and when I saw this little leaf floating near the edge of the pond I thought it would make for a great photo opportunity. Turns out taking a photo of said leaf was a lot easier to conceptualize than it was to execute.

I needed a good vantage point from which to take this picture, and really the only option was to point my camera straight down at the leaf. Since Live View autofocus on the D750 is really slow (thanks to being contrast-detect instead of phase-detect) I instead had to kind of brace my feet awkwardly out to the side, lean out, put my camera up to my eye, look down through the viewfinder, and fire off as many shots as I could in rapid succession. The light on the water quickly complicated matters, as subtle ripples on the surface sent sunbeams scattering in all directions which dramatically interfered with the shot I was trying to take. Also, this leaf didn’t exactly stay put and I had to follow it as it floated along lazily by the bank. I used f/4.8 to get the leaf sharp while blurring the background, which was only a few inches below but when shooting a subject at such a close distance it doesn’t take much for things to get out of focus.

When I loaded this photo in Lightroom two things immediately surprised me that I did not notice while I was out by the pond. First, there were dozens and dozens of spots of dirt, dust, and other imperfections on the surface. I eliminated many of them with the Healing tool, but if you go to Flickr and look at the high-resolution original you’ll see hundreds of spots that still remain. (It was a matter of time, really: I didn’t want to spend all afternoon removing dust specks.)

The other cool little element about this picture that I didn’t notice in the moment is the tiny little fly using the leaf as its own personal watercraft. Just goes to show you never really know what you’re going to get when you go out to take pictures :)

I often talk about seeing photo opportunities in everyday life, and looking for chances to take pictures where you might not find them. This shot is kind of a twist on that old chestnut because I’ve been looking for this particular photo opportunity for quite some time, but never really took the time to make it happen. Often have I watched steam rise my mug of morning tea in the early sunlight, and considered capturing it in a photograph, but never have I actually gone so far as to actually do it. Either I’m busy helping my kids get ready for school, or the light shifts before I can do anything, or I just get lazy and don’t act when I easily could. But on a chilly Sunday morning in early November as we were getting ready for church, I once again noticed the white wisps of steam escaping from my oversized mug of tea (I use two bags of green tea and two packets of stevia) and finally decided to, as they say, not throw away my shot.

I ran to get my tripod, mounted my D750 and 105mm macro lens on it, composed a shot with the mug close to the camera, and fired off a couple clicks of the shutter. And…nothing. I mean, I got a few shots but I was disappointed in what I was seeing. They just weren’t interesting at all. Turns out there’s a lot I don’t know about taking a picture of steam rising from a mug of tea.

First of all, the overall composition of the photograph: I needed to back up, way up, so as to get more in the frame. Initially I just got the mug with a few inches of space above it, but that wasn’t nearly enough to capture the beauty of the backlit steam. I scooted my tripod back, made room for a lot more verticality, and that took care of the first problem.* Also, I deliberately chose not to alter the scene in any way. I thought about moving around the mug, the strings on the tea bags, the spoon handle, even the papers on the counter top, but instead opted to leave everything as it was with no changes at all. I think it just felt a bit more authentic that way.

Next, the steam: how to capture it? I originally thought a long exposure would be best because I wanted to get a sense of the flowing, dynamic, almost ethereal scene in front of me and I thought a 1-2 second exposure would do that really well. Turns out…not so much. The longer I dragged the shutter, the less interesting my shots looked. Instead of neat puffs of steam, you could just see a mass of white cloud-like gas floating above the mug. It really wasn’t anything special at all. What I realized was that a fast, but not too fast, shutter gave me just what I was looking for. The image you see here is a 1/45 second shutter which was just enough time to freeze the motion of the steam, but also leave barely-perceptible trails, almost like echoes in time, of the steam as it moved about in that fraction of a second. If you click on the picture and go to the full-size version on Flickr, and then zoom way in, you’ll see what I mean. It’s an extremely subtle effect, but it’s there, and that’s what matters to me.

Finally, the editing: Contrary to my other recent images I did crop this just a bit to tighten things up on the bottom of the image. I also left the mug much darker than I would normally do, rather than bringing up the shadows to get more dynamic range in the image. Again, it’s kind of a subtle editing decision but one that I’m glad I made.

I don’t know if I’ll take this kind of shot again any time soon, but I would like to experiment some more and see what I can come up with. It was a really fun learning experience and one that I’m sure will come in handy down the line at some point.

*I did consider taking a vertical shot…for about 0.68 seconds. I just don’t like taking vertical shots. Don’t know why. Can’t explain why. But it is what it is.

My brother Phil and I were talking about macro photography recently, and how nice it is to be able to envision a picture in your head and then know that you have both the experience and the gear to make that shot happen. It’s something I have really come to appreciate about lots of different types of photography, but especially close-up shots like this one. I used to see pictures in magazines or online publications and think that the people who took them had some kind of unreachable, unattainable mystic quality that allowed them to take such stunning images, but the more I learned and experimented with my own photography the more I realized that such things really were within my grasp. And the grasp of anyone, really. So when my kids and I were eating breakfast on a Friday morning, and I saw this jar of hot sauce sitting on the table with beads of condensation shimmering in the light, I immediately thought about taking a picture just like one I might see on some kind of product advertisement. And I knew I was pretty sure I could pull it off :)

I quickly ran to get my Nikon D750, 105mm macro lens, and tripod while also reminding my kids to eat their breakfast and try to finish before their mother was out of the shower. I scooted the bottle close to the camera, focused with the lens, and then set about tweaking all the little settings that make such a huge difference with close-up photography. The first thing I did was look for a way to eliminate the background, and for that I just put our iPad on a little vertical stand behind the bottle of hot sauce. Problem solved! Next I looked at the bottle and thought about what I wanted to photograph, and how to photograph it. I really liked the light reflecting off the condensation so I wanted that to be the main draw, but then also have enough of the bottle in the shot to provide a sense of overall context. Instead of moving my camera around I just scooted the bottle to different spots on the table until I found just the right location for this shot. (And again, as has become a recent custom…no cropping of the final image!)

Finally, the all-important aperture setting. F/4? F/8? F/22? I shot a few at wider apertures and then some at f/11, just in case I needed it but I thought f/8 would be the sweet spot. Turns out I was wrong–f/11 was the right one. When I loaded my shots into Lightroom I didn’t like the wider aperture shots at all, and in retrospect I think I could have gone even smaller than f/11. Razor-thin depth of field is not nearly as cool as I thought it would be before I got a macro lens, though of course I do appreciate the ability to have it if I need it.

The best part about all this was how I got to involve my kids in the whole thing. They helped me compose the shot, they looked at the rear LCD screen with me as we were figuring out exposure settings, and they got real excited when they saw the final shot too. The whole experience only took a matter of minutes (they had to get to school and I couldn’t spend all morning fiddling with my camera) but it was a unique little project and one that I’m glad we took the time to do.