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

In September 2018 a new park opened up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called The Gathering Place. It was the culmination of years of work to turn a blighted stretch of riverfront into a center for kids to play, adults to walk, and people of all ages to learn, grow, and explore. It wasn’t until the summer of 2019 that we finally made it to this park and we were certainly not disappointed. My family was there for several hours and I would guess we saw about one-third of the park, and we are already looking forward to our next trip where we can hopefully experience a lot more of what The Gathering Place has to offer.

That brings me to this week’s photo, which you would never know was shot at this particular location. It could have been taken almost anywhere and nothing about this indicates that it’s part of a much larger recreation area, but I think that’s what I like about it. The picture is kind of a metaphor for the park as a whole: it’s a spot of calm in the midst of a sea of urban activity, and within that park this little butterfly (moth, perhaps?) found its own little nexus of peace and quiet.

As I often do, I had my Fuji X100F with me and immediately put it in “kind of close-up” mode, which is to say I dialed the aperture to f/2.8, made sure the Manual+Electronic shutter was engaged so I could shoot with as fast of a shutter speed as I needed to, and made sure Auto-ISO was set with the proper minimum shutter speed (just in case!) to freeze motion. I learned a while ago that shooting close subjects at f/2 on the X100F is kind of a nonstarter because the lens loses a lot of its sharpness, and f/2.8 mitigates most of that while still giving you plenty of background blur so you can focus on your subject. While this is certainly no macro lens, it does let you get decent shots like this without too much effort.

This is the third in a series of long-exposure sunset pictures I took at Milford Lake in June, 2019.

Alright, first things first: I know this isn’t Sunset Cove. The real Sunset Cove is located on Cass Lake in northern Minnesota and it’s where my extended family went for a week each summer from roughly 2000-2012, give or take. That being said, the name seemed quite à propos for this week’s photo give that there is both a sunset and a cove.

The fun part about taking this particular photo was that there was basically no wind at all, which meant that I could leave the shutter open for a good long while and still get perfectly sharp leaves, twigs, and trees. In setting up the image I used what I learned from the two previous nights as far as metering, time of day, height from the surface of the water, etc., and I was also quite careful to place my camera in such a way that the various components of the image (such as the tower on the right and the tree sticking out of the water just to its left) were right where I wanted them to be. I focused manually, as on the previous images, which made me really appreciate the X100F’s ability to use focus peaking.

I used similar settings too, such as f/16, ISO 200, and a 30-second exposure to get the metering right before switching to Bulb mode. To get this shot I left the shutter open for almost 3 minutes and even in that time you can see how little movement there was in the trees, as each leaf is basically tack sharp. Even though this picture doesn’t exactly show the sunset, which was out of the frame on the left side, it still clearly shows a warm orange glow as the sun worked its way down and the cool night air began to settle in.

This was a fun way to end our annual trip to the resort, and a good reminder of what was really important: family. I purposely didn’t spend too much time here taking the photo, and as soon as I got this shot I ran back to the cabin to play cards with my wife and siblings. Because all the pictures in the world aren’t worth a good night of cards, chips, and queso dip with family.

Side note: For reference on how full the lake was this year, here’s a shot from roughly the same location in 2013. Everything you see in the foreground was completely underwater.

This is the first in a series of long-exposure sunset photo I’m going to share with you, all of which were taken in June of 2019 at Milford Lake, Kansas. Each year since 2012 our family has spent a few days at a resort on what is, apparently, one of the largest lakes in Kansas and it has yielded some really nice photo opportunities in the past. This year I wanted to try something a bit different and do some long exposures, which were only made possible thanks to the purchase of a cable-release for my Fuij X100F. It’s a simple, no-frills piece of gear I had been thinking about buying for quite some time, and I’m so glad I finally got one. I don’t see myself using it every day, but it sure was fun to see the creative possibilities it unlocked when shooting long exposures.

This was shot on the evening of June 22, and earlier in the day my kids, some of their cousins, and I came across this scene while out walking around:

What you might not know from looking at this is that there should not be any water here at all. When we visited the resort this year the lake was at almost-historic levels, and everything in this picture used to be either dry ground or a parking lot. In fact if you look really closely you can see, just to the right of the tree, a metal railing leading downward alongside what used to be a staircase. So yeah, it was kind of an interesting year at the lake.

When I saw this scene with a tree in the middle of what looked like a lake I thought it would make for an interesting picture, so I returned that evening as the sun was setting and tried to capture in my camera what I was seeing in my mind. Calculating exposures when shooting in Bulb Mode is a little tricky, but I started by setting my aperture at f/16, activating the three-stop ND filter in my camera, and metering the scene based on a 30-second exposure. When that was showing about one stop of underexposure I switched to Bulb mode and left the shutter open for 77 seconds, which smoothed out any motion in the water along with giving the sky a bit of a painted feel, with clouds showing a bit of a wispy look. The slight breeze also gave the tree leaves a bit of a blur which I didn’t like too much, but it’s not nearly as bad in this shot as it was in some of the others I got.

All in all I had a lot of fun taking this picture, and it set the stage for two more long-exposure images that I would go on to capture over the next two nights.

Once again I have my friend Gina to thank for this photo, who has given me several other picture ideas over the years and whose input I always appreciate having when it comes to photography. With all the rain we had this past spring there were all sorts of animals around that we don’t normally see, or perhaps just don’t notice, especially the creepy crawly variety. As we were chatting at work one soggy morning in May she asked if I had my camera with me and suggested that I go out and take some pictures of snails that were hanging around on a particular sidewalk near our building. I didn’t, but I thanked her for the suggestion and the very next morning I showed up with my Nikon D750, 50mm lens, and (you know it) my set of close-up filters to see what I could find.

Sure enough, I soon found a whole rout of snails so I got out my camera, attached the +10 filter, and set to work. The first thing I realized is that height was definitely going to be an issue: my camera was too far off the ground to get a really good look at any of the snails head-on! I would have liked to get some shots that were more at eye level, but that wasn’t really an option given the equipment and time I was working with, so I made the most of the situation anyway. I don’t normally use my +10 filter because it’s just too close for most situations I encounter, but it proved quite adept at capturing pictures of snails. I was able to get really close to this one, and others, and shot with a fairly small aperture of f/8 to get a wide enough depth of field so you could actually see what was going on. And even then, as you can see in the picture, the total in-focus area was only as wide as a few grains of sand! Thankfully these snails moved really slow or else it would have been a total wash.

At one point I went so far as to pick up one of the snails, set it on a leaf a few inches off the ground, and wait for it to come back out of its shell for a photograph. Sadly it did not oblige, though I can certainly understand its trepidation, and the best I could get in that scenario was a picture its shell sitting on the leaf:

While this picture was a little more colorful it was also a lot less lively, and in the end I decided I would rather have a photo that shows the actual snail and not just its portable abode. But who knows…one day maybe I’ll get a picture that does both :)

It’s been a rough couple of months here in the Midwest, and hopefully by the time you read this the sun will be shining and the waters will have receded a bit! We capped a chilly winter with a very wet and rainy spring that saw rivers well over their banks, lakes swelling, and farmland inundated with more water than it could handle. The day after I took this image we got yet another all-night downpour and Theta Pond, which was right behind me as I shot the picture, was more like Theta Reservoir and a little waterfall was pouring onto University Avenue because of it. And thus the name of the picture reflects the conditions in which it was shot, which was an abnormally sunny day in the midst of lots of cloudy ones.

My inspiration for this photo was a few images that I recently posted which I took with my niece when she was in town. It’s weird how the simple act of going out to take photos of flowers can be so soothing, and a good way to slow down and enjoy the simple things in life. There’s flowers all around, especially at this time of year, and yet how many times have I thought to myself “There’s nothing to take pictures of?” (Answer: way too many times.) So I figured I would do just that, and it was a nice way to slow down for a bit which also resulted in a cool photo.

As is normal for me when I use my X100F I shot this in JPEG and used the Velvia film simulation so I wouldn’t have to do a lot of RAW editing. I shot wide open at f/2.0 to get a bit of foreground/background separation, and I think (though I’m not exactly sure) I used the electronic shutter so I could get a proper exposure despite shooting wide open. I used to activate the ND filter for situations like this, but that often slowed down the focusing so I’ve been using the electronic shutter instead and for the most part it works quite well, especially outdoors.