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

Yet another picture in the long line tradition of finding photo opportunities on my way to work. This one was just off the sidewalk between two buildings on campus about 7:25am as the sun was just peeking over the horizon and the grass was still wet with morning dew. I had my Fuji X100F with me in case the chance to take a picture arose, and wouldn’t you know it, I straight-up ignored this one that was right in front of my eyes. I saw this patch of grass, thought about taking a picture for roughly one and a half seconds, and then kept on walking because…well, I don’t really know why.

A little while later I thought to myself Why didn’t I just take a picture? and since I had no good answer, I turned around, pulled out my camera, and fired off a couple of shots. I was using the Classic Chrome film simulation which is why the greens look a little cold and, dare I say it, washed-out compared to if I had shot this with my Nikon and edited the RAW file in Lightroom. Though I might have made different choices regarding color rendition using the latter process, I’ve really tried to embrace the simplicity of shooting JPG and have appreciated spending less time fiddling with sliders on my computer than I used to. And so, what you see is what you get and I’m fine with that.

I really wanted to get some shallow depth of field with this, but when shooting with a 23mm lens you have to a) use a really wide aperture and b) get pretty close to your subject. Thankfully I was able to do both but that meant a trade-off in overall sharpness because using the X100F at its maximum aperture of f/2 gives close-up subjects a bit of a wistful, dreamy quality. Or as a lot of internet reviewers point out, a lack of sharpness. It doesn’t bother me that much since you have to zoom way in to see that the edges of the piece of grass in the center aren’t razor sharp, but it’s something that most people (myself included) probably won’t notice.

What makes this image unique for me is the dew in the foreground and the yellow sunlight glow in the background, both of which create a sense of calm and peacefulness and hopefully help the viewer feel, in some small way, something similar to what I felt on that chilly humid morning in late August when I shot this. A few seconds later I was back on my way to work but it felt nice knowing I was able to capture a small slice of what the morning had to offer :)

This is the kind of picture that, if you don’t live in the midwest, you might think anyone in Nebraska, Kansas, or Oklahoma could take any time they wanted to. After all what could be more emblematic of the Great Plains than a dirt road, corn fields, and an endless blue sky? Interestingly, scenes like this are not actually all that common here and most of the time a picture like this would also include farm houses, silos, tractors, barns, or even buildings and cities on the horizon. You’ll also notice that the scene here isn’t exactly flat either. Rather it’s a slow undulation of earth that feels casual, homely, and downright comfortable.

True, there are plenty of flat spots in the midwest United States but there’s a lot of variation too which is why I stopped to take this photo on a recent trip from Minnesota to Oklahoma. It kind of hits several Midwestern stereotypes in a single frame, none of which are a true representation of what we’re all about here but all of which are parts of the whole. We’ve got corn and dirt roads but that’s not all there is. Though no matter where you go up and down and across these plains you’re sure to find a great blue sky, provided it’s not storming at the time :)

I shot this with my Fuji X100F which is great for many different purposes but perhaps not quite ideal for landscapes as you can see here. A wider lens would have been nice but alas, the Fuji is stuck firmly at 23mm (unless you have a wide-angle adapter, which I do not) and as such I had to make the best out of what I had available. The bigger questions for me when taking this shot were what angle do I shoot at, what height do I position the camera, and how far down the road do I travel? Truth be told I didn’t really consider the final issue that much since I just wanted to get on with my trip (Highway 75 is about 1/4 mile behind me in this shot) but I did take a handful of shots at different angles and positions before getting one I was really happy with.

Note: If you’re sick of me talking about my Fuji X100F and have gotten into the habit of rolling your eyes whenever you see it mentioned here…get ready to scroll past this post entirely and move on to a different blog :)

This photo was taken along the Historic Cave Tour in Mammoth Cave National Park during our 10-day family trip across the midwest United States earlier this year. As I mentioned in last week’s post the only camera I brought with me on this vacation was my Fuji X100F because I knew it would be small enough to bring everywhere we went but capable of handling almost anything I would want to take pictures of. Including, as it turned out, photos of near-dark caves hundreds of feet underground.

I’ve been in the habit of shooting in JPG mode on my X100F because I quite like the Classic Chrome film simulation and found that if I get my exposure right in camera (which is easier to do thanks to an electronic viewfinder) I don’t really need to adjust anything in Lightroom. But walking in caves would require something more so I shot in RAW the whole time we were on these tours. There was almost no light at all down in those ancient tunnels save for some sparsely-placed incandescent bulbs at intermittent spots along the way, which meant I shot almost every picture with very little light at all. I took every picture at f/2.0, ISO 6400, and even then most of the images needed shutter speeds of 1/20 or slower just to get something even worth salvaging. This picture, for instance, required a +.8 exposure adjustment along with shadows lifted by nearly 100 and it still looks dim.

Probably the trickiest part of shooting in the caves was the focusing, or lack thereof. Autofocus is not the X100F’s strong point and even in good light it can be a bit slow. (At least compared to my Nikons or pretty much every other camera available.) In the labyrinth of underground passages it was nearly useless and I had to focus manually at times which was also a bit of a sticky wicket because even looking through the viewfinder I could barely see anything. Most of the time I found myself autofocusing on anything even remotely bright which is what I did here–I focused on the white patch of light in the distance and hoped for the best. The results ranged from fair to midland with a couple standouts like this one here which I liked because the people (i.e. my son and his cousin) help give a sense of scale to the surroundings.

Ah yes, another Theta Pond Squirrel photo. What can I say…I like taking (and sharing) these! One thing I’ve realized as I take squirrel photos is that they’re more interesting, to me anyway, if the subject in question is actually doing something. I’ve got plenty of squirrel photos where the little Sciuridaes are sitting or staring but while the images might be technically competent they aren’t as visually compelling. To wit: a sharp, focused, well-composed image of a squirrel just sitting around is, at the end of the day, just a shot of a squirrel sitting around. It’s not interesting or compelling and certainly doesn’t tell a story.

This picture though, with a squirrel in a tree holding a crust of bread, is compelling for a couple of reasons. First, the critter is in a tree and not on the ground which…I dunno. It seems more interesting to me somehow. Second, he (she? I have no idea) isn’t holding an acorn but a bit of bread so clearly he (I’m just going to run with it) must have got it from a person. Since this is Theta Pond and geese are everywhere, clearly this little guy had to act quick before an avian friend swooped in to snatch his prize. Finally, the bright green and white behind the squirrel make it stand out much more than if it were on the ground or set against some leaves. I shot this at 200mm with an f/2.8 aperture and was quite pleased with how sharp the resulting image ended up, though perhaps I should have erred on the side of caution just a bit and went with f/4. But all’s well that ends well, right?

One other aspect of this photo that you wouldn’t know just by looking at the image is that the person who gave the bread to the animal was, in fact, my six-year-old son. I was taking some photos of people and he was hanging out at the pond with me, and he was ecstatic at the opportunity to engage with some of the local fauna by way of a hot dog bun. He asked if I could take some shots of squirrels and I gladly obliged, and even let him take a few of his own which I normally don’t do when using the big camera and lens, but sometimes you just gotta go for it and let the kids experiment. All this results in a picture that hits all my check marks while also reminding me of a fun time I spent with my child, which is a nice bit of extra icing on the photographic cake :)

Each year my family takes a vacation at Milford Lake in Kansas and each year I try to take a couple of images that would work well here on the blog. In the past I’ve made it a point to bring my 50mm lens, sometimes with accompanying close-up filters, to get shots of nature that are a bit different from my usual slew of Theta Pond pictures but for our 2018 trip I used (what else?) my Fuji X100F almost exclusively. Once again the 35mm (equivalent) focal length proved to be ideal for shots of what really matters: my wife, my kids, my siblings, all the nieces an nephews, and of course my parents and it was nice being able to use the same camera for pictures that would go here on the blog now that I’ve opened myself up to other focal lengths.

Last year my brother Andy and I went down to the boat launch as a storm rolled in and I was able to get this shot of some lightning with my 50mm lens. I thought it worked out pretty well and the longer focal length was nice since the clouds were so far away, but this year a few conditions gave me a little different photographic opportunity that resulted in a photo I think is much more interesting. For one, the storm was much closer than last year and a bunch of us just stood outside our cabins looking straight up at the sky to see a brilliant display of lightning overhead. Also because I had my X100F instead of a 50mm lens I was able to get a much broader view of the scene that simply would not have been possible otherwise. I used a Gorillapod instead of a standard tripod which turned out to work pretty well and actually kept my camera quite stable during longer exposures.

I shot about ten images of the clouds and lightning with shutter speeds around 30 seconds but then I decided to angle my camera down to get some trees at the bottom of the image as a way of providing a sense of scale and context. My shots of clouds with lightning bolts searing through the sky were interesting but not all that compelling because there was nothing to provide a sense of where this was happening in relation to the viewer, whereas this one and a couple others like it did a lot more to make the image seem more personal and relatable. I shot at f/14 to get a super wide depth of field, ISO 200 for a nice clean image, and held the shutter button down with my finger for about a minute in order to get several lightning bolts in a single image.

The one downside to this technique was that successive lightning strikes illuminated the clouds at different times which shows up in the final image as a kind of ghosting, especially with the clouds on the left. It’s not something I noticed initially and while I kind of wish it wasn’t there, I do think the tradeoff is well worth it. Shorter shutter speeds resulted in images that just weren’t all that interesting because they only contained one or two lightning bolts, and if longer shutters meant some ghosting artifacts…well, it’s all part of the fun :)