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

I’m not sure how I feel about this picture.

There are some things I really like about it, and others, well, I just don’t quite know. Is it good? Sure, in a lot of ways it really is. But in some other ways it doesn’t quite work or fails entirely. It’s weird. I honestly can’t quite make up my mind on this one, and I’m really curious what you think.

At the risk of sounding a bit too self-deprecating (which is not my intention, mind you. I prefer to engage in introspection and reflection, and I hope that’s how this analysis comes across) let’s take a look at the things that I like about this picture. What works well, I suppose you might say, if this were some kind of customer-service survey :)

I really like the rich textures on display here. The subtle grooves and crevasses, the way the light bounces off the edges of the leaf and glistens on every little bump and indentation lend this dying specimen an entirely new life right in front of your eyes. Do yourself a favor and click through to the original on Flickr, view it at full resolution, and you’ll see what I mean. I also like how I was able to capture the subject as it hung delicately between the arms of some kind of native Oklahoma plant, caught on its way to the ground from the tree above as if it were saying I got you, man!

Also of note: the entirely out-of-focus background which almost seems like broad brush strokes, crossing the frame in wide swaths of dull earth tones. For that you can thank the f/8 aperture which I find myself using so often in my close-up photography, along with the AI noise reduction feature in Lightroom which transformed this ISO 5600 shot into one that looks as if it were taken at ISO 100. Whatever magic Adobe bakes into that algorithm, it just works. And finally, the pièce de résistance, if you will, is the drop of water hanging precariously from the base of the stem. It’s a subtle but meaningful touch that elevates the image beyond just a simple leaf stuck in a brown plant.

So what’s not to like? Why am I so harsh on this photo? As much as it succeeds in some important areas, it entirely collapses in others essential elements of photography. For one, the color. A yellow subject against a yellow-and-brown background does not a good image make, no matter how sharp the former and how blurry the latter. I have trouble distinguishing the subject from the other elements, and that’s not a good thing. I also don’t like the placement, with the leaf just a bit too far off center. There’s an odd gap on the right side that could have been easily alleviated had I just composed the image with the leaf scooted over just a bit. A rookie mistake, to be sure, but one that I’m clearly still learning to overcome even after all these years :)

Finally, I don’t like how the withered, dry branch juts down awkwardly from the left side of the leaf. If it was long enough to stick out the top it might work, but as it is…it just feels weird and unsettling.

And so I’ll close with this: I view this picture as an opportunity to learn and grow. The good things? Keep doing them. The things that didn’t quite work? Maybe find a way to avoid them next time. And through it all, just keep taking pictures and enjoying the process.

One of my favorite times to take photos is after a rain, especially if the weather is mild and not freezing, excessively windy, or other such adverse condition. Another ideal opportunity is in the morning when the sun is just peeking over the horizon. But when you combine the two, you can really see something special–as long as you’ve got your eyes open and are looking for it, that is. When I left for work on one such morning I made sure to bring my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens along with me, and on the short walk between my car and my office on the Oklahoma State University campus I made sure to keep my eyes peeled in an effort to actively seek out something to photograph: a subject, a scene, a mood, or anything else that might look good when captured with my camera.

I soon came across this small cluster of yellow leaves on a tree near the Library building, and two things immediately stood out to me: the shiny reflection cast by the sunlight behind me hitting the wet leaf in the middle, and the the bright spot of light in the background produced by a yellow lamp at the edge of a sidewalk. (Another nice thing about shooting photos in the early morning: lights such as that one haven’t yet been switched off for the day, which means it’s possible to get some really fun lighting conditions that simply are not present for the rest of the day.) Instead of shooting into the low sun, which I have done a few times recently on rainy mornings, I decided to put the sun to my back and use it to highlight the wet portion of the leaf while capturing the dim light shining from the lamp post across the way. It was a best-of-both-worlds situation and I think I did a pretty good job of capturing the scene in the way I hoped to.

I shot this at 105mm, of course, with a fairly wide aperture of f/4.8 partly to turn the lamp into a large blurry spot of yellow but also to get a relatively low ISO of 1600. Much smaller on the aperture front and this would have quickly gone up to 3200 or 6400 ISO which, while not unacceptable and certainly something I could deal with in Lightroom, would still have been less than ideal. I really wanted the richness of the colors and texture to show through in the final shot, and f/4.8 gave me just what I was looking for.

The other compositional element that proved to be a tad tricky was positioning myself such that the three main elements (green leaves, yellow leaves, and lamp light) were arranged just so. There wasn’t a lot I could do for the leaves, but I did put myself in a specific spot such that the blur of light was cradled neatly between two sharp points of yellow. I had to take a dozen shots to get one that looked just like this, but in the end I’m really happy with how it turned out and glad I was able to spend a minute or two taking this shot before the sun got higher, the lamps were turned off, and the magic of the scene gave way to what was, by probably anyone’s account including my own, just another normal day. But even normal days can be special too :)

This photo is kind of a companion, you might say, to another sunrise photo I shared recently. Both share some obvious features such as a clear horizon, a warm color gradient as the sky changes from dark to light, trees in the foreground, and so on. But it’s the differences that really make each image stand out in its own way, and the more you look at them the more distinct and different each one becomes. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions of course, and I’m not going to say that either one is better or worse than the other. Rather, I hope you (and I, if I’m being honest) find something interesting and unique about each image–and maybe something to critique or learn from also.

Instead of comparing the two, I’ll (mostly) just try to focus on what’s going on with this one and let the other speak for itself. I shot this in a location I’ve used several times before, and it’s one I quite like not just for its photogenic qualities but because it offers a moment of calm and serenity before I start the day at work. It’s a field about a quarter mile from our house which my wife and I walk past almost every day, and if I think conditions are going to be good for photography I make it a point to drive past in the morning before heading to the office. That was the case here; the sun was low on the horizon, the sky was clear, and the wind almost nonexistent, so I grabbed my camera as I headed out the door just in case things worked out to get a good shot.

They sure did :)

I drove up to the edge of the field, got out of my car, grabbed my Nikon D750 and 80-200mm f/2.8 lens, and walked about fifty yards to the east so I could compose a shot without the overhead power lines getting in the frame. I didn’t have a tripod so I had to shoot at f/2.8 to get a decent shutter speed in the low light (and even then, my camera’s Auto-ISO selected a value of 2800 to get a 1/180 second shutter) and after playing around with a couple different focal lengths I ended up with the 112mm picture you see here.

I really wanted to capture more of a feeling than anything here: a sense of scale, perspective, perhaps awe or even just a bit of contemplation. The trees silhouetted against the coming dawn, the shift from dark to light, the single star in the top-left corner, the inky black foreground (which you might notice is a far cry from the sunrise image I shared two weeks ago) all work together, I hope, to make you, the viewer, pause if only for a moment and not just think about something but feel something. Exactly what? That’s up to you. All I did was press the shutter button :)

Ok look, after all this time you should probably know that I’m not great when it comes to titles. But for some reason this week’s shot made me think of this song, and the title just kind of followed naturally. Maybe it’s because the only way to get a picture like this one is to wake up early, or maybe because it’s just a really good song that tends to get stuck in my mind every now and then. Either way, well, let’s get to the photo already :)

A few weeks ago I talked about how one of the most important things you can do to get better photos is to just have your camera with you, and this is yet another example of the truth of that simple little maxim. There was nothing remarkable about this scene at all–just a small outdoor space in the native plant corridor going east/west across the Oklahoma State University campus–and I nearly walked past it altogether without giving it a second thought. But then I realized there might be a photo opportunity and, since I had my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens in hand, I might as well take a minute and see if there would be a photo opportunity in this otherwise mundane scene.

Rather than keep the sun at my back, I turned around and faced almost directly into it as it was peeking over the horizon. The effect was kind of cool, though I don’t think that somewhat pedestrian adjective quite describes what I’m thinking. It’s been a busy day. The dry…um…plant thing (I’m no botanist, that’s for sure) was lit up like yellow lights on a skinny Christmas tree, which was about what I expected. What took me by surprise was how the entire rest of the frame shimmered and glowed, with bits of light dancing all around, nearly setting the scene ablaze. I also liked how much the rich red bricks of the building in the background contrasted with the bright yellows, the entire composition ending up with a surreal almost otherworldly quality to it.

I didn’t really know what to do for exposure settings so I just kind of took a guess and shot at f/8, 1/180 second, ISO 720. (Yay Auto-ISO!) A bit of AI Denoise in Lightroom cleaned things up dramatically, and after a few other minor tweaks to a couple of sliders I got the image you see here. It was a fun and incredibly rewarding reminder of how sometimes you can get really good photos in the most unexpected places. Just make sure you have your camera with you :)

I almost used this photo as my first shot for 2026. I thought it would be a pleasant way to ring in the new year, even though my first photo of said year would not appear here on the blog until several days after the year began. No matter, I thought. I could come up with a couple metaphors to apply here, having to do with the start of something new, bright things ahead, and so on.

So what happened? Why didn’t this image appear in conjunction with a change of the calendar? Honestly, and this is going to sound kind of silly, but I promise it’s true: I just forgot. I almost never put up photos on Weekly Fifty that coincide with any temporal calendar events and, if I do, it’s usually just a coincidence. In this case, it’s kind of the opposite in that I actually did think about using this as my first photo of 2026 when I took it, but ended up waiting until a few weeks later because it, as Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up, just slipped my mind.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how one of the most important things you can do if you want to take good pictures is to have a camera with you. It seems kind of silly, and pretty obvious, but it really is foundational to any good photography. Or even any bad photography. Any photography at all, really, requires a camera. And so it went with this shot: the only reason I was able to capture this scene is because I had my camera with me. I was on my way to my son’s high school cross country meet about an hour away, about ten minutes behind the team bus and just kind of enjoying the early morning drive when I looked to the east and saw the horizon positively glowing as the sun crested the line of tree-covered hills in the distance. I didn’t know if it would even be possible to capture the magnificence of the scene but I thought I might as well at least give it a try.

I pulled off on a dirt road and drove a couple hundred yards down the deep red tracks left by other cars that had traveled the same path, my tires kicking up rusty splotches of mud against the side of my car. A minute later I pulled off on a patch of brown grass, got out my Nikon D500 with 70-200mm f/2.8 lens–my favorite combination for getting photos of the cross country team–and fired off a couple shots of the sunrise. The sun was so dim that even at f/2.8 I was getting an exposure of 1/80 second at ISO 1800; a smaller aperture would have been better for overall depth of field, but not great for shutter or ISO. The crop sensor D500 is ideal for sports and action, but definitely not my first choice for landscapes or any kind of low light situation.

I got about a dozen photos at various focal lengths, and in the end was pretty happy with this one at 112mm. (Again, on a crop sensor so you figure about 155mm or so full-frame.) Lightroom Denoise did an incredible job of cleaning up the, what in my mind was a pretty excessive amount of noise, and a couple other manual tweaks to color, saturation, etc., resulted in the image you see here. It was a fun photo to take of a scene that doesn’t really seem like Oklahoma, but does go to show that there’s more to this state than people might realize :)