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

Last week I might have been a little uncharacteristically hard on myself, or harsh in my assessment of the photo, but one conclusion I kept returning to was that I knew I could do better. Or, maybe, that I was certain there was a better photo buried beneath the layers of overexposed yellows and odd white balance issues but I was somewhat stymied by the RAW file since I couldn’t quite make it look like how I saw the scene in real life. However, if that image was a bit far to one side of the spectrum, this week’s photo hopefully rectifies the situation or at least balances things out. This picture of a typically-purple coneflower was shot in essentially the same location (that being the bison topiary on the east side of the OSU campus) in similar conditions, but it’s a significantly better photo by any measure that I can think of. Basically, if I expressed a sense of frustration at last week’s shot because I thought I could do better, this week’s photo is me demonstrating that I can.

While I usually prefer to evaluate images on their own merits, in this case I think it’s helpful to compare this directly to its counterpart–if that one went so wrong, why did this work out so well? The first thing to consider is the lighting. I shot the first one in the morning just as the sun was coming up when other sources of light, such as street lamps and car headlights, were still present and had a meaningful impact on the scene. I think, though I’m not entirely certain, that’s what led to the odd color cast and the reason I couldn’t quite nail the color balance when editing the RAW file. The varied light sources were competing with each other and, as a result, creating a weird mix of kelvin temperatures which made the oranges, yellows, greens, and violets collide instead of collaborate. This week’s photo was taken much later in the day when the only source of light was the sun, diffused through a layer of clouds and further scattered by drops of rain. While that meant there were no bright bokeh balls in the background, the overall lighting is much more even and brings out the rich hues of purple, red, and violet in the flower.

Another element of this photo that serves to make it a success, at least as far as I’m concerned, is the single clearly-defined subject as opposed to multiple flowers flowing vertically through the frame. Perhaps this is more of a personal stylistic preference than a broader, more universally-applicable, rule but as far as I’m concerned (and it’s my photo, and my blog, so…) the one purple coneflower taking up most of the frame, with added elements for context, makes this a stronger and more visually striking image.

The last major element that elevates this well beyond last week’s image is the significant increase in overall sharpness. Aside from a cold, clinical evaluation of the flower itself, which shows much more sharpness and detail in today’s image, the rest of the photo is sharp where it both sharp and blurry exactly where it should be. What I mean by that is, the out-of-focus elements of the earlier image (the front petals of the coneflower, the flowers on either side, the background, etc.) have an odd, almost artificial look to them that feels wrong somehow. It’s all captured in-camera, but the f/4.8 aperture ended up creating a weaker composition due to extremely shallow depth of field. Today’s image, by comparison, is far better largely due to the f/22 aperture and, as a result, depth of field being much more controlled and intentional. It’s sharp where it should be, blurry where it should be, and everything just works the way I like it.

If there’s one area I would improve in today’s composition it would be to reorient myself, if I were to travel back in time and re-shoot it, such that the secondary coneflower in the background would be positioned a little more to the left and, as a result, not intrude on the subject. It’s a minor thing though, and doesn’t really weaken the image but instead gives me something to remember for next time I find myself in this spot with these flowers.

There’s something not quite right about this photo. From a compositional standpoint I think it’s great, with a colorful coneflower right in the center, two more furled flowers framing it on either side, and some blurry spots far in the background adding a splash of light as well as depth. Not bad, right? But beyond all of that lies one critical problem: the colors are…off. The yellow petals are too bright, the purple center of the flower has a weird tin to it, the green stems on the sides are kind of pale and sickly, and the entire composition seems like it was over-processed by a bad mobile phone filter. It almost makes my eyes hurt just to look at it, and yet, here it is–featured as this week’s photo here on Weekly Fifty. So what’s the deal?

To start with, let’s take a look at the original RAW. Or, rather, a screenshot of the “Before” view in Lightroom, with relevant metadata in the top left corner.

It’s an odd amalgamation of colors, with the purple top of the flower sticking out like a sore thumb–literally. It’s the color of a skin bruise, and I don’t exactly mean that as a compliment. The orange and yellow petals in the foreground are overexposed, and the entire image has sickly pallor to it that I find strange and, to be honest, a bit disconcerting. No matter though, these kinds of issues are easily remedied when shooting in RAW…or so I thought. However, when I imported this into Lightroom and started working with the usual set of sliders, nothing really seemed to work. I couldn’t get the white balance right. The yellows were uncooperative. Even the cropping wasn’t working out. No matter what I did with the whites/blacks/highlights/shadows it just didn’t give me any good results and the color grading, saturation, vibrance…nothing worked!

I often get to the point in my editing where I feel like I’ve got a result that’s good enough and I don’t really want to work with the image anymore. Most of the it’s because I’m happy with the result and any adding minutes or hours of additional tweaking won’t really pay off by giving me that much of a better result. But in this case I honestly just kind of gave up. I don’t know what happened, but something about the original composition did just not lend itself to a final finished product.

So I’m sharing it here not because it’s a great image, but because it’s an example of my learning process as a photographer. Even though in a cold, objective, mathematical sense all the stars lined up just right with this one…from an artistic standpoint it didn’t work out at all. And that’s OK. Sometimes it’s good to have those kinds of images; they can teach us a lot more than we might realize.

One thing I keep learning, over and over, is that you can often find good photo opportunities right in front of you even in familiar spots you see every day. Sometimes it helps to change things, like the time of day or the shooting conditions (i.e. rainy, sunny, snowy, etc.) but I often find that some of my most interesting photos are taken not in exotic locations but in the same spots I frequent on a near-daily basis. As you might imagine, that’s what led to the photo you see here. I shot this photo in the formal gardens on the Oklahoma State University campus, one of the most heavily-trafficked areas at the whole school and the site of innumerable graduation selfies each spring thanks to the prominent towers of both the Library and the Student Union right nearby. I say that as a bit of a qualifier: this not an exotic location by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a simple, mundane, everyday flower in a completely normal and quite common area of one of the two largest schools in the state.

And yet.

The key difference here, much like some of the other photos I have shared recently with a single colorful flower or green plant augmented by blurry bokeh balls in the background, is that I happened to pass through the gardens much earlier in the day than normal. I parked my car on the far side of campus due to an event taking place which preempted my normal parking spot, and as I rolled through the brick paths of the formal gardens on my unicycle I made sure to keep my eyes open for any photo opportunities. This one initially presented itself as just a flower, but when I knelt down and got my camera out I noticed a gigantic bright spot not far behind it, which was actually a collection of three sidewalk lights at the top of a pole that had not yet been turned off for the day. That’s when I knew I had it: the flower, combined with the lights, was something new I had never seen before and I quickly realized I could get an interesting photo out of it.

I set my aperture to f/9.5, with Auto-ISO giving me an exposure of 1/250 second at ISO 1800, and fired off a couple clicks of the shutter with the flower on the left side and the ball of light on the right. It was similar to other shots I have taken with the subject immediately drawing your eye to one side of the frame followed by additional elements (in this case, a huge glowing yellow orb) to round out the rest of the image. It worked, but then it hit me: since there was only one single cluster of lights, why not try to position myself such that the flower appeared to be inside it rather than next to it.

As Jeff Goldblum would say, there it is. That was the key difference with this image, and the one thing that kind of elevated this above many of the other similar shots I have taken recently. Combining the flower and the light to create just one single subject, which also served to open up the final composition to a bit more artistic interpretation, was the missing piece of the photographic puzzle. I’m very pleased with how the final shot turned out, I hope I can find new ways of shooting familiar scenes as times goes by. It’s a lot of fun :)

A few months ago my wife and I spent the morning at a local glass blowing school learning about the process of creating beautiful works of art using glass, some simple tools, and a very hot furnace. Instead of reading or watching videos, we had the privilege of learning by doing: taking an active role in making our own glass creations alongside an incredible, and very patient, instructor. We each chose to make a paperweight–hers in the shape of a heart and mine more like a misshapen football–and in the weeks since that experience as I have looked at both of our creations I kept coming back to the thought that it would be fun to capture them with my camera. Not just a simple snapshot, but something with a degree of careful consideration and an eye for composition. Something worthy of the experience.

So I got out my tripod and a couple Nanlite Pavotubes, shut myself in the laundry room where I could utilize the smooth, reflective surface of the washing machine as I have done many times before, and took the following photo:

It was…fine. It worked in that it kind of got the point across to someone who had never seen the paperweight that it was…well…a paperweight. The picture was more utilitarian than artistic, and while it was a fun photographic experiment, I didn’t think it really did justice to the paperweight itself and the experience my wife and I had creating them. In short, I knew I could do better.

So a few days later I went back to the laundry room armed with four Pavotubes and more of an actual goal in mind for what I wanted the resulting image to look like. I dialed one to reddish-orange and the other to deep blue, and set them at a V-shaped angle behind the paperweight. (Basically, I wanted them to be adjacent to the classic tried-and-true teal and orange color scheme. It’s not going to win points for creativity, but it works really well and gets the job done quite nicely.) Then I put another light, set to a correlated color temperature of 4200K, just off to the right side while holding another 4200K light in my left hand. More on that in a bit.

I set my Nikon D750, with 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, to an exposure of f/13, 1/20 second, ISO 100 with auto-ISO disabled. I used manual mode since I wanted full control not just of the lighting and the entire setting, but the exposure as well–in this case I knew that I could make better decisions than my camera. I also used a two-second timer so as to make sure the vibration of my finger pressing the shutter did not linger and, as a result, affect the image. Finally, when the shutter clicked open I waved the fourth Pavotube from left to right above my camera which had a softening effect on the shadows, and resulted in the white horizontal stripe you can see at about the midpoint of the glass surface.

It might seem a little ironic given the somewhat heightened nature of this image, but there is no AI here at all. Not even for Denoise, since I shot it at ISO 100. I did all the editing by hand including a good deal of dust removal. (I shot this on top of my washing machine, remember. Not the ideal surface for this kind of thing, but not too bad either.) Mostly what I like about this image is how it reflects a mood or a feeling in addition to just showing a cool paperweight, and it also reminds me of a fun experience that my wife and I got to have together. And that’s the most important thing of all.

This photo was a bit of an experiment. I’m not sure if it worked, and I’m not sure what to even think about it from a purely aesthetic or artistic perspective, but it certainly is a bit different for me and a fun photo to try. Basically, I was wondering what would happen if I shot some small plants (flowers? weeds? I have no idea, but they’re just a couple inches tall and if you have any idea what they are I’d love to know.) in my neighbor’s yard with, shall we say, an extreme degree of backlighting. While last week’s photo, which was taken in roughly the same location, used backlighting to enhance the subject and create a sense of vibrant energy that was missing in photos of a flower alone, the sun-drenched background in this image overpowers the subjects altogether. It’s downright obtrusive and even feels oppressive, as if a celestial potentiometer needs to be dialed back a tick or two.

But then, that effect was kind of the point here. I can’t recall taking a picture like this before and wanted to give it a chance or, at the very least, just experiment with something new. I lowered my Nikon D750 so that it was almost resting on the ground, flipped out the rear screen, enabled the live view, and started shooting. I tried some larger apertures but eventually, in a move that will likely surprise nobody who has been following along lately, I ended up at my go-to aperture of f/11 which allowed not one, but two, of these green protrusions to be pretty well focused. I moved my camera to get them kind of along the two vertical thirds dividers, though that’s a bit charitable to the one on the right side. What really stood out to me were the edges of each plant, glowing with so much backlight that they almost appeared to be electrified. I didn’t have too much in mind for the foreground and background, but I was pretty sure that it would look interesting simply because of the vastly different kind of photo I had in mind.

In the end I think this worked out quite well, if nothing else just because it’s different from what I normally shoot. The backlighting is so extreme that the greens are nearly black and the entire image feels monochromatic as a result. Instead of one clearly easily-discernible subject right in the center of the frame there is a morass of shapes poking up from the bottom, all in different states of focus. And an entire section of the frame is so bright it’s probably clipped, with no data to recover even if I wanted to. In other words, from a technical standpoint this photo is probably not great. But from an artistic, creative, and purely Weekly Fifty standpoint, it’s a winner :)