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

I went back and forth on whether to use this as a Weekly Fifty photo, ultimately deciding to go with it even though I’m not really all that fond of the image. I shot it a few minutes after this one which I like much better, but on reviewing my Lightroom library I just couldn’t quite move on from this image despite my misgivings about it. I shot it with my 85mm lens though it would probably look much the same with a 50mm, and I think one reason I’m not all that happy with the resulting image is because it looks like the yellow flower is just sort of…floating in space. Shooting at f/1.8 on an 85mm lens leaves very little room for error when depth of field is concerned, and here you can see that even though the stem of the flower is mere inches (if that) behind the petals, it’s almost entirely blurred out due to the razor-thin DOF. To me, the resulting image just isn’t all that interesting compared to what it might have been if I shot at a smaller aperture.

And yet.

Something about the image of a yellow dot hovering as if in midair against a sea of green and red remained oddly compelling. I can’t quite put my finger on just what is interesting to me about this picture, but on second, third, and fourth look I started to appreciate something about it. It was shot just a few minutes after the other one I mentioned, and I think the combination of the yellow petals and red spots and even diffused lighting made for a scene that was much more than anything I could have created on my own if I set out to take a picture. And maybe that’s what I don’t quite get: I wouldn’t have just gone over to the neighbor’s field and shot this photograph on any normal day. It just wouldn’t have occurred to me, because it seems like a boring subject to look at. But the reality of the situation turned out to be a lot different than what I expected, and I actually find this image to be rather pleasing. Calming, even. A good way to start the day.

And some days that’s all you need.

Every now and then after it rains we get toads crawling up the glass door on the back of our house, and it’s fun to go out and take their pictures if circumstances allow. I’ve put one or two of these images here on Weekly Fifty in years past, but this one is markedly different because it was the first time I shot one with a close-up filter. I got the idea from my brother Phil who, the day before, showed me some pictures of a cicada shell in his back yard that he shot with a +10 filter on his 35mm lens. He used a tripod to get the shot just the way he wanted and it turned out beautifully, so when I saw this frog perched on our back door at 10pm after a rainstorm I thought I would borrow his technique to get a picture.

First of all, you might not be able to tell from the picture but this toad is in fact vertical, not horizontal. It’s about a foot off the ground on our glass door, staring up at the porch light. My wife noticed it as we were on our way to bed because she could see a toad-shaped silhouette on the door, so I went outside with my Nikon D750, set of close-up filters, and a flashlight. Initially I tried some shots with the +4 filter but I couldn’t get close enough to the toad to really get an interesting shot. I also didn’t know how to light the creature, which was turning out to be problematic. After some experimenting I ended up setting the flash light on our barbecue on the other side of the porch and aiming it directly at the toad, which gave it a nice glow from one side.

Then I took my camera and pressed it against the window to hold it steady, and took a few shots with the +10 filter. I had to use Live View because there was no way I could get my eyes in the right position to look through the viewfinder, and focusing was a bit tricky also. I ended up focusing manually and literally moving my camera up and down against the pane of glass until the eyes of the toad were sharp. Live View enabled me to zoom in as I was doing this in order to check focus, and I shot this at f/8 to get a good balance between shutter speed and depth of field. Even then I had to use a 1/90 second shutter which isn’t all that fast, but by holding my camera against the glass I was able to steady it enough to get a decent shot.

This was a super fun picture to take and I’m enormously proud of the result, having never taken anything like it before. So Phil, if you’re reading this, thank you for the inspiration :)

Some days you’re in the right place at the right time, and that’s definitely what happened here. This was on a hot Sunday morning in mid August and my wife and I were doing our best to shoo the kids outside, load them in the car, and head off to church without being too late. The boys and I made it out to the driveway while my wife was wrapping up a few last-minute things inside when I spotted this tiny little mushroom right next to the driveway. The top was no bigger than a dime, and with the sun poking over the horizon (as well as our departure for church being imminent) I ran through a couple scenarios in my head: ignore it and go about my day, grab my camera, or hope it was still there after church.

I chose Option 2, and ran inside to grab whatever camera my 50mm lens happened to be attached to. Turns out it was my D7100 which was fine, even though I like the tilt-up screen on my D750 for low-to-the-ground shots like this, but I didn’t want to take 30 seconds and switch lenses. The clock was ticking! I quickly screwed my +10 close-up filter on to the lens and ran (literally) back outside to see if I could grab a picture before it was time to leave.

I knew that shooting with a +10 filter was going to be a bit problematic in terms of depth of field, and I also knew I had to think quickly about composition and lighting, so I didn’t get to sit and ponder this shot as long as I would have preferred but I think it turned out fine in the end. I took a few shots at f/8 and then, after reviewing them on the camera, realized that I’d need an even smaller aperture to get enough of the mushroom in focus. I stopped down to f/11 and, since I was using Aperture Priority with Auto-ISO and a minimum shutter speed of 1/200 second, ended up with ISO 400 which looks great on a D7100. My boys helped me with picking an angle to shoot from and as luck (or perhaps divine intervention) would have it we got a few more shots, hopped into the car, and made it to church before the opening hymn.

After we got home my kids and I reviewed the shots and I found this one to be my favorite, partly because of the lighting but partly because of the blue in the background that helped the mushroom top to really stand out. It’s quite similar to another photo I posted earlier this year with a similar blue color in the background which, in both images, is our 2007 Toyota Matrix. Originally I didn’t really like the idea of my car in the background but after looking at the picture closer, especially on a smaller screen, I thought it did a real nice job of bringing out the subject in the center. I think the bright spots and dew drops in this other image are visually compelling as well, but the mushroom blended in a bit too much with the streak of yellow in the background.

I shot this photo on the morning of August 7, 2019, which was exactly 12 days before the start of the Fall semester at OSU. Things are always so interesting on campus at this time of year, with the excitement and activity of a new semester just around the corner while the last wisps of summer begin to slowly evaporate in 95-degree yeat. You can almost feel the impending return of students to school and yet, the day I made this image, it was just like most days for the past few months: relatively quiet, mostly empty, and generally kind of low-key and relaxed. But not for long.

As I stepped out the door to hop on my bike this morning I turned around and grabbed my D7100 and 50mm lens just in case I ran across a photo opportunity. And would you know it, I did! Or, rather, with my mind and eyes actively seeking out a photo opportunity I ended up encountering not one but two. Both were right on campus near my building, and while I’m not sure if the other one is worth posting here I did quite like the results of this picture.

One of the fun things about shooting pictures in the early morning is the way the light takes on an entirely ethereal quality for a very short window. The sun had just crept over the horizon and was poking through the leaves of the cypress trees, which you can see in that blob of bubbly bokeh in the top-middle part of this image. The bright spot of light at the end of the purple plant is a light near the edge of the path by Theta Pond, as is the other yellow spot just to the left-of-center. Ten minutes later and the sun was too bright, and too high in the sky, to get the background like this and the lamps were turned off as well. So while the subject of this image isn’t all that interesting, the background and overall lighting kind of elevate it to something else altogether.

And that’s the fun of photography–you can take familiar things and see them transformed before your very eyes :)

This picture is a good example of why I set up this blog so many years ago. The photo isn’t all that remarkable on a technical level, nor is it going to win any awards for creativity, but when I saw this little grasshopper sitting on top of a roll of painter’s tape I knew I had two options:

1. Leave it be, and go on with my work
2. Get my camera and take a picture

The first option is much easier and requires almost nothing in the way of added effort, whereas Option 2 would mean putting down my painting supplies, going inside, getting my camera, attaching a close-up filter, and actually taking some photos. It’s not a lot, but things like that are enough of a barrier for me to, more often than not, choose solutions like Option 1.

So I chose Option 2.

While this isn’t a life-changing photograph or anything really noteworthy of its own accord, the simple act of taking it was a fun, quick experiment with close-up photography and, it turned out, a brief but welcome distraction from my work in the garage. The grasshopper didn’t seem to mind my (relatively) gigantic camera and lens being thrust in its face, and was mostly content to just hang out on his blue perch for a minute while I fiddled with some settings to get the shot. I think I used the +10 filter for this, but I don’t remember for certain, and shot at f/8 to get a depth of field that was wide enough to clearly see the subject but shallow enough to have a bit of background, and foreground, blur. Shutter speed was 1/30 and ISO was 6400, which still impresses me on my D750 even years after getting that camera.

A few heartbeats later and this grasshopper had clearly had enough of my photographic shenanigans, so he/she/it hopped away leaving me to return to my painting. Thanks little buddy for letting me take your photo. It was fun :)

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.

I know it’s a bit of a cliché to take pictures of fireworks, but this was the first time in my life I actually got the opportunity to do it so I was pretty excited to see how they turned out. The thing is, most years on July 4 we put our boys to bed around 7 or 8 and then watch Netflix or do household chores (that laundry isn’t going to clean itself, after all) before heading to bed. We don’t live close enough to the spot where our city has its big fireworks display, and while I have taken pictures of the sparklers and ground bloom flowers we light in the driveway it’s a far cry from a big display of aerial explosions.

This year we were visiting some friends over Independence Day and we took the opportunity to do something special by letting our boys stay up late for the big show. Our friends live a few blocks away from the park where most of the city gathers to see the fireworks, so I thought it would be a fun opportunity to get some shots of the action. Having never done this before I didn’t really know how to set up my camera or how things would turn out, but I was pretty happy with the results.

First, my camera settings: F/16, ISO 200, 23mm focal length (which, on the Fuji X100F translates to 35mm equivalent), and shutter speed of 10 seconds. I quickly realized after the first few shots that longer shutter speeds would result in messy streaks in the sky compared to what you see in this photo, and for the rest of the event I hovered between 8 and 13 seconds.

I also want to note that I was standing directly behind my kids and next to my wife. I didn’t want photos of the display to detract from the experience of seeing fireworks, so I mostly just watched and ooh’d and ahh’d with my kids while pressing the shutter casually.

The reason I like this particular shot isn’t necessarily because of the fireworks, but because of the moon peeking over the trees. It felt like our celestial friend decide to stop by and watch the bombs bursting in air in a show of celestial patriotism :) The moon moves pretty quickly though and a minute after this picture it had gone behind the trees again, almost as if it stopped by to pay its respects and then continued on its journey.

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 second in a series of long-exposure sunset pictures I’m sharing here on Weekly Fifty. I shot this at Milford Lake on June 23, 2019.

After I shot a sunset photo on the night before this, I had a better idea of what kind of image I wanted to capture as well as what settings I might need in order to do it. To get this picture I walked to the west edge of Acorn’s Resort about 9pm, found the spot I wanted, set up my tripod and camera, and waited. My mom was with me at the time and I was trying to describe the photo to her that I was attempting to get, and she was clearly having some trouble wrapping her mind around it because I kept telling her I needed less light.

“But don’t you need light to take a picture?” she asked, a little confused.

“Yeah, but in this case I want less light so I can leave the shutter open longer. That will make it look like there’s more light.”

To which she had a quite logical response: “Why not just take your picture now before the sun goes down?” I tried to explain it to her but without actually showing the end result it was a little tricky. Eventually, she went back to the cabin and I settled in for some long exposures. I set my Fuji X100F to 30 a 30-second shutter, f/16, and activated the ND filter while I waited for the meter to read 1, 2, and then 3 stops underexposed.

I eventually got to the point where I was able to take a nearly four-minute exposure, which I thought would look aaaaaaawesome and have the water super silky smooth. Well, I was right about the latter but not the former. True, in my 4-minute exposure the water was polished to a mirrorlike shine, but the photo just wasn’t that interesting to look at. The issue, I realized, had to do with the sky.

In this 30-second exposure, which I took almost as a practice picture while I waited for things to get really dark, you can see a mass of clouds moving that gives a sense of kinetic energy to the frame which was almost entirely gone in later pictures. Soon after I took this picture the clouds blew away leaving the sky a deep, empty blue. The water was smoother but the resulting image felt dull and lifeless, especially compared to this particular shot. It felt strange, but despite my efforts to capture a super long exposure I ended up preferring this one by a wide margin.

Funny how things turn out sometimes, isn’t it?

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.