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

The local Botanic Garden here in Stillwater often has family events throughout the year, and one week before Christmas last year they invited the public to come out for snacks, crafts, and a bit of a bonfire as well. They recently installed a model train on the premises which runs a few times each month, and because we knew they would have it operating during their Christmas event I made sure to bring my Fuji X100F and little Gorillapod with so I could try a few long-exposure shots and see what happened.

I set up my camera and tripod on one side of the train display while our kids ran around looking at the lights and trying to keep up with the trains as they completed their circuits around the tracks. My goal was to catch the trains in motion but also have a shallow depth of field to create a sense of foreground and background, which meant I had to shoot at f/2.8 with an ISO value of 200. This left me with a 2.5-second shutter speed in order to get the right exposure, though in hindsight I could have activated the built-in ND filter and gotten about seven seconds or possibly even more. I manually focused on the rocks because I wanted them to be nice and sharp, and I wasn’t too worried about the trains not being super well focused because I knew they would end up looking like blurry streaks anyway.

After getting one or two shots that I wasn’t quite happy with, I realized that I could use the burst mode on my camera to get five photos in succession and then just pick the one I liked the most. This resulted in several mediocre images but a couple ones that I really like, especially the one posted here. I always like the sense of motion that light trails give a shot, and it was neat to hear my oldest son ask me how I got the trains to move so fast. In reality they were chugging along kind of slow, but the motion trails here make them look like some kind of supersonic bullet trains.

After spending just a few minutes here I put the camera away and joined my wife and my boys at the hot chocolate station where we also met up with some friends who happened to be at the same event. It was a clear starry sky on a crisp December night, and having this photo is a nice way to remember it all.

What a blast from the past this was! I haven’t seen a stereo like this in years, so you can imagine my surprise when I was biking home from work and saw this old thing lying by the side of the road about a hundred yards west of a drainage ditch. It practically screams 1997 with a CD player, tape deck, analog radio tuner, and even an FM antenna wrapped around the handle. Just seeing this thing brought up all kinds of memories from high school and sitting in my basement listening to music while playing Zelda: Link’s Awakening on my Game Boy.

When I first biked past it was cold and the sun was rapidly setting, so I made a mental note to bring my camera and get a picture of this music machine on the way to work the following day.I figured my Fuji X100F would be perfect for the picture though I thought about bringing one of my DSLRs, but the picture I was envisioning was really better suited to the lens on the Fuji as opposed to any of the lenses I have for my Nikons. I knew I wanted to get a shot of the stereo and some of the surrounding environment, and the Fuji along with my Gorillapod proved to be just the ticket.The next morning the boom box was still there so I parked my bike on the boulevard, got out the camera and tripod, and took a few minutes for indulging in my photography.

To get a really clean image I set the ISO to 200 (I normally use auto-ISO, max 6400 with minimum shutter speed of 1/125) and opened the aperture up to f/2.0, but also activated the ND filter so I could get a longer exposure of 1/2 second. I was hoping to get some light trails from passing vehicles and when I was satisfied that I got the image I was hoping for I packed up, pulled my gloves back on, and went on my way to work.However, while I was looking through the photos I noticed something that I did not expect. The image I envisioned, that of the stereo in the grass with car headlights in the background, was decent but it paled in comparison to the image I ended up selecting for this week. See for yourself:

Do you notice the difference? While the second shot does indeed have a mark of light on the left side, the entire picture feels dull and lifeless compared to the one at the top of the page. Unbeknownst to me, I had inadvertently taken a picture (that I ended up using) with an oncoming car behind me whose headlights were casting a really nice yellow glow on to the stereo. It gives the subject a sense of life and vibrancy that’s totally missing from the second image, and really goes to show how much lighting can impact the overall results of a photograph.

On my way home later that day the boom box was gone, perhaps picked up by a passer-by or maybe just thrown into the trash. Either way I’m glad I was able to capture it for one moment as a fun trip down memory lane.

I have taught a class called Information Technology Project Management at Oklahoma State University for the past four and a half years and it really is one of the standout parts of my job. While I do miss teaching high school, which I did in Minnesota for several years, I have really come to appreciate working at a university and also teaching college-age students. Many of them in my class are near graduation and they are getting ready to move away, start careers, or take a year off to just go see the world. It’s a fun opportunity to be able to teach them and each semester I cap off my class with a batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies.

I always like to involve my kids in this process and usually make their consuming of said cookies contingent on their willingness to pitch in with the creation process. Normally I would just stand near them, hold my camera at eye level, and take a photo but this time I wanted to try something a bit different. I stood on a chair, held my Fuji X100F out at arm’s length, set the aperture to f/2.8, and fired off a few shots from directly above. I rather like the result even though I wasn’t entirely sure where to focus, and as such my son’s head on the left is a bit blurry but I do think it works to draw the viewer’s attention to the mixing bowl and other baking implements.

As I look back at photos of my kids that my wife and I have taken over the past seven years the ones that seem to have the most impact are the ones that also convey a sense of time, place, and activity. A headshot is great but if that headshot can be part of a larger story that’s even better, and I think that’s one reason I’m happy with this picture. I like that both boys are intently staring at the mixer, I like that there’s a bit of a mess on the counter, and I like that it clearly tells a story of something that’s happening. Plus I like that it involves homemade chocolate chip cookies :)

To close out 2018 I thought I’d share this picture that I took in November on a rather unusually snowy morning here in Oklahoma. Where as the classic Christmas tune speaks of walking in a Winter Wonderland, we don’t usually get scenes like that down here and instead it’s more common to have temps in the 40’s with a smattering of snow every now and then. It’s a welcome sight, then, to wake up to snowfall and chilly temps even if it’s only temporary, and as such I figured it would make an appropriate image for the time of year as well as the Christmas season.

Most of the year I don’t really post pictures that have much in common with the dates on which they are published, usually because I schedule posts many weeks in advance and don’t have any kind of grand master plan behind the photos I take and share. As the year winds down though I do like to take a minute and reflect on things, if you will, and that sentiment is kind of echoed in this image. In some ways 2018 was a difficult one and while I’m not going to get into the details here, suffice it to say that as the year is drawn to a close I find myself really taking to heart the old adage of live each day to the fullest. Not in the sense that I have to do extreme skydiving or run triathlons or anything like that, but that partly because of some losses my family and friends have endured this year I really have made more of an effort to use my time more intentionally. Some would say wisely, but I would say that I just hope I’m not being lazy or sitting around and waiting for things to happen and instead trying to make sure the people in my life know I love them and that I’m doing things that matter.

One of my favorite songs of all time is Heart’s Cry by Steven Curtis Chapman, and there’s a line in it that goes like this:

This is my heart’s cry – to stand before the Father one day and hear Him say well done – this is my heart’s cry.

We don’t have a lot of time on this earth, and when I finally meet my maker I hope to stand before Him and know that I did well with the time He gave me. That I was a good father, a good husband, and a good friend. That we trained up our children in the way they should go, such that as they grow old they will not depart from Him. The scene in this week’s image, that of a path going into the distance on a snowy morning, to me represents both the mistakes of the past and the promise of the future, and while the way might be blurry at times we are never far from the love of Christ. The same Christ whose birth, and life, and death, and resurrection, we celebrate at Christmas and throughout the year.

So while this picture represents the end of one year it also, hopefully, shows the beginning of a new one as well. And while we can’t ever be sure of what the future will hold, we can do our best with the time we have right this very moment. So do what you can to make this day count.

As a bit of a postscript, I will say that my sister lost her three-year battle with breast cancer this past March. You can view my eulogy for her at the link below, and if you or anyone you might know would find a sense of comfort in the message please feel free to share it.

The third and final image from my series of photos taken while traveling from Nebraska to Oklahoma, this one is a bit different in that it’s actually not off the beaten path at all. It’s not taken from a dirt road, winding highway, or secret spot of any kind. In fact it was taken on a very busy stretch of Interstate 35 just south of the Oklahoma border, and this is a scene I have probably driven past dozens of times over the years and never really thought about very much. But when you look at the world around you in terms of photography opportunities, it’s interesting what can really jump out at you.

If you saw last week’s photo you know the sky was kind of overcast on this day but at this point it had stopped raining outright, leaving some good lighting conditions for taking photos. Since I was on the interstate at this point, having left Highway 77 in favor of faster speed limits, I was really just wanting to get back home and not really interested in taking pictures anymore. But when I noticed this oil pump just west of a rest stop (one of those parking-only deals where you can pull off the road and stretch your legs, but not much more) I really wanted to get a picture of it because…well, once that photography bug bites you it’s hard to ignore.

It wasn’t until I got out and was framing the shot in my camera that I noticed the wind turbine in the distance behind the pump, and I thought the contrast between old and new would make for an interesting image. I wasn’t really sure about the aperture to use though, because I didn’t want to blur the windmill too much but I also wanted to make sure the pump was firmly established as the focal point. I ended up shooting this at f/4.8 but to be honest it didn’t turn out that different from others shot at f/2.8. What really mattered to me in the end, as I was looking through the images on my computer, was the position of the blades on the turbine.

It’s difficult to explain, but in a lot of the pictures the blades just didn’t look interesting. They seemed static and lifeless, or just plain weird such as one blade pointing straight down with the other two angled upward. This picture somehow conveys a sense of movement and depth in the turbine blades, which combined with the pump fully above the horizon (this was also moving up and down as I took pictures) resulted in an image that seemed much more interesting to me than some of the others.