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

One of the trickiest elements of a shot like this is getting the big drop in focus. I have taken similar photographs over the years with varying degrees of success, but it’s really tricky to get the entire drop of water to be sharp and in focus while blurring the rest of the frame. This is partly due to the razor-thin margins you have for depth of field when working with such small subjects, but also due to the physics of how water drops like this bend and shape the light going through them. Inevitably, the best way to get great results, it seems, is through the use of focus stacking: taking lots of shots and then blending together the sharp areas of each one in Photoshop. (If there’s a better technique, let me know! I’d love to learn more!) That’s what I did here and while I didn’t quite know what to expect, I am very pleased with what I got.

I shot this handheld on an overcast day with my Nikon D750, 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, using an aperture of f/11, 1/200 second, and Auto ISO. After trying a couple shots to varying degrees of success, I realized that the only way I could get the image I was going for was to just combine lots of exposures together. See, the thing about a shot like this is you have the drop of water and then the scene reflected inside the drop of water–and the two are decidedly not the same. If you get the drop in focus, you lose the scene. But if you try to get a sharp scene, the drop itself becomes blurry. One solution is to use a super small aperture, but I really wanted a shallow depth of field in order to get just the drop in focus, and all of that points directly to focus stacking. Thankfully, it’s really not difficult and most of the heavy lifting can be done automatically in Photoshop for you. The only difficult part is getting all the shots you want to combine, which is slightly trickier than you might think.

Ideally, a situation like this would be best handled with a tripod and a very slow, calculated series of shots in order to get everything in focus that you want. This situation, however, was not exactly what you would consider ideal: I just had a few minutes, and I most certainly did not have a tripod as I’m not in the habit of toting a bag full of camera gear with me when walking around campus. I put my lens in manual focus, held my camera as still as possible with my right hand while turning the focus ring with my left hand, and holding down the shutter while in continuous high-speed mode. The result was about a dozen images that, when stacked together, gave me the final composition you see here. And you know what? It works. It really works. The bright, crisp raindrop, the rich greens, the earthy yellows and reds, and enough in the foreground and background to give you the sense that you are carefully peeking into a small world right in front of your eyes.

There’s some objective realities of shooting photos on a rainy, overcast day that are easy to describe or even, perhaps, quantify. The diffused lighting, the mild temperatures, the glistening surfaces…all of these aren’t particularly difficult to explain and all of these make a huge difference in photographic terms. What’s a little trickier to precisely nail down is just how much fun it is to go out and shoot after the earth gets a good long soaking. Not necessarily in the rain, mind you, but the minutes or, better yet, hours after the drops cease to fall but before the sun has yet to show its face from behind the clouds are just amazing for taking pictures. Everything you see has a glistening sheen to it and even the most ordinary, boring objects take on a stunning new appearance. I’d almost go so far as to say it’s difficult to not enjoy shooting in these conditions, and if you haven’t tried it I strongly recommend it :)

And when you combine post-rain conditions with a macro lens…chef’s kiss.

On a warm October afternoon in precisely these conditions, as I was walking across the OSU campus between meetings, I stopped for a few minutes in the formal gardens right outside the student union to get a few snapshots. When I saw this red flower I knew I just had to stop and take its picture, and I’m really glad I took the time to do it. One thing I’ve learned as I have taken more close-up images over the years is that what I envision when I see a scene isn’t always easy to capture, even with a good understanding of the fundamentals of photography such as light, shadow, composition, exposure, and the like. Weekly Fifty is littered with not-quite-there images that almost get what I was trying to capture, and every time one of those shots happens I try to think of it as a learning experience so that I might do better next time. Well, I gotta say, this is one of those next time shots that really does work just about exactly as I had hoped it would.

Aperture, and by extension, depth of field, is super tricky when shooing with a macro lens. It’s tough to get the area you want in focus while not compromising too much on other elements of the image, but with this shot I was able to pull of pretty much precisely what I was going for in terms of subject and sharpness. I really wanted the one large drop of water to be sharp and in focus, and maybe a few others too, with a subtle blur around the rest of the drops nearby. I shot this at f/11, 1/200 second, and Auto-ISO with a value of 150 using my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, and as my dad would say, by golly it worked. There’s a vertical line of three drops that are all tack sharp, right near the bright spot on the flower petal just above them and to the left. The texture on the petal is so rich and thick you can practically touch it through your screen, and I like the mix of three colors: red, orange, and a subtle dark green in the background. This whole image just works in a way that I am very pleased with, and makes me excited to try similar shots the next time it rains.

One of my favorite books that my wife and I used to read to our boys when they were younger is Moo Moo Brown Cow, Have You Any Milk, the story of a kid who lives on a farm and gets a great deal of help from his animal friends before heading to bed. It’s a charming little tale, perfect for sending children off to sleep, and includes a few lines that, for whatever reason, have stuck with me over the years. Lines including:

Then we’ll dream the whole night through. Of flowers to sip, green grass to chew, a golden grain of wheat or two. The moon so high and sky so blue…

I don’t really know why, but something about the gentle rolling cadence of the lines in this book has always stuck with me, and I have always held it in quite high regard. The phrase “A golden grain of wheat or two” was on my mind when I took this photo, though to be honest I am not entirely certain that the grain in question actually is wheat. For an Oklahoman, formerly Minnesota, and before that, a Nebraskan, I know remarkably little about agriculture. Nevertheless, I do know a thing or two about what makes a compelling photograph :)

I have taken a few shots like this one over the years, and the challenge, I have learned, is to figure out how to compose the image so as to emphasize the subject. Lighting is key, of course, but how to make the subject stand out against the background is another matter entirely. For this image the answer presented itself in relatively quick fashion: use the bright colors of the surrounding garden to isolate the subject and, in the process, create a rich vibrant color palette that goes well beyond simple earth tones.

I took this image on a rainy day, our first in several weeks, in late October on the Oklahoma State University campus–the formal gardens, to be precise, just west of the Student Union. Our campus botanists and arborists had done up the place in elegant fashion as a way of welcoming the tens of thousands of visitors that would soon be descending on Stillwater for America’s Greatest Homecoming. In a brief reprieve from the light precipitation, I got out my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens to take advantage of the soaking flowers and overcast sky, which is one of my favorite lighting conditions to shoot in. Especially when it comes to photos of flowers and the like.

I shot this at f/9.5 to get a relatively shallow, but not too shallow, depth of field. I wanted the subject to be sharp while the background a beautiful blur, and that’s exactly what I was able to achieve. I did spend a few minutes angling myself such that the background colors were utilized to maximum effect and, on the whole, I think it worked save for the yellows in the top-right detracting just a bit too much from the wheat. (Or whatever it is.) I barely edited the image too, with just a slight crop on the top-right and a few basic color/exposure adjustments. In short, what you’re seeing here isn’t necessarily photographic brilliance but nature’s paintbrush, a scene created by God but captured, in a bit of mid-afternoon serendipity, by me. And it sure was fun.

I always like taking pictures like this, with a butterfly more or less centered in the frame while interacting in some manner with a flower or plant. It’s not a complicated composition and there’s nothing about these kinds of images that’s going to win awards for creativity or break new ground from an artistic point of view, but they are phenomenally fun to take. Butterflies are a bit more compliant than other flying bugs and animals, in that they move a bit slower and tend to stay in one place a bit longer than, say, honeybees or hummingbirds. Their bright colors almost make it difficult to not get good shots, and you can often find them in groups–that is, if one is around chances are others will be too. And when everything aligns and you find yourself in the right place, at the right time, with your camera at the ready, and able to capture a moment like this…*chef’s kiss*

I highly recommend you try it :)

There is one thing I have changed in my approach to butterfly photos over the years, and you can see it exemplified here. I now make an effort to intentionally position myself so that the butterflies are backlit, which makes their already-colorful wings positively explode with an electric energy that you just don’t get with traditional front-lighting. This strategy helped in a couple of ways here, by not only making the butterfly appear a bright translucent green but also causing the purple flower to take on a shiny purple glow with bright accents around its edges. This technique almost always results in images that far surpass their frontlit counterparts, and it’s an extraordinarily fun practice to try out. You can clear see the effect here with the butterflies wings all aglow, outlined with a white shine and its legs deftly gripping the purple flower bud. Much of that would be lost if this were taken with the sun on the other side, but as it stands the lighting alone transforms this rather pedestrian photo into something pretty special.

The interesting thing about this shot, that doesn’t often happen in the photos I take, is that the subject–the animal–is not actually the focal point of the image. Rather, your eye is drawn first and foremost to the flower and the butterfly, whose colors blend in quite thoroughly with the surrounding colors, is almost an afterthought. One could almost say it’s camouflaged and hidden in plain sight, and only upon closer inspection does the viewer notice that something more is in the shot beyond the purple flower. It’s an unexpected way of composing the shot that I didn’t actually plan but, on reflection, I quite like.

When I was a kid the only way to listen to new music for free was by tuning into a local radio station, like 102.7 KFRX or 106.3 The Blaze. It was a simpler time, and one I look back on with a great deal of fondness, though I suppose it’s probably on par with the rose-colored lenses through which most adults view their childhoods. (If I were to be shot back in time, Marty McFly-style, I would probably miss out on a lot of the modern conveniences we have today. But that’s not really how nostalgia works, is it?) Every few songs there would be a series of commercials, and for a good stretch of time one of those commercials was for something called a Hearts on Fire diamond from a local outfit called Sartor Hamann Jewelers. I don’t remember any specifics about the ad, or the diamond, or anything really other than the somewhat lispy host, possibly the owner or the founder of the business, who would go on about how sure you could go somewhere else to get your loved on a boring normal everyday diamond, but only Sartor Hamann had the Hearts on Fire diamond which was extra finely-cut, or ultra-rare, or exquisitely-set, or…something. Who knows. Not me, that’s for sure. But the commercial, and the odd-sounding name (Why would someone want to set someone’s heart ablaze?) stuck with me over the years, which I suppose is probably the mark of a good advertising campaign. Well done, Mr. Hamann. You win this round.

When I was at the OSU Botanic Garden recently with my family and some friends I came across this crystal heart, hanging by a rusty chain, not far from where a pair of kodama were keeping watch over the grounds. Though the heart was made of plastic and certainly not on fire, it brought me back to my high school days in the blink of an eye and all I could think about was that incessant radio ad. It’s interesting how things happen like that–one minute you are going about your business, but then you smell something, hear a noise, see a picture, or stumble across an object and you are instantly transported elsewhere with all manner of memories flooding back if even for just a fleeting moment.

I don’t want to read too much into this–it’s a plastic heart hanging from a tree, after all–but it was a fun little trip down memory lane and I’m glad I could capture the moment with my camera. I shot this at f/8 and was quite pleased with how everything turned out: the blurry background, the sharp vertices, and the colors of the garden flowers reflecting off the facets. And though this was a neat little photo to take I did not tarry long, as I wanted to put the camera down and get back to my wife, our kids, and our friends who were busy making memories of their own. And I wanted to be a part of them.

I’m not sure what my first Hayao Miyazaki movie was, but it just might have been Spirited Away, which I had the pleasure of watching in a movie theater near downtown Lincoln, Nebraska, back in college. Perhaps it was Princess Mononoke, which I rented (probably without paying) from the video department (which I managed) tucked away in the corner of the Russ’s Market I worked in to pay for rent, gas, and school. It undoubtedly was not Kiki’s Delivery Service, which I saw with my friend Gavin–probably in his house on 17th street either before or after playing a game of spades with Drew and Robert, but if not then certainly in our rental house on 51st Street where Gavin and I lived, along with Evan, Nick, Ross, Ben, Simon (the other one), Craig, and other friends who rotated in and out of for four years while we were all at UNL. My first Miyazaki film was definitely not My Neighbor Totoro, which I watched on the recommendation of Jennica, one of my students, when I taught high school in Andover, MN, on the north side of the Twin Cities. Nor was it Howl’s Moving Castle which I have seen but do not remember when, where, or really anything about the movie at all come to think of it.

But here’s the thing about Miyazaki movies: they leave an impression. They transport you to another place and time, and invite you to sit back and absorb the sheer wonder of the world you are invited to inhabit, if only for a little while, along with all its vibrant and unique characters. Creatures great and small, filled with heart and emotion, each with a story to tell or, as Michael W. Smith might say, a place in this world. (Note: please leave that link un-clicked. The song, and its accompanying video, are impossibly cheesy. But decades later that sandpaper-scratchy voice is still wandering around in my head, loath to vacate the space between my ears though long have I tried.)

Creatures such as the kodama you see here, whose presence is a clear and tangible indicator that the forest they inhabit is doing OK.

I saw these while wandering through the OSU Botanic Gardens with my family and some of our friends on a warm September afternoon, and was delighted to have my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens along for the occasion. Each of these little white figures is about an inch tall, and someone had placed them in a shallow pan hanging by three chains from the branch of a tree near the garden entrance. It was one of those little moments of serendipity that you encounter every so often that reminds you how clever and creative people can be–that someone thought to put these little creatures in the middle of the garden to keep watch, in a manner of speaking, over the area and reassure visitors that everything is going to be alright.

I experimented with a few different angles and focal lengths, as I almost always do when shooting close-ups like this, but didn’t want to move the figures at all—only myself and my camera. I tried a few shots with the shorter one in focus but found that I preferred this one, and with the light hitting it as you see here it really made for a fun composition. When both figured were well-lit it didn’t have quite the same effect, but here your eye is brought squarely to the first one and then to everything else in the frame which slowly reveals itself the more you look at the image.

This was a fun picture to take, a creative scene to stumble upon, and a reminder that I really need to show my kids some Miyazaki movies :)

One of my favorite lighting techniques, at least for artistic or experimental shots, is to light my subjects from behind. It’s not something that’s altogether intuitive for me, as it goes against much of what I learned when I first started getting into photography years ago, but I have tried to pay attention to how a little (or a lot) of backlighting can elevate and transform a photo and lift the mundane into something extraordinary. Case in point: this coleus plant, which I came across while wandering around the OSU Botanic Gardens with my family and some friends on a Saturday afternoon in early September. There are dozens of these brightly-colored plants all around the gardens and while they certainly are cool to look at, they somewhat ironically do not always make great photo subjects. (Or perhaps I’m just not looking closely, or thinking creatively, enough. A challenge, perhaps? Hmm…) That was not the case here.

This particular coleus was practically aflame in the afternoon sun, with the light bounding off the edges of these leaves to create a silhouette that gives the entire composition a feeling of life and energy–almost like a flame twisting and writing as it makes its way upwards. I had my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, which is an outstanding combination for an afternoon among nature, and once I had this shot in mind the next thing to consider was the aperture: Too small and the depth of field would be too wide. Too large and the edges of the leaf would not be in focus. I also had to consider the angle from which I was shooting, and the background behind the plant as well. Finally, I didn’t want to spend too long taking this shot because I also wanted to hang out with family and friends :)

I took this at f/19 which, while a bit smaller than I would have preferred, did help me meet my primary goals for the shot. I think a smaller aperture would have been possible with a bit more patience and experimentation, but again, time was of the essence. I do like how the border in the foreground of the leaf is (mostly) sharp and in focus while the back of the leaf is blurry, which shows just how crazy the DOF tolerances are when shooting close up. And this wasn’t even that close! This leaf, or rather collection of leaves, measures about five inches from left to right–certainly too big to be considered a macro shot, but a great example of how versatile a macro lens can be nonetheless.

In some ways this shot is an upgraded version of the sunrise image from last week, and even though the scale of the photos is entirely different the basic principles are kind of the same: lighting a subject from behind in order to get a glowing silhouette. It goes to show, or at least shows me anyway, that at the end of the day photography is often about the same basic principles that it always has been. It’s light and physics, and everything else is just details :)

This photo is a couple of things. First, it’s a decent shot of an early morning September sunrise. Not outstanding, mind you, but not half bad if I do say so myself. And I don’t mean that to be self-deprecating, just to say that if I were to rank my Best Sunrise Shots that I have taken over the years I don’t think this would be on it. That being said, I do quite like a few things about it: the trees in the foreground, the rich colors of the sky as dark fades away, and the bright ball of light as it crests the clouds. It’s got a few layers that lead your eye from foreground to background, and I also like how simple everything is. It’s just a basic picture of the sun coming up without a lot going on in the frame to overcomplicate things. It’s not great, but it’s also not awful. It’s fine, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

The other thing about this shot is what it could have been if only I had been able to take it ten, even five, minutes earlier. That’s not a regret per se, but just a statement of fact: had I been able to grab my camera and get outside just a slight bit sooner this image would be entirely different and, most likely, a lot more interesting too. What I was really going for here wasn’t the sun necessarily, but the silhouette of the clouds on the horizon. The wavy fractal lines burning bright with the sun behind them created an amazing view that I noticed shortly after I dropped my son off at school, and I hightailed it back home to get my camera to go take a picture. But the sun is a fickle celestial body and usually just won’t stay put, especially at dawn and dusk.

By the time I made it back home it was already halfway above the clouds! I ran inside, grabbed my D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, hopped back in the car, and drove as fast as I could to the pasture two blocks east of our house. The sun was in a hurry, and so was I–but alas, like C3PO attempting to save his friends from the trash compactor, I wasn’t fast enough. In the few precious minutes it took me to get out of my car, walk across the road, and put the camera to my eye the sun had already crested the clouds and was well on its way. Blerg.

No matter! I did get this shot and a fun story to tell, and of course a learning experience too. And the next time I think there might be a good sunrise, I’ll be ready…

For years one of my favorite types of photos to take at Milford Lake during our annual family vacation is that of a setting sun. Unlike most other shots that one can create during a weekend getaway out in nature, there’s a temporal quality to sunset shots like this–something that you just can’t capture save for a fleeting moment at the end of day and, perhaps, in the early morning if one is so inclined. Each year my sunset pics look a bit different, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this year’s is better than the rest, it definitely shows evidence of refinement based on what I have done before.

I kept things real simple here in terms of gear: Nikon D750, 50mm lens (yes, the same lens that this blog is named after) and 10-stop ND filter. The camera itself was incidental; one could get almost the same shot with any cheap Nikon or Canon from Walmart. Full frame is not required to get a good sunset shot like this. The most important factors here were weather and composition: the former was basically just happenstance and entirely out of my control, but the latter involved understanding where to place the setting sun and the horizon within the frame and only comes with lots of experimentation, self-reflection, and looking at similar shots from other photographers. I have learned over the years that I enjoy sunsets the most when the sun itself is off-center, roughly along one of the vertical third lines, and the horizon roughly bisects the image. Too much foreground or too much sky tends to have a reductive effect on the photo as a whole, and my favorite sunset shots generally end up with more or less equal parts foreground and background.

There’s also two other fun elements in this shot that I just enjoy capturing: a silky-smooth lake surface and the brilliant starburst emanating from the setting sun. The former requires a long exposure (hence the 10-stop ND filter) and the latter requires a small aperture and good timing. If the sun is too high or too low you won’t get the points of light, and neither will they appear if your aperture is too wide which is why mobile phones can’t get shots like this. They are stuck at a fixed aperture usually between f/1.8 and f/2.2.

The result is a sunset shot that I am proud of, and one that does a good job of showing the natural beauty of Milford Lake—and hopefully helps show why I enjoy going there so much with my family each year.

This is one of those shots that’s so simple, so basic, and so easy to capture that it almost feels like cheating. This is not complicated in the least, and no special gear or equipment is required other than a camera, some vegetation, and the setting sun. But when done right, a picture like this can just knock it out of the park and do exactly what you might hope it would do: create some kind of feeling, emotion, or mood for the person who views it.

The basic idea here is super easy: find some kind of plant with a bit of color to it (I like wide blades midsummer of grass or tree leaves in the fall as they are changing colors) and position yourself such that the sun is behind it. Then get out your camera, open up the lens aperture, and start taking pictures. that all there is to it. The bright colors and brilliant light can end up making these types of photos some of my favorites that I have taken over the years. In fact, when my brother Phil and I were walking around on the shores of Milford Lake while some of the younger kids were fishing on the nearby dock, I had this picture in my mind that I had taken seven years prior on the Oklahoma State University campus. (I’m not kidding, I really was thinking of that shot. I really like it, and it was my phone background for a good long while.) When I saw a few blades of green grass that had turned to orange and red, along with the sun lowering on the horizon, I thought it would be a great opportunity to take another similar shot.

I used my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens but anyone could get this composition with a basic DSLR and 18-55mm kit lens. All I did was lower my point of view to take advantage of the backlighting, focus on the orange leaf on the left, open up my aperture to a decent-but-not-too-wide f/4.8, and fire off a couple of shots. I also played around with my position relative to the leaf, moving in and out just to try some different compositions while also experimenting with different aperture sizes but in the end this simple image just clicked in a way that none of the others really did. I like it a lot, and it’s now my iPad background :) I think this experience, especially in light of all the super close-up insect shots I have been taking lately, is a good reminder that photography doesn’t have to be fancy to be good. Sometimes just something basic and simple is all you need.