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

If you have been following Weekly Fifty for a while, you know how much I enjoy doing close-up shots of…well, pretty much anything. I got a set of close-up filters way back in…2015? 2016? I can’t remember anymore but my goodness I have used those things a lot over the years. It’s so fun to discover the beauty in everything around us that is often overlooked simply because aren’t looking close enough. Ordinary objects like pencils and toys and flowers become works of art when viewed up close, and a cheapo set of screw-on filters can help you unlock this magical world just waiting to be discovered.

But you know what’s even better? An actual macro lens :)

In October I finally got a lens I have been looking at for a long, long time: The Nikon 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED. I know there are newer F-mount macro lenses with similar focal lengths from third parties like Sigma and Tamron, but I have had my heart set on this particular lens and was glad to finally pick it up when Nikon had a sale recently. And my goodness, this thing is incredible. What you’re seeing here is the first of many close-up shots you are likely to see over the coming weeks and months, all thanks to this lens. This was actually one of the first pictures I took with it, and it showed me how incredible this lens is but also how much I have to learn. And when it comes to photography, I sure do enjoy learning.

A couple of things to note here: First, this was shot at f/19. Seriously. That just goes to show just how insane things like depth of field are when working at close distances. This piece of candy is less than an inch from front to back and yet, only about half of it is in focus. Maybe a third. And that’s at f/19! I used a tripod, ISO 100, and a 3-second exposure to get this shot and it hopefully gives you an idea of how little the margin of error is when working at such close distances. This is just an ordinary piece of candy, but it could almost be a work of art just because we are seeing it so close.

Yeah…I’m looking forward to learning more about this lens :)

I just love shooting pictures in the fog. It’s one of the most challenging conditions in which to take photos, but the results are singular. There’s just no other way to get shots like this unless conditions are just right. You can’t fake this, and most of the time you can’t even plan for it. You just have to keep your eyes open, recognize these opportunities when you see them, and have your gear ready (along with a knowledge of how to use it) to get a shot. When my kids and I went outside on this particular morning in mid-October during the fall of 2021 I didn’t even have any specific intention to take this picture, but as soon as we left the house and started playing in the street we all realized just how incredibly thick the fog was. We could barely see across the street, much less down the street to our neighbor’s house. Right away I knew I could get an interesting photo but it would require some quick thinking before the fog evaporated.

I told my oldest son to get my bike, ride to the corner, and then cycle back slowly so I could take a few pictures. While he was on the way down I grabbed my d500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and after a little while I honestly couldn’t even see him through the thick cloud that had descended on our neighborhood. He soon turned around and started the return trip, and I basically just fired off dozens of shots at f/2.8 hoping I would get one where he was right in the middle of the street like you see here. I didn’t want to bark orders to him about where to go and how to look, since the entire scene had a strange, calm stillness to it that was almost palpable. The result is something that looks like a shot out of a scary movie, and one that I don’t think I’ll be able to repeat any time soon…if ever.

Three notes about the image: Yes it has been edited to remove my son’s face. I don’t post pictures of my kids online publicly, but I really wanted to share this particular image, so the result is the compromise you see here. I used Photoshop to essentially copy/paste some fog over his head so you can’t see his face, and if that’s too much editing…well, it’s a creative choice I can easily live with. The other note concerns the car in the background, which you might not even notice at first. It’s actually much farther away than it might seem, and I can assure you my son was not in danger at all. A few seconds after this I did let him know that a car was coming up the street, and he had plenty of time to pull over and let it pass. I think it adds kind of an interesting layer to the image though, almost like he is being stalked by a nameless monster–one that you might not even see at first but is definitely there once you look a bit closer. Finally, even though this looks like it was edited to be black-and-white, I can promise you that what you see here is what we saw on this morning: a world shrouded in fog, devoid of color. It was really cool.

This is not a black and white photo.

It looks entirely monochromatic, sure, but the image you see here is exactly what I saw in person when I took this shot. It’s also, contrary to what one might assume, not a picture of the moon. This is the sun peeking through layers of clouds and fog on a Thursday morning in mid-October, and it’s a shot I never even considered until one of my kids made a rather astute observation.

To set the scene: K-12 schools were closed on this day due to Fall Break, and I was out in the front yard tossing the football around with my boys while my wife was inside getting some research done for her job. It had rained the previous day but overcast skies kept the humidity level high, and the next morning the whole neighborhood was enveloped in fog was so think we could hardly see our neighbor’s house. The stillness of the air, combined with the near-zero visibility, created an almost otherworldly scene punctuated with the sounds of my kids saying “Look at that spiral!” and “Good catch!”

I was right there in the mix with my boys with my mind split between tossing the ball and marveling at the fog, when my oldest son cried out “Dad, look at the sun!” I turned my gaze eastward and saw a bright patch of light in the clouds, but then I looked closer and realized that through all the haze we could actually look directly at the sun. I ran inside, grabbed my D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and hurried back outside to see if I could get a good shot.

I have learned from lots of pictures of the moon that it helps to have something in the foreground to create a sense of scale and context. (A picture of a bright circle in the sky is, in and of itself, just not that interesting.) I shot through a gap in the branches of the pine tree in our front yard at f/2.8, and quickly realized that aperture was way too small. The foreground was a blurry mess and didn’t look interesting at all. I quickly dialed my lens down to f/22, shot another picture, and the needles were too sharp. The Goldilocks-style sweet spot was f/11 which gave me just enough foreground blur (but not too much) and a clear shot of the sun, and I positioned myself so it looked like the sun was cresting a foggy hill–notice how the lower third is just a bit darker than the rest.

Five minutes later this scene was gone, and while I don’t know when I will get the chance to shoot a photo like this again I was thrilled to have the opportunity and know how to operate my camera, and make use of the elements around me, to get an interesting picture.

Many years ago I was traveling from Oklahoma to Nebraska when I came across an interesting street sign on Highway 36 just west of Washington, Kansas. It bore the name of an all-too-familiar recurring track in the Mario Kart franchise–the bane of many a racer’s existence, and the cause of more than a few controllers’ untimely demise after being hurled against the wall. Even so, Rainbow Road holds a special place in the heart of many Mario Kart players–perhaps precisely because of the challenge–and I was stunned to see an actual Rainbow Road street sign IRL, as kids these days might say.

Alas, when I first drove past that sign it was dusk and I had a schedule to keep, so I didn’t stop to get a picture. Over the years I took that route through Kansas on more than one occasion specifically to get a shot of the street sign, though my efforts were stymied every time. So when I found myself driving, once again, through Kansas earlier this year I made it a point to see if I could get a shot of this sign. However, I didn’t take my normal route. Instead, I went north through Washington on a small two-lane road which, after a few miles, turned to gravel, veered east, and then back north after joining up with–you guess it, Rainbow Road.

There’s a few miles of this stretch of road before it meets up with a highway that make for great photo opportunities such as the one you see here. I don’t know that this is the best shot one could get along this drive, but this scene certainly did make for an interesting picture in and of itself. I pulled over, got out my Nikon D500 and 70-200mm lens, and got to work composing this shot. It turned out to be trickier than I thought, though thankfully the sky was cloudy enough to case a nice diffused light over the entire scene. The challenge became how to capture an interesting shot of this street sign: what angle do I shoot from? What focal length do I use? What aperture and, as a result, what kind of depth-of-field am I going for? I ended up opening the door of my car so I could kind of half-climb into it, basically using the rear seat as a ladder, so I could get my eyes level with the street sign. I wanted a shot of the road going off into the distance, and I liked the two yellow markers on either side indicating the presence of a ditch. I like how it turned out, and I think it captures the essence of the scene quite well.

Two other notes: First, the road you see isn’t actually Rainbow Road. It’s 28th Road. Rainbow Road is the one I’m driving on, and you can’t actually see it in this shot. Kind of counterintuitive, but it’s true :)

Second, I had to do a bit of retouching on this picture to remove a day/date indicator on the stop sign that someone had written in marker, as well as a rusty bolt on the lower-right part of the N. Notice how there is only one bolt holding the sign to the post: that’s not how street signs are attached. There are almost always two bolts, as you can see on the 28th Road sign, but I didn’t like the unsightly rust on the lower bolt. Enter Photoshop, and thanks Adobe for making this possible :)

One final note to any who find themselves on this stretch of gravel in the middle of Kansas…make sure to watch out for errant turtle shells or ill-placed banana peels. And if you see a blue shell flying overhead, it’s best to run for cover.

After weeks of photos featuring airplanes and wind turbines, this image is much more simple and also serves as the final shot in this series of photos from my trip to Nebraska. This was also, fittingly, the last thing I shot before putting my camera gear away and just focusing on getting back home. I think this was off of Highway 77 but I don’t remember exactly, though it was definitely somewhere in Kansas. From a compositional perspective this is about as simple as you can possibly get: the windmill lining up on the left third of the image, and the grass exactly filling the bottom third. There’s a clear subject, a sense of perspective with the grass in the foreground blurred out due to depth of field, and a wide open sky on the right side. No clouds, no birds, no trees, just a simple shot of a windmill on the prairie. And I like it that way.

While I appreciate the sheer size of the metal wind turbines so prominent across the midwest, there’s something special about a simple windmill–rusty after years of being blasted by the elements–sitting in a grassy field against a deep blue sky that seems distinctly Middle American. This image could have been taken 100 years ago and it would look almost the same, and hopefully 100 years from now this windmill will still be here for future generations to consider.

I shot this with my Nikon D500, 70-200 f/2.8 lens, at 200mm with an aperture of f/2.8. Is that lens overkill for such a photo? Maybe, but then again, without the f/2.8 aperture it wouldn’t have the delicious foreground blur that helps you feel like you are part of the photo. Shooting this was a good way of going back to basics, so to speak, and using fancy gear to take a very simple but very effective picture. I hope I can stop and see this windmill again on my next trip to Nebraska, and hopefully people will still see it standing tall for years to come.

If you’re tired of wind turbine photos, don’t worry: this is the final one I plan on posting. Maybe. Hopefully. Who knows. In any case, here’s yet another photo of the Kansas prairie and some wind turbines, but just like the others I have shared recently, this one is distinctly different in a way that I haven’t yet been able to photograph until now.

In a way this isn’t a picture of wind turbines or hay bales or anything like that. It’s a picture of scale. It’s meant to display the vastness of the rolling hills in Kansas, in a way that you can’t really get without something in the foreground and something else way in the background. Out west you can get these kinds of shots with mountains in the background that clearly conveys a sense of scale, but what do you do when you trade high peaks for open blue skies? Simple: find something else to use instead.

I shot this on my Nikon D500 at 200mm on my 70-200 f/2.8 lens, with the aperture set to f/8. I tried a wider aperture but the wind turbines in the distance were too fuzzy to even tell what they were, and f/8 gave me just the right combination of sharpness and background blur. If you look closely though, you’ll notice something interesting about the turbines: they’re blurry, but not in the way you might expect. Rather than losing sharpness due to depth of field, the towering columns and spinning blades appear wavy and ill-defined due to the mirage effect that happens when hot air rises from the ground and causes light to bend.

I was trying to capture an image that, like some of my other recent images, shows the sheer vastness of the midwestern vistas. It’s tricky to do that with a telephoto lens, but I think this picture does a pretty decent job due to the compositional elements of foreground and background. At the lower portion of the photo you can see hay bales receding into the distance, followed by rolling hills and then two layers of wind turbines: the two in the middle are closer and the two on the edges are father away. It all comes together to form an image that slowly recedes away from the viewer and, in doing so, helps illustrate just how big this scene really is.

If there’s one thing I’m not happy about in this picture it’s the editing artifacts where the sky meets the ground. I darkened the sky just a bit in Lightroom to make it look more like when I actually took this picture, and there’s a bit of a white line or some kind of border as a result that seems a bit artificial. I don’t care for it, but I also don’t care enough to spend a long time tweaking the original RAW file. I’m happy with the shot as-is, and that’s good enough for me :)

One strange problem with photographing wind turbines is how to deal with the position of the blades. What position should they be in for a cool-looking picture? If you have never taken a picture like this before you might think that you would want the blades of your subject (in this case, the large turbine near the right side) to be positioned just like the one on the left: one blade straight up, and the other blades at the four- and eight-o’clock positions. Here’s the thing though…that position doesn’t convey movement. It’s weird, but it’s true. When you look at the turbine on the left it looks static and unmoving, even though in reality it was turning and churning in the breeze just like the rest. So what do you do?

You could try to invert the position of the blades such that one is straight down and the other two are at the classic 10:10 orientation, but that doesn’t work either. The result is a turbine with what appears to be only two blades since the third, the one that is straight down, isn’t immediately noticeable. This position also makes the turbine look odd and off-kilter, though I don’t exactly know why.

My best advice when shooting pictures of a three-bladed turbine is to take the shot when the blades are just like you see here: one at the 1:00 position, one at the 5:00 position, and one at the 10:00 position. (Roughly speaking, that is.) It looks like they are on the move, going places, doing things, and generating power in such a way that other positions just don’t seem to convey. Since the blades were, in fact, spinning kind of rapidly when I took this I just set my camera to rapid-shot mode, held down the shutter, and fired off about 30 images. One of them turned out great–the one you see here–and I hope it gives you even a small sense of scope and scale that I got while standing in this field by the road.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Independence Day, in no small part due to Randy Quaid’s character Russel Casse, a former fighter pilot who now spends his days piloting a crop duster and occasionally spraying the wrong field. At the end of the movie, in a move of shining heroism, he sacrifices himself to defeat the alien invaders and save the day in a scene that still gives me chills when I watch it. I like to think that in an alternate reality Mr. Casse somehow survived the explosion (maybe the aliens teleported him? Maybe he has a magical ejector seat?) and he spent the rest of his days quietly flying his single-engine crop duster somewhere in the midwest. And if so, maybe he’s piloting this very airplane you see here.

It could happen, right?

Doubtful as that scenario might be, it’s still fun to imagine. And this photo was enormously fun to take. After watching this airplane treat the sorghum field by Highway 15 in central Kansas for about ten minutes, and after getting some decent shots at high shutter speeds to freeze the action, I wanted to see if I could get some panning shots to really cap off the experience. I’ve shot plenty of panning photos of my kids on their bikes in front of my house, but never an airplane flying low over the ground like this! Since I already had plenty of photos where all the motion was frozen, I figured I might as well try a panning picture and see what I could get.

The first thing I had to do was switch over to Manual Mode. That way I could specify the aperture and shutter speed I wanted in order to get a panning picture. I shot at f/22, 1/45 second, ISO 100, and my light meter showed a pretty good exposure at those settings. Then I waited until the airplane was coming in for another pass, made sure my camera was on high-speed shooting, and held down the shutter button while I followed the plane through the viewfinder. I used single-point autofocus since the motion of the plane was entirely predictable, rattled off several dozen shots as it flew past, and then quickly reviewed my images to see if I got any that worked.

I repeated this process one or two more times and then it was time to head to my car and get back to my drive. I didn’t really bother to see if any of the shots were tack sharp since the point was kind of moot: I needed to get going, whether I got any good shots or not. A few days later as I was looking through my images in Lightroom I saw the image at the top of this post and it kind of floored me. It turned out great! The plane is almost tack sharp (but not quite, though I’m fine with what I got) and there’s a clear sense of motion as the background whips by and the cloud billows out from behind the plane. More than that is the angle of the aircraft, which I thought was really cool. It’s kind of a 3/4 view instead of full profile, and that almost makes it seem like the plane is careening through a high-speed turn, possibly being chased by Dom Toretto or one of his racing buddies. I still can’t quite believe I got this shot and it makes me smile to look at it, and think about how I could do this even better if I’m ever in this situation again.

Ok I’m going to be honest here: I don’t exactly know what’s happening in this picture. I mean, I get it on a conceptual level but I don’t know any pertinent details. This airplane, the same one from last week’s photo, is spraying a mist of…something…over a field of sorghum. Is it fertilizer? Pesticide? Who knows. (Not me, anyway) All I know for sure is this was a fun photo to take.

This started with me driving from Oklahoma to Kansas, taking small highways and back roads as much as possible in order to see the scenery and have the ability to pull over for a break whenever I want to. As I was going east on Highway 15 I saw this crop duster doing its thing over a field just south of the road, so I pulled over to snap some photos. Ok, a lot of photos. Hundreds of photos. As many as I could given the time I had available, which wasn’t exactly unlimited given that I had places to go and people to see. I used my D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, zooming in and out to capture images while keeping a constant f/2.8 aperture to freeze motion and blur the background and foreground ever so slightly. Having never photographed a scene like this before I wasn’t sure it would work, but I think the results turned out great. Certainly much better than I could have expected or hoped for, especially given that I never expected to be photographing a crop duster in the first place :)

As I was going through all my photos trying to pick out my favorites, I settled on this as one of my top three for a couple of reasons. First, the 3/4 view of the plane helps show it as a three-dimensional object compared to the profile view from last week’s shot. Also, I wanted to capture a sense of just how low this airplane was flying, and once you notice its shadow on the sorghum plants you can clearly tell that it’s only a few meters off the field. Certainly not a normal situation for an airplane to be in! Finally, I of course wanted to see the trail of fertilizer (or pesticide, or whatever it is) behind the airplane which clearly convey a sense of motion and energy.

This was an incredibly fun picture to take and a good reminder about keeping your eyes open, looking for photo opportunities when they present themselves, and being prepared with the right gear to get the shot.

I can’t recall a time when I was able to take a picture like this, and I don’t imagine I will have the opportunity again anytime soon. It also shows the importance of preparedness, and also of simply having the dumb luck to be in the right place at the right time. I shot this when I was driving along Highway 15 in the middle of Kansas, and spotted a small yellow plane flying low over a field with a cloud of fertilizer billowing out behind it. It was a crop duster! I had only seen these once or twice in my life and I was thrilled to get the chance to witness one in action up close and personal. Thankfully I brought pretty much my entire camera kit with me on this particular trip so I pulled into a driveway, got out my D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and started firing away. I took hundreds of photos as this airplane went back and forth across a field of sorghum and came away with a three favorites which I will be posting here on Weekly Fifty.

I wanted to start my series with this picture even though the crop duster is barely distinguishable from any other small single-engine aircraft. If you look closely you can see a bar across the middle just below the driver’s window which sprays fertilizer, but other than that it looks like pretty much any other normal yellow airplane. What I like about this image is that it shows a scene that is pretty different from what you might expect. Here’s this yellow plane clearly aiming for the ground as if coming in for a landing, but there’s no runway in sight. A long undulating road is perpendicular to the plane and there’s also plenty of power lines to crash into, and yet, this plane is diving headlong into the greenery despite having nowhere to go. Clearly this is not a normal situation!

Though I didn’t really plan this image–it’s one of a few dozen that I fired off in rapid succession as the plane descended–I like how perfectly all the elements come together to form a compelling composition: The cloudless sky, the empty road, the red barn, the rolling hills, and the trees in the background all serve to form a scene that is distinctly Middle America. I like the profile shot of the airplane and its position at the intersection of the top third and right third of the image, and the sense of anticipation as it is on its way to fill the empty space on the left. The 1/6000 shutter speed made it possible to freeze every bit of motion while still conveying a clear sense of activity, and shooting at f/2.8 resulted in a subtle background blur as well.

I’m extraordinarily pleased at this moment of photographic serendipity, and I’m excited to show the next two images in this series as well.