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

Here’s the final picture I’ll be sharing from my time with the Sigma 40mm f/1.4 ART lens, and I chose this one for a reason. It might sound corny, but I don’t think I could have gotten this particular shot with any other lens. But first, a bit of background: this was taken at the Big XII Equestrian Championship held at OSU back in late March, and even though OSU ultimately lost (but not by much!) we were glad we could go out and support the riders who had worked so hard to get there.

After one of the events one of the riders, who was a student in my wife’s class, brought her horse up for our boys to see up close. Normally I’d have my Fuji X100F for times like this but since I was evaluating the Sigma lens I brought that with me instead and even though I wasn’t exactly used to its sheer size and heft, I got some shots such as this one that I really like. What I find most compelling about this image is the way the horse is tack-sharp, especially its eye, but everything in the foreground and background is blurry to some extent. As the viewer your eye is immediately drawn to the horse but then you start to notice other elements like the man’s plaid shirt, the younger child in a blue coat, and context clues such as the overhead lights and the fact that my wife is wearing a hat. It all comes together to paint a richer picture of the entire scene than if it were just the horse by itself, and when you add in the fact that my oldest son is reaching out to touch the horse it’s kind of the cherry on top.

So why couldn’t I get this shot with any other lens? The options I had at my disposal were:

• Fuji X100F (23mm f/2.0 lens, 35mm equivalent on full-frame)
• 35mm f/1.8
• 50mm f/1.8

I’m not counting my 85 or 70-200 because I wouldn’t even think to bring them to a situation like this; they’re just not practical. And with each of those lenses I wouldn’t have been able to get the shot framed quite like this while also getting the foreground out of focus. The background, sure. But not the foreground. The closest might have been my 35mm lens but even at f/1.8 the man’s shirt (which I really like, by the way. The plaid pattern is just buttery smooth when blurred out) would have been too much in focus. If I used my 50mm I would have had to stand farther back to get a similar composition and then, as you might have guessed, the foreground wouldn’t be as blurry. Something about the 40mm focal length just worked ideally to capture this image, and even though I don’t plan on ever purchasing that lens (At $1300 it’s just too expensive) it sure does give photographers some interesting creative freedom.

I’ve posted a few sunrise and sunset photos over the years here on Weekly Fifty, but nothing quite like this one. And, true to form, it was a photo I almost didn’t take because I didn’t think it would be worth my time. Either that or I figured the results just wouldn’t be very good. Another in my series of images taken with the Sigma 40mm f/1.4, I shot this just outside my building on the way to work (about ten minutes later than I shot last week’s photo of the pond) and as I rode my bike past this tree I literally had to stop, think about the scene for a second, and then go back for the shot. I’m so glad I did.

Once again I shot this picture wide open at f/1.4 just to see what this lens could do, and once again I was not disappointed. It was pretty neat to shoot a scene like this wide open and get such good results, which is a testament not only to the lens but to the flexibility of shooting in RAW. See for yourself, with the original unedited image below.

When I got this into Lightroom I thought I wouldn’t have much to use because it was just so underexposed, but the more I worked with it the more I was surprised at the exposure latitude and dynamic range that I had to work with. After significantly raising the shadows, tweaking the highlights, and doing some simple color corrections like white balance I ended up with a photo that I really like. Regardless of the lens used to shoot this, it’s just a picture I enjoy and am glad I was able to capture. And once again, as I’ve said before, it was a good reminder of why it’s important to stop, turn around, and go back to get that photo.

Just a bit about this picture behind-the-scenes before I get too deep into the weeds here. When I shot this I was evaluating a lens for Sigma corporation, specifically their 40mm f/1.4 ART lens that they sent me to test out for a few weeks. I’ve only used third-party lenses a handful of times over the years and always preferred first-party versions, but this thing was a whole other beast entirely. It was awesome, and I was super excited to get to review it. I only wish they had let me keep it!

As part of testing this lens I went around shooting a ton of pictures, several of which you’ll see here over the next few weeks. It was fun seeing the world around me in a bit of a different light, having never shot with an f/1.4 lens and certainly not one of this caliber before. Case in point: this magnolia flower, similar to others I’ve shot before, but on a whole other level optically speaking. The 40mm focal length of that Sigma lens meant that I could capture a wide field of view (not true wide-angle, but wider than a 50mm lens) and get a lot of context to the shot, while the f/1.4 aperture meant that I could all but eliminate the background entirely. Normally to get this much background blur I’d need to get closer, which would mean a narrower field of view and a different image altogether.

You can read my actual review of the lens over at DPS and I don’t want to waste your time just gushing over it here on Weekly Fifty, but I did enjoy shooting with it and seeing what it was like to capture the world at f/1.4 :)

This photo came about after a few days of my wife and I doing somewhat of a science experiment with our kids involving the classic tornado-in-a-bottle project. We spent an hour or so on a Tuesday afternoon, thanks to a city-wide weather-related school closure, putting a few of these together to bet with somewhat mixed results: the mini-tornados functioned normally but the containers were a bit leaky. The next day we revised our design, primarily using hot glue as an adhesive between the bottles, and things were significantly improved such that we couldn’t detect any leaks at all despite some significant usage by the kids including dropping one of the contraptions onto the kitchen floor. It was a fun way to spend a couple of hours, and the kids really seemed to enjoy creating whirling vortexes in these bottles for a lot longer than I thought they would.

Later that evening as the sun was going down but before the kids went to bed I had the idea of using one of the bottle experiments as a photo subject, but I didn’t really know what to do or how to photograph it. I got out my D750 and 85mm lens, mostly because it was convenient and readily available and I needed a bit more reach than my 50mm but wanted to avoid she sheer heft of the 70-200mm. I put the camera on a tripod and aimed it at the kitchen table with the bottle in the middle, just like you see here:

The trick here was lighting. I didn’t really know what to do to properly light the scene, so I started with a 2500 lumen LED shop light sitting on a chair and pointed up at the bottle from behind. I also didn’t really know what exposure settings to use except that I wanted a slightly long shutter and a low ISO, in order to get some motion trails and a nice clean shot. As such I used manual mode, ISO 100, F/2.8, with a 1/60 second shutter speed. The results were…not good.

I played around with the light a little more though, firmly thinking that a big strong backlight would give me the look I was going for, while also stopping down my aperture to f/4 to get a wider depth of field. I did this because it was tricky to get the bottle to sit on the exact same spot on the table every time I turned it over, and I needed a bit of wiggle room in case I didn’t get the placement just right. Things improved, but not very much.

At this point I was really wondering what I was doing wrong, and then I realized that my light was simply too bright. I switched out the shop light for a flashlight with an angled head, set that on the chair, lowered my shutter speed to 1/10, and got the picture you see at the top of this post. After that I kept on trying new settings like smaller apertures and longer shutter speeds just for the fun of it, and while some of those photos turned out OK nothing was really any better than the image I chose for this week’s featured photo. It was a fun experiment to try though, and gave me some interesting ideas to try for future pictures too.

If you’ve been following along the last few weeks you’ve seen that the recent set of pictures has had a distinctively midwestern theme, with images of windmills and trucks and cotton and other items indicative of the Great Plains. This picture is a departure, or rather, a return to the more normal types of photos I enjoy taking. It’s a simple scene and, like a lot of my Weekly Fifty photos, entirely unplanned with what I hope are some interesting results.

On a Friday evening earlier this year my brother and his girlfriend were down for a visit, and we spent a while playing the board game Ticket to Ride with our kids. It’s kind of like a super duper basic version of Settlers of Catan in that you have to connect various regions on a map with roads or, in this case, train routes. We didn’t quite finish the game since the kids had to go to bed, but we left it out for the next morning which seemed like a good compromise for everyone. After waking up and making my way to the kitchen the next day I thought that the colors of the trains, lit by the glow of the early morning sun, would make for an interesting photo but instead of reaching for my Fuji I went for the classic Nikon + 50mm. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…something about that lens is just kind of magical. It’s not what I prefer for general-purpose everyday shots, but it’s amazing when you want to get a little artistic and creative.

So I set the camera on the table, dialed in an aperture of f/2.8 (I knew f/1.8 would be waaaaaay too big and leave almost nothing in focus) focused using Live View, and took a shot. Sure enough, even at f/2.8 the depth of field was too shallow so I closed it down to f/4 and left the ISO at 100, which meant I needed a super long shutter speed of 1.5 seconds. No matter, though. Just set the self-timer, press the shutter, take your hands off, and you’re good to go. (Sorry for my use of the second-person pronoun. Sometimes it just works better.) My oldest son, who was awake and watching me take this picture, was eager to get going with breakfast so I quickly put the camera away and set about taking care of some of the usual morning routine activities, but it was nice to get a shot of this almost-completed train route before everyone else woke up and the moment faded away.