Simon

This picture is somewhat of a return to form, you might say, albeit not exactly intentionally. It’s not like I threw away my full-frame camera and macro lens, in order to recapture my roots with my original 50mm lens and Nikon D200 body, but the idea here isn’t too far (literally as well as geographically) from some of the pictures I took years and years ago. Like many of my earlier images I shot this right in my own back yard, and there wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy that went into the planning of this photo. It wasn’t planned at all, really. But the end result is an image that I like quite a bit, and more than that, really enjoyed taking.

One recent evening after a few hours of rain had quenched the parched ground, I found myself with a bit of time while my kids were playing video games and my wife was out with a friend. I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired or even fully lucid, having not slept all that well the previous night, but I thought I would grab my camera and walk around the yard just to see what I might capture despite my somewhat wan frame of mind. I’m sure glad I did, as often this kind of simple act can, in and of itself, provide just the kind of revival, to to speak, that might be needed.

I had my eye out for color, or at least contrast, that stood out in the overcast evening. Much of our yard was varying shades of earth tones–green, brown, and a little red in the dirt which is not unusual for our modest residential property here in Oklahoma–so when I saw this leaf, and several others like it, I thought it might make an interesting picture. It’s not that this single individual leaf stood out from the rest in any particular way; it just kind of looked good, if you know what I mean. I saw it and though I bet that would make for a good photograph. So that’s what I tried to do.

I squatted down on the somewhat soggy grass, put my camera in Live View, flipped up the screen just a bit, dialed in an aperture of f/11 with minimum shutter speed of 1/180 second, and fired off a couple of shots. (My aging D750, as I have written about before, still stands toe-to-toe with any modern camera in terms of straight-up image quality, but when it comes to composing in Live View…well, let’s just say it’s pretty outdated. It works great if the subject is still though, which this leaf most certainly was.) This one ended up as my favorite from the bunch: the leaf is sharp, detailed, and stands out from the foreground and background. It even has a cool purple fringe on the lower portion which is not, as one might assume, an optical artifact from light bouncing around in the lens, but just the natural color of the leaf as it withers away.

There’s one other feature of this photo that I wanted to share, or rather, a bit of information (disclosure, perhaps?) about how it was processed. As with most of my Nikon D750 photos I shot this in RAW, and here you can see a closeup the original image:

It’s darker, of course, and the colors are not as pronounced, but that’s to be expected on an undeveloped RAW file. It’s also quite noisy, since it was shot at ISO 2200. But here’s the same section of the final image:

This is entirely due to the AI Noise Removal tool in Lightroom, which I have found myself using more and more thanks to the incredible quality of its results. I don’t know exactly how it works, all I know is that it sure does work. It’s so much nicer than fiddling with the Color and Luminance sliders that I used for years, and does an outstanding job of preserving details that would otherwise be lost with the old way of removing noise.

Anyway, just thought I’d share :)

I had no time to prepare for this photo. It came about with no planning, no thought process other than “Grab the camera!” and no control over almost anything including my own point of view. A few minutes before this shot was taken the sun had not yet crested the horizon, and a few seconds after I clicked the shutter the spider had skittered down and started to disassemble its web altogether. It was an incredibly fortunate moment of serendipity, and one that I’m thrilled to have been able to capture with my camera.

Shortly before I had to leave for work my son and I noticed this large spider web in the back yard, which we happened to see while looking out the window just kind of at random. One of us, I’m not sure who, remarked at how the web was lit up in the morning sunlight, creating a scene that had hitherto been hidden in plain sight without the incoming light. As we examined it through the kitchen window we saw the spider still asleep, presumably, in the middle of the web which made it feel like we were witnessing something that had been frozen in time. That’s when it occurred to me that I could, at the very least, attempt to take a picture and even if it didn’t turn out at all at least I would know that I tried.

I snatched my Nikon D750 with 105mm macro lens from the shelf, went outside with my son, and then carefully approached the spiderweb which was still absolutely drenched in sunlight. The last thing I wanted to do was disturb the spider, its web, or anything else so I took great pains to tiptoe around the yard and sidestep anything that might be connected to the spider web. I wasn’t sure what exposure settings to use, or even what I was hoping to capture with my camera…all I knew was that this was a scene worth photographing and I wanted to do it. Somehow.

I ended up dialing in f/5.6, 1/180 second, with an Auto-ISO of 1600 to get the shot you see above. I wasn’t particularly close to the spider or else I would have used a smaller aperture to keep the depth of field under control, but in the end I kind of wish I had. f/5.6 worked fine, but I wish the spider was just a bit sharper and the web a bit more in focus. Also, I think my presence did have the unintended consequence of waking up the spider…possibly due to the noise of my footsteps or subtle variations in air pressure as my body moved closer to the web. Whatever caused it, the spider soon started scooting south and I only had a second or two to take this picture before the entire scene changed. The spider began disassembling its food-catching creation and before we knew it, all that remained of the web was a thin strand of silk. The spider drew itself, and what was left of its overnight creation, up into the tree above.

My son and I were kind of amazed at what we had just witnessed, and as I write this I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. Is this behavior normal? Did the spider pack up it web like we might pack up a tent, only to unfurl it the next night? Or did it just start over altogether once the sun came down? Did it move to another location? So many questions with so few answers, but at least I got a fun picture out of it :)

Not long ago we met up with some friends for a weekend in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, roughly halfway between our respective home bases in Nebraska and Oklahoma. We got a big Airbnb with plenty of room to spread out, make meals, play games, and just catch up on life while the kids hung out together. The town was small, the weather was warm, the entire experience was one that, in some ways, felt like something out of a postcard. Not long after dinner we all walked down the cobblestone-paved Main Street over to the eponymous Falls, and then continued on for a bit of geocaching. (We found one!) Before heading back to the Airbnb we all just kind of hung out on the bridge near the falls, which had long ago been transformed from a road into a pedestrian area, and after getting some shots of my family and our friends I set about seeing what I could capture of the falls themselves.

I set up my Fuji X100F on a tripod and, in an effort to smooth out the water a bit, I dialed in an exposure setting of f/16, ISO 200, and 1-second shutter. (Which, now that I think about it as I type this, I could have increased by a few seconds if I had activated my camera’s built-in ND filter. I forgot about it!) I didn’t spend too long trying to get an ideal picture here; mostly I just wanted something that would capture the scene and, hopefully, convey a sense of mood, feeling, or emotion to the viewer. The calm air, the smooth surface of the river, the aging concrete structure holding it back, and the clear sky in the background. But there’s something else going on in this picture if you look a bit closer…

Did you see it? Look on the left side of the frame, on top of the dam just near the water.

That guy is the missing piece of the photographic puzzle, the key to all of this, one might say. He provides the much-needed element of context and perspective, immediately giving viewers a sense of scale while also serving as a point of calm and serenity next to the swirling waters coming off the dam. I don’t know who he was, but until he showed up with his fishing pole the scene, while interesting, also felt a bit hollow and empty. I’m just glad he didn’t move much in the one second it took to take this picture! So to that fisherman dude: thank you, whoever you are.

The phenomenon you see illustrated here, with points of light radiating out from a bright center, is one of my favorite photography tricks to pull off. Though it’s not actually a trick at all, just a matter of understanding some fundamentals of how pictures are captured by cameras and the importance of exercising control over exposure. Also, you can’t get this kind of shot with a phone so it’s kind of a fun, if perhaps slightly vain, flex for anyone who shoots with a dedicated camera and knows what they are doing. But more than all that, this picture is among my favorites from our entire trip to the Black Hills and Badlands over the summer, which is why it most certainly deserves a spot here on Weekly Fifty.

I shot this with my Fuji X100F at f/16, 1/80 second, ISO 1250, and while that ISO is a bit higher than I normally use with that camera it was a tradeoff I was more than happy to make here. Usually my primary consideration when taking pictures is aperture because I like to control the depth of field, but here it was aperture for a different reason entirely. My choice here had nothing to do with depth of field and everything to do with the beams of light: You can only get a starburst like this if you shoot with a small aperture, since the light bouncing off the physical blades is what produces the desired effect. It’s also why you can’t do this on a mobile phone–they all* have fixed-aperture lenses.

You also can’t get a shot like this unless the bright point of light is just that: a point. When the sun is out and about during the day it’s just too large and bright to produce starbursts, which is why you can only get these if you compose your shot so that the sun is almost entirely obscured behind a tree, building, mountain, or other such object. So basically, conditions have to be just right to get a picture like this, and I consider myself exceedingly fortunate to be able to capture this image at such an incredible place as the Badlands. While our road trip was not over, our time in the park was, and the next day we left the park to continue on to more sights while also making our way back home.

Looking at this picture reminds me of not just the incredible scenery, but the time spent with my wife and kids over the course of the ten days we were on the trip, and that says quite a lot about the real magic of photography.

*To be fair, there are a few models that use variable-aperture lenses but they are by far the minority. All phones from major manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, Google, etc. have fixed-aperture lenses.

Note: This sunset time-lapse was taken at the same time I shot the photo above, but with a different camera and from a slightly different location. I used my GoPro Hero 12 Black for the time-lapse, and positioned it just down the boardwalk from where I shot this week’s featured image. I figured the two photos were close enough that it counts :)

One conclusion I kept coming back to during our trip to to the Black Hills and Badlands was that no picture seemed to adequately capture the vastness of the scenes we were witnessing. It didn’t seem to matter what focal length I used, what angle I shot from, what I included in the foreground or background…few things ever really captured the sheer scale of the western wilderness stretched out before us. It’s not that such a thing isn’t possible, just that I found myself continually outside my area of expertise. That said, I was certainly willing to try and ended up with a few photos such as this one that, while not quite A+ level, could certainly be described as not bad. Not too bad at all.

I took this photo looking south from Bigfoot Pass Overlook while the sun was setting just out of frame on the right, with the intention of capturing the brilliant colors of the clouds overhead while also getting the rich red strata layers in the rocky terrain in the foreground. While I’ve seen many beautiful sunsets over the years, I don’t think I have ever seen one quite like this, and even though my Fuji X100F was probably not the ideal camera for this scene it was the one I had with me so I gave it a shot.

I had to think carefully about my exposure settings since there simply wasn’t much light to work with; the sun had actually just dipped below the horizon a few minutes before taking this picture. Though smaller apertures are usually better for scenes like this so you can an ultra-wide depth of field with maximum overall sharpness, while still letting in plenty of light, that just wasn’t going to work here especially since I was shooting handheld. I used a 1/80 shutter at ISO 400 and, of course, shot in RAW to get as much color information as possible.

Unlike my photos from the past few weeks I didn’t put anything in the foreground to give a sense of scale and perspective, but that wasn’t what I was really going for here so I don’t mind too much. I kind of like the elevated shooting position I was in, and if you look carefully at the left side of the frame you will see a truck driving on the road if you really do want a sense of how big the scene is. Not that it’s the Rocky Mountains or anything, but the view isn’t exactly tiny either.

So in the end, I guess the question is: does this photo work? I think so, but that’s kind of up to the viewer to decide. Do I like it? Absolutely.