Simon

hen I did my 2020 In Review video one of the things I mentioned as a goal for 2021 is to do more long exposures, especially with ND filters. Soon afterwards I decided to bite the bullet and get a nice 10-stop ND filter (or, as my wife calls it, a very dark circle) for my 50mm lens and the first thing I wanted to do was go down to the OSU campus and take a picture of the rainbow at Theta Pond.

In the winter when the sun is low on the horizon there’s a good chance of seeing a rainbow in the fountains, but you have to catch it at the right time of day when looking at the fountains from just the right angle. It’s a really cool sight, and not difficult to capture with a camera, but usually you end up with a picture that looks like this:

It’s not bad, but it looks kind of messy with the droplets frozen in midair while the pockmarked surface of the water gives a sense of messiness to the overall composition. When I shot this picture (the one you see directly above) I wanted to create motion trails, but all I could do was lower the ISO to 100 and close the aperture to f/16, but even then the shutter speed was 1/15 second which is nowhere close to long enough if you want to show motion trails in a fountain.

Enter the 10-stop ND Filter!

After getting the filter I raced down to campus with my kids and let them run around while I fiddled with my camera for a while. The result is what you see at the top: a much smoother pond surface, silky-smooth motion trails from the fountain, and a sense of peace and calm that doesn’t exist in the other image. The key difference between the two images is shutter speed: 15 seconds vs 1/15 second. Letting the shutter stay open for so long during a bright afternoon day lets you capture images like this, and I’m thrilled to find out what else I can do with this ND filter in the coming months.

If anyone ever asks me to define the word serendipity I’m just going to point them in the direction of this image. Nothing was planned about this in anyway, and I’m so happy with the results for so many reasons. Before we moved to Oklahoma years ago I had never seen an armadillo in the wild. At a zoo, perhaps, but never just running around like a squirrel or possum or other such creature. While you don’t see these things every single day in urban areas, they really are quite a common fixture out in the country–so much so that they have earned the unfortunate nickname of Texas Speedbumps. We live in Stillwater which isn’t a huge city but not exactly a small town either, and as such it’s not out of the ordinary to see these wandering across someone’s yard or hear them rustling around in the bushes when out walking around Boomer Lake. Or out at Lake Carl Blackwell, where we found this guy.

During the pandemic we have been going on walks out on the equestrian trails at Lake Carl, as it’s known around here, and it’s a really fun way to spend the afternoon with our boys exploring new territory and just getting out in nature a bit. We headed out there on a warm afternoon in late December and I made sure to bring the closest setup I have that resembles any type of wildlife photography gear: My Nikon D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens. For actual wildlife photography you would want a much longer lens, but the 70-200 will suffice in a pinch especially when paired with a crop-sensor camera like the D500 to get a little extra reach out of the glass. I didn’t really expect to shoot any particular photos that day, but wanted to be ready in case an opportunity presented itself.

We actually ran across several armadillos during our hike that afternoon, either scampering across the muddy path or off in the distance, but I wasn’t able to get any great photos. Our kids sure enjoyed seeing them, and excitedly pointing out their features like the long snouts and hard shells. As we were nearing the end of the hike, only about a quarter mile from the trailhead, we saw this one armadillo scrounging for grubs in a patch of short grass and I had the thought that this could turn out to be a decent photo opportunity.

I carefully walked towards it, circling wide and making sure the sun was at my back in order to get a nicely-lit image. I crouched down, fired off several shots, stood up, crept forward, and repeated the same pattern. I had my camera on continuous high-speed shooting which fired off 10 frames each second, which was certainly overkill but didn’t exactly hurt either. I set my aperture to f/4 instead of f/2.8 to avoid temping the depth-of-field fates, and a minimum shutter speed of 1/500 second. Mostly this armadillo just ignored me but every now and again would pop his head up, check things out, and then go back to rooting and munching.

And then he stopped. He lifted himself up on his hind legs, and looked right at me for a split second. I jammed the shutter button and held it down until he turned away and scampered off. I took about 150 shots in those few minutes and there was one, exactly one, that turned out how I was hoping which is the one you see here. And the key to this image? The tiny white glint of sunlight reflected in his eye. That one little dot makes the whole photo, and it only happened because I was in the right spot and his head was tilted at just the right angle. I didn’t set out to get this photo when we went on our walk, but I’m so glad everything worked out to make this shot happen.

And that, my friends, is yet another example of why I enjoy photography so much.

This is a photo I have thought about taking for a long time, but never really made happen until a chilly evening in mid December of last year. I shot this while I was out walking around on campus with a friend, mostly to just shoot the breeze and catch up on things, but also with our cameras in tow so we could take some long-exposure photos of campus. If you’re the kind of person who likes to have a sense of place and geography, you might notice that the Low Library from last week’s shot is in this image too, albeit much smaller. This was taken southwest, as the crow flies, from where I stood to get the picture of the library; just behind me is University Avenue. I knew I wanted to get a picture of the fountains, but I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted the photo to look like until I got to this spot. I tried one or two long exposures on the west side of Theta Pond but this scene was the one that really caught my eye.

I used my Fuji X100F on a very short tripod to get it low to the ground, set the aperture to f/13 and ISO to 200, activated the three-stop ND filter, and calculated an exposure time of four minutes to get the shot*. I activated the shutter with my cable release so as to minimize any shake from me pressing on the camera. And also because it was really cold out, and I didn’t want my fingers to get frostbite while holding down the shutter button for several minutes at a time! Getting pictures like this is an exercise in patience because you have to wait so long to know if you got a good shot, and my Fuji takes about as long to process a picture like this as it does to take it. So basically, this picture took almost ten minutes of work, which meant I couldn’t just go around snapping a dozens of frames willy-nilly. I had to be careful about planning things out and framing the shot to get it just how I wanted.

And oh man, it turned out great. I’m super happy with the smooth glass-like surface of the water, the fine mist from the fountains, the starbursts of light punctuating the midsection of the photo, and the library in the background. The trees have a cool snowy accent to them which was gone by the following afternoon, and you can also see snow on the ground along the middle of the photo too. I’m honestly not sure what I would even do differently if I went back to take this photo now, other than to maybe tilt my camera upwards a bit more to get the treetops and some more sky, perhaps? I dunno.

I think the best thing about this image isn’t the picture, but the experience. I rarely go out at night to take long-exposure photos, and it was so cool to do that with my friend on a chilly winter night. I hope we get to do more of this, and really see what nature has to offer when you slow down. Way, way down.

*My camera’s meter indicated that a 30-second shot would be about three stops underexposed, which meant a proper exposure would be about four minutes.

Photos of the Low Library are so common it’s practically a cliché. Not that any picture of this particular building is more or less valuable than any other (and I have certainly taken my fair share of similar images over the years) but a view of this library from the formal gardens isn’t going to win any awards for originality. However, there is something about this scene that you won’t find too often: snow. And not just snow, but enough to make snowmen–many of which can be see scattered about the lawn. Here in Stillwater we just don’t get snow very often, and when we do it’s usually not enough to use for fashioning any sort of humanoid likeness. The snow that we might get once or twice each winter is generally one or two inches of white powder, most of which disappears within a day.

Not this time.

When my kids woke up on the morning of December 14, the ground was already covered with a few inches of snow which meant they were practically bouncing off the walls (and certainly the furniture!) with excitement. A few hours later and we had about five inches of snow–the really thick kind that’s not great for sledding but awesome for rolling into snowballs and snowmen, which my wife and I did several times with our kids that afternoon. The next day most of the snow was still on the ground, which is also quite atypical for central Oklahoma, and this was also the day my buddy Ryan and I went out to campus to take photos as the sun went down.

He had his Mamiya Medium Format camera and a Nikon F1 film camera, and I brought my D750 and Fuji X100F. We spent about two hours walking around campus looking for photo opportunities and just shooting the breeze while struggling to keep warm in the rapidly-lowering temperatures. About a half hour into our photo walk around campus we got to the center of the Formal Gardens and shot the scene you see here: First Ryan on film, and then me on digital.

I used my D750 and my 50mm lens, sans ND filter because I didn’t have one when I took this, and wanted to get a shot with some cloud streaks in the barely-lit sky. I also wanted to remove people from the frame as much as possible. The best way to accomplish both? Use a long exposure! I stopped down to f/16 which let me use a 10-second exposure that did a great job of creating a silky smooth sky, but didn’t quite remove the people: you can see a few blurry spots right in the center, which are some college students milling about. A longer exposure would have almost certainly made them disappear entirely.

I like pretty much everything about this: the snow on the ground, the texture of the grass and bushes thanks to the off-camera lighting on the right side, the starbursts on the lights in the right and left side, the orange glow of the library lights, the smooth sky…all the elements come together to make a photo that you just don’t see very often. The only thing I’m not happy with is a subtle orange smudge on above the library on the right: I forgot to clean my lens before taking this shot. Arg! It’s not a deal-breaker though, and now I have something to try differently next time :)

You’ve heard me say many times that you don’t need to go very far to get good photos, and that includes just stepping out into your own back yard. Even so, it’s been a while since I posted a picture here on Weekly Fifty that I shot literally in my own back yard. Most of the time I’m out with my family and my camera is used for snapshots of people, and not the kind that I share here on the blog. But on a mild afternoon late last year I had my D750 and 50mm lens outside, as opposed to the Fuji X100F I normally use when taking snots of my wife and kids, and realized I could use it to get a really cool picture of this leaf by the fence.

I did have to alter the scene just a bit to get this shot, which I don’t normally do but in this case I thought would be OK. This one leaf was initially part of a triad with two others sticking up near the top of the frame, so I gently picked them off to get just the single leaf in the shot. I’m actually looking straight down here, not up towards a tree, which is one reason this image caught my eye. Normally you would have to contend with the bright sky for a shot of a single leaf, but in this case the dirt and brown branches gave a rich visual contrast to the image that I don’t often see. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I see it, but don’t take the time to stop and really notice.)

Choosing the right settings for this photo was a bit tricky, since the leaf was so large and my camera so close that a wide aperture would mean too much of it would be out of focus. I knew any larger than f/2.8 wouldn’t work, both for depth of field as well as overall sharpness, but I did try a few shots at f/4 and f/5.6 just for fun. In the end I preferred this one, shot at f/2.8, the most because of the way it obliterated the background even though the right edge of the leaf isn’t quite in focus. It was worth the tradeoff, and it’s not something I notice easily anyway.

I didn’t spend too long outside taking nature shots while my kids were climbing the ropes and swinging in the swingset, but it was fun to try something different but also quite the same. I think I need to take my own advice and look for photo opportunities right in my own backyard a little more often :)

If this looks kind of similar to last week’s photo, you’re probably not too far off the mark. I shot this about two minutes after that one, about ten feet away, looking in the same direction using some of the same techniques. I even have the subject off center, just like last week, with the notable difference here being the color of the focal point: yellow instead of red. This image also bears a striking resemblance to another photo I put up last fall, with this specific type of flower backlit against a blurry horizon. The big question for me when I took this image was one of aperture: f/1.8 would obviously give me the most pleasing background blur, particularly with the spots of light. But the sharpness sacrifice isn’t always worth it and in this case wasn’t one that I was quite willing to make. So I stopped down to f/2 which might not seem like a big difference, but even that little bit of change can have a big impact on overall sharpness–not to mention the slightly wider depth of field too. And in a photo like this, those tradeoffs can be well worth it.

One of the exciting parts of shooting this picture was working to get just the right spots of light in the deep background. That bright blurry light just to the left of the flower was no accident: I set my camera to continuous high-speed shooting and waited for a car (not a bus or a big truck) to drive by, and after a few attempts I got just the right reflection I was aiming for. It’s those elements that you can sort of plan, but not quite, that make photography a lot of fun. I also enjoyed getting to shoot with my D750 and its famous flip-out screen which my D7100 sorely lacks. (Famous only insofar as it was a bit of a revelation when that camera was originally released, though in 2021 it’s hardly a feature worth writing home about. Or in this case, blogging about. Nevertheless, I do enjoy using it so I’m going to mention it here just because I feel like it.)

This is also a good example of how the time of day, combined with the time of year, can have a significant impact on your photography. I shot this on December 1 when the sun is low on the horizon in the afternoon, and for a good chunk of the year you would need to either get up early or stay up late to get an image like this. And in either of those situations you might not have the same level of traffic in the background, which would make getting the shot just a little more tricky. It’s neat to see how nature can have such interesting, and not entirely expected, effects on the photo-taking process.

This picture is kind of similar to some that I shot near the end of 2020 in that it has a single subject, in this case a leaf, with some wide-aperture artifacts in the background complementing the main focal point of the image. What separates this image from some of the others I have taken recently is the sheer level of contrast between the subject and the background elements. When I was walking towards Theta Pond one afternoon in early December my eyes were immediately drawn to this scene because of the bright red leaf set against a long row of green bushes, and thought it would be fun to show that extreme level of color contrast in a picture like this. It more or less worked out how I had hoped, but there was one thing I didn’t plan on that turned out to be the proverbial icing on the photographic cake.

As I was lining up this shot I saw that, much like some of my other photos, the light bounced off vehicles as they drove past in the distance which resulted in the bright football-shaped blob on the right side of the picture. What I didn’t expect was all the smaller, similarly-shaped bokeh balls along the lower-right side. I don’t even know what caused those, as the only thing in the frame was just…well, dirt really. Even though the sun was setting which led to the beautiful backlighting, I didn’t really count on the dirt in which these bushes were planted to create anything special in the way of lighting flourishes.

Unlike some of the other images I have taken recently, I shot this with my D750 instead of my D7100. Why the change? Mostly because as I left for work on this particular morning I still had my 50mm lens on my D750 and was too lazy to take it off and put it on my D7100. I think I could have gotten this shot with my D7100 but the crop factor would have meant a few compromises in terms of framing the scene, though I suppose I did end up cropping the original full-frame image a bit anyway. It’s nice to have a bit of wiggle room though, and the flip-out screen on the D750 is nice when framing shots that are at a bit of an awkward angle such as this. Mostly I just enjoy shooting with that D750 and 50mm lens, though. And that’s probably why I had that lens on that camera to begin with: after all is said and done, and even taking into account all the other gear I own, it’s still a joy to go out and shoot with that combo.

Those of you who have been reading Weekly Fifty long enough know that I like to schedule my posts well in advance–weeks, even months before they go live. As I write this it’s about a month prior to the post being published, and we’re coming up on the end of a pretty rough year for a lot of people. 2020 has been soul-crushing in a lot of ways for a lot of folks, and if you have been hit hard by the pandemic then please know my heart goes out to you and I hope you are doing OK and starting the new year with a sense of optimism and even excitement. It’s been tough to see the silver lining with everything that has been unfolding these past several months, and yet, it is there if we look hard enough. There is news of a vaccine on the horizon, and the Biden administration will undoubtedly bring a host of changes from the past four years, and even though you are reading this during the cold of January it’s only a few months until things warm up and the browns and grays give way to green grass and bright blue skies.

And this photo, I hope, brings a tiny bit of a sense of optimism to you as you start the new year.

I rarely share photos of my kids here on Weekly Fifty (and even when I do, I never show their faces) but I thought this would be worth posting as we all begin 2021 together. I shot this over Thanksgiving break when my wife and I took our boys to Lake Carl Blackwell just west of town and spent the afternoon walking on trails we had never seen before. We didn’t know where we were going and had no map or GPS to guide us, and instead just told our oldest son to lead the way while our youngest followed close behind. Some spots on this trail (which I think was an equestrian trail, but I’m not sure) were muddy, others were covered in leaves, and a few spots were nothing but knee-deep trenches through the dirt and mud. It was exciting not knowing where we were going or what we would find along the way, and through it all our kids just kept forging ahead without a plan other than to see what was just around the bend.

And that’s kind of how I feel going into 2021. There’s uncertainty, of course, but I also have a sense of hope and excitement as opposed to the overbearing foreboding which has characterized much of 2020. What lies ahead I’m not sure, but I know we’ll get through this with the Lord’s help, and hopefully we will soon leave COVID-19 and the pandemic in the rearview mirror for a long, long time.

Here it is, my final photo for 2020. And just like usual, there isn’t really anything special or noteworthy about the fact that this image is the one to close out the year but I hope you enjoy it anyway. I schedule my posts weeks or even months in advance, and it’s basically just dumb luck as far as which picture happens to land on any given Wednesday, but even so I do think there is something to be said for this particular image as we leave 2020 behind and head into a new year.

But first, the photo. This was the result of several attempts at capturing a backlit leaf at Theta Pond one morning in mid November. The first challenge was to find a single leaf, isolated against everything else in the frame. An inspection of a nearby gingko tree resulted in nothing noteworthy, as too many leaves were visible in the shots I was taking and nothing really stood out in the frame. Then I came upon this tree on the south side of the pond, and actually ended up removing two dead leaves from the foreground that would have obscured the leaf you see here. I put my camera in Live View because I wanted to get three specific balls of light to the left of the leaf just right in the frame, and thankfully the wind had died down a little because, let’s face it, my D7100 in Live View is…well, let’s just say it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of autofocus performance. The final composition is one that I like. Really like. I thought the greens on the top left, the bright leaf in the middle against a darker background, and the spots of yellow in the lower-left corner create a compelling composition that I enjoy a great deal. The backlighting worked perfectly, and there’s even a tiny drop of water on the bottom of the leaf–a little bonus I didn’t even plan on. It’s a great picture of a dying leaf, and yet it also fills me with hope to look at this too.

If you really wanted to (and I’m not saying I do, but…if you wanted to) you could turn this picture into a bit of a metaphor for this past year. I tried writing a few sentences about it and deleted all of them, because nothing I can say here on my little photo blog can hope to console those who have lost family, friends, and loved ones due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Make of this photo what you will: I have some thoughts in my head, but that’s probably where they will stay until I can find a better way to share them in written form. But whatever you think of this image, I hope you can focus not only just on the withered leaf but on the bright spots behind it, the green trees full of life, and the sunlight streaming through the frame lending an iridescent glow to everything you can see. Let those parts of the picture not be absent from whatever thoughts and interpretations you take from this.

And may all of us, Lord willing, look forward to a bright and hopeful 2021. May God bless you and keep you, may He make his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you, and may He look upon you with favor and give you his peace that passes all human understanding.

Cheers, everyone. See you next year :)