Simon

Springtime rainy days are among my favorite kinds of weather for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that they make for exceptional photo opportunities. I have written about this extensively here on Weekly Fifty but it continues to hold true: it’s almost difficult to not get good photos on cloudy, overcast days during, or just after, a good soaking. Mornings and evenings are also good due to the light being low in the sky, and when you combine all of the above… *chef’s kiss* That’s how the underlying conditions unfolded when I set out to take this picture, and the results played out almost exactly as one would expect.

On a recent rainy morning I drove out to to the OSU Botanic Gardens on the west side of town, camera in hand, with the specific intention of taking several pictures of whatever I might find: leaves, flowers, decorations…the Gardens are always changing and, in many ways, you never know what you’re gonna get. This scene was the first thing I came upon after exiting my vehicle so I figured I might as well give it a try and see what happened. (One nice thing about digital photography compared to its analog counterpart is that you don’t have to save your shots for when you really need them. If you see something, you might as well take a picture, and even if something better comes along, you’re not really sacrificing anything.)

One of the trickiest parts of photographing a scene like this is trying to figure out what to focus on: the buds, the branches, the bubble…everything all at once with focus stacking? There’s a lot of choices but, generally speaking, you can’t go wrong with trying to get the bubble tack sharp and let the rest of the photographic chips fall where they may. It’s often the brightest part of the composition and, as a result, the element that the viewer’s eye is naturally drawn to, which makes it kind of a good general baseline to shoot for. It’s not always easy though: autofocus is not super reliable in these situations, and if your aperture is too wide the depth of field can quickly become downright unwieldy. But when it works, it sure does work.

I shot this at f/13 to get a pretty large depth of field, while ironically remembering that when I purchased my macro lens I kept wondering if f/2.8 would be wide enough. (In reality I almost never use f/2.8 because it’s almost always too wide when doing close-up photography, but that’s just one of those things you learn with time and experience.) I always use back-button focus which made this shot a lot easier: I took a handful of shots while rotating the focus ring, knowing I would get some that were sharp and plenty that were not. No matter though, that’s what large memory cards are for :) I also kept the background in mind, adjusting my point of view so that the drop of water was set not against the light gray sky but the rich green grass on the berm behind. The rain gives everything a glossy shimmer that simply doesn’t happen on any other kind of day, and in the end I was pleased to get this and many other pictures which you’ll be seeing here on Weekly Fifty in the coming weeks. I hope you enjoy viewing them as much as I enjoyed taking them.

Every now and then I leave the house, camera in hand, and think to myself I’m going to get a good photograph today. I just know it. And almost every time that situation arises, I get exactly what I set out for: a good photo. The thing is, though, it’s usually not due to any special situation or circumstance; the results are usually directly related to something a bit more personal, or perhaps, esoteric: my own mindset. I’ve had plenty of occasions to head out the door with the intention of taking an interesting picture and, like the first dove sent by Noah, returned empty-handed. Nothing strikes my eyes as particularly photo-worthy, I don’t have the gear to capture what I had in mind, or I just don’t feel any inspiration.

On the other hand, I’ve encountered numerous times when I went out not necessarily with anything particular in mind, other than the desire to take a picture, and things just sort of click. Nothing is different from a situational standpoint: same location, same gear, same time of day, etc. But by changing my mindset I end up seeing things differently somehow, and finding photos that I wouldn’t normally see in the places where I might not expect.

This week’s image is an example of just such a phenomenon. I brought my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens with me to work as I often do, and as I left my car I had a on the way across campus to my building I told myself that I was going to get a picture. I didn’t know what, or where, or how, but I knew I would get something. I took the same route, along the same paths and sidewalks, that I do every day and, as sure as I live and breathe, I began to see things differently. I noticed the sun cresting the horizon, the shadows dancing across familiar brickwork, the clouds floating lazily above me as the sky turned from gray to blue, and greens, blues, reds, and yellows showing up on plants and trees all around me. Normally I just kind of walk past all this and don’t give these kinds of things a second thought, even with my camera in hand, but with my mind in a different place and my heart set on taking a picture, I was able to see everyday sights in an entirely different way.

As soon as I came across this scene I knew it would make an interesting photograph, and immediately set to work. I hoisted my camera up to my eye, set an f/11 aperture, and took a few shots. They were fine, but with the flower properly exposed the background was entirely blown out and, as a result, unrecoverable by bringing down the highlights in Lightroom. Not good. So I dialed in -2EV exposure compensation, and thought to myself Now we’re getting somewhere. Examining the image on the rear LCD screen confirmed another suspicion: I had a bit more wiggle room with depth of field, so I opened the aperture up a little to f/8.

That did the job. I now had the flower in focus as well as just a bit of the leaves immediately surrounding it, but everything else was beautifully blurry. Bingo. I only had about 2 or 3 minutes until the sun was fully above the horizon so I took a couple more shots from alternate angles, and then, satisfied, I stowed my gear and went to work–on time too, I might add :)

Editing this was pretty simple: adjust the shadows, bring down the highlights, add a bit of sharpening, and tweak the white balance just a hair. It all came together to produce a final image that, while not particularly outstanding, is still exactly what I set out to get: a good photo. Nothing I would want to print and frame on my wall, but at the same time, not bad either. And I had fun in the process, which is always a good thing too :)

One common refrain you might notice here on Weekly Fifty is that many of the shots I take involve a degree of serendipity: I encounter a photo opportunity while out walking around on campus or other such relatively benign activity. I rarely have something specific in mind, and I’m often just as surprised by the results as you, the reader, might be. This picture, though, is kind of the opposite. It required careful planning as well as timing (though one could argue that’s just two ways of saying the same thing) and also something entirely beyond my control: clear skies. Thankfully, everything came together just fine and the result is the shot you see here, along with a video of the three-hour time lapse condensed down to 11 seconds.

The setup here is surprisingly simple: I captured this scene very early in the morning on March 14, 2025, with my GoPro Hero 12 attached to a tripod in my own back yard. About a month earlier I heard that there would be a lunar eclipse and used the SkyGuide app (which I purchased about a decade ago) to figure out if I would even be able to see it from where we lived. Once I got the answer (a resounding yes) I thought about asking my neighbor if I could put my camera and tripod in his field to get a good clear shot, but the more I pondered the possibility the more I realized I could use the trees in our yard to my advantage. They would provide much-needed context, allowing you, the viewer, to get a sense of where the eclipse is and where you might be positioned if you saw it happen. The treetops visible on the edges of the frame give the sense that you are standing in a clearing with your head tipped upwards to watch the scene unfold, which is pretty much exactly how my GoPro was situated behind our house.

I used the Star Trails preset built in to the GoPro and set a timer for it to start at 12:30am, knowing that totality would be about 90 minutes later. Since the battery lasts roughly three hours on this kind of time lapse, I thought it would capture the entire eclipse from start to finish as the moon made its way through the earth’s shadow–and that’s exactly what ended up happening. I held my iPhone up next to the GoPro with SkyGuide open so I would know exactly where to aim the lens, and then I set the timer and went to bed.

One thing I have learned when taking Star Trails shots like this one is that sometimes they work, and sometimes they just don’t. You can plan everything just right but be stymied by bad weather, a full moon, passing clouds, or a number of unexpected issues. This time, though, everything just worked and worked beautifully. I still can’t quite believe how well the final photo turned out, especially because I won’t even have the chance to do this for a year since that’s when the next lunar eclipse will happen. And who knows, maybe I’ll have more ideas to try for capturing a picture of it by then :)

About a year and a half ago, my wife was gifted a very nice orchid that she has been happily caring for ever since. Neither one of us are what you might call plant people, but when we do come into possession of a pothos, potted cactus, or other such green growing thing we try to keep it around for as long as we can, as best we can. Sometimes it works, every now and then it doesn’t, but these plants are a fun to have around and a lot less work than a pet and that’s a good thing :) This orchid, which I have photographed before, has always presented a bit of a challenge: how to adequately take a picture of a flower that is mostly white, with the only color tucked away in the middle surrounded by petals on all sides? My previous images have been fine, but never quite worked how I wanted or envisioned them to be in my mind when I composed the shots. Something just didn’t quite work right, and it was tough to put my finger on it.

And then the flower went dormant. Its flowers fell and it just kind of sat there in its pot for months on end, not doing much of anything but not really dying either. Just…existing. My wife diligently maintained it though, with regular watering (soaking?) along with plenty of sunlight and then, one day, we noticed several green buds start to appear all around it. Not long after that they began opening and unfolding into brilliant flower petals, and that’s when I thought I would try my hand at another picture. Boy howdy did it ever work this time :)

The key to taking a picture of a white flower, I realized, was to just let it be what it is. Don’t try to change the color of the flower with light–instead, use light to enhance the location where the flower exists. I shot this after the sun went down, and the large frosted window behind the flower was completely dark. That meant I could control all the light, and create exactly the kind of scene I was hoping for. The color here comes from several Nanlite Pavotubes, all set to specific color and brightness values to get the shot I wanted.

On the left: three set to a deep orange/red mounted on a triangle metal frame, aimed not at the flower but at the frosted glass.

On the right: one set to dark blue, held in my hand and aimed once again not at the flower but at the background.

Behind the flower: one set to 2700K white light, aimed up for just a hint of translucence in the petals.

In front of the flower: one set to 2700K white light, held in my other hand and aimed at the flower to make the petals shine while also casting just a bit of shadow where the edges curved.

To create the photograph I used my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens on a tripod, with manual exposure (f/8, 1/15 second, ISO 100). I used a 10-second timer so I could press the shutter and then position the to handheld lights right where I wanted them. I took about two dozen shots, each one with minor alterations to the light and even the angle at which I was taking the picture, and in the end this emerged as my favorite. What works so well, in my opinion, are all the subtleties: rim lighting on the lower-left, shiny orange on the green buds, the gradient from blue to orange/red in the background, the petals at top just slightly out of focus to create a sense of depth, even the texture of the petal on the top right that’s only visible if you zoom way in. It’s my third time attempting a photograph of this orchid, and this time, indeed, was the charm.

This is one of those images for which I really had trouble coming up with a title. I usually don’t dwell on the title for more than a few seconds since it doesn’t really matter that much to me, and in the end just went for function over form. It happens :)

Every now and then I take a picture that fills me with an odd sense of deja vu. I can’t help but shake the feeling that I’ve seen it somewhere before, and that definitely happened here. I couldn’t quite place it though, and then after a while it hit me: It was strikingly similar to this shot I took way back on May 10, 2013, with my Nikon D200 and the same 50mm lens I use to this day. (Though perhaps not as much as back then, when it was the only lens I owned.) I liked the original so much that I used it as the masthead for Weekly Fifty, which you can still see if you go rooting around on the Wayback Machine :)

On some unconscious level I think I must have been channeling my younger self when I came across the scene you see on this week’s photo. I was on the OSU campus the morning after a long night of rain, hoping to take some photos of glossy greenery under overcast skies…but that luck simply did not pan out. By the time I went out with my camera nearly all signs of precipitation had evaporated, and instead of grey clouds there was a bright yellow sun and more than a bit of wind. It was, as one might charitably describe the situation, not ideal. And yet even in these kinds of circumstances it behooves one to keep his or her eye open and see what can be captured with a camera anyway. And when I saw this large brown leaf hanging down amidst a sea of yellow and orange, I knew I had found something worth photographing.

I tried to take my time and consider a few things when composing this photo, and I think it worked out pretty well. Of course I considered the basics of exposure: aperture, shutter, and ISO (though the latter are largely handled by Auto-ISO, but still…) as well as depth of field, sharpness, lighting, etc. You know–the fundamentals. But beyond that I really tried to pay close attention not just to the leaf on the left but the two on the right. I wanted them in the frame but blurry, and positioned such that they did not intrude on the subject or any other elements of the photograph. I also wanted an aperture that gave me just enough blurriness, but not too much. Basically, I knew I wanted the background to be just as important as the subject, and I adjusted my camera and composed the shot accordingly. And I think it worked. I quite like how everything came together in this photo, and the multiple layers work to create a composition that’s more than what you might see initially. (i.e. just a leaf.) I also like that I didn’t crop this at all: what you see here is what I shot, nothing more and nothing less. Things don’t always work out that way, but when they do it sure does feel good :)

And now I’m wondering if a decade from now I’ll take a picture of a leaf and think to myself “This reminds me of something…”