Simon

I gotta be honest, I don’t really know what’s going on here. I don’t even have a good title for the photo, which is why I just sort of fell back on an old McBain quote from The Simpsons. We’ve got a little protrusion of frozen water, poking up like a periscope from the surface of Theta Pond on the OSU campus, against a backdrop of cypress leaves and a dark chunk of wood. It’s mid-afternoon and the bright sun overhead is making the subject, and the surface of the pond, shine and sparkle with the blue sky reflected brilliantly in the frozen water. But…at the same time this image is just a little weird. It’s got the basic elements of what I would consider a good photo: clear subject, basic but effective composition (i.e. subject is slightly off center, etc.), simple but eye-catching color scheme, and yet something about this image just doesn’t quite do it for me.

And that’s why I’m using it for this week’s featured photo :)

I’m using this not because it’s an outstanding picture, but as a sort of meta-commentary on why I’ve been doing this blog for the past 13 years–and why I hope to continue for years to come. I don’t use Weekly Fifty as a way to showcase my best pictures, or show off my photography prowess, or anything like that I started this blog so I could use it to hold myself accountable for using my camera on a regular basis, that I might ultimately learn and grow as a photographer. And well over a decade later, that same simple idea continues to be the reason I keep doing it. That means sometimes I post images of which I am very proud, photographs that required time, effort, and planning, and pictures that make me positively giddy to share with the world. It also means sometimes the photos are just evidence of the learning and growing process, and those are just as valid in my opinion.

And that’s what we’ve got here. It was fun to shoot this photo–holding my camera barely above the surface of the pond on an afternoon about a week after a couple inches of snow descended on the city–and I like how it almost seems like this little chunk of ice looks almost like a frozen dianoga peeking around at its surroundings. But at the end of the day this isn’t an image I would put in the upper echelon of photos that I would be proud to display on my wall. It’s just a little weird and nonsensical. That’s kind of the point though, and it’s why it deserves an entry on the blog :)

You’ve probably heard me say on more than one occasion that we don’t get a lot of snow here in Oklahoma. Well, none that sticks around anyway. Every now and then we’ll wake up to a serene scene of the grass covered in a blanket of white, but it usually lasts about one or two days before melting away. That was the case the case a few days before this photo was taken, and it fit the pattern quite nicely. Snow started on a Thursday afternoon and continued until late into the night, so the next morning the whole town kind of shut down. I spent so much time outside with my kids sledding, throwing snowballs, and just messing around that I didn’t take a single picture of the snow at all. Not that I regretted it; I was just more focused on my family rather than my camera. Gotta have priorities, right?

A couple of days later I brought my camera to work, as I often do, and went for a walk around Theta Pond to clear my head after four back-to-back Zoom meetings just to be out in nature but also to see if I could get any good photos. Much to my surprise, a not insignificant portion of the water surface was still frozen even though the rest of campus showed no signs of snow whatsoever. It had long since melted, but the frozen pond persisted, which meant I was able to get the shot you see here. It’s a magnolia leaf resting, not floating, on the water with some cypress leaves surrounding it. I couldn’t get very close and all I had was my D750 and 105mm macro lens, so I did end up cropping the composition a bit, but the distance afforded me the luxury of shooting at a pretty wide aperture–something I don’t often do with my macro lens especially when taking pictures of super close subjects.

There wasn’t much I could do to control anything here other than the angle from which I took the photo and the aperture I used. I couldn’t move myself or the leaf much because I didn’t want to actually set foot on the ice, but even so I’m quite happy with how this turned out. The foremost edge of the leaf is pretty sharp, there’s a nice interplay of light and shadow to add an interesting amount of contrast, and if you look closely you’ll see some subtle clues that the leaf is not, in fact, resting on liquid but on ice. It was a fun photo to take and an interesting one to look at visually, and though I’m sure the pond has long since melted I’m going to keep my eyes open for future photo opportunities like this one.

If this picture brings you a bit of déjà vu, you might be on to something. The view from the top of Mount Scott in the Wichita Mountains is one of the most incredible sights in Oklahoma, and is part of what makes this location one of my family’s favorite places to spend a weekend. It’s not always easy to get a specific picture that you have in mind though, and over the years I’ve realized that the way for me to get the most fulfilling (even if they’re not the most technically impressive) photos is to just kind of go with the flow. We’ve gone to Mount Scott in all sorts of weather conditions, and things rarely line up with the photos I want to capture or the gear I happen to have with me. So, the most recent time we visited the area the only camera I brought with me was my trusty little image-creating powerhouse–the Fuji X100F. And it worked great.

After a day of hiking on the Charon’s Garden trail we brought things to a close by driving up Mount Scott to watch the sun lay itself to rest under a blanket of clouds in the brilliant sapphire western sky. Well, that was the plan anyway. Like I said, with this place (as with most mountains) you never know what you’re gonna get. And as it turned out, the mountain cooperated. As the kids climbed on rocks and the sun slowly crept lower and lower, there came a point just after it settled below the horizon when the entire sky was lit up with a bright blue and orange glow with streaks of clouds crossing from left to right like the broad strokes of a master’s brush. I snatched my Fuji from my side, held it to my eye, and popped off a couple of frames to see if I could capture the faintest glimmer of what it was actually like to be seeing the sunset in person.

Then I remembered my fundamentals: aperture, shutter, and ISO. If I wanted a good shot I had to shoot in RAW, which I usually don’t do on the Fuji since the JPEGs hold up just fine on their own, thank you very much. But when shooting vast landscapes like this it helps to have a little extra leeway in editing, especially when pulling data from the shadows like I knew I would need to do here. I dialed in an aperture of f/5.6 to get the scene pretty well in focus with minimal depth of field while also getting enough light to keep the ISO low since I was shooting handheld and needed a fast shutter. I used Auto ISO with a minimum shutter of 1/125 which left me with ISO 640–perfectly acceptable for a 2018-era APS-C sensor, especially since I was shooting RAW, though of course lower is always better. It’s all about tradeoffs though, and that was one I was happy to make.

The resulting RAW file was pretty dark and, to be honest, uninspiring. But a little coaxing with gradient masks and other Lightroom adjustments got me to a result that is pretty close to what the real scene was actually like. I don’t know when we’ll get back to the area and, when we do, what kind of photos I’ll be able to take, but in the meantime this one serves as a great example of what you can get when everything just sort of works out.

I’m not sure I have the patience to be a wildlife photographer. I certainly don’t have the gear for it, and I don’t really know if I have the compositional eye for this kind of image-making pursuit either. That being said, it is fun to take pictures of our animal counterparts with whom we share the planet every now and again. Most of the time when I end up taking photos of animals, like the squirrel you see here, it’s basically an accident, or perhaps seen from a more positive angle, serendipity. In this case I was walking around Theta Pond on the OSU campus with my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens (hardly a good combination for wildlife photos, though an outstanding setup for lots of other kinds of pictures) and just kind of paused in my tracks when I came face-to-face with this fleet-footed furry friend.

Unlike some of the other photos featured here on Weekly Fifty in recent weeks, this one involved virtually no planning whatesoever; it all happened within the span of four or five seconds, and I consider myself lucky to have gotten anything at all as a result. The moment I saw this squirrel I immediately raised my camera to my eye, having already set a few parameters like Auto-ISO with minimum shutter of 1/250 as well as a somewhat small aperture of f/8, and took a couple of shots. I didn’t have time to consider much of anything beyond just trying to focus on its eye and, if I remember correctly, I think my focus point was in the middle already and all I did was just adjust the direction of my camera in a split second in order move the focus point manually and just crop the image later. It also helped that this particular day was quite overcast, which lent a nice even light to the whole scene–at 2pm, which is when this image was captured, the sun was behind the squirrel but obscured by cloud cover, or else the backlighting would have rendered the shot a lot more challenging.

Every now and then I’ll bring my D500 and 70-200mm lens out to get pictures of small animals, but it’s just not something I really get much enjoyment from and most of the time I’m much more content to take creative, artistic photos with my macro lens or even the ol’ 50mm f/1.8G that I’ve had for more than a decade. So when a picture opportunity like this present itself and I’m able to try something a bit out of my comfort zone, it’s fun, interesting, exciting, and even a little exhilarating. I like it :)

Time-lapse video of this star trails photo: youtu.be/HRg8OHnSY1c

One of my favorite features of my GoPro camera is its ability to take star trails shots, like the one you see here, with relative ease. Despite its minuscule image sensor, especially compared to a full-frame DSLR or Mirrorless camera, it has a bevy of software features to help photographers get incredible images that are difficult, impractical, or even impossible to capture with a larger, more expensive, digital camera. I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself though; let’s back up a bit and talk about this week’s picture a bit, shall we?

I shot this on the outskirts of Medicine Park, Oklahoma, which sits nestled in a valley just outside one of our family’s favorite spots in the state: The Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. We rented a cabin (or house, I guess, depending on your definition) with some friends and spent a few days down in the area hiking, exploring, and just hanging out together. I brought a couple cameras to take some photos and video clips of the weekend, and on two of our nights there I set my GoPro on a tripod just behind our rented residence, pointed it up at the sky, set it to Star Trails mode, and went back inside until morning. The first night’s photo wasn’t bad at all, but it had several elements that I was pretty sure I could improve on for the next night.

I thought this one did a decent job of capturing the spinning sky (or, rather, the spinning earth as evidenced by the rotating stars) but I wasn’t a huge fan of the greenery on the left side which was lit up from a bright light at the edge of the yard. I also didn’t like how the horizon was slanted upwards and to the right, which was partially due to the barrel distortion of the camera lens but also thanks to the slightly askance angle at which my tripod was sitting. Ultimately, I was really hoping for more celestial spots in the background and fewer terrestrial elements in the foreground.

The following night I set up my GoPro about twenty yards north of the same location, used a flashlight to sort of gauge where I was pointing it in relation to the tree on the left, set the Star Trails timer, and went back indoors. Instead of getting up the next morning to see how things went, I woke up to the sound of strong winds whipping the trees about 3am. Not wanting the camera to topple into the nearby pond, I grabbed my flashlight, ran outside in my slippers, snagged the tripod, set it just inside the door, and went back to bed. (In retrospect I don’t think there was anything to worry about, especially because the GoPro is waterproof, but I didn’t want to take any chances.)

The next morning I was pleasantly surprised to see that everything about the original star trails image had been addressed: the horizon was straight, the tree was less prominent, and the whole scene had a sense of scale and, dare I say it, majesty that was missing in the first one. I’ve taken a handful of photos like this since owning the GoPro and it never ceases to be incredibly fun and supremely satisfying to set up a shot in the evening, check on the results the next morning, and see something I am genuinely proud to have been able to capture.