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

I used to be a big proponent of pictures as a medium for storytelling. In several of my earlier Weekly Fifty posts from years ago I would often talk about the story behind each picture, as if there had to be more for the viewer to interpret beyond what they simply saw in the photo. And while that is certainly one way to approach photography, I don’t think it has to always be the case. Sometimes an interesting photo is just an interesting photo, and it doesn’t need any type of backstory or apocryphal information in order to be an engaging visual experience for the viewer.

And yet…

Pictures as stories can be a fun and interesting way to approach this type of art, and even if you don’t do it all the time it is a technique that I recommend trying. All that brings me to this week’s image which is…well, what do you think? I would normally use this space to talk about how I created the image, what it means to me, how I shot it, etc. but this time I think I’m going to leave that alone and ask you to interpret the picture in your own mind. Does it mean anything to you? Does the title influence how you see the photo? (or is it merely a reference to a song I used to have on repeat during study sessions in college?)

See, this picture certainly does have a bit of a story to tell in my mind. I shot it specifically in order to tell a story, and composed it in such a way so as to conjure certain emotions or thoughts in the mind of the viewers, and yet I want to keep that information to myself. I did not manipulate anything you see here, and the objects in the frame were not altered by me in any way. I did choose where to place my camera, what exposure settings to use (50mm, f/8, 1/90 second, ISO 3200*), and where to focus on the subject in order to create the shot I was looking for in order that I could tell the story I intended. However, as I post it here I find myself less interested in sharing what it means to me and curious instead about what it means to the viewers. If you’d like to comment, I would enjoy reading what you have to say and I’m sure others would too. If not, that’s just fine too. And if this image means nothing to you, that interpretation is, in my mind, just as valid as anything else.

So to come back full circle, I still believe in the power of pictures as vehicles for telling stories but I think there’s more to this particular visual medium than that. Photography can be what you want it to be, and if it means something to you then it has served its purpose.

*the value selected by my D7100’s Auto ISO feature

As I’m posting this photo, the classic Monty Python phrase comes to mind: “And now for something completely different.” This is a good example of why I started this Weekly Fifty blog in the first place, which was to motivate me to keep taking pictures and try new things in doing so. The backstory here comes from an early morning when I was awake before anyone else and, thanks to what was honestly just one of those flashes of inspiration you get from time to time, I thought I would take advantage of the very dim light and do some long-exposure photography. I wanted to stay inside in case my kids woke up and started fussing (I like to let my wife stay asleep when those things happen) so I literally just wandered around the kitchen looking for ideas. I found an apple in the fridge, set it on the table, and wondered what I could do to capture a picture of it in some kind of unique way.

After a bit of fiddling I realized I could do some rudimentary light painting with nothing else but my iPhone and the built-in camera flash. A quick swipe up from the bottom of your iPhone screen lets you use the flash as a continuously-on flashlight, which turned out to be ideal for adding splashes of light and color to long exposures. I set my D750 on the table and turned on the kitchen light to lock focus on the apple, then turned out all the lights and set my exposure using manual mode. I knew I wanted to shoot at f/4 and wanted a relatively low ISO, but not one that would result in too long of an exposure. The value I decided on for my exposures was f/4, ISO 200, 10 seconds which gave me just enough time to get the images I was trying to make.

So how did I get this specific result? Let me see if I can break it down…

It began with a nearly pitch-black kitchen, and apple, my camera, and my iPhone. After dialing in my exposure settings I put my camera in self-timer mode to minimize any camera shake and also give me a chance to get my hand over to the apple.

With my iPhone flashlight turned on and my finger over the light, I pressed the shutter button and then held my phone behind the apple. As soon as the shutter opened I slid my finger to the right, which caused the apple to be backlit with a bright white light. After a half second I put my finger back over the light and then moved my hand away in a swirling motion. The red light you see is the light of the camera flash going through my finger, which was not something I planned initially but turned out to be kind of cool.

The blurry smudge just above the apple is my hand, which got briefly exposed when backlit the apple. I tried several variations of this shot but couldn’t find anything to get rid of my hand completely, and since my kids were going to wake up soon I just left well enough alone. I hope it looks like a bit of smoke or something else besides a hand :)

It was fun to play around with this for a little while and I’d encourage you to try something similar, if for no other reason than to experiment with your camera. It’s always interesting to try new photographic techniques, and if you have a camera and a phone you can easily get shots like this…or probably something else way more creative which I would love to see!

This picture is a bit of a departure from the kind of photos I normally post here on Weekly Fifty in that it’s not about the technique, the artistry, or anything of a technical nature. Rather, I am posting it entirely because of its personal meaning to me. Last week’s picture was the kind of image anyone could look at and see some type of meaning or emotion, or at least develop some kind of interpretation, from the picture of a building with a rainbow next to it. This, on the other hand, is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum and at first glance it’s probably not even obvious what you’re actually seeing here. And for once, I’m OK with that since it’s not about the picture itself but the story behind it which, I suppose, is the reason I like photography so much in the first place.

This image represents a transition of sorts, in that it’s the ending link of a paper chain I created with my two young boys in late July of this year. We made it so we could count down to the start of school, and for the next three weeks they removed a single link each morning with their mother after I left for work. While they were eating breakfast in the kitchen on the morning of August 19 I grabbed my D750, stuck on the 50mm lens, and ran into the boys’ bedroom to snap this image before they could take this link down. It’s being held to the top of their bunk beds by a bit of twine, and I thought I would frame the link in such a way so as to include a bit of the twine as well as the bed sheets so a casual viewer might have just a bit of context. Hopefully it’s obvious that you’re looking at a child’s bedroom here given the prints on the sheets, and if you have kids of your own you might remember similar first days of school and the excitement and anxiety that accompanies them. Of course we took other pictures on this morning but to me this was one of my favorites because it showed the last bit of the countdown that my kiddos have been doing for several weeks now, and I hope in years to come I can use this picture to remember the morning and others like it.

As for the technical details, the light was still very dim when I shot this so I went clear to f/2.8 in order to let as much in as possible. I didn’t want to go wider than that because I knew I would be working with an extremely shallow depth of field, and even at f/2.8 my camera still bumped the ISO all the way up to 6400. Thankfully the D750 handles noise extremely well even at those values, and the resulting image is pretty clean. (Though some of that is due to a bit of noise-reduction in Lightroom, the kind that would normally be applied in-camera if I was shooting JPG.) I toyed with a few different angles and ultimately settled on this one because there were just enough hints as to what you’re seeing without being completely obvious, and I like that it still left a bit of mystery hanging there as well.

Even though you can’t see it by looking at this image, when I look at it I think of my two boys heading off to school: my oldest (who is five) going to kindergarten, and his brother (who is nearly 3) to the early childhood center run by a local church. Certainly the other snapshots we took that morning mean a great deal to me and my wife, but it’s the little things like this that I don’t want to overlook in the hustle and bustle. Sometimes it’s the details that can make all the difference.

You want to know the difference between your iPhone camera and a DSLR with a 50mm lens? Take a look at this photo of the Low Library on the OSU campus, and now look at the one below which I took about 30 seconds later with my iPhone:

Granted the latter might be considered somewhat cheating as it’s actually a panoramic photo, but you get the point: the wide angle of view on an iPhone camera can fit way, way more in the frame than the limited angle of a 50mm lens. For the sake of comparison, if we adjusted for sensor size and compared these two imaging devices on a level playing field the focal length of the iPhone 5C on which the lower image was shot would be roughly 31mm while the 50mm on a crop-sensor camera (which is what I used to make the top image) would be 75mm. That’s a massive difference, and hopefully illustrates why the latter is so much more limiting: you honestly can’t fit much in the frame!

And yet, it is precisely this limitation that makes it such a useful lens. To wit: the top image, which I prefer to the bottom one, shows a much larger rainbow and has a more tightly controlled sense of composition. There are three elements in the frame, or four if you count the sky. The other image, while showing a larger view of the rainbow as a whole, feels somehow less majestic and almost cold and distant. True, it does convey a greater sense of scale due to the wide grassy lawn and the several buildings which are cradled gently beneath the colorful bow in the sky. However the top image seems, to me anyway, more intentional and purposeful. It seems to be about something, whereas the lower image is a picture of something. Perhaps it’s a a distinction that is either quite subtle or utterly meaningless, but if you handed me a mobile phone and a DSLR with a 50mm lens I would choose the latter even though it is so much more limiting. For, as I have learned over the years, it’s precisely within those limitations that I find myself being so much more creative.

Some of you might look at this shot and think I’m cheating or treading trodden trails here, but I promise that’s not my intention. What you are looking at is, yet again, a picture of a magnolia flower just like I shared a few weeks ago (and a few times over the years before that). Could I find something else to shoot? Sure. Have I? Definitely. So why do I continue to return to this specific type of flower? Mostly because it’s so fascinating, such a unique arboreal artifact to look at, and so much fun to photograph.

This is, of course, another image made with my close-up filters (if you’ve missed the past few weeks worth of posts you might want to scroll down and check them out) as you can probably tell already. It’s great fun having these filters now as these magnolia seed pods start to mature, as previously the closest I could get to them when taking pictures was about a foot and a half. It worked, and 24 megapixels allows me to get a little closer when cropping, but it’s not the same at all as being mere inches from the subject. In early August I posted a few pictures of similar seed pods in far earlier stages of maturity when you could see these curly little tendrils sticking up from the base of the flower (sorry for my lack of technical knowledge here. As Bones would say, I’m an educational technologist, not a botanist) and it was fun to revisit them much later in life as the seed pods were starting to balloon out.

Soon these pods will wither and die, and from them will appear a host of tiny red seeds that will be scattered, eaten, trampled, or maybe even planted in fertile ground and eventually give way to tiny little magnolia trees. And maybe that’s why I like taking these images repeatedly over the years: it’s a way to remind myself of the circle of life (cue Lion King theme) and document it one picture at a time.