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

I remember banging away at my mom’s typewriter when I was a kid, and yes I did say typewriter and not computer. She had one that we would haul out of the closet from time to time, plug in to the wall, and use to type letters or just play with kind of as an expensive source of amusement. This was in the late 1980’s before most homes had a computer and even though her typewriter did need to be plugged in it was merely so the physical action of pressing a key would then trigger a small motor that would activate the individual mechanical lever for the corresponding type hammer. This thing had no screen, no mouse, and used a physical ink ribbon that had to be refilled if letters started appearing as light gray. It wasn’t the most efficient way to get things done, and we always kept a small bottle of White-Out handy when using it, but without a computer screen we didn’t know any different at the time and it was a pretty useful and practical way to engage in written communication.

Of course my mom’s typewriter was far more modern than the one in this picture, and far more functional as well given that this one has some sort of plant growing out the top, but seeing this Royal model and taking its picture did bring me back a few years to what I guess you could say was a much simpler time. When I took this photo my wife and I had just eaten lunch at a local diner called Granny’s (kind of appropriate, I suppose, given the subject of the picture) and were on our way back to the car when I saw this collection of old household items sitting outside a store called The Nook. Something about the colors really stood out to me, and I thought about trying something a bit different and taking a shot straight on instead of with my usual foreground/background composition, but there were too many cars parked in the way and my 50mm lens was not wide enough to get that kind of a picture. So I went with what works and I’m pretty happy with how things turned out.

I shot this with my D750 which enabled me to get a bit more foreground and background blur than would have been possible on my D7100 due to the sensor size (if I was trying to shoot the exact same composition, that is) and really like the mix of colors that I was able to get in the final shot. This was taken at f/1.8 and even though I had to stand pretty far back to get everything I wanted in the shot, there depth of field is still quite shallow. Yay for full-frame cameras! :)

Clearly the typewriter is the subject of the scene but you can see a lot of interesting things going on in the background too, and the typewriter just happened to be perfectly positioned so as to enable a picture like this with its features neatly on display while also offering a bit of deference to the background objects too. When I was editing the RAW file in Lightroom I actually desaturated things just a bit which is contrary to my normal style of postprocessing, but I thought it was appropriate given the old-fashioned nature of the image itself. I think it would be cool to revisit this scene in the near future, perhaps in the morning or evening when the type of daylight and background traffic would allow for a much different type of picture. And who knows, maybe in the meantime it would be fun to track down an old typewriter and see if my kids can play around with it too :)

The story behind this photo is a bit strange, and it all begins with a shopping cart and a bicycle. On most days I like to ride my bike to work, especially now that the weather is so much warmer and it’s not raining as much. It’s only three miles from my house to my office which means it takes about 15 minutes on two wheels which is not much longer than it takes to get there on four. I also get a bit of exercise in the process, which I use to justify the rather copious amounts of Mt. Dew that I usually drink when I arrive at work. There’s a bridge that crosses a small creek at the halfway point in my bike ride and a few days before this picture was taken I saw something a bit strange as I crossed the stream. (And yes I know this is something you should never do.) Below me in the bushes I spied, with my little eye, a shopping cart:

I believe this was a Tuesday or Wednesday, and at the time I thought it would for kind of an interesting picture but didn’t want to be late for work so I just kept on biking. On Friday I saw that the cart was still there, so I hopped off my bike and went down to see if I could use this in any way to create an interesting picture. I tried a couple different angles and it just wasn’t working out, mostly because the greenery around the cart was so thick that you couldn’t really see the cart itself in most of the pictures. I also realized that when I was on the grassy ridge it was difficult to get a sense of place and context, which made the picture of a yellow shopping cart a little too mundane and boring. I really wanted to take advantage of the setting and the early morning light, so I searched around a bit to see if anything stood out to me and that’s when I saw the dark red piece of grass that ended up being the subject for this week’s picture.

If you look close the grass is barely attached to the main stalk. I think it has turned red as part of the dying process, and my guess is that it will soon become brown and fall off. The richness of the color kind of took me off guard, and when I got down low to photograph it I noticed something in the background I could use as a little extra compositional bonus: the yellow shopping cart :) If you look near the top left corner you will see a faint yellow stripe which is the top of the cart, and though it was not entirely intentional I thought it added a fun extra bit to the image overall.

It’s weird how many times I have biked over that stream on the way to work but never taken 30 seconds to stop for a photo. Now I wonder what else there is on my 15-minute early morning bike ride that might make for an interesting picture as well. Hmm…

This picture is another example of not only being in the right place at the right time, but having my camera with me to document the occasion. My coworker and I were walking to get some sandwiches for lunch when we came across this scene of a man carving a figure out of a tree stump, so of course we stopped to get a closer look and take a few snapshots…except I didn’t have my camera. Cue sad trombone. Thankfully he was still carving away when I returned a short while later with my D7100 + 50mm lens, and I spent a few minutes taking pictures from three different angles: what you see here, then on the opposite side, and a few more through the fence. It was clear that bystanders were not supposed to get too close so it was actually kind of a good thing I was shooting with a crop sensor camera since it gave me a little bit more reach with my lens, effectively turning it into a 75mm which helped bring me a bit closer to the action.*

I wasn’t quite sure what exactly I was going for as I shot the pictures but I knew I wanted it to be dynamic. Even though the tree stump was a fixed element and the man himself wasn’t really moving around too much, the chainsaw carving away gave the scene an incredible sense of life and vibrance–something I was hoping to capture with my camera even though I wasn’t quite sure how. I got about 25 images and looking through them it finally clicked: wood chips. That was the secret sauce that added the sense of life and action to the image which I wasn’t even thinking about at the time I took the photos. I mean, I was fairly pleased with how some of the other shots turned out but most of them didn’t explicitly show tree shavings flying around and you couldn’t really see the bar of the chainsaw either, and both elements were clearly present in this picture which I really liked.

I shot this at f/1.8 even though I knew it wouldn’t be the sharpest picture in the world, but given that I was standing several feet away I knew anything smaller than f/1.8 would give me a depth of field that was simply too wide and I was really hoping to get some separation between my subjects and the background. At one point I even tried shooting through the leaves of a small tree to get a bit of foreground in the mix as well, but it ended up just being distracting and kind of gratuitous. Despite the fact that almost none of this was planned out beforehand I am quite happy with how the shot turned out, and it’s cool to have something like this wood carving here on campus. You can’t see it in this picture but the boy and his dog (the thing the carver is working on in the photo) are facing a pond and it really does create a calming pleasant scene when you see it in person.

A few hours later as I was leaving campus to head home I caught up with the carver as he was walking across the lawn and we had a brief but incredibly heartwarming chat. His name is Clayton Coss and for nearly the past three decades he has been giving new life to dead trees by turning them into beautiful works of art. You can watch his story in this video, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

https://youtu.be/X-llstWitKw

The next morning I saw the finished tree carving, and it really was a sight to see. Mr. Coss, if you ever read this…thank you for such a marvelous addition to our campus here at OSU.

*There’s much more to the crop vs. full-frame issue than this, and shooting a 50mm on crop does not magically make it a 75mm lens in terms of composition, background compression, etc. but it does give you a similar field of view as a 75mm lens which is all I meant here.

Good morning everyone! I know this is a bit strange to have an update on Thursday morning with no picture to go along with it, but I wanted to let you know about a podcast episode I recently recorded for the “This Week in Photo” network. It’s all about blogging and I used my experience with Weekly Fifty as the background for much of what I had to say. I thought you might find it interesting so I’m posting the link here:

http://thisweekinphoto.com/twip-family-56-photo-blog/

 

One rain-soaked evening in mid-April my wife and I had just finished watching The Martian and were getting ready for bed with our usual routines of turning off lights, loading stray items in the dishwasher, and finding stray toddler shoes to put back in their proper place when she came running up to me and said “I have a great Weekly Fifty photo for you!” Since it was nearly 10:30pm and we were about to turn in for the night I had no idea what she was talking about and at first thought it must be some kind of joke or prank. I followed her down the hall to our front door where we could see a tiny pair of green feet through the window in our front door, and the little triangle of a frog’s mouth sticking up right between them. Somehow a small frog had found its way to our front door and climbed almost two meters up on the glass so it could be close to our porch light, and there we were just staring at it through the window sort of dumbfounded at the whole situation.

I quickly ran to grab my D750 since there was not much light and I knew I would need to shoot at some high ISO values to get a decent photo of the frog, and we spent a good ten minutes trying different angles from inside the house without much success. It’s not that the frog itself was moving around or in a particularly bad position for a picture, but that all the images we made seemed to be somewhat devoid of context. Sure you could see a frog…but so what? The pictures we got were not all that interesting and certainly did not invite the viewer to look at them for more than a few seconds, if at all. My wife encouraged me to get up on a chair or stepladder and try some varying angles and while they were better than any shots I was coming up with, it still felt kind of lifeless and empty.

Since our little amphibious friend was staying fairly still and more interested in chilling out than moving around, I found a pair of flip-flops, donned a raincoat, and took my camera outside to see if I might have any better luck getting a more compelling photograph. My guiding principles here were subject, context, and composition. I wanted the subject of the image to clearly be the frog, and also have the viewer immediately be able to tell that this was a situation a bit out of the ordinary. Soon I realized that the porch light itself could provide the solution since you don’t normally see this type of scene, and shooting from a low angle implied that the frog was high up on the glass door. I moved around quite a bit trying to frame the picture exactly how I wanted, and shot this at f/1.8 to get a shallow depth of field in order that the viewer would see the frog first and the light (as well as other details) second. I also liked the lower ISOs that shooting at f/1.8 afforded, even though it wasn’t all that necessary on my D750 ;)

Anyway, I hope you like the final shot. I sure do, and to me this serves as a perfect illustration of how it’s important to use your camera every day and build up your knowledge of the fundamentals so when a cool moment like this strikes you are ready for it.