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

Do yourself a favor here: click on the picture to see it in the Flickr gallery, and then click the option to see it full-size. I’m not trying to be conceited or anything, but when I posted the image here on the blog it seemed like some of the sharpness and richness of color somehow got lost with the small size.

Did you do it? Cool :)

It was kind of a dreary day when I shot this image, and my coworker and I went out for a very short walk to just get out of the office for a few minutes. As I often do I had my camera with me (which is increasingly becoming my D7100 while my D200 sadly gathers dust on the shelf) just in case we came across a picture opportunity, and while I had no intention of taking pictures of these small bushes I did notice two things as we passed by that made me think twice: the mix of rich colors along with the bits of rain that had pooled among their leaves. First I took a couple shots from a low angle looking out over the bushes while trying to keep one large drop of water in focus, but they didn’t turn out all that great and looked rather derivative of some similar pictures I have taken in the past. Since I don’t look at the LCD screen on my camera that often I didn’t know how these initial images turned out, but as we kept walking I saw another cluster of colored leaves that was just begging to be photographed.

For the shot above I stood directly above this patch of leaves, set my aperture for f/2.8, and popped off a couple shots at 1/180 second with an ISO of 125. Even though the day was rather overcast there was plenty of light for shooting with a fast shutter and low ISO which turned out to be a huge benefit once I loaded this picture up in Lightroom. The original picture looks bland, boring, and altogether forgettable but thanks to the magic of shooting in RAW I was able to take the picture to (cliché warning) a whole new level.

This image is OK, but it’s lacking the texture and crispness of the edited file, and I also like how in the final version there is something in the way of a clear focal point as well. The larger drops in the top-left quadrant serve to anchor the picture and draw your attention, but in the original file there isn’t a good sense of what you are supposed to look at. I know some people who shoot in RAW but don’t do anything to the files in post, and while I’m not one to tell anyone how he or she should approach his or her own photography, I will say that if you are not doing anything to your RAW files you might as well shoot in JPG and let your camera take care of interpreting the data how it wants to. Neither one is necessarily good or bad and both have tradeoffs, but it might be worth your time to play around with your RAW files a bit in Lightroom or Photoshop to get a little more out of them than you might initially realize.

Anyway, sorry for the somewhat technical tangent there. I hope you like the picture and if nothing else, I hope you find time in the coming few days to get your camera out and go take some pictures with it :)

(Note: Last week I mentioned that the picture of the cow was taken when the camera crew from a local PBS station was setting up to record a short interview with me. Here’s the video in case you want to see it.)

Over Christmas we visited some family in Missouri and I had a metal debate before we left which mostly centered on the question of bringing my D750 + 50mm lens or my D7100 + 35mm lens. Both lenses have a similar field of view since the 35mm on a crop sensor camera shows roughly the same image as a 50mm lens on a full-frame camera (though other things like background compression, bokeh, etc. are different due to the absolute focal length of each lens being different) so there really wasn’t a big advantage to bringing my new D750…except I really wanted to use it :) I did wonder if it would be worth the risk since the chances that it might get stepped on or dropped while on a family car trip with two young kids were much greater than the chances of it getting damaged while sitting safely on a shelf at home, but then, cameras don’t take very good photos if they are sitting around un-used.

In the end I decided that life’s too short to worry about such things, and I didn’t spend $200 on a drops-and-spills warranty so my new camera could get pampered and under-utilized. We took the D750 + 50mm combo and the more I used it while visiting our relatives the more I was glad we made that decision. It worked like a charm and there were only a few times during which the field of view was a bit too limited, though there really wasn’t a good way to solve this given my current lens and camera selection anyway. The real benefit of having the D750 on our holiday was its ability to shoot at crazy high ISOs (well, high compared to my D7100 but maybe not when pitted against some of the new cameras out there) and still get usable pictures of grandma and grandpa playing with our boys.

The evening before we left to return home I saw this piece of wire artwork which my wife made years ago in elementary school sitting on a bookshelf and thought it would make for an interesting picture subject. Since it was the Christmas holiday there were some lights and decorations in the house that aren’t normally around, so I tried to find a location for this sculpture that would put these accents to good use. I found a table with a lamp that had some Christmas lights behind it, set the sculpture down, and fired off a few pictures. My initial shots were at f/1.8 which resulted in the figure’s head being in focus but not the arms and legs, so I stopped down a bit to f/2.8 which still allowed me to use a relatively fast shutter of 1/125 second in order to eliminate any blur due to camera shake. Only problem was the dim light which meant I had to use ISO 5000…but my goodness. The final image is so clear I don’t think I could ever tell at first glance that it was taken at such a high ISO. My D200, which you all know I enjoy using, looks terrible at its max ISO of 1600. So yeah, as much as I enjoy shooting with my older cameras I’m really starting to enjoy this D750 :)

Despite living most of my life in what might seem like rural midwestern states like Nebraska and Oklahoma I have spent comparatively little time on actual farms interacting with, you know, real live farm animals. I’m basically a city slicker even though I have a master’s degree (albeit in a field that has nothing to do with agriculture) from one of the nation’s top agriculture schools, so when I found out I would be going to a local farm to be interviewed for a short public broadcasting video I thought it would be fun to bring the ol’ 50mm lens with just for kicks. Since my D7100 is now basically my backup camera and my D200 spends most of its days giving the dust in our house an object on which to settle I figured I would bring the former with me lest my new D750 have an unfortunate encounter with some dairy cattle.

As soon as we got to the location I realized the critical flaw in my plan: there was almost no space in which to move around, thus making a 50mm lens on a crop sensor camera wholly impractical and almost useless:

I tried to get a few shots of the cow you see above along with her friend, but there was almost no room to move back which made getting anything interesting in the picture an exercise in futility. That, and these animals wouldn’t hold still at all making it next to impossible to get any good pictures with the gear I had. Ironically the image at the top of this post was the first one I took and the only one that turned out from about 20, but in the end it’s not about how many pictures you take but how many keepers you get. And since I got one I’m happy with how things turned out :)

One side note about this picture worth mentioning: since getting my D750 I have been shooting with Auto-ISO and I really like it. Listen to the audio clip (click the play button below the featured photo) to hear a bit more, but suffice it to say if your camera has this feature you might want to give it a try. Even on my D7100 which can’t handle the crazy ISOs of my D750 I have found it to be quite useful.

If you’re not quite sure what’s happening in this picture, don’t worry since I don’t really have much of an idea either. On the right-hand side is a unicycle that is strung up between two posts with some steel cable, and intertwined in the same mesh is a couple of plastic frisbees. I think it’s some kind of artwork, though its purpose has never really been clear to me. (And as a guy who often rides a unicycle around campus I want to ask the creator if I could maybe help him or her with a few lessons!) I have often thought it might make for an interesting silhouette picture but there is usually so much activity with students, professors, tours, gardening crews, and other things going on that it’s hard to get in a good shot. However, one day late in the Fall 2015 semester I was on an errand and noticed that the light and general lack of people made for the kind of picture I had thought about for a while. Good thing I had my camera with me :)

Originally I was just looking to get the unicycle itself but as a pedestrian walked by I thought I would use it as an opportunity to get a bit more energy in the shot. This was taken with my D200 which is notoriously unreliable when using apertures smaller than f/1.8 on my 50mm lens, but in this case that was actually a good thing since the wide-open lens opening allowed for a bit of background blur that would not really happen at smaller apertures. I took two pictures and had a bit of a tough time deciding which one of them was my favorite but in this one it’s much more clear that there is a person walking by whereas in the other one it’s not as immediately noticeable. And since I exposed for the background and not the foreground it resulted in a nice clean silhouette, though if you look closely you can actually make out the red, yellow, and blue colors of the discs next to the unicycle.

This might be seen by some as a companion piece to this picture from a few weeks ago, but any similarities are entirely unintentional other than the idea of capturing a silhouette. I must admit that I have been somewhat fascinated with these types of shots lately and would like to explore it a bit more, possibly creating intentional silhouettes with a few willing (and patient) individuals. It’s fun to try these types of pictures and see what turns up. I should also mention that I did edit this quite a bit in Lightroom to get the colors in the background how I wanted them, and I do wish there was less clutter (chain link fence on the right, tree supports on the left, etc.) in the shot but as the saying goes, it is what it is and I’m happy for what I was able to capture. As Spike says, “Whatever happens, happens” and that’s a lesson I’ve had to learn over and over again with every time I raise my camera to my eye :)

Couple things about this picture:

1. I took it on December 22, the first day after Winter Solstice. This isn’t really big deal except for one thing: starting on this day everyone in the northern hemisphere gets more light each day, so in that sense it’s kind of like an early Christmas present that keeps on giving clear up until June 21.

2. It’s another photo that I just happened to take because I had my camera with me. It was not planned at all.

3. It’s the first picture I’m posting here on Weekly Fifty that was taken with my new Nikon D750 :)

I often extol the virtues of my decade-old Nikon D200 here on this blog but for a long time now I have been wanting a little more out of my lenses especially when it comes to shooting portraits. The D200 and my D7100 have served me well but when it comes to paid work their dynamic range, high ISO performance, and depth of field when shooting larger subjects like people has left me a bit wanting. Enter the D750, which came out a year ago and has been sitting atop my constantly-growing wishlist ever since. It’s a full-frame camera which means it addresses all three issues I have been having with my smaller sensor models, and has a ton of added features too that I hope to find quite useful in the coming years. In some ways this new camera represents a fresh start, just like the sunrise, because it’s kind of a new way of looking at photography and certainly my existing collection of lenses. (All of which function quite differently on a full frame vs. crop frame camera.)

But enough about the camera, let’s talk about the photo. I’ve long been a fan of these silhouette sunrise/sunset pictures and have posted a few here on the blog before, but in this particular one I like how the light poles jut vertically through the frame, especially the one on the left. Seeing them in the foreground as well as the background gives a sense of scale to the overall composition, and the sun was low enough on the horizon that I was able to get plenty of the rich deeply-saturated sky colors that only happen at dawn and dusk. I shot this at f/4 though I could have gone smaller, but even at that aperture this image is plenty sharp with little to no depth of field.

One of the differences between a larger camera like a DSLR or mirrorless and something smaller like an iPhone is the sheer level of detail each is able to capture. For instance, here’s a this 100% crop of the middle area of this picture:

I have no idea how far away those branches are, but it’s at least a couple hundred yards yet even then you can clearly see individual branches whereas on a mobile phone you would not get nearly this level of image quality. This helps illustrate why I like my iPhone camera just fine but really enjoy having the benefits of a camera with a larger sensor when I want it :)

Finally, and I realize this is going way off topic here, I thought I’d illustrate one aspect of the D750 that I really like. It, along with other newer cameras, has the uncanny ability to see things that other models like my age-old D200 simply can’t find. The image below gives you an idea of just how much information is captured by a modern image sensor:

Believe it or not this is the same picture but with a little bit of processing in Lightroom. Even though the original picture looked almost entirely black in the bottom third of the frame there was actually a lot of information there just waiting to be recovered in a computer. This is massively useful in many different photographic situations, and also a key differentiator between a bigger camera and that which you might find on a mobile phone. The latter simply has no chance of capturing all this information.

Anyway, sorry for the extra long and slightly wandering post today. I’m kind of geeking out about my new camera and I hope you don’t mind :)