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

Normally one doesn’t associate mid-50’s and rainy with the month of December. Well, not in the midwest United States anyway. Around here we’re more used to chilly and/or snowy days followed by frosty nights, warm blankets, fires in the fireplace, and soup brewing all day in the crock pot. The end of 2015 was a bit different though, and instead of cold and showy we got warm and rainy. It happens though, and one might go so far as to say that Midwest weather is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get. And if it’s also true that you can tell a lot about someone by his or her shoes, I certainly hope this image tells something about the owners of these :)

On this mid-December afternoon I was home with my two boys while my wife was meeting some friends from church for a cookie exchange and the kiddos were starting to get a little stir crazy. It had been cold and rainy all day so we couldn’t do much outside, and we had exhausted much of the usual indoor activities to the point where nearly everything ended up in some kind of little fight or squabble. (You know, typical of kids just being kids.) About 4pm we finally got a bit of a break: the rain stopped, the sun came out, the kids got their jackets on, and outside we went! Before spending the next half hour looking for bugs under rocks, playing hide and seek in the bushes, and pretending to be lions sneaking up on unsuspecting prey I took a quick shot of both boys as they stood on a patch of leafy ground freshly washed by the day’s rain. I should have taken this photo after we were done playing as the mud and dirty pants would have spoke much more to the afternoon’s backyard playtime but hopefully this picture at least captures a little bit of what the day held in store.

Since we were going outside I brought (what else?) my usual D200 + 50mm combination because that camera can take a beating and keep on shooting, and I wasn’t too worried about it getting wet, muddy, or dirty. I also tried to keep the photo-taking to a minimum and spend as much time as possible just playing with my kids. Even though I might not have pictures to prove it, we sure did have a fun time :)

Talk about serendipity. Nothing about this picture was planned at all, and yet I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It came about when a coworker and I went on a short walk to the campus post office a few weeks ago, and as we were heading back to the office we spotted this rather unique car in the parking lot. It’s a Tesla Model S, and though I had read about them and seen videos online I never got to see one in person. And as luck would have it, I had my D200 + 50mm combination with me (yet another reason to always have your camera handy!) so we paused for a few minutes to gawk at the car and take a few pictures.

This is kind of an updated version of a picture I posted in March 2015, though that certainly was not my intention when I took it. Mostly I just wanted to capture that slick Tesla logo along with a bit of sun flare, and it was only later that I realized I had kind of taken the same image as the Volkswagen several months ago. In comparing the two side by side there is a clear improvement on this Tesla shot, though I have a long, long way to go in terms of photographing these sorts of things. For instance, the image you see here involved about 10 minutes of retouching in Lightroom whereas a professional would have spent an entire day or more on this one picture in Photoshop doing all sorts of cleanup and editing work. I’m not that good, nor do I suspect I ever will be, and also don’t have that kind of time to devote to creating magazine-worthy images of cars. (Though my buddy Ben could do it in a heartbeat. He’s a graphic design genius and does this sort of thing for a living.)

A bit about the photo: I shot it at f/9.5 so I could reign in the depth of field just a bit while also hopefully getting a bit of sun flare that would likely get all blown out with a larger aperture. I used ISO 100 to get as clean of a shot as possible, shot in Aperture Priority, and ended up with a 1/160 shutter. I shot from a low angle to accentuate the sleekness of the vehicle and hopefully convey a sense of power and dominance, which would be kind of lost if it were shot from eye level.

Not long after I took this picture a professor I knew walked past and we got to chatting about the Tesla. Turns out his office mate, who I also know, owns the car and after a brief email exchange a few days later he offered me a ride and it was one of the most astounding experiences I have ever had. The closest comparison I have for accelerating in a Tesla is to that of cresting the top hill of a roller coaster. At one point we went from zero to ninety in a matter of seconds, all in a vehicle that was whisper quiet. It felt like something out of Star Trek, and gave me something to start saving my pennies for :)

Any time I see a little guy like this running around I think about the line from Star Wars Episode IV when Obi-Wan sees R2-D2 for the first time. He looks at the droid hiding among some rocks, takes off his hood, and says “Hello there!” Our little blue robot friend is cautious but curious, and eventually warms to the strange old hermit who is here to help. The same thought goes through my mind when I’m out with my camera and 50mm lens (admittedly not the greatest combination when it comes to wildlife photos) and in this case I literally said it out loud as I was carefully following this squirrel around for a few minutes one morning. I was trying to reassure him that I meant no harm, but since he most likely did not speak English he just kept on running away :)

Longtime readers of Weekly Fifty will note that this is not the first time I have featured a picture of one of these wily little rodents here on the blog, and I don’t mean to keep posting variations on the same picture over and over. But since I’m doing this blog to help me continue to learn photography I figured it wouldn’t hurt to show yet another squirrel since it’s all in the name of education and improvement. When I shot this I didn’t have much time to think about composition and framing since he did not hold still for very long, but I did try to keep a few key elements in mind:

• The squirrel had to be tack sharp

• I intentionally shot at an ultra-wide aperture of f/1.8 in order to get some blurriness to the background, otherwise the squirrel would have blended in too much

• I wanted to get a bit of the tree on the left side to provide a bit of context

• I was really hoping to capture him with his hands out, preferably while munching on an acorn or something similar

Whenever I shoot photos of subjects I have done before I try to improve on past mistakes and make the new batch better, and if I look back at other similar shots of little animals that I have taken I can certainly see a marked improvement here. I did get most of what I was aiming for, even though you can’t quite see what he is holding in his hands. Even though this shot is decent I sure would like to get my hands on a zoom lens someday for some real wildlife photos, but until that happens it looks like I’ll be sticking with squirrels and ducks for now :)

As a side note, I also got this picture that I don’t like as much but figured I would share it anyway. I tried this a few weeks ago and got a lot of opinions from you all regarding which butterfly image you preferred, so I thought it would be fun to try it again :)

Here’s the honest truth about this week’s photo: I have been trying for a few weeks to get an honest-to-goodness Christmas picture that I could post here, but it’s just not working out. As I type this it’s 60 degrees and sunny here in Oklahoma, with highs hitting the 70’s later this week which obviously rules out anything like snow, snowflakes, icicles, or anything that captures the essence of winter. I thought about taking photos of christmas lights or decorations, but I’ve done that before and it all seemed a bit too contrived. Instead what I decided to post here is an image of my eldest son skipping down the sidewalk at a local nature reserve. We like taking our boys there when the weather cooperates, and it certainly did on this early December morning when this photo was taken. I didn’t plan it and it doesn’t seem like a Christmas photo per se, but I’m using it anyway not because of what it is but because of what it represents.

We are told in 2 Corinthians 5:17 that “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here.” Matthew also writes in his gospel that “Unless you become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven.” To me these verses speak to the Christmas story as much as anything in the first few chapters of Luke. And watching my son run and skip down this path reminded me of the powerful sacrifice Jesus made for him, me, you, and all of us on this little blue marble in the sky. This pale blue dot, this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, this planet earth that we all call home. Jesus was born and lived a perfect life only to be sacrificed not for what he did wrong, but for our sins. That’s the true meaning of Christmas, and that’s what this season of presents, trees, lights, and carols really is all about.

This photo is not perfect: the colors in the sky are washed out, the silhouette of my son is barely visible against the dark sheaves of grass, and I wish I would have been a bit closer to get a cleaner composition. But seeing it fills me with hope not just for my kids but for the new year and for all of us. With so many uncertainties just around the corner we have to choose how we will respond when we wake up each day. We can approach tomorrow with fear and trepidation, or we can choose to be joyful and embrace the challenges that a new sunrise brings. As for me and my house we will serve the Lord, and with that I wish all of you a very merry Christmas and a most blessed new year.

I debated whether to feature this image here on Weekly Fifty because it feels a bit repetitious. I have featured this location before, and indeed once posted an almost identical image a few months ago. But like Ahab’s white whale, this picture here represents something I have been trying to capture for quite some time: a silhouette with the Theta Pond fountains in the background. I have made some specific deliberate attempts by asking my friends to walk near the pond while I took their pictures and once caught this silhouette almost by accident while out shooting with my 85mm lens. But for some reason capturing a good silhouette with my 50mm lens (more on that in a bit) has proved almost impossible…until I got this one.

While it’s not perfect on a technical level (I could do without the cars in the background) I like what’s going on here: two people, one playing a guitar and the other walking his dog, having a conversation. It’s the sort of scene that’s not too uncommon on a college campus, and the fountain backdrop adds a bit of mystery to the whole situation. When I walked past the pond on this particular day I saw the guitarist by himself and the other guy walking his dog about a hundred yards away. Slowly the dog-walker made his way over to the guitarist, most likely because he heard him play a familiar tune and wanted to talk about it. Based on how they acted I don’t think the two guys were friends or really knew each other that well, and it was fun to see a moment of connection between two people if only for a brief moment.

This description makes it sound like I was some kind of stalker, which is one problem I have with candid street photography. I only watched the scene for a minute but even that felt like a long time to be surreptitiously taking pictures of people I did not know. I guess I could have gone up and introduced myself to make things less weird, but I don’t think these guys even noticed I was there in the first place and I imagine most of the strangeness is just a misperception in my own mind.

I’m quite happy with this picture even though it’s not exactly the type of silhouette I have been trying to get. At this point I’m not even sure I could explain precisely what it is I’m looking for, but I hope I know it when I see it.

Incidentally, the reason this type of image is hard to capture with a 50mm lens involves a couple of factors. The most important thing is that the subjects be properly backlit by the fountain, which can only happen if the fountain is large in the frame. That, in turn, can only happen if the subjects are physically close to the fountain (which is the case here) or if you use a telephoto lens to compress the background–essentially bring background objects closer while maintaining the same size for your subject. Since the Nifty Fifty is neither wide or telephoto, it means you need a situation like this for a good silhouette which is not always easy to come by. However, after getting this shot I’m encouraged and will probably continue trying to get that elusive white whale…