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

Several weeks ago my friend Julie issued a friendly challenge to me on Facebook: post one nature picture each day for a week. I normally don’t participate in activities like that because most of the time I end up forgetting to take photos or the challenge goes on far too long and I lose interest, but this one intrigued me. “One photo a day…I can do that,” I thought to myself. “And just a week? That’s not too much commitment.” I gladly accepted her challenge (Thanks Julie! If you’re reading this, thanks for putting me up to it. I sure had fun!) and spent the next several days deliberately trying to take photos of nature. This picture is from the fifth or sixth day if my memory serves me properly, and I should probably admit one thing right upfront: it was slightly staged, so while it might not conform to the letter of the law it certainly hits the spirit of the challenge.

I took this picture the day after a rainstorm, and it was one of those times where I knew exactly what sort of image I was going for but didn’t quite know if I would find it. With an overcast sky and everything either drenched or starting to dry I figured it wouldn’t be too difficult to find a puddle with something floating in it. I really wanted to get a picture of a leaf, stick, flower, or something else floating on the water but I also had to find a puddle that wasn’t full of other distracting elements like grass, sticks, or random flotsam and jetsam. I came across a puddle that fit most of the criteria but had nothing floating in it, so I took an oak leaf and set it on the water only to have it immediately sink to the bottom. It was probably a good thing because a brown leaf in a brown puddle on an overcast day would have been fairly depressing.

A little while later I found the puddle you see in the picture but it had nothing floating in it, but I really liked the lighting and overall compositional elements of the shot so I walked around a bit to see if I could find something to add. Soon I came across a small patch of flowers and decided to pick one and set it in the puddle, which is what you see here. I soon realized that getting the shot I wanted required me to get very low to the very wet ground–something I was not keen on doing at that particular moment. Thankfully my D750 has a flip-out screen that can be used to compose photos in Live View, and it’s one of those things I hardly ever use but really comes in handy when I do need it. Longtime readers of this blog know that I used to shoot every photo with a super old Nikon D200, but this picture would have been impossible since that camera has no flip-out screen and doesn’t even have a Live View function either. To get this shot on that camera would have required me to not only get all wet and muddy from kneeling down super low on the ground, but it would have created all sorts of ripples in the water that would have resulted in an unusable shot. So…sometimes I guess it does pay to have better gear :)

The other consideration here was, as it so often is, depth of field. I needed a sense of context, so shooting at f/1.8 wasn’t an option since the entire foreground and background would be too blurry. f/5.6 resulted in a DOF that was simply too wide, and I finally settled on the sweet spot of f/3.3 which left the flower in focus and just enough context to see that it was floating in a little puddle. I really like the smooth, slightly blurry surface of the water and was overall quite pleased to get this picture. And it was all possible because of Julie’s challenge. Thanks Julie!

You know the old saying The best camera is the one you have with you. That was certainly true on this day when I snapped a picture of the sunrise while biking to work. However, instead of using my iPhone or a pocket camera I just happened to have my D750 + 50mm lens :) I was listening to a recent episode of This Week in Photo where one of the guests was talking about how to become a better photographer, and his advice was simple: use your camera every single day. Whether you just poke through the menus or take a picture of a coffee mug, spend some time every day using your camera and, he said, after one year you will be a vastly better photographer than when you started. Now, I can’t confirm or speak to the truth of that sentiment but I do know that using my camera on a regular basis (every now and then I go a day without picking it up, but for the most part I do something with it each day) has certainly helped me grow and improve. So before I get too deep into the weeds regarding this particular image I’d like to offer this bit of advice to anyone who is wondering how to become a better photographer: use your camera more. It’s not doing you any good sitting on your shelf, and could be doing amazing things once it’s in your hands.

That being said, here’s how this particular image unfolded, and keep in mind there was nothing particularly noteworthy about the setting or framing here. This scene is about one block from my house, and I live in a small midwestern city with nothing particularly noteworthy when it comes to photographic locations. (In other words, if you like this picture you can probably take one just like it wherever you live.) From what I have been told there used to be a house here but it was destroyed many years ago either by tornado or by fire, and now the property sits vacant with a small shed on the north and a holding pond just beyond the treeline. I bike past this every day and don’t think much of it, but on this particular day I was looking at things with a fresh eye since it was the Monday morning after daylight savings time and I was now seeing the sunrise from two wheels instead of from the kitchen table with my boys. Most of my readers know by now that I usually bring one of my cameras with me when I go to work and, since the morning of this photo was no exception, I pulled my bike over, got out my D750, and snapped a few images before continuing on my 3-mile commute. What I was surprised to see later on as I was editing the images was the difference between the top picture and this one, though the two were only taken about 30 seconds apart:

I like this second one too, but didn’t post it as my official photo for this week for a few reasons:

• There is no clear focal point. What is the viewer supposed to see: the yucca plant, the orange horizon, the treeline, or the vertical branches in the foreground? The picture is decent but too cluttered.

• The colors are not as good, even though it does have a nice foggy horizon line which I thought was pretty cool.

• I was hoping to get the foreground flora in focus and blur out the background by shooting at f/1.8 but the tops of the foreground branches blended into the background a bit too much even with the shallow depth of field.

If memory serves me correctly I shot the bottom image first, then moved forward just a bit to capture the second one and even though the top image is fairly pedestrian I like it for its simplicity: it’s a treeline with the sun poking out, and in all honesty, it’s hard to go wrong with a nice sunrise photo. I do realize that it’s a bit derivative and has more than a few similarities to a picture I posted in January, but I like to think that each successive similar picture is just another rung on the ladder of learning. Or maybe I’m just lazy :) Either way I’m happy with the image and if nothing else it was a nice reminder of why I like to bring my camera with me more often than not.

To me this photo is an illustration of how important lighting and time of day can be when it comes to getting the shot you want. I took this picture as I was walking past Theta Pond on campus before work one morning specifically because I wanted to basically get a do-over for a picture I took the previous day. At that time my coworker and I took a short break to go for a walk around the pond and then back to our office, and on the way I saw this patch of flowers so I stopped for a picture. What I got was decent but rather uninspiring:

The main problem here is the light: the overhead sun creates all sorts of harsh shadows that create a stilted and uninviting scene. The flower in front looks like it is tilted downwards as if shying away from the light, and the picture feels a bit cold and distant despite showing a rather colorful garden of white and yellow flowers. Admittedly the colors are all a bit brighter and have a greater sense of contrast, but I think that leads to a less pleasing image overall. My solution was to revisit the same location right when the sun was coming up to get a better picture and I think I mostly got what I was looking for.

Ever since I watched Sam Abell’s lecture on The Life of a Photograph I have been trying much harder to microcompose my pictures. This involves getting the overall composition set up properly but then adjusting your point of view so very small things are also aligned how they should be. Case in point: the flower in the top photograph struggling to reach up to the sky while the rest of the flowers are still tilted downwards. A properly composed picture would have the entire flower, petals and all, situated in the dark area between the two bright spots in the background. My picture suffers a bit due to this oversight in microcomposition and is left with a bit less of an impact overall. Imagine if the entire bright flower were set against the dark background and how much more it would stand out as a result, but alas, the photo remains a solid B instead of an A. Like so many things here on this blog it was a learning experience and I fully intend to do better next time, or the time after that, or the time after that…and that’s how the game of photography goes :)

There’s a bit of a story behind this photo that I thought would make it particularly interesting to post here on Weekly Fifty. Over four years ago when our son was just a few months old my wife and I continually struggled to get good-looking non-blurry photos of him with what we thought was a very nice pocket camera. (And one that we still have and use from time to time.) Kevin, the guy in the picture, was my friend and coworker at the time (he’s still my friend, but no longer my coworker as he now lives 60 miles away) and he and another coworker named Ryan helped me learn, quite literally, almost everything I know about photography. I didn’t know an aperture from a bag of Doritos and thought about getting a D3100 with a kit lens because it was supposed to take good pictures. I had heard the old familiar refrain of “it’s not the camera, it’s the lens” before but all I saw when I looked at cameras online was spec sheets and feature lists telling me this camera is cooler than that camera, and here’s a camera that you’ll like better than the other one, and even talking about all this with my buddies did little to assuage my ill-founded desire to get a fancy new camera with a kit lens. I mean honestly, how much difference could the lens make anyway?

With much patience over a few weeks of time Kevin and Ryan helped me see that it wasn’t the camera but the lens that really mattered, and on one afternoon when Kevin came over to our house to let me and my wife play around with his Nikon D200 and 50mm f/1.8 lens we were hooked. My wife and I bought a D200 and a 50mm lens and the rest, as they say, is history. That super old camera combined with a really nice lens immediately helped us get significantly better photos of our child, and I could hardly believe how much better all our pictures were compared to everything we had been able to get from our pocket camera. Several months later I created Weekly Fifty, a year after that I started writing for Digital Photography School, and in March of 2015 my wife and I decided to see if we could actually make some money at all this picture-taking stuff with our side project Stevens Creek Photography.

That leads me to this week’s picture. Kevin recently asked his longtime girlfriend to marry him, he and his fiancée asked if I would take engagement photos. I don’t know if I can quite explain how honored I was to be able to do this, not only on a professional level in that a couple would entrust these special moments to be documented by me and my camera, but on a personal level as well since it was a sign of the confidence that Kevin had in me as a photographer. I talk here on the blog all the time about understanding the basics like aperture, shutter, and ISO along with more esoteric concepts like framing, composition, mood, subjects, lighting, and the like and this photo session was a concrete example of how all that practice has paid off. The three of us spent a few hours at various locations and I came back very pleased with the pictures, and the two of them have told me on more than one occasion how much they like their photos as well. And it all started with Kevin, his D200, and a 50mm lens.

This picture was taken with the same 50mm f/1.8 lens I have had since the beginning but on my much-newer D750 and it’s a nice reminder of how much I have learned over the years. I would have never been able to take this shot without all the pictures of flowers, wagons, trees, toys, shoes, rocks, and other things I have shared here on Weekly Fifty though I see this not as the end but just the beginning. In many ways I feel like I have more to learn now than when I first started out, and I’m excited for the photographic journey ahead.

This week’s picture isn’t so much about the photo itself, but about the power of photography as a medium of expression and how it presents a specific view of reality. When you see this image, I have two questions for you:

1. Where do you think it was taken?
2. What do you think is the backstory?

For me the picture seems like something you might find in a brochure about impoverished countries in need of aid, or perhaps it would go along with a story about rural farmers struggling to make with a rapidly changing climate. Maybe this tire is a relic from a long-abandoned farm, or maybe the trees and dusty ground are about to be paved in favor of an urban revitalization project. What about the people, though? Who put the tire there, and why? Why is it sitting abandoned between two trees?

The real story here is, I’m afraid, actually quite simple and mundane. This photo was taken behind my son’s elementary school when he and I went on a bike ride on a warm afternoon in February. In the foreground is a cracked cement basketball court and in the background you can see a line of trees that mark the border of the school’s outdoor classroom. If I turned just a bit to the left you would see a large suburban water tower, and a bit to the right is a set of fairly modern playground equipment. This tire, according to my son, is just another playground fixture that the kids like sitting on and I’m guessing it was donated by a local farmer who no longer needed it. While the image in and of itself might conjure up all sorts of ideas and stories, the truth is much less interesting.

I took this image specifically to illustrate the ability photographers have to shape perceptions of the world around us. It would have been interesting to put a kid in the shot and see if that affected the viewers’ interpretation of the scene as well, but as it stands I view this as a case study in how the pictures we take, the decisions we make when editing them, the angle from which we shoot, the lens we use…all these are creative and hopefully quite intentional tools and techniques that can be used to tell a story. I do think photographers have a responsibility to accurately represent the world around them, but that doesn’t mean there is no room for creative expression either. We walk a fine line sometimes, and as long as we are truthful and not intentionally deceiving people then I’m happy to dip my toes a bit to one side every now and then just to see what happens.