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

Before I say anything about this picture I need to make one thing clear: I do not condone the act of taking photos on train tracks. It’s a stupid and irresponsible thing to do that can easily get you killed, and no life is worth losing just to get a picture. The only reason I took the photo you see here is because, as you can see, I wasn’t even standing on the train tracks. Instead I was in the middle of a two-foot-deep trench that was left from when some repair crews had removed the section of tracks that crossed a local road. Since a large section of the train tracks had been physically removed from existence I figured it would be safe enough to get a picture by standing where they once were :)

On the day I took this I wasn’t planning on taking any pictures as I biked to work, but since I don’t get opportunities like this very often I thought I would stop for a few minutes and see what I could get. It was early morning so there was not a lot of light, but I needed a shutter of at least 1/90 second to minimize any motion blur. That meant a wide aperture of f/2.0 since I was trying to leave my ISO low, though in retrospect if I knew I was going to do a black and white version of the picture I would have probably stopped down to f/4 or smaller and bumped my camera up to ISO 1600. The foreground and background are each just a bit out of focus thanks to using such a wide aperture, but overall I’m fairly pleased with how this composition turned out.

When I was working with this image in Lightroom I wasn’t quite happy with how the original was looking, and soon I realized that it was the colorization of the whole composition. As you probably know by now I don’t do much black and white photography, but this one seemed like it would work out quite well so I tried a couple different filters and eventually settled on a modified version of Lightroom’s green filter. (If you’re not sure about how black and white filters work, here’s an article I wrote for DPS that explains things a bit more) I like the way your eyes are drawn to the rails and the horizon, whereas in the original the focal point was less clear. This also imbues the picture with a twinge of nostalgia for me, perhaps because my dad worked on the railroad for nearly 40 years and I have so many memories of scenes like this from when I was a kid. I also had to crop the image quite a bit from the original that you can see below, and as usual I added just the faintest touch of post-crop vignette too.

With all that being said, I just want to close with a bit of an imploration: your life is worth far more than a picture, and please keep this in mind when deciding whether to go for a particular shot or not. When it comes to trains and train tracks, stay away and admire them from afar.

In a recent post I suggested that one way to get inspired to take pictures is to simply look at more pictures, and one of the best ways to do that is by signing up for an account at Instagram, Flickr, or some other type of online photo-sharing-slash-viewing service. My cousin Beth, for instance, takes all kinds of amazing images with little more than an iPhone and an Olloclip:

https://instagram.com/p/6vEoJ2v5Tt/

Looking at her photos and many others on Instagram has helped inspire me to find new and creative ways of using my own camera, and even though I don’t have any gear capable of taking true macro shots I enjoy looking at her pictures to get ideas for my own photography. Case in point: this week’s image which you see at the top of the page of a fly resting on a magnolia seed pod. As I was biking across campus on my way to work recently I noticed several of these pods on the ground and though I’d stop and see if I could get a few good shots. Seeing these brown hulls with red seeds poking out is kind of a unique experience that only happens during a short window of time each autumn, and I wanted to capture their surreal beauty with (what else?) my go-to D200 + 50mm lens combo.

Trouble is, this lens has a minimum focusing distance of about 1.5 feet, which means macro shots are out of the question. But when I saw a fly perched atop this seed pod I wanted to try getting a shot of it despite not being able to get very close. The problem then became one of framing: how should I position the subject in my picture so as to have maximum visual impact, and also make sure the fly stood out from the brown background? I didn’t have much time to work with since a) I was on my way to work and b) the fly was likely to take flight any second, so I laid on the ground and scooted as close as I dared without disturbing the insect, opened up the aperture to f/1.8 to get as thin of depth of field as possible, and fired off a couple shots.

The result, while being inspired by Beth’s picture, is different in several ways: the fly is one aspect of a bigger overall composition and almost serves as a secondary focal point to the seed pod itself: many viewers might first notice the seeds and only then realize there’s a fly on top. There’s also some foreground and background elements to give the picture a greater sense of context, and the green grass helps add a bit of color to what would otherwise be a rather dichromatic image. All that being said, I do think a set of Kenko extension tubes would be pretty cool :)

This photo is, in many ways, quite similar to another one I posted last year called Control. Both pictures are looking upwards at structures, both have a building on the left-hand side, and both have something sticking out of the building that you, the viewer, are supposed to focus on. I think on some kind of subconscious level that original picture informed my choice of composition and framing here, which goes back to what this blog is all about in the first place: helping me learn to be a better photographer. And often that means taking other ideas, even ones that I have had before, and not just learning from them but using them to change how I see other photo opportunities in the present day. (A good example of this is the REMIXD blog that a former student of mine set up with one of his friends where they essentially re-take photos in a new light after learning more about photography. It’s pretty cool.)

I’ve said before that a 50mm lens on a crop sensor camera is not the best for architecture pictures, and while I still stand by that assertion I am coming to realize that there are some situations in which it can be useful. This image of a crane, for instance, would not really be possible with a wider lens because the building would fill more of the frame and the crane itself would be more of an afterthought or a footnote in the overall composition. As is illustrated here, a 50mm lens on a crop camera lets you see architecture in a more limited manner but that can also mean that you have to learn to emphasize different things in the photo.

What makes this picture a bit more interesting, in my opinion, is that there is a clear sense of motion because of the wind causing the straps hanging from the crane hook to blow around a bit. It almost seems like they’re dancing, though of course that bit of personification would be utterly silly :) Compare it to this picture taken a few seconds earlier though:

It’s the exact same image, but without the wind everything seems so dull, lifeless, and (worst of all) just plain uninteresting. While I certainly wasn’t planning on using the wind to make a point about adding a sense of motion to your photographs, I kind of like the lesson that I was left with when it was all said and done.

A few weeks ago my cousin Beth suggested that I sign up for Instagram and start using it to share my Weekly Fifty pics. I had thought about it in the past a few times, but to be honest I rather like engaging with people right here on the blog instead of Instagram. One of the best parts of this continual photography project is the comments from people on each blog post, and I think this is a better platform to foster engaging back-and-forth dialogue than Instagram.

And yet, Beth’s idea intrigued me. She suggested I use it as a platform to essentially bring people to the website, and that seemed like a compelling proposition–enough that I actually did sign up for an account which you can check out here. Basically all I’m doing there is posting the same picture you see on the website each Wednesday along with a few hashtags. Nothing special, but at the same time it’s kind of fun to have another outlet on which to share some of these 50mm pics.

So what does that have to do with this picture of a couple shoes? Well, what I soon found out after setting up an Instagram account is that I’m spending more time looking at more pictures than I used to. Seriously, most of the photographs I see on a daily basis are families and kids on Facebook whereas on Instagram there’s more of an artistic bent to the images being shared along with hashtags to help categorize everything. All this has been a bit of a revelation for me and I have found myself simply looking at photos more than I used to and, consequently, getting ideas for pictures of my own.

Which brings us to these shoes you see here. This post was directly inspired by this image that showed up on my feed recently:

https://instagram.com/p/7ZEEq6Td_5/

This image of a kid’s shoe on the first day of school got me thinking: I have kids of my own, and I should try taking a picture of their shoes. So I went over to our entryway early in the morning before my boys got up, sat my D200 on the floor, and took the picture you see at the top of this post. I hope the worn and tattered light blue fabric captures not only a bit of the spirit of childhood playtime, but a sense of calm and comfort as well. I shot this at f/3.3 to get a little less bokeh, which meant I needed a longer shutter of 0.3 seconds given my low ISO of 100.

On a side note, I like how the Instagram pic was also taken on a crop sensor Nikon D7000 with a 50mm lens, but I didn’t even realize it until I was writing this blog post. Yay for 50mm prime lenses!

This photo is a bit more abstract in nature, and thus somewhat of a departure for me, but that’s kind of why I’m posting it as this week’s featured picture. Unlike most of the images I have here on the blog, the subject and context is not (I’m guessing, anyway) immediately clear to the viewer. Instead of a flower, a museum, or even a tornado siren I’ve got…a floor and a door. What, then, is going on here? The tagline of this blog is “Exploring the wonders of creation through a 50mm lens,” and that’s exactly what led to this picture.

I was walking through a building on campus recently when I came across an old room that was being renovated and thought it might make for an interesting picture. So, like I often do, I just kept on walking with that same thought ringing in my ears that has haunted me for years: “What if someone sees you?” I know the obvious answer, for experienced photographers unlike myself is, “So what?” but I still have trouble getting to that point mentally. I continued to walk down the hallway until I finally got the guts to turn around and go into the empty room to see what I could see. Turns out there wasn’t a whole lot going on, but enough elements did stand out that I thought might make for at least a semi-compelling photo.

The yellowed colors on the wall, the layers of paint around the edges, the dusty concrete floor, the dirty repainted moulding around the base, and the blue-ish light streaming in through an old window all came together to form an interesting take on what might otherwise be a quite uninteresting and rather nondescript room. The only trouble was capturing it with my 50mm lens, since its limited field of view (especially on a crop-sensor camera) makes it wholly impractical for interior shots like this. To get this shot I stood as far back in the corner of one room as I could, and even then there isn’t enough room to see the entire doorway in front of me. This limitation, however, presents some unique advantages as well: instead of seeing an entire room, the viewer is instead forced to notice singular details of the room that combine to form a more complete picture in his or her mind.

Or maybe I’m reading way too much into this, and at the end of the day it’s just a poorly-composed picture of a doorway. Either way I kind of like the picture and enjoyed the process of taking it, which in some ways is more important than the end result.