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

My wife and I recently visited the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, and I brought my D7100 + 50mm lens to see if I could get any decent shots. This one here illustrates both the utility as well as the limitations of the setup, and while there is plenty I wish I could change about the image I am also quite pleased with it overall. To wit: a 50mm lens on a crop sensor camera is quite impractical when your primary location is a mostly indoor art museum. The focal length is better suited for medium-to-tight portraits, and other types of pictures you might see here on this blog–very few of which are indoors. Even so, I like to make the best out of any situation and I knew there would be some limitations with that setup in a museum but I did it anyway for a challenge.

After an hour of walking through the museum we came across this bronze sculpture by Harriet Whitney Frismuth titled “Joy of the Waters,” and noticed something quite extraordinary: this little girl, caught up in the beauty and dynamic energy of the bronze woman behind her, started imitating the work of art by dancing around on the floor. Through a series of twirls and pirouettes she brought the work of art to life, and while all manner of adults might simply look at it and marvel at its beauty this little girl expressed it in a whole new manner. She didn’t care if anyone was watching, and just spent a minute dancing her cares away, and if the woman in bronze had been able to jump to life at that very moment I am sure she would have joined right in.

As for shooting the actual photo, I had very little time to compose the shot and also didn’t want to interrupt the girl. Thankfully my equipment, though a bit limiting, did allow me to get what you see here. I had three goals here:

1. capture the girl dancing…
2. with the figure in the background…
3. with as little blur as possible.

That meant a fast shutter and, given the subdued lighting conditions, a wide aperture and high ISO in order to make the best use of the light available to me. I had to back way up and through a doorway (hence the stair railing on the left side) in order to get everything in the shot, and the high ISO of 3200 gave me a bit more grain than I would have preferred, but the blur-free movement of the girl was exactly what I was hoping to get. A super wide lens like my buddy Ryan’s Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 would have been awesome, but alas, I don’t have one of those and it’s another item on my ever-growing shopping list of camera stuff to buy…

Right now you might be thinking “What’s up with all the flower pictures lately?” And to be honest I’ve been wondering the same thing myself since I don’t normally go around taking photos of flora. But since the whole point of Weekly Fifty in the first place was to help me get out and shoot more photos in order to build my skills as a photographer, this second flower picture in as many weeks fits the bill quite nicely. I see it as a refinement of last week’s Starburst picture, which was itself inspired by another flower picture, which probably came about as a result of seeing other flower pictures, and you get the idea. Photography, to me, is a continual process of improvement and the latest fruits of my own personal process are what you can see in the above yellow-and-orange image. In that sense, think of this as the second in a two-part series and see if that helps :)

A few days after I shot the Starburst photo we had one of those rainy, overcast days here in Oklahoma that would seem much more appropriate for some place like Seattle. Those days are my favorite kind of weather for several reasons, one of which is they create such incredible lighting conditions for photography. So I grabbed my D200 + 50mm combo and went on a very short walk to see what I could see, and not two minutes later I came across this flower just begging to be photographed. This time I took my own advice and shot at f/2.8 instead of f/1.8 and tried to get an interesting composition as well, and I am extraordinarily pleased with the result. The overcast sky gave a nice even light with no harsh patches of brightness and shadows, and a light drizzle added a few touches of water drops that gives the whole scene a nice bit of added texture. I also like how the bright orange and slightly subdued yellow contrast beautifully with the dark green background, which really helps to bring out the color in the main subject. Finally, the leaf with drops in the foreground is clearly the focal point of the image but the tips of the flower pistils are tack sharp as well, which was a very welcome coincidence. I certainly wasn’t planning on having those be in focus but am pleased as all get out with how things turned out.

This might very well be my second favorite flower picture I have ever taken, right behind my shot of a coneflower I took almost exactly one year ago under very similar overcast conditions. And it was all a direct result of taking what worked and what did not work about last week’s Starburst picture and trying to learn a few things from it.

Here’s another photo that was directly inspired by my friend Julie and a recent post on her blog called Glow in the Dark. She posted a picture of a white and yellow flower (can’t you tell by now that I know nothing at all about horticulture?) against a dark green background and I was instantly struck by it. Hers was also taken from a low angle which helped give the subject a bit more presence and prominence in the frame, which I thought was a really cool way to frame her shot. I went out not to duplicate her photo, but to take something similar. My rules were:

1. It had to be a flower
2. It had to be centered in the frame
3. It had to stand in stark contrast to the background

This sounds easy, and for many of you it probably is, but for me it was a bit tricky since things are so bright and sunny here in Oklahoma. It’s not like Minnesota where there’s tall pine trees everywhere you turn–here it’s more like tall prairie grass as far as the eye can see :) That makes rule #3 a bit tough since everything is lit up so much during the day. Of course one easy solution to this is to take pics early or late in the day, or on an overcast day, or in the shade. Well, as a married guy with a full time job and two kids I don’t have a lot of control over some of these circumstances so I had to make do with the shady option, and as luck would have it I found this flower on a tree about 50 yards from my building at work. Woohoo!

My only regret here is that the depth of field is a tad too shallow. I shot this at f/1.8 because I wanted a super bokehlicious background, but it wasn’t until I saw this in Lightroom that I realized the error of my ways: the flower was so thick that the colored parts of the petals were in focus but the edges of the flower were not. I’m not a big fan of this and wish I would have taken my own advice (tl;dr: don’t use f/1.8 unless you really really need to) and shot at f/2.8, but all’s well that ends well and I’m kind of getting used to the blurry edges of the petals now. It’s not ideal, but it does lend a bit of an otherworldly quality to this shot of a flower.

Another in my never-ending experiment with what could probably only very loosely be called street photography, this picture is (I assume) about two generations of people: a woman and her mother enjoying the shade near a pond on a very hot summer day. It’s less of a true street photo and more of an observational image, and another in a long series of attempts by me to capture a thin slide of humanity. I’m not even sure I like it very much, but it was the result of me going outside with my camera to just try something and since that’s the point of this blog in the first place I thought I’d post it.

I didn’t make a lot of technical choices here, and instead tried to focus on composition and framing. I saw these two women when I was out for a brief stroll and thought it would make an interesting image (except for the giant tree trunk on the left-hand side, which was unfortunate but unavoidable) so I put my camera in aperture priority and ISO 200, and crouched down low to get this shot. You can’t really tell from looking at it but the ground sloped up to where I was positioned, so a picture taken from my standing eye level would have looked pretty much like a throwaway snapshot. In retrospect I wish I would have used shutter priority or manual mode in order to get a slower shutter and some cool motion blur on the fountain, so I’ll try to keep that in mind next time I’m in this type of situation.

What are the two women thinking about? Why are they on the bench? Are they even related? I don’t know, and nor do I really want to. I like to think this is about two generations sharing a moment of peace, and while that could be far from the truth it does make me smile. And Julie R., if you’re reading this I hope it brings a grin to your face too ;)

To be honest I feel kind of silly posting this picture because there’s not really a whole lot going on here: it’s a couple flowers against a green background. Anyone could get this shot, maybe even with an iPhone. So why post it here? Well…because I just like the photo. It didn’t require any special techniques, gear, or even much effort but that’s not really the point. If my goal as a photographer (well, one of them anyway) is to create images that I like, then this basic picture fits the bill quite well. I shot it when I was out looking for a different photo that I might post here someday if I can ever get it right, and even though there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about it I think I might end up printing it as a wall decoration someday. It’s simple but visually pleasing, and sometimes that’s all you need :)

This was in the middle of a medium-sized flower patch and that I paused and examined for a few minutes from a couple different angles. I generally don’t like shooting at ultra-wide apertures because the shallow depth of field can be a bit too unwieldy, so I took a few at f/4 with the goal of getting one flower in focus but adding some blurred out ones in the background for a bit of context:

I usually don’t look at my pictures until I get them loaded into Lightroom but I wondered if f/4 might result in a depth of field that was a bit too wide, so I looked around a bit more for a solitary flower with just a few others in the background. Soon I found the one you see in the original photo and took a few shots at f/1.8 (which required a 1/8000 shutter speed even at ISO 100) specifically because I was hoping to do a couple of things in the image:

• I wanted the focal point of the image to be the flower in the center, which was a bit different from my usual style of having the subject off to one side
• I wanted the flower on the right to be slightly out of focus, but not too much
• I wanted the third flower on the left to be way out of focus to give a sense of depth and perspective
• I wanted the sidewalk behind the flowers to be in the background as a way of adding a bit of color variety

Overall I am quite pleased with how things turned out, and I guess it just goes to show that sometimes you don’t need to be all artsy and technical about things. Sometimes you just gotta take a picture of a flower :)