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

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 :)

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 :)