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

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…

Foggy mornings are so cool for photography, and whenever we get one here in Oklahoma (which is only a handful of times each year) I like to go out and shoot some pics even if I don’t even have anything specific in mind. That was the case when I got this picture of the student union on the OSU campus: it was a busy morning at home, as often is the case with two little kiddos running around, but I made sure to bring the ol’ D200 + 50mm lens with me to work just in case the fog stuck around. Lo and behold it did, and after I parked my car I literally ran over to the main lawn on campus to see if I could capture some interesting pics of buildings, trees, or anything else shrouded in mist. The tricky thing about a 50mm lens on a crop sensor camera is the field of view if just so limited, which makes it difficult to capture the sheer size or scale of large things like this. (Something I mention not infrequently here in these posts. Sorry to repeat myself so often but man, times like this just illustrate once again how constraining it can be.)

To get this shot I had to stand waaaay back, which meant other elements like the trees on either side ended up in the shot too. At first I was a bit frustrated, and didn’t have a lot of time to mess around since I was on my way to work, so I thought I would turn this problem into an opportunity :) My solution was to use the surrounding elements to intentionally frame the student union in a way that added to the scale of what I was trying to convey. The structure itself with no foreground elements would probably have not been as interesting either, and in these conditions it ended up looking a bit like the Overlook Hotel from The Shining.

I shot this wide open because I couldn’t be sure my aperture blades would close properly (I think I mentioned this in a recent post as well) but even so I’m quite happy with the overall composition. Everything was so far back that depth of field was not an issue, and the drop in sharpness that can happen when shooting wide open was not a problem because the whole scene was so foggy and dreamlike that a bit of softening actually added to the mood.

After I shot this I went on my way to work but also snapped this with my iPhone:

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A post shared by Simon (@sringsmuth)

The contrast here is kind of jarring, and in retrospect I kind of like how the 50mm shot is a bit more closed in. It makes everything seem more personal, as if the viewer is actually approaching the student union instead of just observing the scene from afar. I don’t think either shot is necessarily better, but if I had to pick one I think I’d still go with the first :)

This picture is a bit of a departure for me since I don’t normally post images like this. It’s kind of a bokeh explosion with almost no clear focal point except for the one seed in the center (another thing I don’t do very often, incidentally) but I’m posting it here for a couple of reasons. You might have remembered a few posts in which I cautioned against shooting prime lenses wide open unless you really needed that crazy depth of field or light-gathering ability. Most lenses aren’t the sharpest when wide open, and the depth of field is often so shallow it’s downright unmanageable. Unfortunately, my trusty little (or giant, when you put it next to almost any modern camera) D200 is not the performer it once was and has this nasty habit of not stopping down the lens aperture on about one in five pictures. This means on any given photo session where I’m shooting with an aperture smaller than f/1.8 I’ll have several photos that are fine and then one that is completely washed out because the lens blades did not close properly.

To combat this problem I’ve started thinking of my lens as not just limited in focal length, but limited in aperture as well. By shooting at only f/1.8 I have had to consider things that would not normally be an issue, since I could just control depth of field or incoming light by stopping down my aperture a bit. It’s kind of ironic since I normally preach against using the widest possible aperture and yet, in some ways it’s what I’m stuck with.

This photo, then, is a result of such conditions. It’s a sprig of seeds on a Chinese Pistache tree caught in the afternoon sunlight, and what you see here is almost exactly what I set out to capture: one single seed in focus with the rest of the image a red and white tapestry of beautiful bokeh. In some ways I wish I could have made the foremost seed a little more accentuated since it’s kind of difficult to notice at first glance, but when dealing with non-macro lenses results like this are about as good as one can reasonably expect.

This is one of about 25 images I shot while moving the focusing ring on my lens back and forth and I quite like it partly because it’s kind of a unique composition for me but also because this is the first post of December and the colors evoke a sense of the coming Christmas season. A bit of foreshadowing, if you will. So while this might be a bit premature, let me close this post in turn with a bit of foreshadowing about Christ himself from the book of Deuteronomy:

The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken; (18:15)