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

Oklahoma State University is a school steeped in tradition, and one of the most prominent is our annual homecoming celebration. It’s touted as one of the biggest in the nation and for good reason: nearly one hundred thousand people fill the campus to the point of bursting as they walk along University Avenue to look at homecoming decorations in front of Greek houses, take photos with our mascot Pistol Pete, and spend the weekend steeped in the lore and traditions of their alma mater.

https://youtu.be/GyniQrJb_Z4

Unfortunately, this year’s celebration was marred by a horrible tragedy that took place as Saturday morning pre-game parade was wrapping up. In a matter of seconds four people lost their lives and ten times that many were injured when a car drove through several barricades and a police motorcycle only to crash into a sidewalk full of spectators. The weekend went from celebration to catastrophe, and our whole community mourned the loss of life amid what is normally such a fun, carefree weekend. The next few days saw the beginning of the long and painful process of rebuilding from the ashes and finding a way to get back to some semblance of normalcy both on campus and in town. That’s the thing about tragedy: the world continues to turn and the sun always rises. The question, then, is what you are going to do when it does.

For me and most of Stillwater and OSU the answer involves getting back to life as normal, or what is now considered as such in light of the tragic loss of life. As classes resumed the following Monday a noticeable pall was cast over campus, and normally vibrant quarters of student life were subdued and quiet. The sidewalk path leading up to my building at work was decorated with flowers from those who worked with Bonnie Stone, who worked one floor below me and lost her life in the car crash, paused to remember her and leave small tokens of their sympathy for her friends and family. But slowly things are coming to life again: classes continue, clubs hold meetings, and the Student Union’s scheduled open mic comedy nights are still happening. That’s life, and it always goes on as it always must.

This brings me, via a long and winding road, to this week’s photo. On Tuesday morning after Homecoming I was walking with two friends to the small convenience store inside the Union when when we passed by these two ladies quietly studying near one corner of the campus garden. Perhaps they were finding their own way to move on after the awful events of the weekend, or perhaps that wasn’t even on their minds and they were simply seeking out a quiet place to study. Either way I thought it symbolized how people always find a way to move on after tragedy, and I asked if I could take their picture. They agreed so I knelt down, fired off one single shot, and returned to my friends. We all have to find our own way of returning to lives in the wake of events like this: these girls were doing their best, and so was the rest of campus.

If you’re ever stuck for a photo opportunity, you could do a lot worse than your local botanic gardens. Almost every time my wife and I go there with our kids I’m struck at the incredible diversity of both flora and fauna tucked into the space of just a few acres, and sometimes it’s difficult not to snap a good picture. When we visited the gardens in October I brought my tried-and-true 50mm lens along with my D7100 and sure enough, I left with a memory card stuffed not only with some nice photos of my family but more than a couple displaying the beauty of nature. Case in point: the monarch butterfly you see above.

When I took this picture my parents were visiting for the weekend, and my dad and I spent several minutes basically crawling around next to some flowerbeds trying to capture pictures of butterflies as they were either flying, resting, or sipping flower nectar. My goal was to capture a photo with all of the following elements:

• A clear shot of a monarch butterfly

• On a flower

• With the sun behind me so it would be well-lit

This shot meets the first two requirements, but kind of misses the third. I like it though, because the shadows aren’t too dramatic and there is still plenty of color on the butterfly. The lighting also made for a more dynamic background, which I didn’t think about at the time but rather like in retrospect. The decision to post it here was a bit of a tricky one, because I also got this shot that I think is pretty decent:

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I was really having a tough time deciding which of these two to use, but settled on the one you see at the top for a few reasons:

• There is a lot more going on besides the butterfly, while still retaining the butterfly as the focal point

• The background is more interesting

• There is a greater sense of motion and activity, whereas the second one feels stilted and rather static

• The lighting in the second image created harsh shadows along the ridges in the butterfly’s wings

I’m curious though…of these two shots, which one do you prefer and why? There’s no right or wrong answer, I’m just curious. But more than that, I’d also like to encourage you to look at some of your own pics and think about why you like certain ones. What about them stands out to you from a coloring, compositional, or even emotional standpoint? Learning why you like certain photos you take is a good way to help you to learn what works, what doesn’t work, and ultimately to take better photos as you grow as a photographer.

One of the fun parts about having kids is when you get to teach them about nature using real-life examples. Case in point: the photo you see here, which was created, you might say, when my buddy was over to hang out while his kids played with my kids on a recent Saturday morning. As everyone was playing outside we found a spiderweb stretched between the eaves and some bushes below on the western side of my house, which the kids found utterly fascinating. We have kind of a live-and-let-live policy when we’re outdoors, in that if we come across bugs and other creepy crawlies that might seem ugly or scary we generally let them be. It’s their turf, after all, but we have quite the opposite outlook whenever we find bugs or insects inside our house. Then, all bets are off :)

On this particular morning we thought it would make for an interesting science lesson if we could show the little ones just how a spider goes about having a morning snack. After some searching in the yard we came across a grasshopper a bout two inches long, which we brought over to the spider as somewhat of a peace offering: don’t come inside the house and we’ll make sure you start the day with a full tummy. For a while the spider seemed kind of intimidated at the green insect that we put in its web, and it spent a good 20 minutes huddled on the opposite side far away from the grasshopper. It was quite similar to a scene in my backyard a few years earlier in which we fed some grub worms to a garden spider, though in this case the prey was much larger than the predator.

A little while later one of the kids ran back to check on the situation, and wouldn’t you know it, the spider had wrapped the grasshopper in silk and was taking a break while waiting to further subdue his first catch of the day. It was a fascinating, if strangely grotesque, look into how nature operates and something the kids will probably remember for a while. Of course I had to document it with my camera, so a little while later I went out with my trusty 50mm lens (which, with a reproduction ratio of roughly 0.15, is hardly a macro stalwart) and took a few shots from several different angles. This one was shot at f/2.8, 1/180 second, ISO 200 and severely cropped in order to get a much better look at the subjects. As much as I talk about my D200, I knew I would need the extra resolution of my D7100 for cropping purposes so I used that instead and I sure am pleased with how everything turned out.

So was the spider :) The grasshopper, well…not so much.

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 :)