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

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.

Before I get too far into this post I need to offer a disclaimer: this photo was not taken with my 50mm lens (cue sad trombone). I used my 35mm f/1.8 which, because I shot this on my crop-sensor Nikon D7100, could be argued is actually closer to a true 50mm lens than my actual 50mm lens. But math and semantics aside, I just want to make sure to get this out of the way right upfront lest I be taken to task for misleading anyone. Truth be told the physical focal length of this 35mm lens makes its optical properties quite different from a 50mm lens, and it’s not just in terms of the strict field of view. There’s also issues like background compression, focusing distance, minimum aperture, etc. that make this lens dramatically different from its slightly more telephoto counterpart.

So why am I posting it here on my blog dedicated to shots taken with my 50mm lens? The answer lies in the purpose behind this blog in the first place: this image illustrates what can happen if you stop letting your camera collect dust on the shelf and take it out to snap photos. And since this blog serves as a public space for me to keep pushing myself as a photographer and keep my camera in my hands and not in a closet somewhere, I thought it a fitting place for this image despite the fact that I took it with my 35mm lens.

When I took this image I was on my way home from Lincoln, Nebraska a few weeks ago. I went back home for the funeral of my best friend’s father who passed away from ALS, and I decided to get a very early start on my return trip to Oklahoma the following day. I wanted to get back to my wife and kids, and also leave a bit of wiggle room for pictures along the way. (My go-to travel kit is my D7100 + 35mm lens, because it works great for so many photographic situations from people to nature to architecture to anything in between.) That’s one of the nice things about road trips: photo opportunities abound if you’re willing to look for them, stop, and get out of your car. I took Highway 77 south out of Lincoln and as I crept up on Beatrice I saw a gorgeous sunrise on the horizon, so I pulled over, grabbed my camera, and took several shots. A half hour later as the sun was a bit higher in the sky I passed what I think was a Christmas tree farm south of Wymore and saw a field of young pines silhouetted in the morning fog, backlit by the rising sun.

And I kept on driving.

See, at the time I was thinking of a dozen reasons why I shouldn’t stop for a photo. They were all stupid thing like:

• I just stopped a half hour ago

• I already took a sunrise photo

• I don’t have time

• I might get my shoes all wet in the morning dew

• I’ll never be able to capture a good photo of that scene

• I already drove past, and it’s too late now

Thankfully before I had gone even a half mile down the road I decided that all these reasons were patently ridiculous so I found a dirt road, turned around, and drove back to the tree farm. I pulled off the road, got out my D7100, and took a dozen shots before getting back in my car and continuing my seven-hour drive back home. In the end I’m so extraordinarily glad I took a few minutes out of my day to get this image. Every one of the reasons I found to not stop and take a photo seems entirely trivial compared to the picture I got, and even if I didn’t manage to capture a decent shot I would still have had a fun little experience. And sometimes that, my friends, is worth a thousand photos.

Remember that scene in Star Wars: Episode IV when Grand Moff Tarkin ordered the destruction of Alderaan? It contained a few brief shots of the Death Star Control Room and for some reason those few seconds have always stuck with me. I really liked the idea of flipping levers and pushing buttons to activate such a massive device (though if it were me I don’t think I would have been able to go through with the annihilation of an entire world), and though the chances of me ending up on the Death Star to flip said levers and switches is somewhat remote, we have the next best thing at my job: video edit bays.

The title of this post is a bit misleading, since it’s meant to be a reference to the main telecommunications control room where I work at Oklahoma State University, but the picture itself is in fact showing one of the nearby video editing bays. It’s where members of our production staff monitor incoming video feeds, edit live and recorded footage, and work to produce polished final content. Each bay contains a board similar to this one but a lot bigger, and allows editors and producers to perform all manner of complex edits in realtime. Every time I walk past one of the edit bays I can’t help but reminded of the Death Star Control Room, especially since they seem to shave several common elements such as the lever you see in the picture. What does it do? I honestly have no idea, but it sure does look cool.

Getting this picture was a bit tricky and involved a bit of help from my coworkers Gina and Kristi. My goal for the shot was to show one control lever within the larger context of the entire edit board, and also illustrate the many other buttons and readouts at the same time. I took a few shots at f/1.8 but the depth of field was simply too shallow and I didn’t like how the row of lights behind the lever spread out like a long yellow fan. There was one other major problem too: the lighting.

This picture is simply too cluttered, and there is no clear focal point on which the viewer is supposed to focus. What’s the point here? Is it the lever, the rows of lights in the back, or the green and yellow buttons in the foreground? My solution was simple: Have Gina and Kristi help me alter the lighting conditions just a bit. We found another lever that was in the opposite position (I wasn’t about to go pulling levers or pushing buttons on my own), Gina held my iPhone on Flashlight mode above and just behind the lever, and Kristi helped me with some tips on positioning. The added light allowed me to shoot at f/2.8 (albeit with a still-very-slow-for-handheld shutter of 1/20 second) and helped bring the focus of the picture squarely on the lever. I really like the final result, and looking at it makes me think just for a bit that I’m on a giant spaceship in a galaxy far, far away…