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

My friend Julie has a blog called Ramblings from Jewels where she is always posting pictures of flowers and other plants, often from her own garden. Looking through her images inspired me to take some shots of flowers on my own, since I don’t do that sort of thing very often. I’m not really sure why, either. Part of me thinks it’s a bit cliché to go around snapping photos of flowers because, well, flowers are everywhere and surely I can’t add anything to the collective photographic pool that hasn’t been seen before. And yet, when I see some of the pictures that Julie and others post, I start to think maybe I can have my own original take on flowers too. Anyway, I went out to shoot some a few days ago and ended up with this, which I was not pleased with at all. It was mid-day, the sun was shining, and as a result this picture was filled with harsh shadows and washed-out colors. I went back a few days later when it was nice and cloudy, and got the one you see above instead, with which I am quite pleased. It did take a bit of tinkering in Lightroom to bring out some of the colors and vibrancy (yay for shooting in RAW!) but man, I’m telling you, no amount of post-processing can fix an image that’s just bad to begin with. Practice, practice, practice, I tell ya.

If you follow this blog you will likely notice that most of the photos are taken outdoors with plenty of light. This is partially due to the limitations of a 50mm lens, which on a crop sensor camera like my D200 has a very narrow field of view (for more information see this DPS article). Indoors it’s just not possible to move back from a given subject enough to properly compose a photo, but outdoors I have much more room to move around. The other issue at play is my D200 itself, which has quite a bit of noise at ISO 800 and above. Now, I could just stick my 50mm lens on my D7100 to address the latter issue, but I like to think of it as a challenge instead: how can I make the most out of what I’ve got? This photo is one result. I went to the library on campus and tried photographing a long shelf of books such that it looked like they were receeding into infinity. This image looks a tad photoshopped, but it’s not (other than basic adjustments like saturation/contrast/etc. which have to be applied to all RAW files). The General Index book was thick enough that I was able to tug on the left side a bit so it stuck out at a slight angle, which made it possible to make the title readable but not overwhelm the entire image. The rest of the blur is just a nice benefit of a gigantic aperture focusing at very close range.

In case you’re wondering, here’s the photo taken by a former student that I mention in the audio commentary.

As a side note, this book reminded me of a similar Index. I wonder if pulling this book out entirely would release the Flood…

I have had a photo like this in mind for several years, but was never quit sure how to exactly go about capturing it. The idea came to me when I saw an old Mac desktop wallpaper with wet blades of grass, and ever since then I wanted to take a similar photo. I don’t think this one does a good job of capturing the essence of the original, but I sort of tried to put my own spin on it and come up with something a bit different. Also, this shows one benefit of having a 24 megapixel camera too. While most of the time I leave my 50mm lens on my D200, I had to crop this so much that there just wasn’t enough room to work with given that camera’s 10 megapixels. Fortunately my D7100 was there to save the day :)

Sometimes I’m amazed at how much mileage I can get out of the magnolia tree. Whenever I need some inspiration for a photograph, I just look around at one of these oddities and soon enough, as Henry Jones once said, “The solution presents itself.” I was certainly not expecting to get a picture of a bee mid-flight here, but I do like how it turned out. The only thing I’m not happy with, and that I will continue working towards, is how the bee is ever so slightly obscured by the flower petal. It would be awesome to get a picture of a bee hovering right by a flower, and one day I’ll get it, but for now this is probably the best bee picture I can recall taking. The thing about those little suckers is they won’t stay in one place and generally respond quite poorly to my humble requests to do so. A nice telephoto lens might have made this picture a little easier, since due to the limitations of my 50mm lens I had to stand about 2 feet away and hope the bees did not sting me. But the nice part is I got a cool closeup view of some magnificent flowers which, much to my surprise, had wilted the very next day.

This was quite an unexpected photo, as I was visiting my parents in Nebraska and went to take a look at some of the trees my dad was cutting down in the back yard. On several stumps, long sticky drops of sap had collected and hardened over the past week and I thought I would try to get a closeup shot of one. As I walked past some of the pine trees looking for a good vantage point from which to shoot, I came upon this stump which had, curiously, a loop of string tied to it. Upon closer inspection I realized that the tree limb had grown around the string, which was most likely tied in place by me or one of my siblings many years ago. We used to play behind these pine trees, digging holes and hiding all manner of artifacts in their aromatic branches. Did this string once hold a sign? Was it used to lure rabbits with a bit of food at the end? Perhaps it was one in a long line of ambitious but ill-conceived booby traps designed to capture unsuspecting trespassers like the neighbor kid. I honestly don’t know what this string was there for, but it was a fun tangible memory of a carefree time gone by.