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

Another example of how a bit of sunlight (but not too much) can work wonders for a photograph. This was just before sundown, at roughly 7pm (check the EXIF data on Flickr if you want to know for sure), when I was playing with my son at the park. Normally a tricycle might not seem like a good subject for a photo, but in this case I wanted to see what I could do given the available light and the relative calm of the park. But in this case I think it turned out OK, and I even tried a few different poses, so to speak of the tricycle itself. I was kind of going for that automobile-advertisement concept. Not sure if this would make it in a spread in Tricycles Monthly, but maybe I should give it a shot :)

I took this at the Bocce Ball tournament during the annual Oklahoma Special Olympics, held on the OSU campus at Boone Pickens Stadium. My coworker’s daughter was helping out with this particular event so we walked over to see her and the team she was with, and while we were there I tried to capture a bit of the scene with my camera. In doing so I realized again just how far I have to go when it comes to taking pictures of people, especially in a crowded public setting. I just did not feel comfortable getting close enough to these athletes to take their photos (I’m just a dude with a camera, after all, and not a credentialed sports photographer or anything like that) so I tried this approach instead. I’m happy with the picture itself, but I’m not sure if it works to adequately capture the energy and excitement of the day. No, scratch that. I know it does not work. Hmm. I’m going to need to practice sports photography more…

I don’t often use manual focus when shooting, and I suppose it’s a skill that I would like to try more as time goes on, but it’s so darn easy to use autofocus that I wonder if I will ever actually make myself go full manual. Still, it’s times like this when focusing by hand can really come in handy. I was playing with my kids outside when I saw a few tiny spider webs in the low-hanging branches of our backyard Chinese Pistache tree, and thought it would make for an interesting photo especially with the impending sunset. Trouble was, I couldn’t get my lens to focus on the web closest to me so I had to do my best to compose the shot manually, and while it mostly worked out you can see that the foreground of the web isn’t quite as crisp as I would like it. Even at f/4 the depth of field is simply too shallow, or else I needed to be a bit more careful when shooting. I don’t think it’s a bad photo, but I do think I missed out on what could have been a much better picture had I taken a few more shots or at least taken the time to check things in camera. But then every minute I spent fiddling with my D200 was a minute not playing with my kids, and if that means I don’t get the exact picture I’m looking for, it’s a tradeoff I sure can live with :)

This photo was quite unexpected, but I am rather pleased with how it turned out and would like to try this sort of thing again. I went on a brief photo walk with one of my coworkers the other day, and saw her looking up at the trees and taking snapshots with her iPhone. For some reason this concept had not really occurred to me before, and I thought I would try replicating what she was doing. She talked about how cool it was to see the leaves light up with the sun behind them, and she sure was right. It was a little tricky trying to nail the exposure, and it helped that I set the shutter button to lock exposure while using the back button for focusing. The other issue was aperture, as I had no idea what kind of depth of field I was even looking for. Since the screen on my D200 is so tiny it’s hard to visualize this when out shooting, so I tried a couple different values and but knew that anything beyond f/4 would probably not have much DOF to speak of. Thankfully this picture at f/3.3 worked out quite nicely. I had to tweak it a bit in post, but overall I am quite happy with the dynamic range I was able to capture without doing any sort of HDR trickery.

This was another example of why you should always have your camera with you. It was about 8am and I had to take something across campus, and even though I did not have a free hand I figured I might as well take my D200 with me just in case. So I strapped it to my back, trekked across campus, dropped off the package, and turned to walk back when I spotted this flower-covered branch poking up from amidst a sea of white clouds. It almost appeared to have some sort of inner light, a glow if you will, since the sun was low on the horizon and had not reached its full intensity for the day. I tried a few different aperture values, and ended up with the ol’ trusty f/4. It has lately become my go-to aperture for most outdoor shooting, though having the option of blowing things wide open at f/1.8 sure is handy when you need it.