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

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.

This photo, unlike some of the others here on Weekly Fifty that were captured in a moment of spontaneity, required a fair bit of planning. My family was visiting Milford Lake in Kansas, the subject of a blog photo from 2013, and while the kids were playing on the beach my brother Tom and I did some experimenting with rocks, water, and photography. I wanted to capture the result of a rock hitting the water, and it took several iterations of the same basic idea in order for this picture to come to fruition. Over the course of many attempts I learned to adjust the angle at which I shot, the overall framing, the method for predicting where Tom would throw a rock, and more details which you can find in the attached audio commentary. After each attempt, my brother would wait patiently while I checked the results on my dim camera LCD screen (I shot with my D200, as usual, because I didn’t want to bring my D7100 that close to the water) and then set things up for another try. Incidentally, this is not the best photo from the exercise: that distinction goes to a picture with a mushroom-shaped plume exploding from the water, but unfortunately it was not quite in focus. As such, I’m content to settle with this one but I’m fairly happy with the result. And supremely grateful to Tom for all his help :)