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

I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, and one of the most prominent structures in the entire city, and probably that whole part of the state, is the Capital building. At 400 feet tall, it towers over everything else in sight and dominates the city skyline, and is a welcome sight for tired eyes after a long drive down Interstate 80. I visited the building once or twice when I was a kid, but didn’t really think much of it other than it was a big building where important people met to make laws and look out on the city from the 14th floor observation deck. When my wife and I visited family in Lincoln recently, we thought it would be nice to take our kids to the state capitol building to relive some old memories but also see things from an adult perspective, and hopefully walk away with a renewed appreciation for what those storied halls and rooms represent for our democracy. We asked my parents if they would like to go with, that’s how the six of us spent the better part of our morning walking through hallways, going up and down stairs, and even listening to a floor debate in the legislature from the balcony. It was fun, educational, and even a bit enlightening while also serving as a cool way to show our own kids that participating in a representative democracy is something anyone here in the United States can do.

The visit also gave me some cool photo opportunities, like the one you see here. This is a hallway (obviously) with busts of several Nebraska governors lining one side, and light pouring in from the wall. The stark contrast between light and shadow prompted me to do something I almost never do when taking photographs: shoot in black-and-white. I will occasionally use Lightroom to convert images to monochrome ex post facto, but I can probably count on one, if not two, hands the number of instances in which I shot images exclusively using black and white. My Fuji X100F has what is, apparently, quite a good black-and-white simulation called Acros but I almost never use it because, well, I guess I just like the look of color photographs. This situation, however, seemed to be quite appropriate for black-and-white given that the actual scene was almost devoid of color anyway, and the contrast between light and shadow was so prominent already.

I knelt down to get a low angle, adjusted the aperture to f/4 (leaving Auto-ISO enabled, with a minimum shutter of 1/125 second) and snapped a couple of shots. If I had a tripod and more time I would have carefully created a more considered composition, but as it stands I think the final result isn’t that bad. I like the old-school water fountain on the right side of the image too, kind of like a bonus :) I don’t think I’ll be doing black-and-white photography much more any time soon, but it was, and still is, fun to experiment with every now and then.

Each year we have a few dozen yellow crocus flowers that spring up in our yard, and each year I use them as an opportunity to practice my photography—sometimes re-creating shots I have done before, other times trying new, creative photo ideas, but always enjoying the diminutive little blossoms for as long as I can before they disappear to make way for the green grass that soon takes over. I still enjoy the first shot I ever took of these crocuses back in February 2013, and while lots of the subsequent photos of this scene that I have taken since then are improved in some fairly objective ways, I still remember the thrill of taking that original image with my Nikon D200 and 50mm lens and kind of marveling at the fact that I, a normal person without any kind of special camera gear, could take a photo of a flower in focus with others blurred out in the background. It was a revelation, and has stuck with me and continues to shape my photography even more than a decade later.

Which brings me to this week’s image, of course. It’s a crocus, but shot a bit differently from most. I used my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, which longtime readers will probably not be surprised at, but I also used a tripod in order to steady the camera and compose the shot precisely how I wanted to. It’s a technique I have been using a bit more when doing macro shots, at least when possible, in order to be a bit more intentional and considered and get the shots I really want, not just the settle for photos I’m able to get—as is sometimes the limitation when using my hands alone to steady the camera.

It was just a bit windy so I used Auto-ISO to set a minimum shutter speed of 1/350 second, and at f/9.5 that gave me an ISO of 720. Perfectly acceptable, especially with a bit of Lightroom post-processing to smooth things out just a bit. I used Live View and shot at 1:1 magnification while focusing manually in order to get the tip of the stigma as sharp as possible, and even at f/9.5 the depth of field was far less than a quarter of an inch. While this image might have been possible without a tripod it would not have been easy, and probably a lot more frustrating too.

As I type this the little yellow petals have all disappeared. The days are warmer, the sun lingers longer, and time continues its inexorable crawl. And yet it’s comforting knowing that year after year, no matter what happens these little flowers just keep popping up with the last breaths of winter as if to remind the world that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and things are going to be alright.

There’s a geological curiosity about two hours from where my wife and I live, just south of the Kansas border and surrounded by the kind of windswept plains and endless horizons that make you feel almost as if you have taken a few steps backward in time. It’s…well, I’m honestly not sure what this place is but it’s called Gloss Mountain. Gloss Mountain State Park, to be precise, and it’s one of those places that’s been on our “Hey we should go there someday” list for years but until recently we just never really took the time to make it happen. My wife and a friend went out there last fall, but in February we all decided to take a few hours and go there with both of our families. The weather wasn’t ideal, the timing could have been better, and perhaps the practicality of the whole endeavor wasn’t the greatest, but one thing we have learned over nearly two decades of being married is that if you’re waiting for the best time to do something, you could be waiting forever. And there might never actually be a best time to do something, so you just have to decide whether you’re simply going to do it or not. That’s kind of what we did with this trip: we picked a date, we planned when we would leave (i.e. after the kids were home from school) and we just made it happen.

So on a chilly, windy afternoon in mid-February my wife and our kids, along with our friends and their kids, loaded people, snacks, blankets, and sandwiches into two vehicles and drove nearly two hours out west to Gloss Mountain. Our goal was to make it there in time to see the sunset from atop the plateau, and while there was a bit more cloud cover than we anticipated, we still got to see a beautiful Midwestern painting in the sky, a pale shadow of which I attempted to capture in the above image.

I brought my Fuji X100F, Nikon D750, and 70-200mm f/2.8 lens–a bit overkill perhaps, but I wasn’t sure what to expect, exactly, having never been to Gloss Mountain before and not quite sure what I would need to capture a picture of the sunset. I took lots of photos and eventually settled on this one as my favorite from the bunch. Even though you can’t see the sun itself (We never did, to tell the truth. The clouds obscured it the whole time we were there.) the golden rays off in the distance tell you everything you need to know. I had a few shots without the plateau on the left, but didn’t like them as much because they didn’t really do a great job of conveying a sense of scale–which is the most interesting part of a shot like this, in my opinion. In fact, there were two compositional decisions I made to try to capture the scale of the scene: the first was including the plateau, and the second was to make sure to get the road in the shot as well. I had some images without it but realized that, while artificial, the road actually served a useful purpose in helping the viewer understand the sheer size of all the natural elements present in the scene.

It wasn’t long after I took this shot that we succumbed to both weather and time, and returned to our vehicles for the drive back home. It didn’t take long for us to start talking about a return trip, hopefully sooner rather than later. We might wait for an ideal time, but hopefully we will just decide to make it happen and then do it :)

A few months ago I noted, in my 2023 Wrapup Video, that one of my goals for 2024 was to try my hand at focus stacking. Not handheld impromptu focus stacking, but real actual focus stacking in a controlled environment with precise movements. The kind that you have to plan out and take care to pull off in order to get a very specific kind of shot. I don’t know if this image is the greatest example of focus stacking, but speaking personally, it is the best focus-stacked shot I have ever taken. Do I have room to improve? Of course. Did I learn a lot? Absolutely. And that, by itself, makes this a photo worth taking.

What you’re looking at here is a close-up of a cutting my wife took from her pothos plant, with the goal of getting it to the point where it’s healthy enough to be potted so it can grow on its own. I saw it sitting on the windowsill while I was washing dishes and, after noticing all the tiny bubbles on the green stalks, decided to turn it into a close-up photo opportunity. I moved it to another windowsill where I could set up my camera gear, got out a tripod, my Nikon D750, and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, and set to work. I quickly realized that the tolerances I was dealing with were so crazy small that I would need to up my game a little. A single shot wouldn’t work; I needed to do some stacking.

To wit: Each of the green stalks is about a quarter inch in diameter. That means each bubble is about…oh, I dunno. 1/32 or 1/64 inch in diameter. Super duper small, in other words. My camera was so close that when I shot this at f/11, the depth of field was about the same: 1/32 or 1/64 inch. One solution, then, would be to (naturally, of course) shoot at a much smaller aperture in order to get more bubbles in focus. But that had the unfortunate side effect of putting too much else in focus too:

This image was fine, I guess, but I really liked how shooting at wider apertures obscured so much else in the frame. But wider apertures meant that not enough of what I wanted to be in focus was actually in focus. You have to choose one or the other…except when you can have both. Enter focus stacking.

To get the final image I took a series of exposures at f/8, carefully adjusting the focus on each one to move from the close side of the stalk to the far side. Then I loaded the series in Photoshop and had it merge the in-focus parts of each of the layers into a single image, which I then loaded back into Lightroom for some final coloring adjustments. Just so we’re clear: this is not cropped. My camera lens was just really close to the subject.

I really like how this turned out, and I can certainly see the practicality of focus stacking in a controlled environment. It was fun to take this, enjoyable to edit, and most importantly, my wife liked it too :)

Ok so you know how I constantly talk about using Weekly Fifty as a tool to help me learn, grow, and improve as a photographer? Well this shot is a clear example of the kind of the progression that I am always looking for, and it happened directly after I took the photo last week. In that sense, this could be thought of almost as a Part Deux to the stylized monochromatic image of a five-spoked wheel of light that I shared seven days ago. It’s like the original, but different in some key ways that demonstrate a clear sense of personal growth. It also cannot simply stand on its own, as I would have never taken this brilliantly-colored image without first shooting its black-and-white counterpart.

Basically, here’s what happened. After taking the photo of five white lights arrayed in a star pattern above a clear glass ball, editing it just a bit in Lightroom, and uploading it to Flickr, I immediately thought about ways to improve upon it. My first, and perhaps most obvious, thought was to use color. Just imagine a similar composition but full of brilliant greens, blues, reds, and more! And so I did. I put my memory card back in my camera, went back to the same setting I had just created with the lights above the glass ball sitting on a whiteboard, and got to work. I changed the color of each of the lights to random HSL values, like reaching into a bag of skittles and just going with whatever came out. The result was fine, and I took a few shots from straight-down like I had done with the previous image, but something was…missing. It was too derivative, and I realized that just changing the colors wasn’t enough.

I then set each of the five lights to specific colors of the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. I also changed my physical position to more of a three-quarters view instead of straight down, and spent a few minutes just sort of roving about while photographing the illuminated glass ball from a variety of angles. I quickly realized that doing so gave me exactly what I didn’t even know was missing, and helped not only elevate the image but transform it into an entirely new creative composition. Instead of looking straight down at five colored bars of light, I was now looking at a multi-hued star suspended in midair surrounded by brilliant streaks of luminescence, almost as if someone had taken an electromagnetic paintbrush and spread streaks of color around the ball from all across the visible spectrum. What really sold me on this image was the green in the top-left, which almost gives a sense of kinetic energy and motion as if the ball were simultaneously rolling while remaining perfectly still.

This shot looks almost artificial, like something an AI program would generate, but I promise you it’s all real and captured completely in-camera. It was gloriously fun and rewarding to take, and made me practically giddy at the thought of what might come next.

Thanks Phil and Tom :)