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

I went back and forth about this image for a while. When I initially took the photo and loaded it into Lightroom, I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. It’s a fine sunrise, but I didn’t think it had the sort of impact, either visually or on my journey as a photographer-in-training, but as the weeks went by I started to like it more and more. I think what bothers me, but at the same time kind of fascinates me, about this image is that it doesn’t really have a subject. There’s not one singular focal point for the viewer to look at, which is a huge contrast from almost every other photo I post here on Weekly Fifty. It has some interesting elements to it, certainly, but not one spot to draw you in or demand your attention. Instead, the entire composition asks you to consider it as a complete whole first, and then with discrete components upon further reflection. At the risk of sounding a bit too analytical, and making something out of nothing, I really do think this is one of the better sunrise images I have ever taken.

Eagle-eyed viewers might notice some striking similarities between this one and a shot I posted a couple months ago, and those viewers would be correct in their likely assumption: both shots were taken in pretty much the exact same spot. The view here is just a block down the road from our house, and scenes like this are not entirely uncommon when I head out for work in Fall and Spring when the sunrise coincides with my departure. I had my camera with me, as I often do, when I left work work on this particular day and pulled over on the side of the road to attempt to capture this vista with my D750 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens. I shot this at 150mm, f/11, 1/250 second, ISO 500, and didn’t really edit the final result much at all. A couple of my normal tweaks that I apply to every image (slight boost to the shadows, tone down the highlights and black levels, etc.) aside, what you see here is pretty much exactly what I saw when I hopped out of my car. God did the painting, all I did was happen to be in the right place at the right time to capture it.

I don’t normally do time-sensitive images here on Weekly Fifty, and almost never post images to coincide with a particular calendar event, and the same holds true with this one. It has nothing to do with the usual themes of late December: Christmas, Winter, Snow, or the new year just around the corner. Instead, this image, perhaps more than most, demonstrates my growth as a photographer simply because it is fundamentally different, given its lack of clear central subject, and as such it not only forced me to consider it more closely but also think about what I might do differently as a result. And so with 2024 just a few days away, seeing this photo gives me a sense of excitement for what lies ahead. Like the sun cresting the horizon and burning through the clouds, the future is bright and hopeful despite the gloom and shadow that still looms everywhere in this world. But even darkness must pass; a new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer. Here’s to hope, and here’s to good times ahead. God bless you, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year to you all.

This is one of those images that’s more of an exploration of a concept than a great finished photograph, but that’s also the same reason I kind of like it. I don’t know that I’ve come across a scene quite like this one before, and it was fun to get the opportunity (or challenge, more accurately) to photograph it. I was walking through the OSU formal gardens one afternoon when I came across this drop of water nestled between three leaves, and something about it just kind of struck me as kind of captivating. It’s almost a case study in the concept of surface tension: the droplet is just sitting there, minding its own business, and holding itself together with the power of physics and, perhaps, its own sheer will.

So how to photograph it? That’s a good question, and while I don’t think I got quite what I was attempting, it was fun to try. I thought about taking this shot from a side perspective, but I’ve done that before with drops on leaves and wanted to try something new. Top-down seemed like the right idea, especially since that was how I was looking when I was walking past and saw this. I used my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, set to f/22 and Auto-ISO with minimum shutter speed of 1/200 second. (Resulting ISO was 2200, but honestly anything up to 6400 looks just fine on my D750.) I would have liked the water drop to be a little sharper but that’s kind of the classic problem when doing close-ups of subjects like this. You can either get the reflection in focus or the drop doing the reflecting, but usually not both unless you use super small apertures or bust out Photoshop for some focus-stacking. I do like the fun swirls of white sky and earth tones, which are likely just the brick walls of the surrounding buildings, that you can see in the drop and even though the extra elements like dark green leaves in the lower-right corner are a bit of a distraction, I don’t mind them as much as I thought I would.

In the end this was a fun image to take and while I won’t be printing it and hanging it on my wall anytime soon, I do think I learned a few things in the process of creating it and honestly that’s what really matters the most.

I remember when I was first looking into macro lenses and being a little confused as to why they didn’t seem to have apertures much wider than f/2.8. Why not larger, I wondered to myself as I scrolled through available options for my Nikon F-mount cameras. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t find close-focusing lenses that had maximum apertures of f/1.8 or even greater. It seemed obvious to me, as an inexperienced close-up photographer, that one would want to let in as much light as possible and have ultimate control over depth of field which would, so I reasoned, would necessitate a lens with a larger maximum aperture.

Live and learn, eh?

Turns out, close-up photography doesn’t really require f/2.8 apertures very often. Hardly ever, in fact, since depth of field is so crazy shallow when shooting macro images at such a wide aperture. It’s just not practical and doesn’t really produce pleasing results anyway unless you are going for extreme focus stacking. Case in point: this week’s image, an acmella oleracea flower just outside the student union at Oklahoma State University. It was a bit of an overcast day which made for nice even lighting, and I had my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens in tow, so when I saw this brown and yellow bud sticking up from the greenery I figured it would be a fun opportunity to practice my photography.

The yellow and black bud you see here isn’t even that small: probably about the size of an average acorn. And I wasn’t even super close to it, as you can see from all the surrounding leaves in the frame. As such I thought I thought a wider aperture of f/8 or f/11 might work well to give me a shallow depth of field and draw your attention right to the center of the frame. But as I have so often experienced when taking these types of images, larger apertures ≠ better results. Even f/11 gave me a depth of field that was simply too shallow, and I had to stop down all the way to f/19 to get the shot you see here. If you click on the image to see the full-size version on Flickr you’ll notice that everything is sharp and detailed, and you can see every single individual brown and yellow spike on the top of the bud with the rest of the composition nicely blurred–particularly the other flower on the right-hand side, which was an intentional choice by me. I wanted to position myself in such a way as to add something else interesting to the shot rather than just one single flower, and I think it worked out pretty well.

One of the trickiest elements of a shot like this is getting the big drop in focus. I have taken similar photographs over the years with varying degrees of success, but it’s really tricky to get the entire drop of water to be sharp and in focus while blurring the rest of the frame. This is partly due to the razor-thin margins you have for depth of field when working with such small subjects, but also due to the physics of how water drops like this bend and shape the light going through them. Inevitably, the best way to get great results, it seems, is through the use of focus stacking: taking lots of shots and then blending together the sharp areas of each one in Photoshop. (If there’s a better technique, let me know! I’d love to learn more!) That’s what I did here and while I didn’t quite know what to expect, I am very pleased with what I got.

I shot this handheld on an overcast day with my Nikon D750, 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, using an aperture of f/11, 1/200 second, and Auto ISO. After trying a couple shots to varying degrees of success, I realized that the only way I could get the image I was going for was to just combine lots of exposures together. See, the thing about a shot like this is you have the drop of water and then the scene reflected inside the drop of water–and the two are decidedly not the same. If you get the drop in focus, you lose the scene. But if you try to get a sharp scene, the drop itself becomes blurry. One solution is to use a super small aperture, but I really wanted a shallow depth of field in order to get just the drop in focus, and all of that points directly to focus stacking. Thankfully, it’s really not difficult and most of the heavy lifting can be done automatically in Photoshop for you. The only difficult part is getting all the shots you want to combine, which is slightly trickier than you might think.

Ideally, a situation like this would be best handled with a tripod and a very slow, calculated series of shots in order to get everything in focus that you want. This situation, however, was not exactly what you would consider ideal: I just had a few minutes, and I most certainly did not have a tripod as I’m not in the habit of toting a bag full of camera gear with me when walking around campus. I put my lens in manual focus, held my camera as still as possible with my right hand while turning the focus ring with my left hand, and holding down the shutter while in continuous high-speed mode. The result was about a dozen images that, when stacked together, gave me the final composition you see here. And you know what? It works. It really works. The bright, crisp raindrop, the rich greens, the earthy yellows and reds, and enough in the foreground and background to give you the sense that you are carefully peeking into a small world right in front of your eyes.

There’s some objective realities of shooting photos on a rainy, overcast day that are easy to describe or even, perhaps, quantify. The diffused lighting, the mild temperatures, the glistening surfaces…all of these aren’t particularly difficult to explain and all of these make a huge difference in photographic terms. What’s a little trickier to precisely nail down is just how much fun it is to go out and shoot after the earth gets a good long soaking. Not necessarily in the rain, mind you, but the minutes or, better yet, hours after the drops cease to fall but before the sun has yet to show its face from behind the clouds are just amazing for taking pictures. Everything you see has a glistening sheen to it and even the most ordinary, boring objects take on a stunning new appearance. I’d almost go so far as to say it’s difficult to not enjoy shooting in these conditions, and if you haven’t tried it I strongly recommend it :)

And when you combine post-rain conditions with a macro lens…chef’s kiss.

On a warm October afternoon in precisely these conditions, as I was walking across the OSU campus between meetings, I stopped for a few minutes in the formal gardens right outside the student union to get a few snapshots. When I saw this red flower I knew I just had to stop and take its picture, and I’m really glad I took the time to do it. One thing I’ve learned as I have taken more close-up images over the years is that what I envision when I see a scene isn’t always easy to capture, even with a good understanding of the fundamentals of photography such as light, shadow, composition, exposure, and the like. Weekly Fifty is littered with not-quite-there images that almost get what I was trying to capture, and every time one of those shots happens I try to think of it as a learning experience so that I might do better next time. Well, I gotta say, this is one of those next time shots that really does work just about exactly as I had hoped it would.

Aperture, and by extension, depth of field, is super tricky when shooing with a macro lens. It’s tough to get the area you want in focus while not compromising too much on other elements of the image, but with this shot I was able to pull of pretty much precisely what I was going for in terms of subject and sharpness. I really wanted the one large drop of water to be sharp and in focus, and maybe a few others too, with a subtle blur around the rest of the drops nearby. I shot this at f/11, 1/200 second, and Auto-ISO with a value of 150 using my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, and as my dad would say, by golly it worked. There’s a vertical line of three drops that are all tack sharp, right near the bright spot on the flower petal just above them and to the left. The texture on the petal is so rich and thick you can practically touch it through your screen, and I like the mix of three colors: red, orange, and a subtle dark green in the background. This whole image just works in a way that I am very pleased with, and makes me excited to try similar shots the next time it rains.