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

There’s a field not too far from our house that my wife and I walk past almost every day. It’s usually unmoved, which is likely intentional on the part of the owners, since it gives the grasses, flowers, and animals that live among them, a chance to flourish where they otherwise might not if the green space was more maintained. It’s a pretty large open area where houses will probably be built someday, but hopefully not for a good long while. Though the way things are going around here, you never know. #fingerscrossed

This field is also a good spot for taking pictures, and a couple of my favorites were shot here over the past several years including one of a butterfly resting on top of an Indian Paintbrush flower in the morning dew. A few weeks ago as we walked past the exact same spot, my wife remarked that it looked like rain and sure enough, a thunderstorm rolled through overnight. The next morning was a bit too wet to bike to work so I took the car, but made a slight detour to the field with my camera in hand hoping to get a good picture of one of the flowers.

Nature, as it turned out, did not disappoint. I got to the spot just as the sun was barely showing itself on the horizon, and found this flower rising above the grass which made for an excellent photo opportunity. I experimented with a variety of exposure settings and eventually settled on f/19 which seems a bit small, but the more I looked at the images in Lightroom the less I liked the ones at wider apertures because, while the flower was fairly sharp, the rest of the image was so blurry as to be almost entirely incomprehensible. I also like how the trees on the edges of the frame help provide a bit of (what else?) context while also serving to contain the sky just a bit. And the orange glow on the horizon as the sun pokes through the clouds is icing on the photography cake.

Some of my shots are the result of serendipity, and others only come about after a great deal of careful planning. This was a bit of both, and a good reminder that good things come to those who wait…but also those who plan ahead.

For the past several years, I have enjoyed taking my DSLRs and several lenses to our family vacation at Milford Lake, Kansas, and experimenting with different kinds of photography that I don’t normally get the chance to do back home in central Oklahoma. A couple days at the lake means there’s a host of photographic opportunities at one’s disposal including close-up shots of plants and animals, long-exposures of the sunset, telephoto pictures of wildlife, and lots more. Many of these shots have been featured in Weekly Fifty over the years, and this kind of photography is usually one of the highlights of my year.

But this year things were different. I still brought some photography gear, but not as much as I normally do. I also took some photos, but not with the same fervor as years past. Instead of spending time with camera in hand and eyes pointed at nature, I traded that for time with family in the pool, at the beach, and in the cabins playing games and catching up long after the sun had set. I also did a lot more with my GoPro this year, both in terms of video but also photos, and in the end I think I found a place (figuratively, not literally) where I tried to spend more time just being present with the people, rather than out and about with my camera. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but I just found it to be much more pleasant and meaningful to put the camera down (or, more accurately, not pick it up in the first place) so I could be more involved with my family.

But when this opportunity presented itself…boy howdy. You better believe I ran inside and grabbed my camera! My brothers, or maybe one of the nieces or nephews, found some snails crawling on and around various objects outside after a thunderstorm blew through, including this one making its way across a crack in a fallen tree that had been carved into a bench seat some years ago. I knew right away that the combination of late afternoon sunlight, glistening post-precipitation texture, rich natural greens, browns, and grays, and the two little antennae sticking up would make for a fun photo. And, if you don’t mind me saying so, I think I was right :)

I shot this looking straight down at the snail using my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens, dialed in to an aperture of f/13, 1/125 second, ISO 6400. Thankfully the snail wasn’t exactly moving fast, but even so it was a little tricky to get the focus just right given the super thin margins I was working with for depth of field. I really like how you can see the texture of the snail’s body and shell, and even now looking back at this I find myself cheering on the little crawler for making it across that gap. Way to go, little fella!

On a side note, I have been leaning more and more into Lightroom Classic’s AI-powered Denoise feature and this shot is yet another example of how effective it is. Though ISO 6400 is pretty great on a D750, it’s obviously not as crisp and clean as ISO 100, but whatever algorithms Adobe has developed for the Denoise feature work wonderfully.

By now, if you have been following Weekly Fifty for any length of time at all, you have probably heard me wax at length about the idea of context and how important it is, for me anyway, when taking pictures. I like to give viewers, whether myself or someone else, a sense of the broader time, place, mood, or even weather conditions that led to the creation of any given image. The clearest, or perhaps simply the most recent, example of this phenomenon is my picture of star trails while we were camping at a nearby lake with some friends. Instead of just water, earth, and sky, I made the deliberate choice to include our tents in the shot which made a huge difference in the meaning, message, and mood of the final image.

This concept of context, and that star-trails-with-tents image, was certainly on my mind when I took this week’s image during my family’s annual trip to Milford Lake, Kansas–the same location where I took my first GoPro star trails shot a year ago. As things were winding down for the evening and I got to thinking about where to position my camera to take a long-exposure shot of the night sky, I realized I could enhance the composition and tell a bit of a story by including our cabin in the frame instead of just the lake. All the other star trails shots I have taken at the lake were set up with the camera near the shore, but this one would be different: I found a picnic table across the gravel turnaround near the cabin, and used a jaws-style clamp to secure the GoPro to one of the bench seats. I was pretty sure no one would be coming around at night and, even if they did, I was similarly confident they would not notice a small black camera attached to the picnic table with black securement. There was still just enough light to compose the shot with the cabin on the horizon and the expanse of sky above, though there was one small hitch in the plan. I wasn’t sure exactly where Polaris would be and, as such, I wasn’t sure how to orient the camera so the stars would rotate around it.

The next morning when I checked the camera, everything had worked out more or less how I expected but with a bit of a twist. The rotational center was also in almost the exact center of the shot! I did not plan that at all and was actually hoping it would be closer to one of the edges, but as my sister would say, you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. Everything else worked out great though! The cabin lit up by the dim glow of the porch light, some green streaks from fireflies slicing vertically through the foreground, and a brilliant sky full of stars showing our relatively small place in the heavens. In the end I’m very pleased with how this picture turned out, and I actually appreciate that it didn’t go quite how I expected. Sometimes it’s fun to have things pan out just how you want them, and sometimes it’s fun to just be surprised :)

This photo changes things up in a different way than I expected. One fairly common thread that runs through a lot of my pictures recently is that many of them are improvements, so to speak, upon an original version that was created years ago. Some of these are intentional, others coincidental, but part of the continual journey of growth and improvement in photography, at least for most people, is learning from what you have done before and then building on it to create something even better.

This photo, however, changes things just a bit. It builds on an image of a coneflower from July 16, 2014, that I hot with my original camera kit: A Nikon D200 and 50mm f/1.8 lens. A combination that is positively ancient compared to modern gear, combined with almost no knowledge of light, exposure, composition, or any other fundamental elements of photography. I had no idea what I was doing, but I took a picture that I was proud of and have since printed to hang on my wall. I knew there was room for improvement though…

A few weeks ago as I walked from my car to my office on a rainy weekday morning, I saw a scene with some coneflowers that was not too dissimilar from the one I encountered over a decade ago. I had my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 lens in my backpack and thought that this would be a great opportunity to use my years of experience to take a picture of a coneflower that was even better than the original. I carefully composed the shot, taking into account things like the aperture (to control depth of field), the angle of light, the background, and the other flowers that might be in the frame, and took a dozen photos–my favorite of which you see featured above.

But here’s the odd thing: I still prefer the original. This doesn’t usually happen with my photography, and it’s got me thinking about things a bit differently lately. Normally a picture I take today, which was inspired by a similar shot I took years ago, is almost always improved in many ways. It’s normal for most photographers, and a sign of growth and change. It’s a good thing. But in this case, the opposite happened. The original has a lot more contrast, a lot more shadow detail, and also a bit more of something I can’t really quantify: character. It just feels more…moody, perhaps? Brooding, even? The petals have more life and texture to them, and I prefer the giant brush stroke (as it were) of dull red and green on the right side over the blurry yellows in the background of the new one. There’s even a glint of light on one of the flowers in the background, thanks to a bit of rain that had not yet rolled off, which adds to the overall tone of the original image.

This isn’t me trying to be self-deprecating or anything like that. It’s just an observation, and one that has got me thinking about my photography a little differently lately. Or maybe my editing style, which has, I think, grown a little punchier and brighter over the years. Maybe I need to tone things down a bit, and let my photos breathe a little instead of dialing the Lightroom sliders all the way to one edge or the other. Whatever it is, I do like that this photo gave me an opportunity to stop and contemplate things in a rather unexpected way.

This photo is mostly the result of some simple experimentation. A proof of concept, perhaps, to see if an idea I had would actually work out. In the end I’m not entirely sure it did, but at the same time, not altogether convinced it did not. If nothing else it was a fun picture to take and a good chance to come away from a walk around Theta Pond on the OSU campus with a cool picture and a bit of a story to tell, which means the whole exercise was time well spent. The trick here, which is the same as that on many a close-up photo, lies in the depth of field: how to get the right aperture, along with the proper distance from the subject, in order to get the shot I was aiming for. In this case there was a bit of an additional wrinkle added to the mix in that the subject, as it were, could be many things. Should it be just one purple flower? Perhaps two? What about the main portion of the plant or, perhaps, one of the unfolded flowers? What about using a small aperture so the entire plant? Lots of options to consider, for sure.

I ended up going with a pretty simple, perhaps obvious, solution: just use the most colorful part of the flower and go from there. I shot at f/8 to get a nice mix of subject sharpness and background blur, even though that meant most of the plant besides the purple petals was not in focus. It didn’t really matter to me after I decided to use the flowers as the subject, but what did matter was the background: I wanted to position the plant (or, rather, myself) such that everything behind it helped accentuate it while also adding some fun context. The bright white blur is one of the fountains in Theta Pond, and the dark vertical line is a cypress tree at the eastern edge of the water.

In some ways this is a bit of a classic Weekly Fifty composition: it’s certainly not the first time I’ve taken a picture at Theta Pond in the afternoon, of a bit of flora while facing west with a fountain in the background. Is it a complicated setup? Nope, not at all. But it’s fun style of picture to take, and it brings a smile to my face–not only while taking it, but viewing it afterwards.