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

Nearly a decade ago, when I got a set of close-up filters for my 50mm lens, I took some photos of lily flowers that kind of took my breath away. Not because the images were particularly outstanding, but because of the realization that I could actually capture images of incredibly tiny objects with such clarity and beauty. I thought this was some rarified form of image-creation that was simply beyond the likes of mere mortals such as myself, but that was not the case at all. Anyone can do it; all it takes is the right gear and a willingness to experiment and try new things. And in the years since then I have found myself returning to many kinds of pictures I took back in the day, as they say, to put a more modern spin on them and revisit them with fresh eyes, better gear, and more advanced knowledge of concepts like light, color, exposure, depth of field, and so on. Not to erase the originals or diminish their impact at all, but to iterate on them and see if, and how, my photography skills have grown over time.

There’s a bit of hidden artificiality to today’s picture that you can’t really see, but I thought I would disclose it anyway for a bit of a peek behind the scenes. These lilies, while quite real, were sitting in a vase in our kitchen when I decided to take a picture of them. Or one of them, to be more precise. However, when I set up my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens on a tripod next to the kitchen table I soon discovered two things that made it quite challenging to get the kind of picture I was hoping for.

The first was the lighting. While the vase was near a window, most of the light was coming from the fixture overhead. The artificial nature of the light was far more apparent than I initially thought it might be, both because of the odd color cast but also the direction. It just didn’t look natural to have such harsh overhead lighting on the flowers, and the resulting contrast among the subtle texture variations in the petals came across as crude and garish. I tried adjusting the position of the vase and playing around with different overhead lights in the room to no avail. It just wasn’t working out.

The second problem was the background, which did not occur to me at all when I started thinking about creating this image. Since the vase was sitting on my kitchen table, the green areas you see behind the petals were a pale shade of dull brown–courtesy of the dining surface which has been well-used over the course of many decades, starting long before it was given to my wife and I by her father when we first got married.

Both the lighting and the background proved to be intractable problems and not easily fixed by simple repositioning of the vase. I was going to have to think outside the box on this one or, more accurately, outside the house.

I picked up the vase and tripod, went out to the back yard, and gave it another go to see if I could get a halfway decent shot. I had something specific in mind, which is pretty much exactly what you see here, but what I didn’t know is if I could actually get it given the shooting conditions. My efforts were stymied by the wind; the slightest whisper was enough to shake the delicate stamens, particularly the pollen-rich anthers balancing on top of each one. And when working with millimeter tolerances due to the close-up nature of the shot, well, let’s just say my patience rapidly began to wane. I set my aperture to f/11, used Live View to focus on the top of the pistil in the center, waited for a break in the breeze, and fired off a couple of shots. This was the only one that turned out and even so, if you visit the high-resolution original on Flickr you’ll see that it’s not quite as sharp as I would have preferred. That’s just my own nitpicking though, and the end I’m very pleased with the results I got here. I like the bright, vivid colors and the dual-tone palette dominated by yellow but accented by rich reddish-browns. The green background is a nice touch, and even though the flower petals are lost in a sea of background blur, I quite like the overall effect :)

I almost didn’t get this picture. Twice. But like a lot of my good shots, and even some of my favorite shots, success is sometimes the result of more than a little bit of serendipity. A few weeks ago we went camping with some friends, and I almost didn’t bring my camera. Not just my Fuji X100F, which would be ideal for a situation like this (weather permitting, that is) but my GoPro, which doesn’t really have much of a place on a camping trip at all. And yet, as my wife and I packed the tent along with the usual supplies such as bug spray, sleeping bags, spare clothes, and the like, I decided to toss in the Fuji and GoPro anyway. I didn’t really know what I would plan to do with them–the former because it’s not weatherproof and not ideal when out in the elements, and the latter because we weren’t doing any kind of extreme activities at all. Just basic tent camping. Nothing more. And yet, I thought to myself, why not.

As we cooked over the campfire while the sunlight waned in the blanket of blue high above, I noticed that the wind was growing calm while the clouds cleared. I thought that I might be able to use this as an opportunity to take a long-exposure photo of the stars streaking across the nighttime sky, and quickly grabbed my GoPro and set about looking for a place to put it to get a good picture. I found a flat rock near the shore, just on the other side of the tents, that seemed ideal: it would get much of the lake in the foreground with a nice view of the sky along with the stars circling around Polaris as the earth turned. I placed the camera, set the timer to start the shot at 12:30am, and went back to the fire so I could focus on the people, not the pictures.

A while later as everyone was settling in for the night, I had a sudden flash of inspiration. It was the kind of light-bulb idea that hits out of nowhere, and ends up changing everything in a way that, in retrospect, seems so obvious. The one thing I consistently mention here on Weekly Fifty, the technique that informs my photography more than just about anything, is context. My original idea for a star-trails shot had none of it. It would have been a cool photograph, but with very little to connect the viewer on a psychological or emotional level, with the experience of actually being out at the lake on a clear starry night. A simple change would fix all that.

Just to the south of the little peninsula where we pitched our tents was a large dock that protruded about thirty yards into the lake. It was several feet off the water, and realized that if I attached the camera there and pointed it in the same direction as I had originally planned, it would capture not only the sky and stars but our tents as well. Bingo. Suddenly there would be something in the picture to ground the photo in a way that viewers could connect with, as opposed to a scene of water, horizon, and stars but devoid of any human life. The nearly full moon was a bonus, as it illuminated our tents along with natural elements like grass and rocks. Even the clouds cooperated, showing up as just a couple of light streaks without obscuring the stars at all.

The next morning I could hardly wait to check the GoPro to see what it got, and I’m enormously pleased with the result. I wish the horizon was a bit straighter but that’s the price you pay when you line up your shot in near total darkness after the sun has already set. It was an enormously satisfying photo to take, and gives me a few ideas about what I might do next time also.

There’s been a bit of a nature, or more specifically, a flower theme lately here on Weekly Fifty. This isn’t by design, but more of an example of how I approach photography–that is, I try to find interesting things to capture with my camera when I have it out and about with me. When flowers are blooming, well, there you have it :) Each year my neighbor leaves a section of his two-acre yard unmowed and, as a result, it fills with bright beautiful flowers and also a veritable flurry of bees, butterflies, and other bugs and insects looking for nectar or maybe just a place to rest their wings. When my wife and I were walking past his field recently I noticed that the flowers were starting to spring to life and, as soon as we got home, I grabbed my trusty Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens so I could go and see what I could capture with it.

A bit to my surprise, the results were not exactly what I was expecting. Though the sky was overcast as a result of the recent rains, I just didn’t see much in the way of anything that looked interesting from a photography standpoint. The flowers I saw when we walked past earlier were almost all white which might look good in a vase on a kitchen table but don’t always make the most interesting picture subjects. Or, at least, not when I’m the one behind the camera anyway. I like to take pictures of flowers full vibrant colors, and white is kind of the opposite. I did try several shots from different angles, and played with the composition a great deal in order to see what white flowers might look like against dark trees, red brick, and brown house siding…but nothing really worked. No worries; I got to spend time walking around in nature and that’s always a good thing :)

As I was about to turn and head back across the street to my house I spotted the purple flower you see above and figured Well, why not. It wasn’t the most spectacular flower I had ever seen, but it might make a good photo anyway, and what was the harm in trying? (Answer: none whatsoever.) I lowered my camera down, flipped out the screen, engaged Live View, set the aperture to f/11, and fired off a couple of shots. What you see here is essentially exactly what came from the camera: no cropping, minimal color adjustments. (Mostly just white balance.) It’s fun, and quite gratifying, to take pictures like this just as a way of keeping the ol’ photo-taking skills sharp while also learning to keep my eyes open and see ideas and opportunities where I might otherwise just pass by without a second thought.

I know I probably sound like a dinosaur when I say things like this, but if you have been following Weekly Fifty for any length of time this will not come as a surprise: this photo is not only an illustration of how a dedicated full-frame or even APS-C camera remains far superior to a mobile phone camera in most respects other than simple portability, and also a reminder that phone screens are not always the best vehicle for viewing pictures. I took this shot with my D750, a camera that is over ten years old as I write this in 2025, using a 105mm f/2.8 macro lens that was released in 2006. And yet, I humbly (or not so humbly) submit that this image would literally be impossible to capture on any mobile phone. Not some, or most, mobile phones, but any mobile phone. It can’t be done. Sometimes the old ways are just better than the new ways :)

So here’s how this played out. I was out at the OSU Botanic Gardens on a rainy, overcast morning (are you seeing a theme here, based on the last few Weekly Fifty photos?) when I came across the scene you see above. It was part of a display in the grass just below last week’s hummingbird picture, possibly put here by some patrons or perhaps the proprietor. In any case it was a fun, whimsical display that was practically begging to be photographed on that drizzly day. The owl was less than one inch tall and its counterpart, the little hut in the foreground, about half that. I bend down, enabled Live View, flipped the screen out, set an aperture of f/8, and got to work taking some photographs. I really like the three-quarters view for subjects like this instead of head-on or profile, as it helps draw the viewer into the scene and feel a sense of connection that isn’t really present when looking from other perspectives. F/8 meant that the texture and detail on the owl would be quite clear, even the ruffled feathers and sharp talons, and even the texture on the tree was pretty clear too. I tried a couple shots at f/4 but it was just too blurry, and f/11 had kind of the opposite problem. Hence, f/8 was the sweet spot.

There’s something else here too: a tiny, almost microscopic, drop of water in the blue paint just below the foremost eye. If you’re looking at this on a mobile phone you probably can’t see it, but even if you’re on a computer you might need to click over to the original on Flickr and zoom in a bit, but trust me, it’s there. Subtle details like that are essentially obliterated on sites like Instagram which is a bit of a shame, and one of the reasons I’m on Flickr: you can see the full-size originals and zoom in to examine each pixel if you really want to. Also, I did use the AI Denoise feature in Lightroom to compensate for the bit of noise and grain particularly in the out of focus areas, and it’s something I have learned to embrace a bit more recently. There’s a time and a place for AI in some respects, and if it helps me do a bit of the heavy lifting for making images a bit cleaner and smoother, I have no problem with that at all. Overall I’m very pleased with this shot and it was a fun way to practice some of the techniques I have developed over the years.

Finally, to address the issue I mentioned in the opener, there’s a couple reasons you can’t get this with a mobile phone. First, the fixed focal length of roughly 28mm on most mobile phone cameras is far too wide to get a shot like this. Even phones with telephoto lenses can’t get this kind of picture because their lens apertures are too wide and, when paired with minuscule image sensors, can’t re-create the incredibly shallow depth of field on display while also maintaining the sharpness, crispness, and level of detail you can get with a dedicated camera. I’m certainly not against mobile phone cameras and they are, of course, often a convenient choice. But sometimes they’re not the best choice and it’s amazing what you can get with some dedicated camera gear, a little practice, and an eye for seeing photography situations right in front of you.

I must admit, when I was out at the OSU Botanic Gardens recently to get some pictures of plants and flowers, I definitely did not have “green and purple hummingbird tree ornament” in mind as a possibility. And yet, here we are, and I could not be more pleased with this picture and how it all unfolded. I was walking through the gardens with my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens and, after photographing several different kinds of living things, decided to head to an area near the north end that usually has a collection of small trinkets, odds and ends, and figurines scattered (carefully placed?) about to give visitors a moment of whimsy and serendipity as they look at the flora throughout the area. On the ground were some painted rocks, a few seashells, a model house, and other such things, many of which would have been fun to photograph. But the thing that really caught my eye was the artificial avian friend you see above, and I knew it would make a great subject to capture with my camera.

The easiest choice I had to make was what to focus on, and as far as I was concerned there was just one answer: the eye. I suppose someone could get creative in a situation like this and think of something else that might make for an interesting image like, say, the beak or the spring or…well, I really don’t know. Because that’s not, as Dr. Alan Grant might say, what I would do. I’ll take the eye any day of the week and, much like Daniel Kaffee’s father, twice on Sundays.

The next choice was what angle from which to photograph the bird: straight on from the front? A profile shot from the side? How high or low should my point of view be? I settled on what you see here because it worked well to show the eye clear and sharp along with some depth of field with the beak and the tailfeathers just out of focus enough to make things interesting.

And that’s it, right? Just click the shutter a few times and then go about my day, eh? Well, maybe…except something else happened that I, like the One Ring when it was picked up by Bilbo, did not expect. The slightest whisper of wind wove its way through the clearing, causing the wing wheel in the foreground to spin ever so slightly. Fortunately my camera was in continuous high-speed shutter mode which meant I was able to get several shots while the wing rotated and, since I was using my customary Auto-ISO setting of 1/200 minimum shutter speed (along with an f/3.3 aperture which still gave me an ISO of 1100, which tells you a bit about how cloudy it was on this day), got just a bit of motion blur to add a sense of kinetic energy to what was otherwise a surprisingly static composition. I was not expecting that at all, and I’m so glad things turned out the way they did because the result exceeded any expectations I might have had. Between the light, the colors, and the motion blur, this might just be one of my favorite shots I have taken recently. Time will tell of course, but for now I can solidly say that, like Lloyd Christmas, I like it a lot.