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

Just a bit about this picture behind-the-scenes before I get too deep into the weeds here. When I shot this I was evaluating a lens for Sigma corporation, specifically their 40mm f/1.4 ART lens that they sent me to test out for a few weeks. I’ve only used third-party lenses a handful of times over the years and always preferred first-party versions, but this thing was a whole other beast entirely. It was awesome, and I was super excited to get to review it. I only wish they had let me keep it!

As part of testing this lens I went around shooting a ton of pictures, several of which you’ll see here over the next few weeks. It was fun seeing the world around me in a bit of a different light, having never shot with an f/1.4 lens and certainly not one of this caliber before. Case in point: this magnolia flower, similar to others I’ve shot before, but on a whole other level optically speaking. The 40mm focal length of that Sigma lens meant that I could capture a wide field of view (not true wide-angle, but wider than a 50mm lens) and get a lot of context to the shot, while the f/1.4 aperture meant that I could all but eliminate the background entirely. Normally to get this much background blur I’d need to get closer, which would mean a narrower field of view and a different image altogether.

You can read my actual review of the lens over at DPS and I don’t want to waste your time just gushing over it here on Weekly Fifty, but I did enjoy shooting with it and seeing what it was like to capture the world at f/1.4 :)

This photo came about after a few days of my wife and I doing somewhat of a science experiment with our kids involving the classic tornado-in-a-bottle project. We spent an hour or so on a Tuesday afternoon, thanks to a city-wide weather-related school closure, putting a few of these together to bet with somewhat mixed results: the mini-tornados functioned normally but the containers were a bit leaky. The next day we revised our design, primarily using hot glue as an adhesive between the bottles, and things were significantly improved such that we couldn’t detect any leaks at all despite some significant usage by the kids including dropping one of the contraptions onto the kitchen floor. It was a fun way to spend a couple of hours, and the kids really seemed to enjoy creating whirling vortexes in these bottles for a lot longer than I thought they would.

Later that evening as the sun was going down but before the kids went to bed I had the idea of using one of the bottle experiments as a photo subject, but I didn’t really know what to do or how to photograph it. I got out my D750 and 85mm lens, mostly because it was convenient and readily available and I needed a bit more reach than my 50mm but wanted to avoid she sheer heft of the 70-200mm. I put the camera on a tripod and aimed it at the kitchen table with the bottle in the middle, just like you see here:

The trick here was lighting. I didn’t really know what to do to properly light the scene, so I started with a 2500 lumen LED shop light sitting on a chair and pointed up at the bottle from behind. I also didn’t really know what exposure settings to use except that I wanted a slightly long shutter and a low ISO, in order to get some motion trails and a nice clean shot. As such I used manual mode, ISO 100, F/2.8, with a 1/60 second shutter speed. The results were…not good.

I played around with the light a little more though, firmly thinking that a big strong backlight would give me the look I was going for, while also stopping down my aperture to f/4 to get a wider depth of field. I did this because it was tricky to get the bottle to sit on the exact same spot on the table every time I turned it over, and I needed a bit of wiggle room in case I didn’t get the placement just right. Things improved, but not very much.

At this point I was really wondering what I was doing wrong, and then I realized that my light was simply too bright. I switched out the shop light for a flashlight with an angled head, set that on the chair, lowered my shutter speed to 1/10, and got the picture you see at the top of this post. After that I kept on trying new settings like smaller apertures and longer shutter speeds just for the fun of it, and while some of those photos turned out OK nothing was really any better than the image I chose for this week’s featured photo. It was a fun experiment to try though, and gave me some interesting ideas to try for future pictures too.

If you’ve been following along the last few weeks you’ve seen that the recent set of pictures has had a distinctively midwestern theme, with images of windmills and trucks and cotton and other items indicative of the Great Plains. This picture is a departure, or rather, a return to the more normal types of photos I enjoy taking. It’s a simple scene and, like a lot of my Weekly Fifty photos, entirely unplanned with what I hope are some interesting results.

On a Friday evening earlier this year my brother and his girlfriend were down for a visit, and we spent a while playing the board game Ticket to Ride with our kids. It’s kind of like a super duper basic version of Settlers of Catan in that you have to connect various regions on a map with roads or, in this case, train routes. We didn’t quite finish the game since the kids had to go to bed, but we left it out for the next morning which seemed like a good compromise for everyone. After waking up and making my way to the kitchen the next day I thought that the colors of the trains, lit by the glow of the early morning sun, would make for an interesting photo but instead of reaching for my Fuji I went for the classic Nikon + 50mm. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…something about that lens is just kind of magical. It’s not what I prefer for general-purpose everyday shots, but it’s amazing when you want to get a little artistic and creative.

So I set the camera on the table, dialed in an aperture of f/2.8 (I knew f/1.8 would be waaaaaay too big and leave almost nothing in focus) focused using Live View, and took a shot. Sure enough, even at f/2.8 the depth of field was too shallow so I closed it down to f/4 and left the ISO at 100, which meant I needed a super long shutter speed of 1.5 seconds. No matter, though. Just set the self-timer, press the shutter, take your hands off, and you’re good to go. (Sorry for my use of the second-person pronoun. Sometimes it just works better.) My oldest son, who was awake and watching me take this picture, was eager to get going with breakfast so I quickly put the camera away and set about taking care of some of the usual morning routine activities, but it was nice to get a shot of this almost-completed train route before everyone else woke up and the moment faded away.

I’m not kidding, that’s literally the name of this waterway and I have always thought that this scene would make for an interesting photo opportunity, but I’ve never really had the time or gear or weather conditions to get this shot. I’ve driven over this spot a dozen times in recent memory and I have a hunch that this is all that remains of a once-great reservoir, much like Milford Lake just to the south, but that has now been returned to a state that resembles, more or less, how it might have looked long ago with a small stream cutting a meandering path through the Kansas wilderness.

As I was driving from Nebraska to Oklahoma in early February I knew that the weather would be good enough for me to at least pull over and see if I could get some type of shot here, but I wasn’t quite sure just what I was going for. I knew I would want something on the wider end of the spectrum so I grabbed my Fuji X100F, got out of my car, and made my way to the edge of the bluff you see in the foreground. I fired off a couple shots but something wasn’t quite working out and I wasn’t able to put my finger on it…and then I realized was going on. It was the curve of the river.

This shot, much like most of my images up to this point, didn’t do a good job of capturing the scale of the scene because the river just sort of wandered off the frame without going into the distance. It just wasn’t working, but I wasn’t really sure what to do about it. Kind of on a whim I decided to move even closer to the edge and also scoot up to the bridge a little bit too, so it didn’t take up quite as much room in the frame. The result is the picture you see at the top of this post, and it’s very close to what I’ve been seeing in my mind whenever I’ve thought about getting a photo of this location. Not much is different between the two pictures you see here–both have a bridge on the right, a river in the middle, and roughly the same horizon–but the one on top does such a better job of capturing the expansive nature of the scene.

I’d like to revisit this when the grass is greener and the sky is bluer, and hopefully use what I learned here to get an even better shot someday :)

I must admit I had no idea what was going on here when I drove past this scene in Kansas a few weeks ago. I’ve spent pretty much my whole life in the midwest but I had never before seen giant bales of cotton wrapped up in bright pink, and the sight was almost otherworldly. But there I was, driving down Highway 77 southbound towards Oklahoma when just to the east I spotted a field dotted with these bulbous pink cylinders and I didn’t have a clue what to make of it. All I knew is it would probably make an interesting picture, so I turned off onto the shoulder, got out my camera, and set to work.

I had my Fuji X100F and my Nikon D750 + 70-200 f/2.8 with me, and I knew right away I would need the latter and not the former to get any type of decent shot. I’m not one to go around trespassing on random fields, and because I knew I wanted to fill the frame with the giant reddish weirdness that was one of these bales I figured my best option would be to use the zoom lens, which turned out to work pretty well. It’s sometimes tricky to judge things like depth of field on a small camera screen but I was pretty sure I wanted to use f/2.8 since I was really hoping to put one single bale in focus with the rest slightly blurry, and anything smaller than f/2.8 wouldn’t have really given me the background blur I was aiming for. I was just hoping it wouldn’t be too much blur, but in the end any fears of such proved to be unfounded.

The one thing that I was really going for was to have each bale in the shot exist in its own space within the composition–a lesson I learned from Sam Abell in his remarkable lecture The Life of a Photograph. (Skip ahead to about the 47-minute mark if you want, but really the whole talk is worth your time.) Much like Mr. Abell did in his shot of calves being branded I wanted each bale to be separate from all the rest but all work together to form a cohesive whole, so I scooted left and right until I was satisfied I got the composition I was aiming for. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the radio tower in the background but I figured there was really nothing I could do, so I just didn’t think about it too much.

I did see a few other scenes like this on my drive but none were quite as intriguing, and now I know what I’ll be keeping an eye out for the next time I’m driving by some cotton fields :)