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

This is a bit of a change from the spate of flower pictures I have been sharing recently, though I guess if you squint real hard you could possibly mistake it for a kind of blooming plant of some sort. While I’m not in the habit of using Weekly Fifty for some kind of photographic guessing game, I am curious to know what you thought this was when you first saw it. Some kind of composite image, perhaps? Maybe a bit of photoshopping to embellish an ornament? I wouldn’t blame you if you thought there was some level of AI-induced trickery going on, but I can assure you the real answer is much more simple, and instead of artificial image-generating algorithms you’re looking at a combination of light and physics–plain and simple or, perhaps one might say, elegant and profound. It all depends on your point of view, but at the end of the day this image is completely real and captured entirely in camera. It’s a glass sphere sitting on top of a multicolored fidget spinner my son brought home from school:

I bought the sphere at the suggestion of my brother Phil a few months ago, and while I don’t use it every single day I do enjoy seeing the different kinds of creative opportunities it affords. In this situation I think the fidget spinner itself would make for a compelling photo, but the sphere sitting on top of it elevated the composition to a new level that I find to be pretty compelling. The trickiest part of this shot wasn’t depth of field, as often is the case when shooting with my macro lens, but shutter speed. I gave the spinner a flick with my finger and then took several shots of it as it slowed down, and was continually surprised at how difficult it was to capture a sense of motion without turning the shot into nothing more than just a blur.

What you see here is a half-second shutter, but that by itself doesn’t tell much of a story. A half second doesn’t mean anything without knowing how fast the object you are photographing is moving, and in this case I can assure you the answer was slowly. Very slowly. The spinner had, by the time I took this photo, slowed to what I guess you could describe as a crawl or, in other words, barely moving at all. I tried this several times (flicking the spinner, taking lots of photos) and each time the slower it got the more I was surprised at just how slow it really needed to turn to get the shot I was aiming for. I could have just used a shorter shutter with a faster rotation, but that would have required a higher ISO to compensate and I’m really happy with the ISO 400 I was able to use here–it results in a crisp, clean, noise-free image that does just about everything I wanted it to do.

It’s interesting to me how my standards have changed and evolved over time. Back when I first started doing more serious photography, I would have never believed I could one day get a shot like this. Partly because I had no idea how to get a shot like this, but also because I simply didn’t have the gear either. My humble little Nikon D200 and 50mm lens, the combination that kicked off this entire Weekly Fifty project, simply could not produce this image nor anything even close to it. So if someone had told me over a decade ago that I would be capable, both on a technical level as well as an experience level, of getting a picture of an insect feeding on a flower like this I simply would have disregarded the entire premise altogether. It would be too far beyond my reach.

Fast forward to present day and here we are, a photo that would have blown my mind back in 2012 and yet, all I can seem to notice are slight imperfections and opportunities for improvement. I’m not trying to be self-deprecating, it’s just that I’m kind of stunned sometimes at how much my standards have shifted the more I learn and grow as a photographer. But one thing I try to do when reflecting on my past photos is criticize them, since they were the best I could do at the time. Instead I like to see current images as evidence of growth and progression, and if they aren’t pixel-perfect then it means I just have more learning and growing to do :)

What I mean by all this is that today’s photo is, by most accounts, pretty great. (I hope it doesn’t come across as arrogant to say that.) By that I mean it hits all the notes you would expect in a good photograph. There’s a clear subject centered in the frame, and the purple petals immediately draw your eye from the surrounding greenery. It’s sharp, in focus, and there’s something interesting going on with the insect (a small bee, perhaps? I dunno.) taking a few sips of nectar from the flower. There’s even some secondary elements to draw your attention like the subtle waves of color variation in the background, the purple protrusions on the stem, and the single blade of green extending off to the right. Clearly there’s a lot to like, and a lot that went right in the making of this image.

However, and you knew there would be a caveat coming, when see this image it’s hard for me not to notice the imperfections. The bee (or whatever it is) is facing just slightly away from the camera. The depth of field is just a bit too shallow. I wish I had gotten a few inches closer. And so on. What I need to do, and what this image helps remind me, is focus on things like how much I have learned and grown as a photographer and also appreciate this shot for what it is and what it represents. I need to not get weighed down by what this photo could have been, but instead appreciate it for what it is. Sure there’s a few things I could improve next time, but there’s a lot that went right this time, and that’s worth far more to me.

If you’re looking for something new to try with your camera, here’s a suggestion: go out the morning after a rainstorm, or perhaps the morning after the morning after a rainstorm, and look for some mushrooms. You’ll often find them in damp spots that get a mix of shadows and sunlight, and if conditions are still cloudy in the post-rain period then you could be in for a real treat. I’ve taken a handful of mushroom photos over the years and am rarely disappointed, and often impressed, with what I can find either in my own yard or just by taking a short walk.

That was the case here. I was out for a walk across campus to run an errand and, because I had my camera with me, thought I would take a stroll around Theta Pond on my way back to the office. It had rained the past few days and I thought I might find some flowers or leaves or other plant parts with a bit of that classic post-precipitation shine to them or perhaps some drops of water too. Turns out that prediction was somewhat unfounded, since most things had kind of dried up by that point. Not the soil, mind you, but the visible drops on leaves and petals had mostly evaporated. I did, however, spot this mushroom hiding somewhat underneath a shrubbery and immediately decided that it would make an interesting photo opportunity. I set my camera on the ground, enabled Live View, tilted the LCD screen up, dialed in an aperture of f/4, and took a few shots. They were fine, but nothing particularly spectacular–something was missing, or perhaps just not quite right, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. I stood up, circled the protruding fungus just a bit, and then it hit me: it wasn’t that anything was amiss regarding the mushroom. It was the background that proved to be problematic. In my original shots there were just too many distractions behind the mushroom, either colored flower petals or bits of light poking through the shallow canopy. It was cluttering up the shot, and dividing the viewer’s attention away from the subject.

The solution? Just move my perspective a bit. I scooched my camera over a bit, roughly 90 degrees from its original position, and took the shot you see here. It does a much better job of capturing the essence of a mushroom hidden in its own little world, poking up from the wet ground and tucked under an umbrella of green leaves. This image hasn’t been cropped and everything you see here was captured entirely in camera, and I really like the mood and feeling evoked by what you see. It was a fun photo to take, and a good reminder to me that if something isn’t working out (either in photography, or in life) it might help to just view it from a different angle or perspective. You never know what might happen.

Ok, so at this point Weekly Fifty might as well be called “Weekly Flower” because that’s pretty much all I’ve been posting lately. But to be fair, it’s also about all I’ve been photographing lately (not counting shots of people, like my wife and kids, which I don’t post online) so at least you know I come by it honestly :) I took this picture in my neighbor’s field not too far from many of the other flower photos I have shared here over the past month or so, but this one contains a key element that was missing from the others: condensation. Or perhaps precipitation, to put a fine point on it. I took this the morning after we got some pretty big thunderstorms in the area, and even though it only resulted in about an inch of rain in total where we live this field was still plenty wet the next day when the sun came up. It was still cloudy and pretty overcast after my family and I got home from church, so I grabbed my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 lens and walked across the street to Dave’s field to see if I could get a few shots. I didn’t have anything in mind per se, but it’s really fun to take pictures after a good spring rain–especially if your subjects are full of life and color like what you see here.

There’s two elements of this shot that really stand out to me, one of which I kind of caused to happen and the other which I was simply fortunate to be able to capture with my camera. The first, which I was more or less responsible for, is the way the subject almost duplicates the background objects. Not copies, exactly, but perhaps echoes. I didn’t move or alter the scene at all to make this happen, but I did position myself intentionally such that the flowers in the foreground were on the right and pointing upwards in a V-shape, and their counterparts a bit farther back were on the left side of the frame. In fact, on a really basic level, this image demonstrates the power of that age-old compositional device called “The rule of thirds.” It’s one of the first thing a new photographer learns, and with good reason: you can’t really go wrong with it. Sure there are lots of creative ways to compose an image but if you’re not really sure what to do, just bust out the good ol’ rule of thirds and you’re all set.

The other thing I didn’t really plan was the giant drops of water visible on the pink petals of the flower in the foreground. I mean, I did intentionally take this picture after it rained but I did not plan it such that there would be water on this particular flower. I didn’t even think of it while I was shooting the picture, and only noticed these drops after I was back on my computer going through the images in Lightroom. I like the added context and texture they give to the flower and, really, the entire image as a whole. Those two drops, despite being relatively small, serve to elevate the photo well beyond what it would be without them and are a good reminder of how much the subtle details matter when taking pictures.

A couple of weeks ago I shared an image of an Indian Paintbrush flower (also called Prairie Fire, among many other names) that kind of continued an unspoken tradition I have had here on Weekly Fifty, which is to share similar shots such as that one each Spring when these flowers pepper the yards and fields and countrysides of Oklahoma. The image wasn’t anything extraordinarily special but it was worth posting, in that I enjoyed the experience of taking the picture and learned a few things from it as well. Or at least continued learning a few things, since I feel like I still have a long way to go when it comes to flower photographs, but every little bit helps, eh? Not long after I shot the other one I took the picture you see here, which is kind of an evolution of the original and, in my opinion, a much better shot due to a couple of important compositional elements. Basically, I learned a few things with the picture I posted at the end of May, and then I got the chance to use them on the shot you see today :)

To start with, this flower feels alive, vibrant, and colorful in a way that leaves its counterpart seem flat and uninteresting by comparison. The backlighting not only makes the red petals practically pop out of the frame, creates compelling accents on the dozens of white flowers behind and in front of it too. I like how the flower is slightly off-center, which gives the shot some room to breathe and allows for the top-right corner to be dominated by some very dark greens as well as some spots of white light as the sun shows through the trees. Finally, the foreground elements create a sense of depth and three-dimensionality (is that even a word?) that’s missing on the other shot.

It’s important to note that any of my above comparison analysis between this image and the other one should not be taken as criticisms of the earlier picture. One thing I stress over and over here on Weekly Fifty is that I try to approach photography as a continual learning process, and an ever-expanding continuum with no endpoint. Essentially, there’s always room to grow and new things to learn, and one of the best ways to do that is to examine earlier images and apply lessons to future photos. It doesn’t mean the earlier shots are bad, just that there’s always something to learn, new techniques to try, and ways to build skills from the foundations that came before. That’s my goal here, and I hope it’s your goal also. It’s like Andy Dufresne said to his friend Red: get busy living, or get busy dying. Except in this sense, just replace living with learning, grab your camera, and get to work :)

There’s something about this photo that keeps me coming back to it, and it’s only partially related to the subject. I mean, of course the single solitary prairie fire flower is what immediately catches your eye (well, mine anyway) but beyond that a couple of elements in the background just hook me and I’m curious what you think about them too. But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s just start at the beginning. I shot this while I was in my neighbor’s field, the same place I took this shot about a week earlier. This time it was me, my wife, and our two kids who all went over to see the hundreds of butterflies that were floating throughout the field, landing on flowers for a few seconds to sip some nectar before lifting off into the air again. The four of us spent a while just walking around looking at everything and commenting on the sights, sounds, and smells of the field while I had shot a few pics with my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens. My goal was to get a photo of a single butterfly on a flower, but every time I approached one it would fly away before I got close enough to snap a picture. No matter though, it was time spent with family which means, in the end, it was time well spent.

I did, however, notice this single prairie fire flower standing tall all by itself in a small clearing of wild onion flowers and, seeing the brilliant backlight on the central stalk, I just knew I had to take its picture. The flower almost seems like it’s glowing, and has a sense of live and vibrance that really struck me. I got down low to the ground, adjusted the aperture of my lens to f/4.8, and started taking pictures. I got what I was looking for, and really appreciated the billowing clouds of light in the background as well as the white wild onion flowers on the edges of the frame, but what really hit me when I was looking through the shots in Lightroom was the way some of the flowers in the background almost seemed like duplicates of each other. I don’t know how it happened, but it’s super cool to see :)

For example, if you look to the left of the subject about halfway to the edge of the frame you’ll see a green flower stem that looks…well, it almost looks like a ghost. It’s one single stem that looks like two, and it’s almost certainly due to some kind of refracting properties within the camera lens. Once you see it you’ll notice other areas of the frame where similar things happen, and it’s like nothing I have ever encountered in one of my images before. I don’t know what happened and I don’t know how to replicate it…all I do know is that I like it and it elevated this image well beyond anything I could have planned.

I’ve been going back and forth about what to do with this image for a while. On one hand, it’s about 70% of what I wanted it to be and when I look at the shot I just can’t help but think about how I would do it differently if I had the opportunity. It’s the one that got away, so to speak, and there’s a dozen things I would change if I could revisit the complete composition. But on the other hand, there’s a lot I really like and instead of focusing on what didn’t work, I want to think about what did work and use the rest as a learning opportunity.

At the end of the day, the main issue I have with this photo has nothing to do with anything related to composition, framing, or lighting. Rather, it’s my own lack of foresight by not shooting in RAW. I took this photo with my Fuji X100F which I can always count on to produce beautiful JPEG files that hardly need any editing at all except for maybe a bit of exposure adjustment here and there. When I set up this shot I forgot to put the camera in RAW mode, which meant I had far less editing headroom compared to a JPEG image. In that sense I did a disservice to the subject; it’s a beautiful flower that was given to my wife for a very specific purpose, and perhaps I could have done better if I had taken care to get my exposure right in the first place. To wit: the original is not great.

Alrightey then, let’s not dwell too much on what went wrong. Let’s talk instead about what’s going on in this shot (the actual one, not the original you see above) and what worked well. First of all, the flower itself is quite stunning and, being my first experience with an orchid, pretty fascinating too. When it was given to my wife as a gift several months ago its flowers were blooming nicely, and as time went by they only got more stunning. The brilliant white petals persisted, neither fading nor withering, quite unlike most any other flower I had ever seen. One day my wife remarked at how striking it looked when backlit as the sun rose each morning, and it got me thinking about how I might capture some of that essence but in a more controlled manner at night with some artificial lighting.

I set several of my Nanlite Pavotubes outside on tripods, dialed in to different colors, and then went inside with my Fuji X100F and took several shots. I experimented with different color combinations and brightness levels, and ended up with what you see above. The original, that is–not the edited version at the very top. I do think the overall concept here is sound, and the colored lighting worked well, but I just keep kicking myself for not shooting in RAW. I shouldn’t let it bother me too much though, and instead treat it like I do many of my Weekly Fifty photos: as a learning opportunity. And who knows, if the orchid blooms again I might give this another try :)

Just outside one of the main buildings on the Oklahoma State University campus is a row of Genti White Clustered Bellflowers which, for most of the year, are large, stately, and decidedly green—or brown, depending on what season. But for a brief period of time each spring they come to life with blinding brilliance, a curtain of white that shines so brightly in the midday sun it almost hurts to look at them. My wife, who is a faculty member at OSU, remarks on them each year as she goes from one building to the next between classes. When the two of us met up one morning to go for a short walk she mentioned to me that these white flowers were blooming, so later that day I grabbed my camera and went to see if I could capture a shot of them.

The most challenging part of creating this image was deciding how to adequately convey the sheer sense of scale on display, and I’m not sure how well I did it. These flowers bloom high above the heads of the college students passing by, stretch on for the entire length of the building. I could have stood way back and took a picture of the entire scene, but that wouldn’t have been, in my opinion, nearly as impactful as what you see here. I would have been just a fairly normal scene of a brick building with some white flowering bushes in front, and students walking by. I don’t think, though I could be wrong, it would have done a great job of conveying a sense of scale.

What I chose to do instead was focus on a single protruding collection of the tiny white flowers and use that as the main subject of the image, but compose the shot in such a way that several other flowers were visible in the background, while also positioning myself so that a few were also showing in the foreground. The result, at least in my opinion, does a pretty decent job of illustrating the scene without showing a whole lot. I’m not sure if it worked exactly how I had hoped, but it did present a fun challenge and I’m glad my wife mentioned it to me and encouraged me to give it a try :)

I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is a tradition per se, but every Spring when these prairie fire flowers bloom around town I relish the opportunity to capture their beauty with my camera. Often these shots end up on Weekly Fifty, and longtime readers will no doubt have seen similar scenes as this one shared here on the blog, but my enjoyment at taking shots like this is in no way lessened by the frequency, or perhaps regularity, with which I take them. To this day my favorite flower photo I have ever taken is that of a monarch butterfly resting on one of these prairie fires just as the sun is coming up on the morning after a nice spring rain. I’m still not sure how I was able to get that, but in a lot of ways I have been chasing it ever since.

This one is not it :) But it is, nonetheless, still a fun type of image to create and one that I continue to learn from as I grow in my photography journey. I shot this in my neighbor Dave’s field, with his permission of course, one evening while the sun was slowly descending in the western sky. I had really hoped to go capture a shot in the morning after a rainstorm, but the one thing you really need for that to happen is, as you might have guessed, rain. And that has been, sadly, in short supply in Oklahoma lately. As you can see from the withered petals on the stalk, this flower and its peers were not going to be around for too terribly much longer so, rain or no, I knew my time was limited. And let’s be honest, these flowers are beautiful no matter what the weather conditions happen to be.

I shot this with my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens at f/16 and positioned fairly close to the subject. I couldn’t go much wider than f/16 since I wanted as much of the flower to be in focus as possible, but one thing I could easily control was the overall composition–specifically the horizon. Did I want to show just the field, or the line of trees behind it? I took dozens of images from low, medium, and high angles and ended up preferring this one over the rest because it shows more of a sense of place and scale. You get the idea that this flower is in the middle of a large field, and that there’s something (trees? bushes?) off in the distance; the other shots without that dark green line just weren’t as interesting to look at. I also positioned myself such that the sunlight was coming from behind the subject which added a nice glow to the topmost petals.

Who knows…maybe we’ll get some rain and I’ll get to go out again and take some photos, but even if not I’m happy with what I got. And that’s a lot :)

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.