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

Any idea what this is? Go ahead and guess, I’ll wait.

Personally I think it looks like some kind of alien life form, or perhaps a poisonous plant from a sci-fi movie just waiting to release toxic fumes on our band of unsuspecting heroes. Or maybe it’s the fabled jewel at the end of the rainbow, a yellow bulb of replenishing life force for a famished warrior at the end of an arduous trek across the desert.

Or…it’s entirely possible that this is just a close-up picture of a Black Cotton plant, shot in early Spring with a bright overhead sun. The world may never know. Or maybe the world will know, since that’s exactly what it is :) I was walking through the garden just west of the Atherton hotel on the Oklahoma State University campus when I saw this plant with rich purple leaves accented by tiny yellow flower buds, and thank goodness I had my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens with me because it ended up being a really cool photo opportunity.

I normally use autofocus for most of my photography, but that was a little tricky here since there were so many little wisps and whirls in the flower bud that my camera didn’t really know what to focus on. I decided to give manual focus a try which seemed a little tricky given the extremely shallow depth of field, but the results ended up looking pretty good. What really does it for me in this picture are the out-of-focus yellow spots on the right side. They add a really nice sense of depth that was missing in some of the other versions of this image that I took from more of a head-on perspective, and help reinforce the otherworldly appearance of this little flower bud.

This is one of my favorite kinds of pictures to take–the kind that comes out of nowhere, grabs you by surprise, and turns into something unique, fun, and unexpected. This is exactly what you probably think: a single piece of popcorn. Nothing special, and yet, it is kind of special. My wife and I are huge fans of Star Trek and popcorn*, and it’s not uncommon for me to whip up a batch of the latter while watching the former on any given evening after the kids are in bed and our normal obligations are wrapped up for the day. (Or just postponed until tomorrow, which does tend to happen maybe a bit more often than I care to admit.) I don’t usually see popped kernels with this level of roundness and uniformity, so instead of eating this one I decided to save it until after the show was over to I could get a close-up photo.

The setting here was pretty basic: I put my camera on the coffee table, stacked some pillows on the ground, set the kernel on the pillows, and used Live View to compose the shot and get my focus just right. I tried a few different apertures but settled on f/22 which, combined with ISO 100, meant I needed a whopping 15-second exposure. Motion was not an issue and lighting was kind of dark but the final shot turned out really well and I hardly had to do any cropping at all to get it to what you see here.

I think what I really like about this picture is the sense of scale and familiarity, but also seeing the familiar in a different light. Most people recognize a piece of popcorn and can easily tell that’s what this is, but most people (at least in my estimation) haven’t really looked at a single piece of popped corn up close and personal like this. The intricate textures, the network of valleys, the subtle colorations and gradients as they shift from light to dark…it all adds up to a fun way of looking at something completely ordinary from an entirely different perspective. I must admit when I got my macro lens I never thought I would be using it to take shots of a single kernel of popcorn, but here we are. And I’m glad for it :)

*Popcorn recipe that I have used for years:

2/3 cup dry popcorn kernels. I prefer Orville Redenbacher’s

1/3 cup refined coconut oil. (If oil is solid, add it to the kernels and then microwave for 30 seconds to melt the oil.)

Pre-heat 10-quart pot on medium high for 10 minutes. Leave the cover on while heating.

Add kernels and oil to pan. Cover, and shake vigorously every 20 seconds or so.

When finished popping, pour into a big bowl and add a dash of salt.

This picture right here is one of the reasons I bought a macro lens. I have always enjoyed taking pictures of flowers with a set of close-up filters on my 50mm lens (longtime Weekly Fifty readers probably know this already) but to be able to get shots of flowers with an actual macro lens is a whole other experience entirely. Some of the first pictures I took with my close-up filters looked similar to this one, but they were much more difficult to shoot due to the fussy nature of filters compared to a true macro lens. Now I’m able to frame my shot and focus on whatever I want, without trying to move my camera back and forth with a +10 or +4 filter attached to the front and hope that the thing I want to be in focus actually resides within the narrow plane of focus allowed by the filter.

I know it sounds a little odd to describe, but if you have ever used a set of close-up filters you know what I’m talking about. To be fair, they are a great way to experience macro photography without spending a lot of money, but it is nice to have a real macro lens :)

I shot this at our neighbor’s house on the recommendation of my wife, who suggested we go down to our neighbor’s house to take some macro pictures when she saw that their flower garden next to the sidewalk was in full bloom. It was sunny and a bit breezy when we walked over there but we got some great results through teamwork: she blocked the wind as much as she could, and held the flower steady while I took some pictures. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going for and neither was my wife, but both of us knew that we didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to photograph these flowers up close. I tried some that were straight-on and some from the side, and this ended up being my favorite of the bunch. I like that it’s kind of a three-quarters view so you get a sense of depth and dimension, and the yellows and reds just explode off the screen with a sense of life and vibrancy that you can only get at this time of year. I had a great time taking this picture and I’m looking forward to many more like it :)

It might not seem like there’s a whole lot to this picture, but in a lot of ways it represents the culmination of many years of practice, patience, and education.

But it’s a goose, right? I mean, how complicated could this picture possibly be? The answer is, a lot more than you might think.

Theta Pond, on the OSU campus, is inhabited by geese pretty much year-round. Only in the coldest months of winter will you not find geese swimming or otherwise milling about, but despite their ubiquity they do tend to keep a safe distance when it comes to pedestrians and passers-by. Despite seeing geese almost every time I go for a walk around the pond, I have only a handful of good pictures of them–even when I use my 70-200 f/2.8 zoom lens. And none of my geese pictures are up close and personal like the one you see above, mostly because the geese just don’t let people get very close. There’s a host of other elements that have to be line up just right too: lighting, wind, pedestrians, other geese, wayward squirrels, and even some ducks that like to cause trouble for their avian cousins. What this all boils down to is the simple fact that despite having a near-constant presence of geese at Theta Pond, getting a picture like this turns out to be fairly difficult.

I was walking near the pond in early April when, as is not uncommon, I happened upon a goose just sort of chilling on the sidewalk in the afternoon sun. I had my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens with me, but I didn’t think I would have much luck with a picture since these situations usually result in the goose taking leave of the situation long before I can get a shot that I like. This time, however, things were a bit different. I knelt down and crept close to the goose…and it didn’t move. It just eyed me cautiously, but with a sense of curiosity as well. I put my camera in Live View so I could hold it about a foot off the ground with the tile-screen facing upward while I slowly closed the distance between me and the bird. I took a couple of pictures, almost holding my breath thinking that the goose would hiss at me and fly away at any second. And yet it remained.

I kept taking pictures while slightly adjusting the aperture and changing my own angle of view so as to catch a glint of sunlight in the goose’s eye. The goose just sat there, unfazed by me and my camera, and let me go about my business for a precious few more seconds. Soon it decided it had enough of my camera shenanigans and got up to relocate while leaving me to contemplate my good fortune. This was my favorite picture of the batch, and even thought I shot it at a fairly wide aperture of f/4 the depth of field remains well-controlled, and I like that the front part of the bird’s beak is just slightly out of focus. It adds a sense of depth that was not present in some of my other shots.

Bonus: If you click on the picture to load the original full-size version on Flickr and zoom way, way in on the eye you can actually see a reflection of me kneeling down on the sidewalk to get the shot :)

In case you’re keeping track of these sorts of things (and if not, I don’t blame you since I barely am) this is the first 50mm photo I’ve had on Weekly Fifty all year. My 2013 self would likely respond with righteous incredulity, but my goal for this blog from day one was to be a tool that I could use to learn and grow as a photographer—with or without a 50mm lens. And it just so happens that after getting a true macro lens, after shooting with close-up filters for so many years, almost immediately opens your eyes to a boat-load of new photographic opportunities suddenly available. Hence the last four months of Weekly Fifty pictures :) However, that doesn’t mean the old tried-and-true Nifty Fifty is suddenly irrelevant. Far from it! I don’t think I will ever stop using my 50mm lens, but I certainly do enjoy venturing out with other lenses to see what kinds of images I can make.

I shot this picture when my family and I were out geocaching with some friends at the local Botanic Garden. I had my D750 and 50mm lens because it’s a way better walkaround option compared to a 105mm macro lens, and I was able to get some really fun pictures of all the little ones playing together and finding hidden secrets around the area. After a little while we took a bit of a break and the kids found this cat wandering around one corner of the gardens, just sort of hanging out and keeping an eye on all the strange two-legged creatures constantly walking through what was clearly its own territory. Thankfully the orange feline was kind enough to let the kids pet it and play with it, and when I wanted to get in close for a picture it happily obliged. Or maybe it just happily ignored me. I’m not sure. But either way, I was able to get a picture so that’s all that matters to me.

I shot this at f/1.8 because well why not. It was fun to take a fairly simple but effective image with a clear subject, bright colors, good contrast, and a smooth blurry background. The cat’s eye is tack sharp, the colors of its fur contrast with the dark green background, and it looks like it sees something interesting on the horizon which invites the viewer to speculate on what in the world it might be. (Spoiler alert: I think it was a shrubbery.) This is a great example of an image that’s pretty basic but a lot of fun to shoot, and the kind of picture you can’t really get with a mobile phone and auto-blurring software.

Earlier this year I posted a photo of some water droplets suspended in midair that I shot near the southeastern corner of the Oklahoma State University campus. Even though that image didn’t turn out exactly how I had hoped, I treated it as a learning experience and wanted to find ways to improve on the overall concept, since what good is it, I ask you, if we learn nothing from our mistakes? (A rhetorical question, obviously, but one that is always worth asking no matter how often it is repeated.) More than anything, I wanted to solve the issue of the water droplets in the original being just slightly blurry—the result, so I thought, of Vibration Reduction accidentally being enabled on my lens while shooting with a tripod. So I returned to the same spot weeks later with the same gear (105mm f/2.8 Macro lens and my Nikon D500) to see if I could rectify my mistakes and produce a better image.

In short…I did not. Despite shooting at 1/8000 second and disabling Vibration Reduction, the same problem remained: a slight bit of motion blur on the water droplets. I was a little surprised at the result since I had been so certain of the cause of the motion blur, but rather than pack my bags and head out I instead decided to go for something different entirely. Rather than use the water drops as my subjects, I found a tiny purple flower about one inch in diameter and decided to shoot that while using the the falling water as a background. I think it worked, but this gives me even more ideas to try in the coming weeks and months…

Probably the trickiest part about getting this shot was focusing on the flower. I had to use Live View since the whole setup was about 18 inches off the ground and I couldn’t really hunch down to look through the viewfinder, but unfortunately the Live View focusing in DSLRs is pretty bad for moving subjects like a tiny flower in the midst of a blowing breeze. I played with the aperture a bit, erring on the smaller side to give me a bit more depth of field wiggle room, and after many shots I finally got the one you see here. Strangely, the one thing that makes this photo work is the one thing I didn’t consider at all: tiny itty bitty drops of water on the flower itself. There were a couple of shots without those drops and they just don’t have the same punch or visual impact as this one, and I’m super thankful for that bit of serendipity that ended up elevating this image from mundane to…well, something a lot more interesting to look at :)

It’s interesting where you can find inspiration for photography sometimes. My brother Phil and his wife came down for a visit recently and over the course of a few days he and I spent a lot of time talking about photography techniques, experiments, and of course, gear. We played around with my 105mm f/2.8 macro lens a lot, finding interesting ways to shoot everyday subjects and looking for creative photographic possibilities out in the yard or just around the house. One such opportunity cropped up when the four of us (me, him, and our wives) were played a board game called Concept late into the evening after all the kids were asleep. The game itself was really fun, but what captured our interest even more was the colorful translucent pieces that you place on the board throughout your turn.

The more we looked at the rich greens, blues, reds, and yellows the more we thought they would make for an interesting close-up shot. We started with one single piece—the green question mark—and worked outward from there, with my Nikon D750 resting on the table in Live View as we composed the various elements of the shot. Phil toyed around with foreground and background elements, namely the little colored squares and tall exclamation marks, while I tried different solutions for how to light the image. We ended up using an iPhone in flashlight mode off to one side to get the lighting just right, and Phil carefully arranged pieces in the foreground and background until they looked like what you see here. We shot with an f/3.3 aperture which seemed a bit overkill at first due to super shallow depth of field, but the background out-of-focus elements looked so smooth that we didn’t want to go any smaller than that.

This is one of those shots that works fairly well on its own, but also tells a fun story if you know the context for the image. When I look at this I of course see a green question mark but what comes to my mind is a fun evening of hanging out with family, and that means a lot more to me than any one simple photograph.

There are some types of images that I have realized I just enjoy taking. And, conversely, there are some styles of photography that don’t interest me whatsoever. Street photography definitely falls into the latter category for me, as does most animal and wildlife photography: I don’t really have the patience for either one, and when it comes to taking pictures of random pedestrians and passers-by, I just feel icky. (I know some people are great at street photography, but it’s just not my thing.) This image, however–the one you see at the top of this post–is one that I find great joy in capturing. It’s simple, straightforward, and in my opinion, interesting to look at. It invites no deep interpretation and offers no life lessons to the viewer, but it makes me happy to take pictures like this and that’s all I need.

I shot this not by my traditional location of Theta Pond on the OSU campus, but just south of the Whitehurst administration building. I was walking past a tree with a friend of mine when I saw this one single orange leaf hanging out all by its lonesome amidst a sea of its green counterparts, and thought it would make an interesting photo. I had my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 lens with me and quickly realized that the sun was at a good spot on the horizon for me to capture the leaf with a pleasant amount of backlighting. One thing I really appreciate about shooting with my macro lens is that I don’t have to compromise in terms of distance to my subjects. I can get super close, super far, or anywhere in between. Sure the lens works great for getting really close, but it doesn’t have to be used that way. You can take normal shots of everyday things as close or as far as you want, and it’s fine. And that’s how I got this image you see here.

The usual questions applied: aperture, shutter speed, etc. (I never think about ISO anymore.) F/2.8 didn’t work since almost none of the leaf was in focus, so I stopped down to f/4. Same result. F/8 was the sweet spot: a good balance of subject sharpness and background blurriness. All this came together in a matter of seconds, perhaps a minute at best, and then my buddy and I resumed our walk. It’s nice to have the tools and experience to be able to capture photos like this without making a big deal out of it :)

This is one of those photos that started as something very different than how it turned out, and is significantly better as a result. I was pulling out of my driveway on a very cold morning in February, and noticed that the ground was covered with a light layer of frost. That doesn’t happen too often here in Oklahoma, and I think it came about because of a bit of rain followed by sub-freezing temps overnight, but this being a photo blog and not a weather blog, I suppose the cause isn’t nearly as important as the result. And the result, if I do say so myself, is pretty cool. I saw this leaf sticking up and thought it would make for a neat picture, but what I had in mind in that moment was pretty different from how it actually turned out.

Originally I was just going to take a shot of the leaf by itself with my macro lens, and hopefully get an interesting view of its frost-tinged edges and veins. I immediately thought of this shot that I took in 2015 and wondered if I could replicate it, so to speak, but with a macro lens. Or at least take another image that was inspired by the earlier one, as I have had the habit of doing recently here on Weekly Fifty. I put my car in park, got out, grabbed my D750, got down low, put the camera in Live View…and that’s when I noticed it. Not the leaf and the frost, but the sun behind it. Good gravy.

The unexpected image of the sun coming up over the horizon immediately transformed what I was thinking about as I took this shot. Instead of being about a frosty leaf, the photograph became an entirely different image of a sunrise in the background, a leaf in the foreground, and a monochromatic yellow-and-black color scheme that is kind of different and unique for me in my photography. I took a couple pictures with a somewhat wide aperture because, well, bokeh, but then I realized I could do something even greater and make an image that was a lot more interesting if I stopped down my lens a bit.

I ended up going with f/38 which still had an impressively shallow depth of field, but also served to turn the sun into a brilliant multi-pointed star with rays emanating out in all directions as it crested my neighbor’s house. A minute later and this shot was gone, having turned from dawn to day, and I was back in my car on the way to work. But for just a moment this everyday pedestrian scene in my front yard mere inches from my driveway was transformed into something much greater, and I consider myself fortunate that I was able to capture it in my camera.

I got my macro lens right when everything was turning brown and gray for the winter, which meant that I had to wait months until shots like this would be possible. I don’t know if I would say without qualification that it was worth the wait, but I will say that as things green up a bit and colors start showing up, I’m having a lot of fun taking pictures of it all with this lens. I’ve taken shots like this before with close-up filters, but the rendering of the out-of-focus elements (i.e. the foreground and the background) has always been rather subpar. Close-up filters are also much trickier to work with in general, and offer much less latitude in terms of focusing and depth of field, whereas an actual macro lens gives you a ton of freedom for experimentation and creativity. (Though to be fair, the latter is also much more expensive than the former; if you just want to get started with close-up photography, you can’t go wrong with close-up filters.)

When I saw this flower close to the ground, I was a little unsure of what exactly should be the point of focus. I tried a couple of things and eventually landed on the stigma, which seemed appropriate since it was a little different in both size and color compared to the rest of the flower. It was tricky to get it in focus though, since I was shooting handheld and low to the ground. I couldn’t look through the viewfinder to focus which meant I had to use the flip-out LCD screen on my D750, which wouldn’t be a problem if the contrast-detect autofocus was more reliable and better suited to moving subjects. (Even micro-level movements matter a great deal when doing macro shots.) I compensated by using a small aperture and…well, just taking a ton of shots and hoping one would work out. And it did! I’m pretty happy with the result and it gives me ideas for other shots to try in the coming weeks and months.