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

This was an interesting experiment in trying to make what I saw in my mind match what my camera was able to capture. I don’t think I quite pulled it off, but it was a fun exercise in light, color, and crystals :) What you see here is a selenite crystal, one of many hundreds that my family and I dug out of the ground at Oklahoma’s Salt Plains State Park one warm May afternoon. My wife and I had been talking about visiting this natural landmark for years but it was always one of those items sitting near the top of our to-do list, never quite reaching high enough to actually make happen. That all changed when some friends of ours asked if we would want to join them on a trip out there, which was all the motivation we needed. We soon packed up two vehicles with shovels, buckets, water, and lots of clothes that could get muddy without worrying, and made the two-hour trek for a day of digging in the sand.

If that doesn’t sound quite like your particular cup of tea, I’m not sure it was ours either—until we arrived, and quickly found the ground practically teeming with crystals just like what you see here. What made the experience even more interesting was that this is the only location in the world where these particular selenite formations, complete with rust-colored hourglass shapes, are located. They aren’t worth anything (and you’re not supposed to even sell them) but that’s not really the point. It’s quite something to dig into the ground with a shovel or, in our case after some heavy rains, just your bare hands and pull out anywhere from one to a dozen crystals just like this one.

But how to photograph it? That’s a good question. As has been my custom lately, I fired up my Nanlite Pavotubes to see what I could come up with. I used a piece of white foam board, then set two lights on it just out of frame. On top of the lights I placed a piece of clear glass from a picture frame, and then the crystal as the final piece of this photographic sandwich, so to speak. I aimed my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 Macro lens straight down, and started shooting.

The hardest part was getting the depth of field right, and in the end I still don’t think I quite achieved what I was going for. Even at f/45 (1/8 second, ISO 100) too much of the crystal is blurry but I think that might be natural diffraction from the shape of the object rather than shallow depth of field. Even so, the orange oxidation is much less sharp than I would prefer and I wish I could have gotten a shot where everything was clear and in focus. Maybe I’ll try again, or try something different with another crystal, but as it stands this was a fun experiment and gave me some practice shooting a super unique subject.

This is one of my favorite kinds of pictures, partly because of the basics like composition, subject, lighting, and depth of field but also because it’s a single shot that tells a much larger story. And while I certainly enjoy the creativity afforded by the off-camera colored lights with which I have been experimenting lately, at the end of the day images that tell a narrative are a lot more meaningful to me. When I look at this image I don’t see a dog running with a frisbee in his mouth. I see Dashwood, my cousin’s Fox Red Labarador who spent Easter weekend with us (along with my cousins, of course) in an Airbnb in central Iowa. I see my kids throwing the frisbee for Dash in the early morning while the grownups chat after a warm breakfast including bacon made on a barely-working electric griddle. I see two days of board games, hikes by the lake, visiting a diner and coffee shop in the nearby town, and the single greatest Easter egg hunt my kids have ever experienced–courtesy of my cousin’s husband Steve whose boundless creativity provided not just candy but a cast of imaginary characters with an entire backstory.

But enough about the story; let’s talk about the picture itself. To get it, I used the only camera I brought with me for the weekend: my trusty little Fuji X100F, the photographic powerhouse that has been at my side on every trip and vacation for the past five years. Even though that camera is, shall we say, not exactly ideal for capturing fast action you can work wonders if you know how to play to that camera’s strengths. The first thing I did was look at the light, and think about where I would need to be in order to compose the kind of shot I had in mind. I knew that I wanted to get a shot of Dash running past the camera but I didn’t want him shrouded in shadow, so I made sure to position myself such that when he returned a tossed frisbee he would be running just to my right and into the early morning sunlight.

The more I experiment with colored off-camera lighting, the more I find myself learning about light, shadows, and contrast in ways that I didn’t expect until now. This picture is similar in some ways to others I have been sharing recently, but also a radical departure into entirely new territory and one that gives me some interesting things to think about. Until now the overall theme for lots of my pictures has been light, light, and more light. Light from the front, light from the back, light on the sides…light everywhere, and in all sorts of colors. But when is it too much, and what happens when you go in the opposite direction?

That’s what I explored here, with my trusty Fuji X100F and a couple of pavotubes. As I try to apply the lessons I learned from my picture of an old cell phone, I wanted to see if I could create a shot that was more about showcasing an object rather than the lights and I think this worked out fairly well in that regard. Instead of looking at the entire camera, all you can see is the lens and a lever on the side which is used to switch between viewfinder modes. You don’t see any of the controls and dials on top, and much of the camera is also obscured due to the shallow depth of field. However, I think (and correct me if I’m wrong) you still do get a pretty good sense of what this is from a couple important clues including the circle shape, the reflective glass, the words “Fujinon Aspherical,” and even the number 2 at top which, if you are into photography, you probably recognize as an f/stop indicator. All of these were intentional choices on my part, and I think it worked out fairly well. Or, at least, much better than that picture of the cell phone :)

The one thing that really took a while here was the lights: where to put them, what colors to use, and how bright they should be. I ended up using two lights (one orange, the other purple) and holding them in my hands while moving them around slowly into different positions. I tried putting more light on various portions of the camera: top, left side, right side, and front, but ended up preferring what you see here with the far side of the camera showing a soft orange glow and the top of the adjustment ring with a bit of a purple sheen. It was much more subdued and contrast-ey than any of my earlier shots but also feels more intimate and even delicate at the same time.

Clearly I still have a lot to learn, but it sure is a fun journey :)

In Spring 2022 I took this close-up shot of my son’s eye with my macro lens, fascinated at the amount of detail I could capture while also playing around with the lighting a bit. We were outside and there wasn’t a lot I could do to actually control the light, since the sun kind of does its thing regardless of what we here on earth might prefer. Nonetheless he and I still found some creative ways to adjust a few parameters like where he was standing, what he was looking at, and the angle at which I took the picture and in the end I quite like how it turned out. A fun first attempt, at least, and it has stuck with me ever since.

Enter (what else?) my Pavotubes 😀 I thought it would be fun to revisit the original eye close-up with a bit more control over the lighting just to see what I could come up with. Both of my sons were kind enough to oblige their photo-obsessed father as I played around with the position, color, saturation, and intensity of three lights, each attached to the top of a separate tripod, arranged in a triangle shape in front of their faces. My first attempts involved setting each light to a different color, but like my brother Phil said it ended up looking like a weird sci-fi scanner effect from a movie and not the creative style I was really attempting to capture. Also, it was really difficult to get a close-up shot with both my camera and my sons’ heads moving around–even the slightest micro-movement threw the focus all out of whack.

Eventually we just paused the whole operation and went to go eat lunch with my wife, and in between bits of our grilled-cheese sandwiches it hit me: use one color of light instead of three, and find a way to stabilize my sons’ heads. The former was a matter of a couple simple adjustments on the light settings, and for the latter I just put a backward-facing chair in front of the lights so they could sit on it and rest their chin on the wooden chair back. Bingo.

The result you see here, then, is pretty much what I was aiming for though I’m not really sure what I was aiming for. You can see the reflection of the three lights around my youngest son’s eye, and I guess it’s kind of…different? I’m not really sure. Is it interesting? Maybe…I guess. I dunno. It was a fun experiment to try, and who knows, maybe it’ll give me some new ideas to consider at some point too.

This is it! This is the lens that started it all: my humble little Nikon 50mm f/1.8G that I purchased more than ten years ago so my wife and I could take better pictures of our nine-month-old son. The lens that, along with our old Nikon D200, got me going on this whole photographic journey that continues to this day and that I hope will continue as long as I’m capable of holding a camera in my hands. This lens inspired me to create Weekly Fifty, and even though I don’t use it for daily shooting nearly as often these days, it still has a valuable place in my gear bag and I still don’t think you can beat its unique combination of price and features. For anyone looking to level up their photography, a 50mm lens like this is, in my opinion, the single best purchase you can make.

So when I was thinking about some creative ways to use my Pavotube lights, it occurred to me that I could try to take a unique of my meek but mighty Nifty Fifty lens. I tried a couple things that didn’t work, then had a bit of an epiphany, and after more tweaking and experimentation I got the shot that you see here which, in my opinion, is pretty solid.

I started by taking the same approach as I have been doing on many of my recent pictures, but soon realized that setting this lens on our washing machine and lighting it from the side wasn’t going to work. It just wasn’t creating a compelling composition, and I didn’t really know why. Things weren’t clicking, and if you have been taking pictures for any length of time you can probably understand the feeling of not quite being able to make the shot work. I moved lights around, readjusted the position of my camera, changed the angle of view…nothing. No luck. It wasn’t happening.

Then something occurred to me: why not try an entirely different approach and take a shot of only the front of the lens. It could work, but how? The I put the lens on its side (still on the washing machine) and lowered my camera to face it head-on, but no dice. Like Luke said to Han when they were putting handcuffs on Chewie to pretend they were doing a prisoner transfer, “This is not going to work.”

That’s when I realized I was going about this all wrong. I needed to change everything about the shot in order to get something good. I put the lens on the floor, put my camera above it, adjusted my angle of view to be straight down, and placed the lights at 120-degree increments. Bingo. Now I had something I could work with.

After this it was simply a matter of fine-tuning everything. I needed to get closer to the lens, but couldn’t lower the camera so I raised the lens by putting it on my iPad that was enclosed in a black translucent case. I adjusted the colors of the lights. I played around with the aperture. And after much experimentation I got the final shot you see today. I also did some work in Lightroom to adjust colors and remove spots and imperfections, but the result is an image that I am extraordinarily proud to have taken that also tells a bit of a story–at least for me personally. It’s perhaps a bit of a metaphor too. This picture is a look at both past and future, at my beginnings as well as new horizons and new things to explore. This shot makes me thankful for the past, and excited for what is yet to come.