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

Nearly 12 years ago, way back in the waning weeks of 2012, I took this photo of a mockingbird outside the Spears School of Business building at Oklahoma State University. I had my Nikon D200 slung over my shoulder, 50mm lens firmly attached to its front, and if I remember correctly I think I was running to and fro from one building to the next while my coworkers and I got things ready for the annual chili cook-off. The air was biting cold despite the rising sun, and this bird was hanging out on a bush while morning crept over the Oklahoma plains. It was, and still remains, one of my favorite pictures I have ever taken–not because it’s so awesome, but because it helped me realize that yes, in fact, I could take cool photos with my fancy-pants new (used) camera and 50mm lens. It ignited a confidence in me that remains to this day, and I suppose that’s probably one reason why I have it printed, framed, and hung on the living room wall.

Well, fast-forward to the fall of 2023 and I once again found myself at the exact spot on campus where I took the photo of a mockingbird more than a decade earlier. Instead of my D200 and 50mm lens I had my D750 and 105mm macro lens, but other than that things were pretty much the same. The bird was the same, (though perhaps not the same, as the original bird is probably not around anymore. But who knows?) the location was the same, the background was the same, and even the weather was, you guessed it, about the same. I couldn’t have planned it any better, and I wanted to try to get a photo if even there was just a small chance. Turned out, there was :)

I followed this bird for a few minutes as it flew from here to there, always staying within the perimeter hedge, and was able to get close enough to snap the shot you see here. It’s pretty good if I don’t mind saying so, and much improved over the original in almost every measurable way, but there’s also no way I would have ever thought to snap this. Basically, you gotta give credit where credit is due.

Full disclosure though, I did cheat on this just a bit. Even though my lens was a longer focal length compared to the 50mm that I used on the first image, I still had to crop in quite a bit to get the shot you see here. Then I made use of the Super Resolution feature in Lightroom to mitigate the loss of detail and sharpness that happened due to the cropping. Is that taking things too far? I’m not really sure, but I think that’s one of the best things about modern digital photography: we have tools available to us that we can use, whether hardware or software, and it can be good to employ them when needed.

I didn’t hear the mockingbird sing this day, nor did I when I took the original, but I have listened to their songs on many occasions and at the end of the day I’m just glad we have these creatures in the world :)

In some ways this is a photo I have been thinking about for a long time. Years, in fact. Not this photo exactly, but some kind of composition involving the two artificial flowers you see here has been on my list of images to take for a good long while. My wife has had these two floral decorations, which she got from a longtime friend, adorning one of the rooms in our house for so long I can’t recall ever not having them around. I always enjoyed their simple design, translucent colors, and delicate elegance and almost every time I see them I think Hey, I should take a cool photo of these someday. And, as most people might expect, someday just never quite arrive. Until recently, that is.

The question that I always thought about when looking at these flowers was not necessarily how to take a photo of them, but how to take a cool photo of them. Anyone can point a camera at something and press the shutter button, but how could I go about making an image of this daisy and tulip that was compelling, creative, unique, or otherwise elevated above the mundane? The answer, or at least an answer, came to me when my wife and I were sitting by the Christmas tree back in December. I know, I know, it’s now mid February which makes this image a bit out of date, but I guess I just wasn’t really ready to share it yet. I went back and forth on this one since it’s pretty similar to a few other shots I shared already, but at the end of the day…well, it’s my blog so I get to set the rules 😀

To get this shot I combined a few things I have been experimenting with lately: My macro lens, my Pavotube off-camera lights, and my knowledge of exposure, specifically depth of field, when shooting subjects a bit closer than normal. For a bit of context, here’s a behind-the-scenes look at this image:

I’ve got my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, two Pavotubes set to a color temperature of 2800K, and our Christmas tree in the background. I had the room lights turned off so the only illumination on each of the tulips was coming from the Pavotubes, and the trickiest part of the whole setup was figuring out where to place the tulip in relation to the daisy and even the tree lights. I eventually decided on what you see here, with the daisy in front and on the right and the tulip behind it and on the left, with the curly wisps positioned precisely in front of the green, blue, and red lights of the tree. Make no mistake: nothing about this image was accidental; the entire composition was created deliberately with careful attention being paid to exposure, subject, background, and lighting.

This was a super fun photo to create and even though it’s now outdated by several weeks, I’m really excited to share it anyway. Though maybe one could say that it’s right on time, with spring just around the corner and flowers like this about to start appearing in lawns and meadows across the midwest. Here’s to new beginnings and new opportunities, and the ability to create cool compositions with a camera and some lights.

One thing I’m learning about taking pictures of lights like this, which I have done many times before, is that it’s a lot trickier than you might think. Initially, way back when I was just operating with my 50mm lens and a cheap (but effective!) set of close-up filters, I would just go around and find little bulbs like this, get my camera as close as I could to them, and take a shot. I didn’t put much thought into the idea of creating a complete composition, but instead mostly just cared about how much of the frame I could fill with a single light. It was fine, and I’m not going to fault myself for not knowing any better because it’s all part of the learning process, but I can see in this image just how far I have come since those days of my journey as a photographer.

The thing is, a shot like this doesn’t have to be difficult or require a long, complicated setup process. It does, however, require some thought and planning regarding composition, ambient light, and exposure–particularly the lens aperture in order to control depth of field. My goal here was to take a picture with one main subject, the orange light on the right side, but intentionally compose the image in such a way that there were additional out-of-focus lights receding into the background. Previously I would have just paid attention to the one single light, but I’ve learned that adding other elements such as the blurry background lights can have a profoundly transformative impact on this kind of composition.

So here’s what happened. I was walking along one of the paths that wind through the OSU campus one afternoon, camera in hand and headphones on my ears, when I saw a string of orange lights wrapped around a…um…shrubbery? Big green plant, is all I know. Anyway, my first thought was Point the camera at the thing and take a picture! But a second later my mind shifted to Let’s see what we can do to make a much more interesting picture. I realized that if I went over to one side of the plant, everything would be uniformly lit thanks to the shadow being cast by the plant itself. I also realized that if I took a picture at an oblique angle I could get a half dozen additional lights in the frame, but super blurred out and also partly obscured by the needles of the greenery. I used the good old-fashioned Rule Of Thirds to position the bulb, set the aperture to a wide-but-not-too-wide f/4.8, and fired off a couple of frames. Bam. Twenty seconds later I had the shot you see here, albeit with just a tad bit of tweaking to the colors in Lightroom afterwards. The result is an image that’s way more interesting than a single bulb, has a lot more going on in it for the viewer to look at, and makes me think of how I might shoot similar compositions (or at least learn from this one) down the road.

Longtime Weekly Fifty readers know that one of my favorite locations for taking photos is Theta Pond at the OSU campus. There’s always something new and interesting going on around various parts of campus, but nothing quite like just sitting by the pond to collect your thoughts or taking a stroll among the geese, squirrels, and turtles that inhabit the area. Even on the most un-photogenic days in the dead of Winter with nary a speck of color to be found, there’s always something worth photographing. You just have to look a bit harder for it.

While dead leaves laying flat on the ground aren’t always the most photogenic subjects (though they certainly can be, with a little bit of creativity) I thought this maple leaf floating just barely beneath the surface of Theta Pond looked particularly compelling. It feels delicate, almost precarious, as if a single breath or slight breeze would disrupt the entire scene. The leaf looks as though it’s trapped under ice which wasn’t actually the case since the temps were in the mid 60’s, but it’s a cool effect nonetheless. I think it’s the stillness of this composition that I like the most–a sense of calm and serenity that mirrors the general sense of being on campus at the end of the school year, as if the physical environment feels the same sense of exhaustion that many of the students do as they prepare for final exams.

To get this picture I held my D750 + 105mm macro lens pointed straight downwards and moved my viewpoint until the leaf filled the frame with just a bit of empty space around it. I liked the multiple layers at work: dead cypress needles on top of the water, the brown maple leaf just underneath, and a green magnolia leaf a bit farther down. I normally think of images in terms of foreground/subject/background, but this shot is three-dimensional in a different way with the layers being clearly distinct and discernible yet still lending that same sense of first/middle/last to the composition. I did remove some bits of dirt, dust, and other assorted flotsam and jetsam with the healing tool in Lightroom but nothing super egregious in my opinion. I also had to correct, just a bit, for the green coloration of the water which, as anyone who has visited this location will know, is an ever-present reminder of the artificial nature of the pond and the human intervention required to maintain it. All in all though, I really like how this captures a feeling that is difficult to put into words but is often shared by many people at OSU when they wander around the pond.

This image is kind of a companion to last week’s shot because I took it in roughly the same setting, but used some different techniques that I just could do before I purchased my Nanlite Pavotubes. Much of the composition mirrors the previous image: a single subject (a bear, which I promise was not intentional. I did not do that on purpose!) against a backdrop of blurred-out Christmas lights. Also, just like the other image, I used off-camera lighting to carefully control the appearance of the subject. So what’s the deal–why use this as its own separate Weekly Fifty shot? What’s different about it, and what did I learn this time that I didn’t already learn last time?

For me, it’s partly about the subtleties. The small elements of the composition that end up making a big difference and, ultimately, set aside this shot as distinct and unique when put against its counterpart from last week. First of all, the lights in the background serve a different purpose. In the previous image they were used to frame the subject–that is, to provide something of a border around the subject and draw your eye to the center of the image. Here the background lights are used for a different purpose entirely, which is to accentuate the subject. Notice how there is a cluster of lights right behind the bear with a ring of darkness as you go out to the edge of the image, and a few spots of light at the farthest borders. It’s the opposite of how I used the Christmas tree lights in the earlier shot, and an example of how much this kind of compositional element really matters and how it can transform an image entirely.

The other big difference here is how the subject itself is lit. I used just a bit of backlighting but placed much more emphasis on getting the bear, especially its face and eyes, to be as bright as possible. I could have used an external flash but the Pavotubes are just so much better for this sort of thing, in my opinion, because you can place them precisely where you want while also adjusting the strength and color of the lighting at the same time.

I remember when I first started playing around with these Pavotubes, and the revelation I had about controlling off-camera lighting to create compelling compositions. What I’m learning the more I use them, though, is how to use them in more subtle ways that I never considered and, in doing so, create photos that go way beyond just cool product-style shots of video game controllers on my washing machine :)