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

I remember when I was first looking into macro lenses and being a little confused as to why they didn’t seem to have apertures much wider than f/2.8. Why not larger, I wondered to myself as I scrolled through available options for my Nikon F-mount cameras. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t find close-focusing lenses that had maximum apertures of f/1.8 or even greater. It seemed obvious to me, as an inexperienced close-up photographer, that one would want to let in as much light as possible and have ultimate control over depth of field which would, so I reasoned, would necessitate a lens with a larger maximum aperture.

Live and learn, eh?

Turns out, close-up photography doesn’t really require f/2.8 apertures very often. Hardly ever, in fact, since depth of field is so crazy shallow when shooting macro images at such a wide aperture. It’s just not practical and doesn’t really produce pleasing results anyway unless you are going for extreme focus stacking. Case in point: this week’s image, an acmella oleracea flower just outside the student union at Oklahoma State University. It was a bit of an overcast day which made for nice even lighting, and I had my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens in tow, so when I saw this brown and yellow bud sticking up from the greenery I figured it would be a fun opportunity to practice my photography.

The yellow and black bud you see here isn’t even that small: probably about the size of an average acorn. And I wasn’t even super close to it, as you can see from all the surrounding leaves in the frame. As such I thought I thought a wider aperture of f/8 or f/11 might work well to give me a shallow depth of field and draw your attention right to the center of the frame. But as I have so often experienced when taking these types of images, larger apertures ≠ better results. Even f/11 gave me a depth of field that was simply too shallow, and I had to stop down all the way to f/19 to get the shot you see here. If you click on the image to see the full-size version on Flickr you’ll notice that everything is sharp and detailed, and you can see every single individual brown and yellow spike on the top of the bud with the rest of the composition nicely blurred–particularly the other flower on the right-hand side, which was an intentional choice by me. I wanted to position myself in such a way as to add something else interesting to the shot rather than just one single flower, and I think it worked out pretty well.

One of the trickiest elements of a shot like this is getting the big drop in focus. I have taken similar photographs over the years with varying degrees of success, but it’s really tricky to get the entire drop of water to be sharp and in focus while blurring the rest of the frame. This is partly due to the razor-thin margins you have for depth of field when working with such small subjects, but also due to the physics of how water drops like this bend and shape the light going through them. Inevitably, the best way to get great results, it seems, is through the use of focus stacking: taking lots of shots and then blending together the sharp areas of each one in Photoshop. (If there’s a better technique, let me know! I’d love to learn more!) That’s what I did here and while I didn’t quite know what to expect, I am very pleased with what I got.

I shot this handheld on an overcast day with my Nikon D750, 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, using an aperture of f/11, 1/200 second, and Auto ISO. After trying a couple shots to varying degrees of success, I realized that the only way I could get the image I was going for was to just combine lots of exposures together. See, the thing about a shot like this is you have the drop of water and then the scene reflected inside the drop of water–and the two are decidedly not the same. If you get the drop in focus, you lose the scene. But if you try to get a sharp scene, the drop itself becomes blurry. One solution is to use a super small aperture, but I really wanted a shallow depth of field in order to get just the drop in focus, and all of that points directly to focus stacking. Thankfully, it’s really not difficult and most of the heavy lifting can be done automatically in Photoshop for you. The only difficult part is getting all the shots you want to combine, which is slightly trickier than you might think.

Ideally, a situation like this would be best handled with a tripod and a very slow, calculated series of shots in order to get everything in focus that you want. This situation, however, was not exactly what you would consider ideal: I just had a few minutes, and I most certainly did not have a tripod as I’m not in the habit of toting a bag full of camera gear with me when walking around campus. I put my lens in manual focus, held my camera as still as possible with my right hand while turning the focus ring with my left hand, and holding down the shutter while in continuous high-speed mode. The result was about a dozen images that, when stacked together, gave me the final composition you see here. And you know what? It works. It really works. The bright, crisp raindrop, the rich greens, the earthy yellows and reds, and enough in the foreground and background to give you the sense that you are carefully peeking into a small world right in front of your eyes.

There’s some objective realities of shooting photos on a rainy, overcast day that are easy to describe or even, perhaps, quantify. The diffused lighting, the mild temperatures, the glistening surfaces…all of these aren’t particularly difficult to explain and all of these make a huge difference in photographic terms. What’s a little trickier to precisely nail down is just how much fun it is to go out and shoot after the earth gets a good long soaking. Not necessarily in the rain, mind you, but the minutes or, better yet, hours after the drops cease to fall but before the sun has yet to show its face from behind the clouds are just amazing for taking pictures. Everything you see has a glistening sheen to it and even the most ordinary, boring objects take on a stunning new appearance. I’d almost go so far as to say it’s difficult to not enjoy shooting in these conditions, and if you haven’t tried it I strongly recommend it :)

And when you combine post-rain conditions with a macro lens…chef’s kiss.

On a warm October afternoon in precisely these conditions, as I was walking across the OSU campus between meetings, I stopped for a few minutes in the formal gardens right outside the student union to get a few snapshots. When I saw this red flower I knew I just had to stop and take its picture, and I’m really glad I took the time to do it. One thing I’ve learned as I have taken more close-up images over the years is that what I envision when I see a scene isn’t always easy to capture, even with a good understanding of the fundamentals of photography such as light, shadow, composition, exposure, and the like. Weekly Fifty is littered with not-quite-there images that almost get what I was trying to capture, and every time one of those shots happens I try to think of it as a learning experience so that I might do better next time. Well, I gotta say, this is one of those next time shots that really does work just about exactly as I had hoped it would.

Aperture, and by extension, depth of field, is super tricky when shooing with a macro lens. It’s tough to get the area you want in focus while not compromising too much on other elements of the image, but with this shot I was able to pull of pretty much precisely what I was going for in terms of subject and sharpness. I really wanted the one large drop of water to be sharp and in focus, and maybe a few others too, with a subtle blur around the rest of the drops nearby. I shot this at f/11, 1/200 second, and Auto-ISO with a value of 150 using my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, and as my dad would say, by golly it worked. There’s a vertical line of three drops that are all tack sharp, right near the bright spot on the flower petal just above them and to the left. The texture on the petal is so rich and thick you can practically touch it through your screen, and I like the mix of three colors: red, orange, and a subtle dark green in the background. This whole image just works in a way that I am very pleased with, and makes me excited to try similar shots the next time it rains.

One of my favorite books that my wife and I used to read to our boys when they were younger is Moo Moo Brown Cow, Have You Any Milk, the story of a kid who lives on a farm and gets a great deal of help from his animal friends before heading to bed. It’s a charming little tale, perfect for sending children off to sleep, and includes a few lines that, for whatever reason, have stuck with me over the years. Lines including:

Then we’ll dream the whole night through. Of flowers to sip, green grass to chew, a golden grain of wheat or two. The moon so high and sky so blue…

I don’t really know why, but something about the gentle rolling cadence of the lines in this book has always stuck with me, and I have always held it in quite high regard. The phrase “A golden grain of wheat or two” was on my mind when I took this photo, though to be honest I am not entirely certain that the grain in question actually is wheat. For an Oklahoman, formerly Minnesota, and before that, a Nebraskan, I know remarkably little about agriculture. Nevertheless, I do know a thing or two about what makes a compelling photograph :)

I have taken a few shots like this one over the years, and the challenge, I have learned, is to figure out how to compose the image so as to emphasize the subject. Lighting is key, of course, but how to make the subject stand out against the background is another matter entirely. For this image the answer presented itself in relatively quick fashion: use the bright colors of the surrounding garden to isolate the subject and, in the process, create a rich vibrant color palette that goes well beyond simple earth tones.

I took this image on a rainy day, our first in several weeks, in late October on the Oklahoma State University campus–the formal gardens, to be precise, just west of the Student Union. Our campus botanists and arborists had done up the place in elegant fashion as a way of welcoming the tens of thousands of visitors that would soon be descending on Stillwater for America’s Greatest Homecoming. In a brief reprieve from the light precipitation, I got out my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens to take advantage of the soaking flowers and overcast sky, which is one of my favorite lighting conditions to shoot in. Especially when it comes to photos of flowers and the like.

I shot this at f/9.5 to get a relatively shallow, but not too shallow, depth of field. I wanted the subject to be sharp while the background a beautiful blur, and that’s exactly what I was able to achieve. I did spend a few minutes angling myself such that the background colors were utilized to maximum effect and, on the whole, I think it worked save for the yellows in the top-right detracting just a bit too much from the wheat. (Or whatever it is.) I barely edited the image too, with just a slight crop on the top-right and a few basic color/exposure adjustments. In short, what you’re seeing here isn’t necessarily photographic brilliance but nature’s paintbrush, a scene created by God but captured, in a bit of mid-afternoon serendipity, by me. And it sure was fun.

I always like taking pictures like this, with a butterfly more or less centered in the frame while interacting in some manner with a flower or plant. It’s not a complicated composition and there’s nothing about these kinds of images that’s going to win awards for creativity or break new ground from an artistic point of view, but they are phenomenally fun to take. Butterflies are a bit more compliant than other flying bugs and animals, in that they move a bit slower and tend to stay in one place a bit longer than, say, honeybees or hummingbirds. Their bright colors almost make it difficult to not get good shots, and you can often find them in groups–that is, if one is around chances are others will be too. And when everything aligns and you find yourself in the right place, at the right time, with your camera at the ready, and able to capture a moment like this…*chef’s kiss*

I highly recommend you try it :)

There is one thing I have changed in my approach to butterfly photos over the years, and you can see it exemplified here. I now make an effort to intentionally position myself so that the butterflies are backlit, which makes their already-colorful wings positively explode with an electric energy that you just don’t get with traditional front-lighting. This strategy helped in a couple of ways here, by not only making the butterfly appear a bright translucent green but also causing the purple flower to take on a shiny purple glow with bright accents around its edges. This technique almost always results in images that far surpass their frontlit counterparts, and it’s an extraordinarily fun practice to try out. You can clear see the effect here with the butterflies wings all aglow, outlined with a white shine and its legs deftly gripping the purple flower bud. Much of that would be lost if this were taken with the sun on the other side, but as it stands the lighting alone transforms this rather pedestrian photo into something pretty special.

The interesting thing about this shot, that doesn’t often happen in the photos I take, is that the subject–the animal–is not actually the focal point of the image. Rather, your eye is drawn first and foremost to the flower and the butterfly, whose colors blend in quite thoroughly with the surrounding colors, is almost an afterthought. One could almost say it’s camouflaged and hidden in plain sight, and only upon closer inspection does the viewer notice that something more is in the shot beyond the purple flower. It’s an unexpected way of composing the shot that I didn’t actually plan but, on reflection, I quite like.