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

I often talk about seeing photo opportunities in everyday life, and looking for chances to take pictures where you might not find them. This shot is kind of a twist on that old chestnut because I’ve been looking for this particular photo opportunity for quite some time, but never really took the time to make it happen. Often have I watched steam rise my mug of morning tea in the early sunlight, and considered capturing it in a photograph, but never have I actually gone so far as to actually do it. Either I’m busy helping my kids get ready for school, or the light shifts before I can do anything, or I just get lazy and don’t act when I easily could. But on a chilly Sunday morning in early November as we were getting ready for church, I once again noticed the white wisps of steam escaping from my oversized mug of tea (I use two bags of green tea and two packets of stevia) and finally decided to, as they say, not throw away my shot.

I ran to get my tripod, mounted my D750 and 105mm macro lens on it, composed a shot with the mug close to the camera, and fired off a couple clicks of the shutter. And…nothing. I mean, I got a few shots but I was disappointed in what I was seeing. They just weren’t interesting at all. Turns out there’s a lot I don’t know about taking a picture of steam rising from a mug of tea.

First of all, the overall composition of the photograph: I needed to back up, way up, so as to get more in the frame. Initially I just got the mug with a few inches of space above it, but that wasn’t nearly enough to capture the beauty of the backlit steam. I scooted my tripod back, made room for a lot more verticality, and that took care of the first problem.* Also, I deliberately chose not to alter the scene in any way. I thought about moving around the mug, the strings on the tea bags, the spoon handle, even the papers on the counter top, but instead opted to leave everything as it was with no changes at all. I think it just felt a bit more authentic that way.

Next, the steam: how to capture it? I originally thought a long exposure would be best because I wanted to get a sense of the flowing, dynamic, almost ethereal scene in front of me and I thought a 1-2 second exposure would do that really well. Turns out…not so much. The longer I dragged the shutter, the less interesting my shots looked. Instead of neat puffs of steam, you could just see a mass of white cloud-like gas floating above the mug. It really wasn’t anything special at all. What I realized was that a fast, but not too fast, shutter gave me just what I was looking for. The image you see here is a 1/45 second shutter which was just enough time to freeze the motion of the steam, but also leave barely-perceptible trails, almost like echoes in time, of the steam as it moved about in that fraction of a second. If you click on the picture and go to the full-size version on Flickr, and then zoom way in, you’ll see what I mean. It’s an extremely subtle effect, but it’s there, and that’s what matters to me.

Finally, the editing: Contrary to my other recent images I did crop this just a bit to tighten things up on the bottom of the image. I also left the mug much darker than I would normally do, rather than bringing up the shadows to get more dynamic range in the image. Again, it’s kind of a subtle editing decision but one that I’m glad I made.

I don’t know if I’ll take this kind of shot again any time soon, but I would like to experiment some more and see what I can come up with. It was a really fun learning experience and one that I’m sure will come in handy down the line at some point.

*I did consider taking a vertical shot…for about 0.68 seconds. I just don’t like taking vertical shots. Don’t know why. Can’t explain why. But it is what it is.

My brother Phil and I were talking about macro photography recently, and how nice it is to be able to envision a picture in your head and then know that you have both the experience and the gear to make that shot happen. It’s something I have really come to appreciate about lots of different types of photography, but especially close-up shots like this one. I used to see pictures in magazines or online publications and think that the people who took them had some kind of unreachable, unattainable mystic quality that allowed them to take such stunning images, but the more I learned and experimented with my own photography the more I realized that such things really were within my grasp. And the grasp of anyone, really. So when my kids and I were eating breakfast on a Friday morning, and I saw this jar of hot sauce sitting on the table with beads of condensation shimmering in the light, I immediately thought about taking a picture just like one I might see on some kind of product advertisement. And I knew I was pretty sure I could pull it off :)

I quickly ran to get my Nikon D750, 105mm macro lens, and tripod while also reminding my kids to eat their breakfast and try to finish before their mother was out of the shower. I scooted the bottle close to the camera, focused with the lens, and then set about tweaking all the little settings that make such a huge difference with close-up photography. The first thing I did was look for a way to eliminate the background, and for that I just put our iPad on a little vertical stand behind the bottle of hot sauce. Problem solved! Next I looked at the bottle and thought about what I wanted to photograph, and how to photograph it. I really liked the light reflecting off the condensation so I wanted that to be the main draw, but then also have enough of the bottle in the shot to provide a sense of overall context. Instead of moving my camera around I just scooted the bottle to different spots on the table until I found just the right location for this shot. (And again, as has become a recent custom…no cropping of the final image!)

Finally, the all-important aperture setting. F/4? F/8? F/22? I shot a few at wider apertures and then some at f/11, just in case I needed it but I thought f/8 would be the sweet spot. Turns out I was wrong–f/11 was the right one. When I loaded my shots into Lightroom I didn’t like the wider aperture shots at all, and in retrospect I think I could have gone even smaller than f/11. Razor-thin depth of field is not nearly as cool as I thought it would be before I got a macro lens, though of course I do appreciate the ability to have it if I need it.

The best part about all this was how I got to involve my kids in the whole thing. They helped me compose the shot, they looked at the rear LCD screen with me as we were figuring out exposure settings, and they got real excited when they saw the final shot too. The whole experience only took a matter of minutes (they had to get to school and I couldn’t spend all morning fiddling with my camera) but it was a unique little project and one that I’m glad we took the time to do.

I think I got my macro lens about a year ago. I’m not entirely sure, but I definitely had it for the previous Christmas season, which means I most likely purchased it around this time in 2021. In the subsequent time I have learned so much about taking close-up pictures, but also learned how very very little I know and have yet to understand. However, one of the most useful (dare I say important? I don’t know if it quite reaches that level…) lessons that repeatedly demonstrates itself to be true is that you really can find photo opportunities anywhere. You just have to look for them. Case in point: this old paint can.

My wife and I were working on a project out in the garage that involved some wood which needed to be painted white. We got out some old cans of paint that had been sitting in our cabinet for years, pried off the lids, and saw that while one of them was still perfectly good, the other had solidified into a white crusty mess. No worries though–that’s just one of those things that happens sometimes with old paint cans. It’s all good. And it’s even better when you can find a fun way to put said paint cans to use in another way, such as a photo opportunity. I thought the channel on the edge of the lid would make for an interesting subject, so when we were done painting I got my camera and tripod and set out to see what I could do.

I didn’t want to spend too much time with this setup since my kids wanted to go play in the yard, but I did take a few minutes to see if I could turn this paint can into something photo-worthy before chucking it in the trash. I used Live View to compose the shot, disabled Auto-ISO so I could get a nice clean image, put my camera on self-timer, and played around with several aperture settings while also rotating the can to get slightly different perspectives on the paint.

This was my favorite of the bunch, and while it’s not perfect there is an awful lot that I like about it. First of all I’m very happy with how the crusty paint-filled groove turned out, and I’m very pleased with how I was able to get just enough in focus (thanks to an f/27 aperture) while not blurring the rest of the shot too much that it eliminated any sense of context. I also like the black spots on the inside of the paint can, and the completely dark edge of the shot on the right. There’s even a subtle yellow glow on the lower-right thanks to a bit of sunlight creeping into the shot, though ultimately I’m not sure if that adds to the image or diminishes it a bit. Jury’s still out, I guess.

What I do know is that this was a really fun shot to take. I didn’t crop it and used almost no editing at all other than just some basic light/shadow adjustments in Lightroom. Basically, what you see here is pretty much exactly what came out of my camera, and it all served as a great reminder that if you can’t find any photo opportunities around you, you probably just aren’t looking hard enough :)

Each year for Homecoming, the groundskeepers put orange lights around Theta Pond almost as though they are prepping for Christmas. It’s all part of the celebration of what is, I have been told, one of the country’s greatest Homecoming celebration. While I haven’t had too much experience with other Homecomings (I don’t think I ever attended any such events or festivities when I was at UNL) I do know that the Oklahoma State University event is pretty awesome, and these orange lights are just one very small component of what is a really fun time around campus. They also happen to make for a really cool photography subject :)

I have shot these same orange lights a few times over the years, and until now I think my best images were ones that I took with the classic 50mm-plus-close-up-filters combination. While that worked to a certain extent, close-up filters don’t give you anywhere near the flexibility and photographic freedom of a true macro lens. When I saw these lights on a chilly Monday morning as I walked from my car to my office at the Library, I stopped to see if I could get a better shot than I had in past years. I positioned my camera, focused on one of the orange lights super close, and fired off a few frames.

And…nothing. Nada. The shots I got weren’t bad, but nothing about them was interesting or compelling to look at. They were technically solid but creatively bankrupt. The thing is, a single orange Christmas light just isn’t all that great as a photography subject. So I turned the idea on its head a bit: instead of taking a close-up shot of the lights, why not take a close-up shot of something else with the lights augmenting the image? That night I dug out this LEGO Dumbledore figuring from my kids’ toybox and returned the next morning to see if he could help me punch up the picture.

Spoiler: he sure did 😄

I positioned him at a bit of an angle, focused on his eye, set my aperture to f/4 and a minimum shutter speed of 1/125 (yay for Auto-ISO!), and took some pictures. The result was a far more interesting image than similar ones I have created before. It looks like something is actually happening, and the lights behind him give the scene a sense of kinetic energy and, perhaps, a bit of mysticism that is way cooler to look at than just orange lights on their own. Thanks Dumbledore for the help, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes more appearances in my pictures in the future…

One thing I have really enjoyed about doing Weekly Fifty for so many years is that it gives me the opportunity to look back at images that I took a long time ago, and think about similar compositions with my current level of knowledge, experience, and camera gear. Not re-imagine or re-interpret or re-mix, but re-visit and then look for ways to capture a similar mood, scene, or subject now compared to back then. (Whenever “back then” happened to be—sometimes a few months, sometimes many years.) Case in point: this picture I posted in August 2013, along with an extraordinarily short bit of text but my usual 2-3 minutes of audio commentary. Unlike some of my other early pictures I am still quite pleased with that image, though I think I would have made some different editing choices if I shot it now, particularly with regard to exposure levels and white balance. That image of those seed pods on the ground has always stuck with me, and I had that shot in mind when I came across a similar tree recently in early October.

To be clear: I did not set out to recreate the original shot from August 2013 when I saw this red and orange seed pod dangling from a tree branch by Theta Pond on the OSU campus. However, I did have certain elements of the first picture in my head to use as somewhat of an inspiration. Basically, these seed pods have worked before as really great photo subjects, so why not do it again? Except this time around I was armed with a macro lens, a much better understanding of light, exposure, and composition, and a much more colorful subject too.

I started by just taking a few shots of this seed pod front-and-center, but they just weren’t very interesting to look at. A red and orange oval in the middle of the frame with no context didn’t make for a compelling photograph, to be sure. Over the course of a few minutes I adjusted the aperture to control depth of field, altered my distance to the subject, and changed my point of view such that you could see not only the seed pod but the thin branch on which it was dangling. The result, as you see it here, is a far more complete composition and one that almost goes so far as to tell a story: changing seasons, stubborn determination, and perhaps even solitude. Though that last one might be a bit of a stretch, but I suppose it’s up to the viewer to decide.

There’s also one side note about this image that I think is kind of cool. I edited the colors a bit in Lightroom to increase saturation and adjust white balance, but I did not crop this at all. It’s not that I don’t take advantage of the freedom offered by cropping–quite the opposite, in fact–but it’s also really fun to push myself to try to get great shots without the need for cropping at all. Just to see if I can, and see what kinds of results are possible :)