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

If you saw last week’s photo, this shot of a leaf on the water should be pretty familiar to you. And to be honest, I thought about not using it at all for this week’s picture because not only is it so similar to last week’s, but I shot it about five minutes after taking the other one too. Is it really fair to put up two photos that are so alike, taken in such close (physical and temporal) proximity? Well it is my blog, and I do get to decide…so why not? :) Also, though this post is coming a mere four days before Christmas, the theme of the photo is decidedly unrelated to the impending holiday. Read nothing into that! I schedule my Weekly Fifty posts several weeks in advance, and as I write this on November 11, there just isn’t too many Christmas-related photo opportunities around me.

Anyway, on to the photo. Though it bears more than a passing resemblance to its counterpart from last week, it also contains some notable differences. The first, and most noticeable, is obviously the presence of many other objects on the surface of the water. Namely, several brown cypress needles along with one bit of greenery that hasn’t quite given up the ghost. Or, at least, had not as of the time I took the photo. There’s clearly one main subject–the yellow leaf–but lots of other things on the same focal plane almost as if to complement the subject or at least add some context and visual flair to the photo. Subtle indentations in the surface tension are a bit more abundant in this image as well, and one thing you don’t see are the (probably more than one hundred) bits of dirt and dust that I removed from the image in Lightroom. There’s always more, but at some point it becomes a bit reductive, and at some point I just said “enough is enough” and uploaded the picture to Flickr in the state that you see it here.

Just like last week’s, this was a lot of fun to take. I bent out over the bank of Theta Pond with my D750 and macro lens held up to my eye, used my traditional technique of back-button-focusing to keep the leaf nice and sharp, and fired off a couple dozen shots as the scene shifted and changed below me right before my eyes. I like that this shot has basically two distinct layers: the surface of the water and everything underneath, which was only a few inches away but very blurry due to the ultra-shallow depth of field inherent when taking close-up shots like this.

Since taking this shot the weather has shifted and I think the throngs of winter might finally be here to stay, though doubtless we will still see plenty of pleasant days over the next several months. Even so, I think the photo opportunities around me will start to change dramatically, and as always at this time of year I’m excited to see what’s coming just around the corner.

Merry Christmas, everyone. God bless you all :)

I have written a few times about how one of my favorite types of photos to take is also one of the simplest possible in terms of composition: a clear subject against a blurry background. These kinds of pictures are not going to rock the boat or win any awards for creativity, but they are supremely fun and rewarding to take and I feel like every time I shoot a picture like this I learn something from it. This one is a slightly different take on that same theme because the subject isn’t really in front of the background, but more on top of the background. Perhaps that’s just some silly semantic fiddling, but while it might not matter in terms of the final result it mattered a great deal for how I arrived at the final result.

I took this photo while out on a walk around Theta Pond at Oklahoma State University about two days before we were hit with a really bad cold front. It was a rather warm Tuesday afternoon and I had my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens with me, and when I saw this little leaf floating near the edge of the pond I thought it would make for a great photo opportunity. Turns out taking a photo of said leaf was a lot easier to conceptualize than it was to execute.

I needed a good vantage point from which to take this picture, and really the only option was to point my camera straight down at the leaf. Since Live View autofocus on the D750 is really slow (thanks to being contrast-detect instead of phase-detect) I instead had to kind of brace my feet awkwardly out to the side, lean out, put my camera up to my eye, look down through the viewfinder, and fire off as many shots as I could in rapid succession. The light on the water quickly complicated matters, as subtle ripples on the surface sent sunbeams scattering in all directions which dramatically interfered with the shot I was trying to take. Also, this leaf didn’t exactly stay put and I had to follow it as it floated along lazily by the bank. I used f/4.8 to get the leaf sharp while blurring the background, which was only a few inches below but when shooting a subject at such a close distance it doesn’t take much for things to get out of focus.

When I loaded this photo in Lightroom two things immediately surprised me that I did not notice while I was out by the pond. First, there were dozens and dozens of spots of dirt, dust, and other imperfections on the surface. I eliminated many of them with the Healing tool, but if you go to Flickr and look at the high-resolution original you’ll see hundreds of spots that still remain. (It was a matter of time, really: I didn’t want to spend all afternoon removing dust specks.)

The other cool little element about this picture that I didn’t notice in the moment is the tiny little fly using the leaf as its own personal watercraft. Just goes to show you never really know what you’re going to get when you go out to take pictures :)

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 :)