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

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 :)

There’s a nugget of greatness in this picture, but it’s hampered by a few things and in the end when I look at this I think of it more as a learning experience than a picture I’m really happy with. (Or, to put it in correct grammatical parlance, a picture with which I’m really happy. But that just sounds weird to write and even weirder to say out loud.) And I know I sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, but this picture is also a good illustration, at least to me anyway, of why mobile phone cameras still aren’t as good as their DSLR and mirrorless counterparts. First, some backstory.

I shot this at Lake Fort Gibson, where some college friends and I spent a weekend in early October. We have kept in touch over the years and helped each other through a lot of life changes, and six months ago we started tossing around the idea of getting together somewhere just to hang out in person like back in the day. So we did :) We found a cabin, planned the grocery list, collaborated on logistics and travel arrangements, and finally met up to hang out and catch up on things. One of my friends and I took out the canoe on Saturday just to check out the lake, and we decided to get up early Sunday morning to watch the sunrise from the water. Which, of course, meant some good photo opportunities as well.

Here’s the big question I faced, though, which ended up being more consequential than I predicted: what camera should I take for the sunrise canoe ride? I brought my D750 + 105mm macro lens along with my Fuji X100F out to the cabin, and of course my humble little iPhone SE (2020) as well. I ended up just going with my iPhone out in the canoe for one simple reason: it’s water-resistant, and I knew that things were likely to get wet. So at 7am on a chilly Sunday morning, my buddy and I set out in the canoe to see the sunrise and all I had with me was my iPhone.

And in one sense, that was fine. But in another sense, I wish I had brought my Fuji.

As you can clearly see, this picture obviously does not have the sun in it. But you can tell, hopefully, that it showcases the sunrise at a lake. I took this while my friend and I were paddling out to the main portion of the lake, and I really liked this tree silhouetted against the rich, deep colors of the slowly-lightening sky in the background. I also took several shots once we made it out to the lake proper and watched the sun emerge on the horizon, but they weren’t as compelling as this one. Despite not actually showing the sun, this image with a clear subject set against a compelling background was much more interesting to me than the receding horizon with the sun shining bright as it crested the shoreline way in the distance.

So everything’s great, right? I mean, on one hand sure. It’s a fine picture. But it does not hold up under scrutiny, unfortunately. The sky has awful compression artifacts and the gradient looks like something out of a 1990’s-era CD-ROM game. The yellow is not nearly as rich and deep as it was in person, and the trees suffer from an awful lack of overall sharpness. In short, it looks like a mobile phone picture. Had I taken the Fuji and shot in RAW all those issues would have been essentially nonexistent, but then, what if I had dropped the Fuji in the bottom of the canoe or otherwise gotten it exposed to water? Pfft–no more Fuji.

In the end I think this was an acceptable compromise, but it does make me think about the shot that could have been. However, what’s more important to me than this picture is the story behind it: a weekend with the guys talking about life and sharing stories, capped off with a canoe ride at the break of dawn. And that, as longtime Weekly Fifty readers will recall, is all that really matters.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I started playing guitar, but it was at some point during my high school years. My buddy Nick and I basically taught ourselves to play in each other’s basements and garages, and since most of the time we didn’t really know what we were doing when we plugged our cheap electrics into our amps and strummed away, Nick just called it “noodling.” I still use that term to refer to the act of just kind of playing the guitar aimlessly, picking strings or inventing chords or working through a scale or trying some new riffs that just sound good, even if you don’t know the musical theory behind it all.

That’s basically what’s going on here, though a bit more context is required to really make sense of this picture. As you may or may not know, my wife and I have a side project called Stevens Creek Photography which involves taking simple portraits of people around town. We don’t do weddings, and we don’t do birthday parties, and we don’t do any sort of big event photography at all. What do, though, is take great pictures of individuals and families. I don’t usually share these photos here on Weekly Fifty since it seems rather self-indulgent and not exactly in the best interests of my clients who pay me to take pictures for them, not for me to share on my personal blog.

Anyway, I recently did a high school senior portrait session for a young man who asked if he could bring his guitar along for the shoot. Of course I said yes, that would be just fine, and I ended up with this shot you see here which is, honestly, one of my favorite from the entire evening. Spoiler: this was the first time I used my macro lens on a portrait shoot, and I have a whole new level of respect for that lens and what it can do.

It started with a clear idea of the kind of picture I wanted to get: a close-up of this young man’s left hand on the neck, with his other hand strumming near the pickups. I asked him to sit on a bench and just kind of noodle away at his guitar, and then I got out my Nikon D500 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, and went to work. I set the aperture to f/4.8 since I wanted a nice balance between depth of field, low ISO, and fast shutter speed. That lens gave me the flexibility to shoot as close as I wanted to without even thinking about whether the pictures would be in focus, and I used continuous high-speed shooting to fire off dozens of shots hoping one would show his fingers in an interesting position while still, of course, being in focus.

In short, this picture was no accident. It was the result of months of practice with my macro lens, years of learning about exposure and manipulating the fundamentals of Aperture, ISO, and Shutter, and having a clear idea of the type of shot I wanted to get. There’s also lighting, composition, and the simple relationship-building that happens during a photo shoot. And it all worked out! I really like this shot and I hope my client does too :)

Before I get too far into this post, a reminder for anyone who is new here: I don’t really do abstract photography. I’m not one for making the viewer guess at my intentions or come up with their own deep interpretations of my work, or anything like that at all. I just like to take pictures of things I find interesting, whatever they happen to be, and hopefully learn a few things along the way so I can share those things with others. All you are seeing here is the result of that thought process: nothing more, nothing less. However, having said all that, feel free to draw meaning or create your own interpretations of this picture all you want. I don’t mind at all, but just know that’s not really the point of Weekly Fifty 📷

So what is this? I’m not exactly sure, to be honest. It’s some kind of trinket or party favor that one of my kids brought home from school. It’s about one inch wide, made from some kind of thin metal, and I think the idea is that you slip it on your finger, almost like a flexible ring, and then you have something cool to show your friends in the third grade. Whatever it is, and however it got to our kitchen counter, doesn’t really matter here. What does matter is that I thought it would make for a fun macro photo, and while I’m not sure I was entirely correct on that point, it was cool to experiment a bit and see what happened.

To get this shot I put this torus thingey on my iPad in order to get a clean surface with a nice-looking reflection, and then angled the iPad such that the shadow being cast was from top to bottom and not side to side. Then I put my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens on a tripod, set the ISO to 100, adjusted the aperture to f/16, and took a few shots. Even at f/16 the depth of field here is astoundingly thin, and a good reminder to me of something I keep learning over and over and over: macro is a whole different beast compared to normal photography. This shot required a four-second exposure in the middle of the day! In the end I don’t know that this is one of my favorite pictures ever–far from it, in fact. It was just a fun little experiment and, more importantly, gave me some interesting ideas to think about down the road.