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

One evening recently, when my wife and I were walking up our street as the sun was setting and the world was calming down for the night, she pointed up to the sky and remarked at how beautiful the thin crescent moon looked with one lone star hovering next to it. It was a singular scene that doesn’t come along very often, and we both discussed it as we continued the few blocks left in our walk before turning up our driveway. Conditions have to be just right to see something like this in the sky–not just the waxing crescent moon, but the brilliance of a small secondary star (in this case, the planet Venus) right nearby as if stopping by to say goodnight as well as the diminishing daylight that leaves just enough of the surrounding scenery visible to put everything into context.

As soon as we got home I asked her, knowing that we had chores to do and kids to start getting ready for bed, if she minded me riding my bike down the block to take a picture. She did not :) I grabbed my D750 and 70-200mm lens, hopped on my bike, and rook off eastward to the corner by my neighbor’s field. That, of course, might make one wonder: why not just take a picture from my driveway? Why bother biking a few blocks away? The answer, as you might have guessed if you have been reading this blog for any length of time, lies in the concept I alluded to a few sentences ago: context.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that anyone can take a camera, point it at the sky, and snap a picture of the moon. A basic shot of the moon isn’t that difficult, and even many mobile phones with a zoom lens can do a fairly good job of taking a picture of our nearest celestial neighbor. (Though who knows if the results you get from a mobile phone are real or just pretend to be real.) What helps elevate a lunar image is a sense of context: where is it in relation to the viewer? The surrounding scenery? The rest of the sky? What about weather, time of day, cloud cover, birds, airplanes, or anything else that might help put the image of the moon in some kind of space that the viewer can relate to?

The answer for me, and the reason I hopped on my Salsa Timberjack and went down the road to get a picture, was my neighbor’s tree. An empty dark blue sky with nothing but the thin crescent moon and its planetary counterpart would have been fine, but not all that interesting. But the same shot with a tree in the corner, to help give a sense of place for the viewer, is something else entirely. The tree helps the viewer understand that the moon and Venus are low on the horizon–without it they could be anywhere in the sky. It creates a mood of peace and even slight isolation since there’s not a field of trees but one lone tree all by itself. Basically, even though the moon and Venus are obviously playing the main roles, the tree gets its own star as Best Supporting Actor.

All this goes to show the importance of extra elements aside from the main subject when taking a picture. It’s a lesson that took me years to learn, but has dramatically increased the quality of my photos since this whole journey started.

This is one of those photos that’s part experiment, part education, part abstract, and part just messing around. It was also a good reminder of how effective it is to just focus on the fundamentals of photography, practice the basics of exposure, and do just a tiny bit of editing in order to produce an interesting image. I didn’t have any grand designs on this one or a bigger picture in mind, and even though the title might suggest some kind of deeper meaning or implication, it’s really just a Star Trek TNG reference. I mean, if you squint real hard and hold your phone in just such a way, you could maybe mistake this for…um…a stick-dude holding his arms out? I dunno. Look, sometimes I just need a title :)

Anyway, the basic idea here was pretty simple. I wanted to get a shot of these tiny branches sticking out from a larger branch, but show the little ones receding into the background while the image gets progressively blurrier. The two main things I had to consider were aperture and angle, and I spent a few minutes experimenting with both to get the shot. For the aperture I ended up using f/11 since it gave me just the right amount of falloff between the subject and the background: f/8 was too blurry, and f/16 wasn’t blurry enough. F/4 was just a disaster–the entire image was basically a grey mess with some spots of red, and a good reminder that when it comes to depth of field sometimes more is more. The angle was a little tricky because I had to kind of stand on my tiptoes to get the shot, but I really wanted the two small branches on the right to be bisected by the large branch…and it worked.

What didn’t work so well, as I discovered in the process of taking this picture, was nailing the focus. Since the focusing target was so small, and the depth of field so shallow, I couldn’t trust my D750’s autofocus to get it exactly right. It did a good job, to be sure, but I took several shots that were just a bit front- or back-focused, and didn’t quite land the shot how I wanted. I ended up just firing off a burst while I slowly rotated the focusing ring on my lens, and while this approach was somewhat crude it definitely worked. Out of a dozen photos all I needed was a single image that was focused correctly, and I got it.

This is, then, perhaps an illustration of one of the not-insignificant weak points of my aging camera system. Aside from my Fuji X100F, I shoot with a small slew of Nikon DSLRs: D750, D500, and occasionally a D7100. My favorite, the D750, is over a decade old and easily eclipsed by virtually any modern full-frame camera when you compare features on a bulleted list. However, in terms of image quality the D750 still holds up against modern mirrorless cameras like the Nikon Z6iii–it’s astonishing, really. Would I like the convenience of a modern mirrorless camera for a photo like today’s? Absolutely. I would definitely not turn it down. But while a Z6iii (or something similar) would be nice to have, I don’t really need it and in the meantime I continue to find ways to enjoy and appreciate my old gear :)

This is a bit of a companion to last week’s photo of some skyscrapers in downtown Seoul, South Korea, but kind of the opposite. Another side of the same coin, if you will. Whereas the skyscraper were tall, monolithic, imposing, sterile, and fundamentally corporate, here we have someone who is selling food on the street at a winter festival with none of the trappings of corporate Korea to be found. This person was one of many selling all manner of food to passers-by, and while this photo isn’t the greatest street shot ever taken it is a representation of an amazing trip we were fortunate to take with our kids–an experience we are not likely to repeat anytime soon.

Like last week’s shot, I didn’t want to spend much time taking this photo since I was more interested in walking and talking with my family but at the same time I was kind of captivated by the combination of people, food, smoke, light, and shadow and wanted to at least try to see if I could take a decent photo. I set my X100F to f/2.8 because f/2 is a bit finicky from time to time on that camera, bent down just a bit so as to have a more interesting perspective on the scene, and fired off a couple of frames with the hope that one would show the face amidst the smoke and steam.

While I’m very happy with this photo, it also reminded me of why I’m just not too interested in street photography. I get that many people are, and I think it’s probably a fun and creative way to explore the art of photo-taking, but it’s not really my thing. I always feel self-conscious taking pictures of people on the street, as if I’m using them as props for my own artistic edification rather than respecting their dignity as children of God just like the rest of us. But again, no judgement here–I realize this is just a personal hangup for me; I’m sure others feel different when it comes to street photography and that’ perfectly fine and valid. Maybe I just need to practice more, but for now I’m just happy that I have this image to remind me of a unique adventure my family and I got to experience together.

So this one’s a bit different. Very different, really, from the images I usually share. In fact I’d go so far as to say I can’t think of another photo here on Weekly Fifty that looks anything like this. A running theme here on the blog, especially in recent months, is that of building on what I have learned so that I can improve over time, but for this image there simply is no precedent. And that’s partly why I like it so much.

In late 2024 my wife and I took our kids on a trip we had been planning for months, which was well beyond any family travel we had ever done up to that point. After months of planning and preparation, we boarded an airplane and flew 14 hours to South Korea, in order to spend five days in Seoul with her brother and his girlfriend. It was, in many ways, the trip of a lifetime, at least up to that point: we had never taken our kids overseas, and never immersed ourselves in a completely new culture, in a manner quite like this. Everywhere we went, and everything we did, was different in some way from our lives here in America–specifically, small-town Oklahoma. And when we returned I had a conversation with a friend who remarked at one point “You must have taken some incredible photos!”

I did, but not in the way you might expect. The only camera I brought was my Fuji X100F (aside from my iPhone, which did get a fair amount of use as a secondary photo-taking device) and I took well over a thousand pictures during the five full days we spent exploring Seoul, but most, nearly all, were of my wife, our kids, or her brother and his girlfriend. I just wasn’t really interested in capturing the city through the lens of my camera, but rather the people with whom we were spending time in the city. I did take a handful of shots like what you see here but mostly what mattered to me, and what I ended up documenting with my camera, was the people.

That brings us to today’s photo of some skyscrapers on the Han river near the Mubit Square, just southwest of the National Assembly. We were walking along the riverside on a chilly afternoon when I saw these huge structures backlit by the sun against a clear blue sky, and thought it would be fun to take a picture. This is so far outside my daily experience in Oklahoma that I wanted to capture the scene for posterity, and I’m glad I did. It’s a fun and unique scene, for me anyway, that reminds me of an incredible time spent with loved ones on the other side of the world.

Every now and then, and perhaps a bit more as of late, I will share a photo here on the blog that was directly inspired by a picture I took months, or even years, prior. Part of the learning and growing process, after all, involves building on what came before: learning from mistakes, improving on what worked well, weeding out the good ideas from the not-so-good, and so on. But in that same vein, every now and again I find myself taking a picture that I don’t realize is a continuation of, or a building on, a thread that began long ago. And those times can be really cool :)

Nine years ago I took this photo of some read and yellow leaves in the formal garden just west of the Student Union on the OSU campus. It was shortly after a day of cold rain, and I liked how the water pooled in little droplets on various parts of the leaves as well as how the overcast light gave the whole composition a glistening sheen that made the colors come alive. I shot it with my D7100 and 50mm lens, and at the time I was quite proud of the photo. I still am, and I still appreciate how my aunt Linda printed it and hung it on her wall. (Thank you, Linda!)

Recently I found myself in the same spot, once again taking a picture of the same kinds of leaves in very similar weather conditions, but when I shot the picture I wasn’t even thinking about its near decade-old counterpart. I just thought it was an interesting scene all by itself, and I particularly liked the tiny brown spot on the left leaf that had a way of drawing in the viewer’s eye and giving you, the viewer, something on which to focus amidst the sea of rich reds and yellows. But as I was editing the image in Lightroom–just some minor cropping and color adjustments, nothing out of the ordinary–it struck me that I had seen this before. Deja vu, if you will. And then a few days later it hit me: I really had seen this before. I searched through my Flickr photostream until I finally came across the initial image, and looking at the two side by side it’s pretty clear how the one is a continuation of the other. And I think that’s pretty cool :)

As for this picture in and of itself, I think what was most challenging was finding the right aperture to shoot it. I know that sounds kind of basic, but it’s true: at f/11 the depth of field was too wide, and at f/4 it was just too shallow with almost no room for anything but the small speck of brown to be in focus. It just wasn’t interesting to look at. F/8 was the sweet spot, and after that everything else just kind of fell into place. I found a good angle, and a decent distance, and took the shot you see here. Something about the deep saturated colors really makes this image work in a way that I didn’t quite expect initially, and I like how the thick vermillion veins in the leaf on the right contrast so well against the yellow that it almost looks artificial. This could be a CGI rendering but it’s not–just light and physics, folks. And that’s what makes photography so much fun.