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

Some of the best Star Trek episodes involve time: freezing it, traveling through it, jumping between various versions of it, and so on. The exploration of time in the context of a science fiction show where anything is possible, limited only by the imagination of the writers, is fertile ground for some incredible storylines that go well beyond the simple idea of galavanting across the galaxy while shooting lasers at Romulans. There’s a particular frozen-in-time scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation that has stuck with me for decades, and was certainly on my mind as I took this photo. Midway through the Season 6 episode Timescape, some of the crew come across a warp core breach in progress but, in a bit of a twist that can only happen in the realm of science fiction, extremely slowly. An incident that would normally happen in the blink of an eye is instead unfolding over the course of several hours, and Picard is so dumbfounded at the thought of the Enterprise exploding that he loses his mind for a bit and proceeds to, in one of the show’s stranger moments, draw a smiley face in the cloud of gas bursting forth from the dilithium chamber. The warp core, as Commander Data explained, has already exploded. The chain reaction is set, and nothing can be done to stop the sequence of events about to unfold. The only reason it appears to be paused to Picard, Data, and Troi is that they are merely experiencing it in ultra-slow motion.

The point is, and I don’t mean to get too sidetracked here, that taking a photograph is not too dissimilar from this fictional event. A singular mark in time is captured when you press the shutter, but even if the image is tack sharp it’s important to remember that time has not been captured in a frozen state. Even at 1/100 or 1/1000 of a second, a photograph is recording the passage of actual time–just slowed way down. And that, as it just so happens, brings us to this week’s featured photo.

If you think that this picture somewhat resembles an explosion, you’re not wrong. What you’re seeing is a small clump of seeds in the process of slowly expanding over the course of several days. Not long before this shot was taken, this was a ball about the size of a pencil eraser with some spiky protrustions all across its surface. A day or two later the spiny shape you see here will be a small stalk of grass with several tiny seed pods dangling from its tip. And during the in-between time, you get what you see in today’s shot: an explosion in slow motion, captured in a single photograph. It’s essentially the same as what Captain Picard saw, or will see hundreds of years from now, in the Engineering deck of the Enterprise.

To get this shot I positioned my Nikon D750 and and 105mm macro lens on a very tiny tripod a couple of inches away from the exploding ball of seeds, which was about a half-inch in diameter.

I used a two-second delay timer to minimize camera shake, and an aperture of f/32 to keep depth of field under control and get as sharp of an image as possible. I also shot with the sun behind the subject in order to get some backlighting, which helped accentuate the sharp edges and detailed textures that you wouldn’t see if the light was behind the camera.

One final fun note is that this was all in my own yard. I didn’t have to travel anywhere to get this shot–just keep my eyes open for what was right in front of me.

As with many of my photos, this one came about thanks to a simple walk around the pond on a break at work. I had my trusty Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens with me, and unlike some other photos I have taken recently, I didn’t have anything specific in mind. This particular perambulation was more about just getting out for a bit and, if I could get a picture along the way, great. Nothing really caught my eye though, until I saw this bug near the edge of the sidewalk. I don’t know what this thing is. I mean, I kind of do–it looks like a fly, right? That’s what I thought too, and it’s how I would describe it were it not for one key characteristic: this sucker was huge. Probably an inch long, and that’s not including the wings. My son thought it was a horse fly, but I’d say more like moose fly or an elephant fly given she sheer size of the creature. I’ve seen plenty of horse flies but none quite this bit. Not even close. But whatever this is, I know one thing for sure: when I saw it, I knew I had to photograph it. Fortunately, I just happened to have my camera with me because, if the best camera is the one you have with you, then I prefer to be prepared.

Whatever this was, it was not inclined to move around much which gave me a bit of time to compose a shot. I lowered my camera to the sidewalk and fired off a couple of shots, and quickly realized that I had somewhat of a perspective problem. This fly (I’ll call it that just to make things simple) was lower than my camera could go, which gave a point of view that was a bit too high. It felt more like a simple snapshot than a considered composition, but thankfully there was a solution at hand: the grass at the edge of the concrete. I realized that if I kind of nestled my camera on the ground next to the sidewalk it would give me a much better photo than I could get otherwise. This whole exercise also brought to the fore a somewhat intractible problem with my trusty D750: Live View shooting is bad. Really bad. For moving subjects, anyway. For stills it’s great, but the contrast-detect autofocus means the slightest hint of movement when shooting macro results in a big ol’ Rejected flag. There was no way I could compose this picture with the optical viewfinder so the flip-out LCD screen would have to suffice, limitations and all.

Thankfully this fly obliged my objective and held somewhat still for a few seconds, which was just enough time to get this shot. I didn’t really know what aperture to use so I went with f/8 (which is kind of my go-to starting point for macro shots) and took a couple of clicks before the fly repositioned itself at an angle which precluded any photographic possibilities. Turns out f/8 was…not quite right. I should have taken this at f/11 or smaller, as the depth of field is just way too shallow and the somewhat sickly color cast in the middle would have been somewhat ameliorated with a smaller aperture and, as a result, the light being just a bit more under control. It’s fine though, since I do think the shot turned out OK and was fun to take which, as any Weekly Fifty reader knows by now, is all that really matters to me :)

Nearly a decade ago, when I got a set of close-up filters for my 50mm lens, I took some photos of lily flowers that kind of took my breath away. Not because the images were particularly outstanding, but because of the realization that I could actually capture images of incredibly tiny objects with such clarity and beauty. I thought this was some rarified form of image-creation that was simply beyond the likes of mere mortals such as myself, but that was not the case at all. Anyone can do it; all it takes is the right gear and a willingness to experiment and try new things. And in the years since then I have found myself returning to many kinds of pictures I took back in the day, as they say, to put a more modern spin on them and revisit them with fresh eyes, better gear, and more advanced knowledge of concepts like light, color, exposure, depth of field, and so on. Not to erase the originals or diminish their impact at all, but to iterate on them and see if, and how, my photography skills have grown over time.

There’s a bit of hidden artificiality to today’s picture that you can’t really see, but I thought I would disclose it anyway for a bit of a peek behind the scenes. These lilies, while quite real, were sitting in a vase in our kitchen when I decided to take a picture of them. Or one of them, to be more precise. However, when I set up my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens on a tripod next to the kitchen table I soon discovered two things that made it quite challenging to get the kind of picture I was hoping for.

The first was the lighting. While the vase was near a window, most of the light was coming from the fixture overhead. The artificial nature of the light was far more apparent than I initially thought it might be, both because of the odd color cast but also the direction. It just didn’t look natural to have such harsh overhead lighting on the flowers, and the resulting contrast among the subtle texture variations in the petals came across as crude and garish. I tried adjusting the position of the vase and playing around with different overhead lights in the room to no avail. It just wasn’t working out.

The second problem was the background, which did not occur to me at all when I started thinking about creating this image. Since the vase was sitting on my kitchen table, the green areas you see behind the petals were a pale shade of dull brown–courtesy of the dining surface which has been well-used over the course of many decades, starting long before it was given to my wife and I by her father when we first got married.

Both the lighting and the background proved to be intractable problems and not easily fixed by simple repositioning of the vase. I was going to have to think outside the box on this one or, more accurately, outside the house.

I picked up the vase and tripod, went out to the back yard, and gave it another go to see if I could get a halfway decent shot. I had something specific in mind, which is pretty much exactly what you see here, but what I didn’t know is if I could actually get it given the shooting conditions. My efforts were stymied by the wind; the slightest whisper was enough to shake the delicate stamens, particularly the pollen-rich anthers balancing on top of each one. And when working with millimeter tolerances due to the close-up nature of the shot, well, let’s just say my patience rapidly began to wane. I set my aperture to f/11, used Live View to focus on the top of the pistil in the center, waited for a break in the breeze, and fired off a couple of shots. This was the only one that turned out and even so, if you visit the high-resolution original on Flickr you’ll see that it’s not quite as sharp as I would have preferred. That’s just my own nitpicking though, and the end I’m very pleased with the results I got here. I like the bright, vivid colors and the dual-tone palette dominated by yellow but accented by rich reddish-browns. The green background is a nice touch, and even though the flower petals are lost in a sea of background blur, I quite like the overall effect :)

I almost didn’t get this picture. Twice. But like a lot of my good shots, and even some of my favorite shots, success is sometimes the result of more than a little bit of serendipity. A few weeks ago we went camping with some friends, and I almost didn’t bring my camera. Not just my Fuji X100F, which would be ideal for a situation like this (weather permitting, that is) but my GoPro, which doesn’t really have much of a place on a camping trip at all. And yet, as my wife and I packed the tent along with the usual supplies such as bug spray, sleeping bags, spare clothes, and the like, I decided to toss in the Fuji and GoPro anyway. I didn’t really know what I would plan to do with them–the former because it’s not weatherproof and not ideal when out in the elements, and the latter because we weren’t doing any kind of extreme activities at all. Just basic tent camping. Nothing more. And yet, I thought to myself, why not.

As we cooked over the campfire while the sunlight waned in the blanket of blue high above, I noticed that the wind was growing calm while the clouds cleared. I thought that I might be able to use this as an opportunity to take a long-exposure photo of the stars streaking across the nighttime sky, and quickly grabbed my GoPro and set about looking for a place to put it to get a good picture. I found a flat rock near the shore, just on the other side of the tents, that seemed ideal: it would get much of the lake in the foreground with a nice view of the sky along with the stars circling around Polaris as the earth turned. I placed the camera, set the timer to start the shot at 12:30am, and went back to the fire so I could focus on the people, not the pictures.

A while later as everyone was settling in for the night, I had a sudden flash of inspiration. It was the kind of light-bulb idea that hits out of nowhere, and ends up changing everything in a way that, in retrospect, seems so obvious. The one thing I consistently mention here on Weekly Fifty, the technique that informs my photography more than just about anything, is context. My original idea for a star-trails shot had none of it. It would have been a cool photograph, but with very little to connect the viewer on a psychological or emotional level, with the experience of actually being out at the lake on a clear starry night. A simple change would fix all that.

Just to the south of the little peninsula where we pitched our tents was a large dock that protruded about thirty yards into the lake. It was several feet off the water, and realized that if I attached the camera there and pointed it in the same direction as I had originally planned, it would capture not only the sky and stars but our tents as well. Bingo. Suddenly there would be something in the picture to ground the photo in a way that viewers could connect with, as opposed to a scene of water, horizon, and stars but devoid of any human life. The nearly full moon was a bonus, as it illuminated our tents along with natural elements like grass and rocks. Even the clouds cooperated, showing up as just a couple of light streaks without obscuring the stars at all.

The next morning I could hardly wait to check the GoPro to see what it got, and I’m enormously pleased with the result. I wish the horizon was a bit straighter but that’s the price you pay when you line up your shot in near total darkness after the sun has already set. It was an enormously satisfying photo to take, and gives me a few ideas about what I might do next time also.

There’s been a bit of a nature, or more specifically, a flower theme lately here on Weekly Fifty. This isn’t by design, but more of an example of how I approach photography–that is, I try to find interesting things to capture with my camera when I have it out and about with me. When flowers are blooming, well, there you have it :) Each year my neighbor leaves a section of his two-acre yard unmowed and, as a result, it fills with bright beautiful flowers and also a veritable flurry of bees, butterflies, and other bugs and insects looking for nectar or maybe just a place to rest their wings. When my wife and I were walking past his field recently I noticed that the flowers were starting to spring to life and, as soon as we got home, I grabbed my trusty Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens so I could go and see what I could capture with it.

A bit to my surprise, the results were not exactly what I was expecting. Though the sky was overcast as a result of the recent rains, I just didn’t see much in the way of anything that looked interesting from a photography standpoint. The flowers I saw when we walked past earlier were almost all white which might look good in a vase on a kitchen table but don’t always make the most interesting picture subjects. Or, at least, not when I’m the one behind the camera anyway. I like to take pictures of flowers full vibrant colors, and white is kind of the opposite. I did try several shots from different angles, and played with the composition a great deal in order to see what white flowers might look like against dark trees, red brick, and brown house siding…but nothing really worked. No worries; I got to spend time walking around in nature and that’s always a good thing :)

As I was about to turn and head back across the street to my house I spotted the purple flower you see above and figured Well, why not. It wasn’t the most spectacular flower I had ever seen, but it might make a good photo anyway, and what was the harm in trying? (Answer: none whatsoever.) I lowered my camera down, flipped out the screen, engaged Live View, set the aperture to f/11, and fired off a couple of shots. What you see here is essentially exactly what came from the camera: no cropping, minimal color adjustments. (Mostly just white balance.) It’s fun, and quite gratifying, to take pictures like this just as a way of keeping the ol’ photo-taking skills sharp while also learning to keep my eyes open and see ideas and opportunities where I might otherwise just pass by without a second thought.