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

This is more of an experiment than a photo, but given that the result turned out fairly well I’m happy to use it as this week’s image here on Weekly Fifty. Near the edge of Theta Pond on the OSU campus are a couple of odd, orange spheres about a foot in diameter sitting atop a low stone wall. They must be some kind of decoration because I don’t know what functional purpose they serve, but as purely aesthetic objects they have always seemed a bit out of place to me. Not that I’m a good judge of art or architecture; I just don’t know if I get these things on an existential level. I suppose I don’t have to though. Such accoutrements are often subjective in their interpretation, and it just so happens that I think I found an interesting way of photographing them.

As I was walking past one of these orange globes one afternoon I noticed the light reflecting off its surface in kind of an interesting way. The reflection was far from uniform, with spots of white light standing out against the deep orange, and a cracked texture just beneath the shiny surface. I had my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens with me so I got close, real close, to see if I could capture the essence of what I was seeing in the form of a photograph. I wanted to get the details of the leaflike webbing, but I also wanted to show some of the light spots in the foreground and background. I opened up the aperture on my lens as wide as it would go, stooped over, and took a few shots.

When I looked at the results on the rear screen of my camera, they didn’t quite look like how I had hoped. I realized the problem had nothing to do with my camera or exposure settings, but the way at which I was viewing the scene. I played around with a couple different ideas: standing up and looking down, shooting from different angles around the sphere, and so on. I also used manual focus and paid careful attention to the focal plane in the viewfinder, and eventually got the image you see here. It looks pretty cool and I’m not sure you would even know what this is at first glance, but it’s another example of how looking at familiar scenes with a macro lens really can have a transformative impact on your photography.

I didn’t want to post this photo. I don’t even like it very much. It’s not super sharp, it’s not super compelling, and I know I can do much better. And yet, I’m sharing it not because the image in and of itself is anything, but because it represents something. When I look at this shot I don’t see a water droplet frozen in time; I see a much better image that I’m going to take someday. In that regard I suppose you could call this shot a weird form of accountability: by posting it publicly here on Weekly Fifty, it’s almost like a personal challenge to me to create something better and I hope I can do it :)

On the north side of campus there is a water feature that involves a small curtain of drops falling onto a bed of rocks. It’s in a garden of sorts, and it’s kind of calming to look at. I thought it would be fun to try to take a picture of the water frozen in time, hovering inches above the ground with all else obscured in a beautiful blur. The reality of what I captured doesn’t reach those lofty heights, but again, this picture hints at greater things that I want to get someday soon. Below you can see the setup I used to take this shot.

I used my Nikon D500, 105mm f/2.8 Macro lens, and a tripod to get right up close and personal with the curtain of water. My idea was to get the plane of focus just right and then fire off a ton of shots in rapid succession, all at 1/8000 second in order to freeze the motion of the drops. I took nearly 400 images and while some were in focus, not a single one of them froze time in the way I had hoped. 1/8000 second is really fast, but when shooting very tiny objects at 105mm mere inches from the lens, even the smallest bit of movement is magnified to an extraordinary degree. I don’t know if, given the rules of light and physics, I will be able to get the shot I’m aiming for, but I’m going to try different setups and see what happens. (To wit: The above image was shot at 1/500 second with my iPhone and the drops are clearly frozen in time. But that was much father away and you can’t see the micro-level movements of the individual drops in the way that you can on a macro lens.)

So even though this is the one that got away, it’s still a picture worth sharing and one that I hope to return to over time as a bit of inspiration. Or perhaps more of a challenge. Either way, I’m determined to get the shot :)

Note: This post marks nine years of Weekly Fifty. I never would have guessed in the spring of 2013 that this blog would still be going almost a decade later, but here we are :) Thank you, readers, for all your comments, questions, and kind words over the years and here’s looking ahead to ten years and beyond! *clinks glass*

Sometimes I take my camera with when I go out for a short walk around campus (usually by Theta Pond) and just come up empty. I walk around looking for photo opportunities and nothing really happens. No bright colors, no interesting subjects, no mix of light and shadow…nothing. Not that photo opportunities aren’t everywhere, just that some days I have a harder time seeing them compared to others. That’s what was happening when I took this picture, and while this isn’t the most groundbreaking photo I have ever taken it does serve as a reminder to me that even in times of photographic famine there are still images to be made.

Often when I’m looking for a picture opportunity one thing that I consistently come back to is light. I mean, of course photographs must involve light but I try to look for ways in which lighting is being used a bit differently, or how I can see something from a unique angle, thanks to light. The dying leaf you see here is nothing special–just a withering bit of greenery on the ground, the kind of thing you might see almost anywhere you look during fall or winter. What transforms the leaf from mundane to photo-worthy is lighting. By shooting the leaf from a low angle with the sun behind, it appears to glow almost as though it has summoned some speck of new life despite the decay. But wait, as Ron Popeil might say, there’s more.

A few years ago I shot this picture which, as you can clearly see, shares a ton of similarities with the photo features for this week and I absolutely had the original shot in mind when I took the new one. As I framed the leaf in my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, I noticed bright spots of light pop up behind it every few seconds. Vehicles driving east on University Avenue reflected the sun right into my camera, just as they did in the shot of the flower I took exactly two years earlier. (Seriously, they were both taken on January 31 two years apart.) Those brilliant points of light added an amazing extra element to the shot, and elevated it to a whole other plane. Within the span of roughly three minutes I went from not seeing any photo opportunities to creating an image I would be proud to print and hang.

Sometimes you just have to keep your eyes open and be willing to see something familiar, differently :)

One thing I am enjoying about my macro lens is re-thinking shots, or general compositional concepts, that I have taken before with other gear. Sometimes with my normal 50mm lens, other times with some close-up filters, but usually without the right equipment to really capture what I was thinking in my mind at the time. This is kind of one of those moments. About a year ago I took this picture at Lake Carl Blackwell after a particularly nasty cold snap, and while it’s an OK picture it’s not at all the shot I wanted to take. What I wanted to capture was a super close-up image of a very tiny frozen part of the plant, but that just wasn’t possible with the gear I had at the time. So when I came across a somewhat similar scene at Lake McMurtry when I was out on a hike with my wife and our kids recently, I took the opportunity to make up for the shot I wasn’t able to get the first time around.

There were several things working to my advantage for the shot you see here. First, the weather was much nicer which always makes photography more enjoyable. I think it was about 50 degrees and most of the lake wasn’t even frozen except for a few shady spots near the shore. Also, the sun was bright and the sky was clear, which made for much better lighting than the bland, overcast sky of the shot from February 2021. I also had my D750 instead of my D7100 which meant I could use the flip-up screen to help me compose the shot, which was extraordinary helpful since this frozen drop of water was just a few inches off the ground. Finally, and this is the most important factor, I had a true macro lens this time around :)

Initially I wasn’t sure what to use as the subject for this composition, and tried a couple shots with the opaque stalactites on the right. It was OK but something just wasn’t working out quite right. My shots just looked kind of…bland and uninteresting. Then I realized that the single clear drop would make a much more interesting image especially with the rich browns on the left and the white ice on the right. I took a few shots, inched closer, took a few more shots, and repeated the process until I got the image I was happy with. While I’m pleased with how this turned out, I’m glad it didn’t take too much time since I wanted to get back to my wife and kids who were busy tossing rocks into the lake to see if they could break the ice. That turned out to be a lot more fun than taking pictures anyway :)

This is one of those photos that’s not so much about the image, but the story behind the image. It’s a gingerbread house, and not a super fancy or extraordinary one at that, but what you’re actually seeing here is the end result of a fun project that our kids got to do with their grandparents when we went up to visit them over Christmas break. They had been given a gingerbread house kit by a friend who knew their grandchildren were coming for a visit and might want a fun project to do, and it ended up being exactly that: an enjoyable activity for, and I’m not even kidding about this, the whole family to enjoy. I realize that might seem slightly cheesy to say (and read, in your case) but it’s true: my kids had a great time assembling this decoration with their grandparents over the course of a few days. As a bit of caution to errant passers-by one of my kids put the warning phrase “Don’t eat” on top, spelled out in icing and candy. Not that anyone was in the house aside from us, but still, eight-year-olds sometimes have their own sense of logic and you have to just go with it every now and then. When I see this picture, what makes it meaningful isn’t the colors or the lighting or the composition, but the memories. And that, it seems to me, is one of the best gifts that photography has given to all of us.

I brought my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens along for the trip even though I knew there probably wouldn’t be too many opportunities to use it, but the beauty of driving instead of flying when you go on any sort of trip is that you have a lot more luggage-related wiggle room compared to flying. Though that camera and lens mostly stayed in my bag for much of our visit, I thought this gingerbread house would be a great opportunity to use and I wasn’t at all disappointed with the results. Quite the opposite, in fact. Even though this is hardly a macro photo, that’s kind of beside the point: macro lenses are great for much more than just close-ups! I couldn’t do much in the way of customizing the lighting or even the background, but I thought that if I set this confection on a small table with the fireplace in the background it would make for at least a slightly more interesting overall composition. I shot this in manual with ISO 100 and a few different apertures values with my camera firmly mounted on a tripod so as to make shutter speed more or less irrelevant.

As usual my first instinct was to shoot wide open but, of course, the depth of field I was getting was simply far too shallow even with my camera being several feet away from the gingerbread house. (That’s what you get when you shoot with a 105mm lens, after all😁) I honestly didn’t even know what to focus on–the green window trim, the colored candy on top, the roof line, or even the candy cane fence protruding from the front. F/8 kind of took care of most of those issues for me, thankfully. I focused on the big green rectangular blobs that my youngest son put on as windows and doors and enough of the house was sharp to make for a quality end result.

I’m not sure about this picture. I mean, it’s not a bad shot but it feels like there’s a much better image hiding underneath or just out of reach. In recent weeks I have posted a lot of shots taken with my macro lens that I am proud of, but this…well, it’s not one of them. Still, this picture was part of my photography journey so that alone is all the reason I need to share it here.

Here’s what I was going for when I took this shot: I wanted an image of this red flower as the subject, and the fountain in the background as sort of a secondary subject. What’s that…you don’t see a fountain? Well look again! It’s that white blob just to the right side of the red flower. I mean, maybe this could have been an interesting image but it just doesn’t quite get there. The flower and the fountain are too close, almost like they are competing to occupy the center of the frame. The horizon is tilted just enough to look like an accident instead of intentional. The lighting is harsh and uninviting. I could go on. And yet, it’s not entirely a lost cause because I did learn something when I took this shot.

It was really tricky to get the aperture just right, and in the end I don’t think I quite got there. I wanted the flower to be sharp and the fountain to be blurry, but still actually look like a fountain. I succeeded at making the flower sharp but I think I could have stopped down a bit more to make the fountain a little clearer. What I learned was that I need to be a bit more intentional when taking shots like this, and to stop down more than I might think is necessary. F/22, as opposed to f/13, would have probably resulted in a better image and of course shooting at a different time of day (or on a different day altogether, one with more clouds) would have no doubt helped with the lighting. While this won’t be anywhere in my top images of the year, it is a shot I’m glad I was able to take and I think it will help me improve my future photos–and sometimes that’s worth more than having an image turn out spectacularly.

One thing I’m enjoying about my Macro lens is looking for photo opportunities close to the ground. Not necessarily finding things that are hidden or unseen, but things that I would normally just kind of overlook on a day-to-day basis. Not that such subjects are inherently more interesting or valuable or special than anything else, but just that it’s kind of fun to see what there is to see at your feet instead of at normal eye level. That’s how I came across this shot, which is some kind of plant (obviously) just poking out from a covering of leaves and wood chips on the south end of the Oklahoma State University campus.

Longtime Weekly Fifty readers know how often I have posted photos that I took while walking around Theta Pond, and this one continues the tradition quite nicely. I took this picture on a warm December afternoon when I needed to get out of my office and stretch my legs for a bit, so I put on a podcast (probably an episode of The Delta Flyers) and grabbed my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens and went for a bit of a stroll. As usual I just sort of ended up at the pond because it’s one of my favorite spots on campus, and noticed a patch of these brown-colored plants and thought I might be able to get a good shot of them.

One thing I’m still learning about my macro lens is how to effectively utilize and manipulate the aperture of my lens to get the shot I want. The 105mm focal length lets me get very close to subjects which means I have to be very careful when shooting wide open. Not necessarily for sharpness, but for depth of field–though sharpness too, but kind of as a byproduct of DOF since this lens is really sharp even wide open. I put my camera on the ground, flipped out the rear screen, set the aperture to f/8, focused on the red leaf in the center, and took a few photos.

No good. Depth of field was simply too shallow.

I ended up with an aperture of f/16 which I almost never shoot at on my 50mm lens, but I’m finding is much more reasonable on this macro lens than shooting at f/4 or f/2.8. I really like the colors, the leaves in the foreground, the white-and-brown background, and the overall mood and tone of this shot. It just feels like autumn and yet, also feels like something new and exciting is just around the corner too.

One of the reasons I bought a macro lens was to take close-up shots of bugs, insects, and other small animals. It’s a little tricky to do that during the winter though, because much of that kind of wildlife just isn’t around too often. Or, at least it’s not around too often where I live or where I am currently looking–maybe there’s lots of animals and I’m just not seeing them! In any case, I did happen to see this little fly sitting on a leaf while out walking around campus one chilly December afternoon and thought it might make an interesting image. In retrospect…I’m not really sure about this picture.

I don’t know what it was that I hoped to capture in this shot but something about the final image just doesn’t really work right for me. Maybe it’s the fact that the fly, while larger than most images of a fly I can recall capturing, just isn’t that interesting or compelling to look at. Its silhouette on the leaf is fine but unremarkable, and the yellow-and-green color palette is kind of bland and boring. I do like the highlights in the background and overall I don’t think this is a bad shot, just not a super good shot. It seems like the kind of picture someone would take while out wandering around with a macro lens without much to shoot. And it probably seems that way because that’s basically what happened :)

I do think it’s kind of neat that the fly opted to stick around for a few seconds before buzzing away, and whether that was due to the cold temperatures or something else (maybe it was more interested in something besides my giant honking camera lens) it is not lost on me that the situation that arose to make this photo possible was kind of unique even though the end result is somewhat pedestrian. If anything, this just gives me hope for spring and summer as I look for more opportunities to shoot with this macro lens.

At this point you have probably seen several images here on Weekly Fifty that follow this same basic setup: a single subject sitting on a reflective base in front of a blurry background. It’s a simple composition but it’s just so much fun to shoot these kinds of pictures that I wouldn’t be surprised if more show up in the future. So if you like them, great! But if you’re tired of these kinds of images…well, just be forewarned that there may or may not be more on the way. I honestly don’t know as I’m writing this post, but all I’m saying is it’s a super fun and creative style that takes very little effort. (Though it doesn’t hurt to have a good macro lens too!)

As you might have guessed this is an ornament from our Christmas tree which also gives you an idea of the scale of the image. It’s not super small–about 3 inches from top to bottom–so you might be wondering why I shot it with a macro lens. Why not a normal lens? The answer lies not in the idea of making small subjects appear large (or, rather, normal size) but in being able to focus very close to any subject you choose. Most lenses have a minimum focusing distance of about one to two feet depending on the focal length and other optical properties of the lens. That means that you cannot physically focus on objects that are closer than your outstretched hand, give or take a few inches. To get this shot I had to be able to focus much closer than that, in order to make the image just how I wanted.

Shooting at such close distance meant that the depth of field was insanely small–the figure’s eyes are sharp but the tassel on his hat is not, and the background of the miniature diorama is blurry even though it is less than an inch away. The background of the entire composition is, of course, just some crumpled-up aluminum foil but it appears bright and colorful because directly behind the camera is our Christmas tree, and nearly all other lights in the house were turned out which meant that the light you see here is almost entirely coming from a hundred tiny little colored bulbs.

While I have certainly shot images like this before, none of them had this degree of color and vibrancy, and I think this could very well end up being one of my favorite images that I have shot with my macro lens. It captures something unique that I don’t think I could get any other way, and it shows a certain point in time, Christmas, in a fun and interesting way. I am learning so much with this macro lens and I can’t wait to see what this new year holds for it and for my photography :)

This one was really fun to shoot. What you’re looking at is a very small snow globe, about 2.5 inches tall, sitting on a clear surface in front of a crumpled sheet of aluminum foil. The setup is really simple, but the result is a photo I am quite proud to have taken. This isn’t the first photo I have posted here on Weekly Fifty that follows a similar format (one single subject shot against blurry aluminum foil background) and it likely won’t be the last, mostly because these images are just so much fun to create. I learned how to take these kinds of photos years ago with my 50mm f/1.8 lens, and it’s even more fun to revisit this concept with my 105mm f/2.8 macro lens.

There were a few tricky aspects of getting this picture to look just right, but maybe not in the way you would think. The first problem was getting the aperture just right in order to make sure enough of the tree was in focus, but I also had to rotate the snow globe to be in just the right position so the tree was facing the proper direction. You might think that’s a pretty simple issue but it got to be rather complicated because I couldn’t get the entire tree in focus without using a small aperture, which I didn’t want to do. I eventually found a few branches that I wanted crystal clear, but then I also had to deal with the lighting issue.

See that giant window being reflected on the surface of the globe? Yeah, that’s our dining room window right behind my camera and it presented an interesting challenge. I needed a big light source to get this photo to look right, but I couldn’t exactly move the light source to keep its reflection from obscuring the tree. I didn’t even notice this at first, and it took a while to get everything to line up just right: the aperture (and thus, the depth of field), the focusing, and the window behind me. My wife offered a few helpful suggestions as well, and I was glad to have her input because it’s her snow globe in the photo, and in the end I’m super happy with how this turned out. And now I want to make more shots like this :)