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

I realize that this picture seems like it has very little to do with perambulating, but part of the title is just the simple fact that I’m not very good at coming up with titles. In typical Simon fashion I don’t know what kind of flower this is, but I do know that it’s big. Large. Huge. At least by my reckoning, anyway. My wife and I walk by this flowering plant every morning on our usual route while our kids bike up ahead, and for a while now I’ve thought about taking a picture because it’s just such an interesting flower to look at. Most days I simply forget to bring my camera and on days when I do remember there’s usually some kind of aesthetic issue: bad lighting, harsh shadows, or the flower itself is a bit closed-up and not very photogenic.

On this particular morning I don’t think I struck photographic gold or anything, but it was a rainy, overcast morning and I do think it made for some good lighting and a nice bit of texture with the damp petals making the pinks and reds just a shade or two richer. I brought my D500 and 85 f/1.8 lens so I could get some shots of the kids on their bikes, but turns out that camera/lens combo worked great for this picture too. I shot this at f/2.8 because that lens isn’t all that sharp wide open and depth of field is super difficult to control at f/1.8, and f/2.8 still gave me plenty of background blur while making all important parts of the flower as sharp as a tack. I played around with composition a bit, shooting from different angles until I got a background that I liked: the street receding into the distance, with the flower mostly against dark earthy colors instead of the sky. I kind of wish it were a bit more isolated with that second flower in the background not present, but I didn’t want to go altering the scene or, worse, damaging the plant just to get a shot. Besides, I know the guy who lives here and I don’t think he would like it too much if I went around bending and poking his plants while snapping some photos.

This is another classic example of the type of photo I find myself taking so often: it’s a rather normal subject, in a rather unremarkable situation, that I see on a fairly regular basis, and yet I thought it would make for an interesting photograph. And I think it worked out pretty well. If you scroll back far enough here on the blog you will see a handful of similar photos–that is to say, Indian Paintbrush flowers in the morning light, including one of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken. These flowers practically litter the countryside here in Oklahoma, but it wasn’t until the night I shot this image that I even found out their name–a bit of trivia that came about during a conversation I had with my neighbor after I put my camera away and got on my bike to ride back home after taking this shot.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself here. The point is, there isn’t anything inherently unique about this flower or this setting, and yet it made for a pretty cool shot.

So about the image: Each spring my neighbor lets a rather large patch of his two-acre lawn go unmowed which means we get a little sliver of honest-to-goodness wildflowers and other flora just across the street. It doesn’t take long for this spot to fill with flowers of all types including the one you see here, and as we were walking past his house after dinner I thought it would be fun to go back the next day and take a couple of shots. (We’re good friends with these neighbors, and I did clear it with him to make sure he didn’t mind me poking around on his grass with my camera.) The next evening as the kids were getting ready for bed I hopped on my bike, pedaled a few hundred yards, and started snapping some shots. I even found myself literally on the ground in a prone position trying to line up everything just so.

I probably took about 50 shots of flowers, both Indian Paintbrush and otherwise, and this one rose to the top as my personal pick of the litter. I followed the same principle as the dandelion image from earlier this year in that I realized I could make the flower stand out a bit more if I put it against a darker background. While the dandelion had a much greater degree of contrast with the tree behind it, this flower enjoys the advantage of having some really cool rim lighting around the petals which was really fun in its own right. I used the trust old D7100 and 50mm lens and shot this at f/2.4 so as to get the flower tack sharp without getting too carried away with depth of field. I tell you what man, that camera and lens combination isn’t fancy but it sure does get the job done. Not even in a pinch either–just for general photography.

It did feel a little weird crawling, literally, in my neighbor’s field for 15 minutes but I’ve really tried to abandon any sense of self-consciousness I used to have about that sort of thing. I had permission to be there, I wasn’t causing any harm to anyone, and as I was leaving I ended up having a really pleasant conversation with a neighbor across the street whom I did not know but now wave at every time we go past his house. No big moral or grand lesson here, other than to say that it’s fun to take photos, even of familiar subjects in familiar settings, and see what happens as a result :)

Look, I don’t want to sit here and read too much into things that are really just simple photographs. After all, sometimes (I would argue most of the time) a cigar is just a cigar. And yet, it’s fun to let your mind run wild every now and then and imagine characters, dialog, emotions, and entire scenes where none really exists. I think that’s what makes this picture kind of interesting to me. Someone can look at this and just see two flowers after a bit of rain. Someone else might see a different scene entirely.

But first, the photo itself.

I shot this in a vacant lot while out on a walk with my wife and kids–a lot that, after walking past it many times over the past few weeks, I knew contained a lot of flowers. (Side note: Notice a trend here? I used to take lots of photos while out walking around Theta Pond on the OSU campus. That was before the pandemic…) I brought my D500 with, partly because I really like the images it produces but also because it has a decent degree of weatherproofing which I thought might come in handy if the rain started back up again. Also, because I knew before we left that I might end up taking a shot of some flowers I thought the flip-out screen might come in handy. And sure enough, it did :) Soon we came across the lot and I stayed behind for a bit to take a few shots while the rest of my family went on ahead, and even though the lighting was great and there were indeed a lot of flowers, I found that I had a bit of trouble actually getting a good shot.

Maybe I just didn’t know what I was going for other than to take a picture of some flowers, but for some reason things just weren’t quite clicking. I moved around a bit, tried a few different angles, and eventually came across the scene you see here. If I didn’t have the D500 it would have been pretty tricky and I most likely would have found myself on the ground, but the flip-out screen made this shot a lot easier. Normally I would take a shot of the flower in the background but I thought it was kind of neat how the flower in the foreground was closed in on itself and covered in rain drops. It almost looked like it got into an argument with the flower behind it, and turned away while shedding some tears. If you wanted to extrapolate a bit further you could even go so far as to say that the flower in the background is pleading with the other one: I didn’t mean what I just said! I’m sorry…can you forgive me?

But then, interpretations like that are best left to English majors and poets, not yours truly. To me it’s just a couple of flowers on a rainy day, but it can be fun to speculate :)

Ok, this isn’t what you think. Or, perhaps I should say, it probably isn’t what you think. This isn’t some state-of-the-art macro setup with fancy lighting. It’s pretty basic, to be honest. So basic it’s almost funny: I shot this with my Nikon D500 (though it could have been any crop-sensor DSLR, even my old D7100, as nothing about this image required a D500) and my old 50mm f/1.8 lens and a set of el cheapo close-up filters. The same close-up filters I’ve had for years and you have, no doubt, read about many times here on Weekly Fifty. The location? The glass door leading out to our back porch. The time? After dinner one evening back in June. Anyone could have taken this shot, I just happened to be the one who clicked the shutter button.

But that doesn’t necessarily diminish the value of the image, because it was a fun shot for me to take regardless of the level of technical difficulty or prowess required. My wife and I were in the living room with our boys after dinner, and we were either playing a board game or watching them play Super Nintendo when one of us noticed this light green moth hanging out on the glass door. As usual I ran to get my camera and, having taken a few shots of insects and bugs before, knew to grab my +4 close-up filter because the +10 would be too much for this insect that was about three-quarters of an inch from wingtip to wingtip. I held my camera relatively close to the glass, fired off a few shots at f/4, checked the shots for focus and sharpness on the rear LCD screen, stopped down to f/8, took a few more, and that was it. All told it was about two minutes of shooting, and in the end I got this shot right here:

Not that great, eh? When I loaded the RAW into Lightroom I quickly cropped and did my usual set of basic adjustments (lower the highlights, raised the whites, lowered the blacks, and raised the shadows along with a bit of sharpening) and then set to work on the tedious task of removing all those little scratches with the Spot Healing brush. A few minutes of clicking away was all I needed to realize that this was going to take a super long time, and I didn’t know if I had the patience to deal with it.

Then I realized the obvious: I could, quite literally, just photoshop all the dust and scratches out of the image. With a quick right-click on the image I opened it in Photoshop, duplicated the background layer, applied a super over-the-top dust and scratches filter, and then quickly masked out the moth itself so it wouldn’t appear as a giant blurry blob. In a few minutes I took care of all the little nicks and dings and spots and got a finished image that I liked quite a lot. I edit almost all of my pictures a bit, even just basic things like color tweaking, but I don’t often photoshop them. This one called for a bit more drastic measures though, and sometimes it’s fun to bust out the big guns even for something simple like this shot here.

You might be seeing a pattern here: this is the third sunset photo in as many weeks, much like my series of cardinal bird shots from a little while ago. While those avian images were somewhat planned, in that I knew as I was looking through them that I would end up posting at least three, this was more serendipitous though just as enjoyable for me to shoot the photos. While my two earlier sunset pictures were taken at Caribou Lake in the Boundary Waters, this was shot on my drive home somewhere in Iowa. I don’t remember exactly, but judging by the timestamp I think it was maybe an hour north of Des Moines. I was driving south on Interstate 35 when I saw a field of wind turbines set aglow in the fading sunlight, so I looked for a spot to pull over and take a picture.

One thing about shooting photos while on a road trip: you have to keep safety as the top priority. I didn’t want to endanger any other drivers or myself, so I needed to find an exit and a side road from which to take the shot. When you’re on back roads this isn’t much of an issue, but on mainline arteries like the interstate it’s critically important that you prioritize safety when doing any type of photography. As such, I kept driving until I saw an opportunity to leave the road and then, as luck would have it, I ended up on another side road that went north which gave me a clear view of the horizon. (My guess is I took 270th street and then turned north onto Underwood, but I can’t remember for sure.)

The sun sets quickly, often much faster than you might think, so I knew I only had a few minutes to take some shots. I got out my D750 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and did everything I could to limit the amount of light coming in. When you’re essentially shooting straight into the sun, the best option is an ND filter but absent that option you have to stop down your aperture, increase your shutter speed, and lower the ISO as much as possible. I don’t remember my initial exposure settings but I did dial in -5EV for exposure compensation, and I was hoping I could get a good shot of the sunset with the clouds and wind turbines.

I knew from previous wind turbine shots that the position of the blades can be a little tricky so I used a continuous high-speed burst, hoping one of my pictures would turn out. I fired off a dozen shots, adjusted my composition, engaged the continuous shutter again, and that’s when this moment happened: a flock of birds flew by right as I was pressing the shutter. I was astounded, having never seen this happen in any of my photos before, and desperately hoped that one of my pictures would turn out. I got exactly two frames with birds in them, and of those two this is the one I liked best.

The birds add such an incredible dynamic element to this shot, and I like how everything is silhouetted against the brilliant setting sun. The clouds give off a beautiful glow, and even the foreground has a bit of light right at the base of the image. I have seen shots like this but never thought I would be able to get one, and I still can’t quite believe it happened. One fraction of a second later and the birds were gone, leaving what was still a good shot of the wind turbines and setting sun, but without that sense of life and energy with the birds.

If this looks similar to last week’s photo, that’s because I shot it at the same location, using the same gear, at the same time of day, using almost the same exposure settings. The only difference is that this was 24 hours later, and had different weather conditions which led to a strikingly different image as a result.

In my photo from last week you can see the streaks in the sky which show cloud movement over the course of a two-minute exposure. Clearly those streaks are not present here, which indicates that the weather was much calmer and peaceful. There’s also another difference brought on by the lack of wind: the lake is a perfect reflection of the trees, almost like something out of a Bob Ross painting. Even though last week’s image showed a flat, glassy lake as a result of a long exposure, the reflection of the treeline was missing because of all the small but noticeable ripples on the water throughout the course of the exposure. Here the wind was so still you couldn’t feel it at all, and that sense of calm and peace is what makes the water so still.

It makes for a striking composition when compared to its counterpart from last week: similar on first glance, but vastly different upon closer inspection. At first I didn’t like this one very much, and preferred the dynamic sweeping clouds of the initial image, almost as though the sky itself were in a hurry to get on with night. But the more I look at it, the more I think this image reflects the way the Boundary Waters made me feel: peaceful, calm, serene. It’s full of subtle colors, like the rocks in the lake and the dull orange way in the distance, and I think this picture invites the viewer (or me, at least) to pause and consider things a bit more whereas last week’s image is kind of a one-and-done type of photo. “Ooo…, look at that sky!” and then on to the next image.

This was a 4-minute exposure (Which is a little more difficult than it sounds. Without my cable release I had to keep my finger firmly pressed on the shutter while being bitten by mosquitos.) shot at f/16, ISO 200, and the 3-stop ND filter of my Fuji X100F enabled. And while I enjoyed taking this picture, I was eager to be done with it and get back to the campfire with my cousins. Ironically, the calm scene here is a far cry from the next morning: we had to contend with wind and rain throughout the night and long after daybreak as we made our way back across the lake, the portage, and another lake to end our time at the Boundary Waters. It was an amazing trip and I hope I get the chance to return soon.

Earlier this year I had the incredible opportunity to go camping at the Boundary Waters Canoe Area with my two cousins. It was a trip my wife arranged for my 40th birthday, and I couldn’t have been more pleased with how everything turned out. The BWCA is more than a thousand square miles of untouched wilderness at the Minnesota/Canada border, with hundreds of lakes, just as many campsites, and no motorized vehicles allowed. We arrived at the Clearwater Lodge entry point at 7am (which meant we had to leave the Twin Cities about 1:30am) on a Sunday morning, got our gear, packed everything into a canoe, and hit the waters. A few hours later we arrived at our campsite on Caribou Lake which was our home base until Wednesday morning.

Weight is pretty important on a trip like this, since you have to carry everything you bring with on your shoulders. There’s also the issue of rain, wind, dust, and other natural elements: I didn’t want my camera gear getting full of dust or dropped in a lake. As such I mostly just used my iPhone for any pictures, but I brought my trusty Fuji X100F and Peak Design Travel Tripod with for one specific purpose: to get a picture of the sunset. I’m not even sure if I go the photo I was hoping for, but then, if you were to ask me in advance I don’t know that I could have even described the photo I was hoping for. I just wanted a long-exposure sunset image of a lake on the Canadian border.

That’s basically what you see here: a two-minute exposure just as the sun was setting, taken from the shore just off our campsite on Caribou Lake. I forgot to bring my cable release which meant I had to sit on the edge of the lake holding the shutter down with one finger while swatting mosquitos with my other hand, but it wasn’t too bad and I got a few pictures that I liked including this one. The long exposure served two purposes: smoothing out the lake and adding motion blur to the clouds. It’s not quite as dramatic as the sunset photos I took at Milford Lake last summer, but this one comes with a really fun set of memories involving camping way up north, and that’s something you can’t get just any time you want.

I can’t believe I got this shot.

This is my third and final shot of cardinals, and as you might have guessed I got this in the same timeframe as the other two: between 7 and 7:45pm on a warm spring evening as the sun was slowly setting. When I set out to get a shot of these birds all I had in mind was the male: his brilliant red feathers, his piercing black eyes, and his wild mane of untamed tussle on top of his head. As luck, or perhaps divine providence, would have it, I also got a shot of his partner in child-rearing. But to get this shot of the two of them, together, as if catching up on the day’s events or marveling at how quickly their babies were growing, was really special.

For much of my time taking these photos I saw either one bird or the other, but there was one time when they were both together that nearly made my heart skip a beat. I even popped off a few frames before one of them flew away, and even though I didn’t think the images would turn out too well, I was glad to have gotten the chance to try. To wit: in that handful of pictures the male was in the foreground, the female in the background, and one of them was turned the other way. They weren’t great shots, but they were all I could get.

Until ten minutes later both birds returned, giving me one more opportunity to catch them in a single frame. I had my camera ready: D500, 200mm, Auto-ISO with minimum shutter speed of 1/250 second, and an aperture of f/2.8 which I quickly changed to f/4 before I started firing a burst of images at 10 frames per second. Even at that blistering pace I only got maybe five shots that were worth keeping, and only one–this one right here–that rose above the rest. Not one second after I got this shot one of the birds flew away, and the moment was over. But my oh my, what a fun moment it was.

Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

Matthew 6:26

As a postscript to this series, it wasn’t two days later that the birds were gone, having completed their mission of raising two babies from eggs to adulthood. I believe it was the day after I got this shot that one of the birds in the nest was gone, and the next day both had taken to the skies leaving the family of four that had taken up temporary residence in our backyard tree to find new adventures in a place far away. I hope they come back, maybe next Spring, where they will be welcomed with a tree for nesting and some people ready to take their pictures. I’ll be waiting, my camera at the ready.

If this picture bears a resemblance to the one I posted last week, that’s because it was shot only a few minutes later. I’m not going to recount the entire backstory of the incident here, so if you’d like to learn a bit more I recommend going to my entry for the previous photo to catch yourself up. I rarely post pictures in pairs, but this was a rare event to get a picture of a cardinal this close up, so here you go :)

What I found most fascinating about this picture wasn’t the image itself but everything that led up to it. And I don’t mean me standing in my hard holding my D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, but the week prior where my wife, my kids, and I got to watch this female cardinal and her mate care for their small nest of baby birds in our backyard tree. For several days we could see them flying back and forth from the fence to a tree to the neighbor’s roof and, of course, to their babies in the nest to bring food. When we first saw this cardinal she was sitting on the eggs, but when I shot this image her babies were just two days from leaving the nest. I know, on an intrinsic biological level, that mother birds care for their young until they are ready to fly away, but it was fascinating to witness the entire process over the course of a few weeks right in our own backyard.

As with last week’s image I’m not sure if these birds had acclimated to me and my family, but they were a lot less skittish than normal when they finally allowed me to get close enough for these shots. It felt like we had a mutual sense of respect and understanding, though perhaps that’s reading a bit too much into the situation. We gave Mama and Papa Cardinal a wide berth and all I asked was that they let me take their picture, and I’m glad they were willing to oblige for one fleeting moment in time.

So…recently I shared a few pictures of bees here on the blog and in my descriptions for each one I wrote about how I liked those photos but they weren’t quite what I had hoped for. This picture is the polar opposite. Not only is it what I was hoping to get, it’s actually better. It’s probably the best shot of a bird I have ever taken, and it carries some really cool memories along with it too.

But first, as usual, a bit of background.

Each year we have the pleasure of hearing, and sometimes seeing, cardinals in our back yard. The bright plumage on the males is really something special, especially up close, but even if you can’t see them it’s really fun to hear their songs in the morning. This year in early May I was out with my kids climbing the tree and swinging on ropes in our back yard and I noticed this particular cardinal flying back and forth quite a bit over the course of the afternoon. Then I noticed he was flying into one of our small trees quite a bit, and soon my kids and I put two and two together and figured there must be a nest in that tree. So we waited until he flew away, poked our heads in, and saw two tiny baby birds, newly hatched, lost in sleep while waiting for their next meal.

The boys ran inside to tell my wife and I started thinking about how to get a picture of the bright red bird. I knew I would need my 70-200 f/2.8 lens since it’s the longest zoom I have, and my crop-sensor Nikon D500 too. A longer focal length like 300, 400, or more would give me a lot more freedom and options but alas, I don’t have anything longer than 200mm, so I knew I would have to make do with what was available. I got my camera gear, returned to the back yard, and waited.

And waited.

And waited more. Soon my kids returned and went back to swinging and climbing, and I had to find a way to walk a line between amateur birdwatcher and attentive father. The cardinal did come out of the tree and I was able to get a couple shots, but nothing special. I went back and forth between shooting photos and running around with my kids, but ended the day without much success at the former. (But great success at the latter, so it’s all good.)

The same pattern repeated itself over the next few days: we had some bird sightings while playing in the yard, of both Papa and Mama cardinal, but I was never able to get a really good picture. I was too far away, or the birds were too high in the tree, or they flew off before I could press the shutter…you know how it goes. The birds came and went, and their babies got louder and larger, and I kept trying to get The Shot with no good results.

That is, until about a week later when I took the picture you see above. It was about 7pm on a mild evening in April. The sun was on its way down and both cardinal parents were spending a great deal of time hanging around on our backyard fence. That’s when I had the idea to stand close to the small tree with their nest and just wait. I thought maybe the birds were used to seeing me by now, and might not freak out at the sight of this human with a gigantic camera lens pointed right at them.

And that’s when the magic started to happen. I slowly, carefully, stepped closer to the fence with my camera firing away. Papa Cardinal alighted on the fence, hopped around, flew off, returned, and repeated that pattern over and over. All the while I was shooting at 10FPS in 12-bit RAW while slowly creeping closer and hoping one of the pictures would turn out. I was probably out there for 45 minutes and ended up taking over 700 shots, but got some real winners including this one.

I got this at 200mm, f/2.8, 1/400 second, ISO 1600. A longer lens would have helped, as I mentioned before, but I did appreciate the nice blurry background courtesy of the extra-large aperture of my lens. I did have to crop this image a lot, but shooting at 20 megapixels gives a lot of room for that so it wasn’t a big deal. In the end I got a picture I’m very proud of, and along the way my kids and I got to learn a little something about birds and their babies too.