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

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.

After a summer of traveling and exploring different types of photography ideas and styles from Oklahoma to Kansas to the Rocky Mountains, this week’s shot takes it all back to familiar territory. I took today’s photo while out for a walk around OSU’s Theta Pond, and it felt nice to return to something a little more simple and take the kind of shot that just feels comfortable and familiar: a simple composition with a subject in the foreground and a nice blurry background. The kind of shot that my macro lens excels at :)

The basic idea here was pretty simple: a close-up picture of some leaves in the midst of shedding their summer greens for autumn yellows. As I crouched down to take this shot I didn’t even think about the bright spot of light in the background, but when I reviewed the picture on the back of my camera I knew I wanted to integrate that into the shot somehow. (If I had a proper mirrorless camera I would have seen that bright white spot of light right away, but that’s a discussion for another day. Where’s my Nikon Z8?) But how?

I honestly wasn’t sure what I wanted the final shot to look like when I was out by the pond, so I took a dozen photos and then looked for the best one in Lightroom. Below you can see nine of the options, but before I tell you why I opted for the one I did I’m curious which one you would have picked.

I ended up going with Number 9 in the lower-right corner because it was, in my opinion, a complete composition where the subject in the foreground and the spot of light in the background complemented each other and worked together to create a complete image. Most of the other shots felt like two separate entities captured in the frame–the golden leaves and the white spot of light. They were competing for viewer’s attention rather than cooperating to form a single shot. Image 4 was a little different in that I shot it with a much wider aperture and positioned the light to be directly behind the leaves, but that ended up diminishing the impact of the light entirely and somewhat deflated the impact of the final shot. The more I looked at Image 9, the more I liked how everything flowed together and created a beautiful final shot.

While all of these shots have merit, it was fun to select what I thought was the real standout among the bunch and a good reminder to me that sometimes it’s the subtle details that matter most, and can make the difference between a good picture and a great one :)

Ok so let’s get one thing out of the way right upfront: I’m really not the most creative person when it comes to naming my pictures. If anyone has a better suggestion for this shot, please feel free to share it :)

Alright so now that that’s out of the way, let’s get on to the picture. This is kind of a follow-up to last week’s shot of a green…um…something on a flower isolated against a uniform gray background. (I really don’t know much about flowers in case you can’t tell.) Today’s picture is from the same bunch of flowers that our neighbor picked from his garden and gave to us while we were out on a walk, and to get this shot I used some of the same techniques as last week but switched around a bit. Literally.

To get last week’s picture I used a giant translucent fold-out panel and put it between the plant and my main source of light, the kitchen windows. For this picture I moved my camera and tripod to the other end of the table so the window was behind me, which meant my subject was front-lit which is generally a good practice for most photos. Backlighting would have made no sense at all here. I raised up the central column of my tripod, aimed my camera down, put it in Live View, and focused manually until I got the composition you see here. And just for a sense of scale, the pink center portion ringed with curled yellow petals is smaller than a penny, which means depth of field had to be tightly controlled. I shot this at f/13 and even then you can see how razor-thin the area in focus actually was, and in order to get a clean image at ISO 100 it required a three-second exposure. No problem though–just set the self-timer to avoid any vibrations from my hand on the camera, and let the camera do the rest.

I took a bit of a break from macro photography this summer when we were traveling, but pictures like this remind me of how much I enjoy it and how eager I am to get back into it :)

A week ago as my wife and I were walking past my neighbor’s house with our boys, we stopped to chat with him while he was tending to his impressive flower bed in the front yard. He said he would cut a few for us to take home, and we gladly accepted his offer—who would turn down a vase of flowers from a neighbor? Of course my photographer’s eye thought the flowers would be a good opportunity to take some pictures, so a few days later on Sunday morning after church that’s exactly what I did. My wife went out to play with the kids while I set up shop on the kitchen table: Tripod, D750, 105mm macro lens, and a giant translucent reflector. (I have owned this thing for years but rarely use it, so I was excited at the opportunity to bust it out and harness its light-altering power. Mwa-ha-ha!)

My general idea was pretty simple: take a close-up shot of this green, leafy poart sticking up from one of the flowers. In typical fashion I couldn’t tell you what this is or even what kind of flower it’s from, but I do know that the entire green thing you see here is roughly one inch tall. Hence the need for a macro lens. While there’s nothing in the way of context clues to provide a sense of scale, I don’t think it’s really necessary for this shot and, in fact, almost makes the entire scene almost ethereal. Without any idea of how large this thing is, the viewer is free to draw his or her own conclusions and make of this what they will, which is kind of a cool departure for me since I so often speak of the importance of context when taking pictures.

But what of the reflector? I used it, but maybe not in the way you might expect. I intentionally composed this shot such that the plant was backlit, and used the translucent white reflector to create an even background in order to remove any and all sense of context. Normally I like to have a blurry out-of-focus background, but in this case I wanted to try something different and completely and totally isolate the subject with nothing else in the frame whatsoever.

In terms of exposure, I shot this at f/32 in order to get everything sharp after trying, unsuccessfully, to get similar pictures at f/11 and f/22. I set the ISO to 100 which meant I needed a ten-second shutter speed even though it was basically high noon when I took this picture. I focused manually using live view and used the self-timer in order to remove any chance of me vibrating the camera with my finger when I pressed the shutter button. I think the moral of the story here, other than that this was a fun picture to take, might be that you never know when you will be able to try new things with old photography gear. And to always be on the lookout for picture opportunities, especially if your neighbor gives you some flowers.

One of the most difficult, but most essential, components of landscape photography is establishing a sense of scale. When you see a grand scene or sweeping vista in person you can tell how vast it is by comparing it to other things in your immediate surroundings: trees, buildings, animals, people, roads receding into the distance, even the clouds in the sky can help establish a sense of scale. But how do you convey that to an audience who might be viewing your picture of the landscape on a tiny little phone screen? It’s not easy, but it’s essential for your photos to be impactful and meaningful. I’m not sure if this picture accurately conveys a sense of scale or not, but I certainly tried to and I hope it comes across even in some small way.

What you’re looking at here is a view of some huge mountains near Denver. I shot this when my family and I, along with my cousin and her husband, went on the Georgetown Loop Railroad on a warm Saturday afternoon in late July. It’s kind of a tourist-ey activity, but the older I get the more I have learned to embrace those kinds of things from time to time. Did we really need to spend money on train tickets to go a few miles up a mountainside and then right back down to the start 45 minutes later? Probably not, but it was fun and everyone enjoyed the time spent together, so why not? I had my Fuji X100F and my iPhone mostly just to take pictures of our kids on the train, but I wanted to keep my eyes open in case other photo opportunities presented themselves. While pictures of mountains aren’t super difficult to come by, the bridge in the distance helps establish a sense of scale that’s not easy to get across and it’s the reason I took this shot in the first place.

As we rounded a curve on the mountain and I saw this bridge appearing in the distance–the same bridge we crossed a few minutes earlier–and I had maybe 20 seconds to think about the shot, adjust my camera, and hope I could get the image I was aiming for. I The train cars in which we were riding had no windows so there were no issues of glare, dirt, or color tint so at least those didn’t need to be considered but I did have to think about the basics. Always the basics. No matter what you do in photography, you always have to keep coming back to the basics: aperture, shutter, and ISO. I wanted to freeze the motion of the entire scene with no motion blur in the foreground, and I wanted to use a low ISO to get a nice clean shot. I dialed in an aperture of f/2.8 just to make absolutely sure there would be no motion blur, focused on the bridge, and took the shot.

It worked :) What you see here is exactly what I shot—no cropping or editing. It almost looks like the bridge is Photoshopped, but it’s not. Everything you see is exactly as it was, and a few seconds later the scene disappeared entirely as we went around the bend and continued our journey in the train. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get a shot like this again, and but I sure hope I can sometime. The mountains are absolutely beautiful.

This is a picture that seemed a lot more interesting in my mind, and while the final result doesn’t stand up when too well when compared against some of my other images, it’s not bad and at the very least it does remind me of a fun family trip. And if that’s all it does, then it has accomplished its mission. I shot this after a day of driving and hiking near Denver with my wife, our kids, my cousin, and her husband and despite our general sense of exhaustion near the tail end of a busy but enjoyable day, I wanted to take one last opportunity to get a picture of the scenery. This small river was near the road we took down a mountain and after catching a few glimpses of it over the course of 10 or 15 minutes I asked if anyone would mind stopping for a quick photo opportunity. We pulled over near a trailhead and I hopped out, grabbed my Fuji X100F and tripod, and ran down to the river to take a few pictures.

The first mistake I made is neglecting to shoot in RAW. Normally I use JPEG on the Fuji because the results almost always come out looking fantastic, but this time was one of the exceptions. I wish I had more latitude to recover the blown-out highlights in the sky and warm up the foreground a bit, but as is the case with many things in life, you live and learn. The next mistake I made, which maybe wasn’t a mistake but more of an example of my inexperience, was not knowing how to compose the shot. I wasted about ten minutes taking pictures of the river that just didn’t look all that great, and then I found the spot you see here with some rocks jutting out on the right-hand side. That gave me the focal point I didn’t realize I needed, and I used that to basically anchor the viewer’s attention and give people something to catch their amidst the chaos of the rushing water. Had I thought about that sooner I would have taken greater care to compose more images like this one, but in the end this is what I got so this will have to do.

It’s not that this is an awful picture, just that I see it as more of an example of unused potential: there’s a much better image waiting to be uncovered here, and if I’m ever in the position to shoot a scene like this again I’ll have a better sense of what to do. And as for the answer to that question–what to do–I did take a few steps to at least ensure that the rushing water appeared as you see it. I activated my camera’s 3-stop ND filter, set the ISO to 200, and the aperture to f/16 in order to limit the light as much as possible. I also used a two-second self-timer to make sure any vibrations I might have made when pressing the shutter button did not affect the image. Finally, I didn’t spend any time at all thinking about what would happen if I got my tripod wet :) It dried out just fine! I’m glad we pulled over to get this shot and, as I often do here on Weekly Fifty, I’m using it as a fun learning opportunity.

As we hiked on various paths and trails on our visit to the Rocky Mountains, one thing quickly became abundantly clear to me: I had to balance my desire to take camera gear with my desire to have food and water. Usually the latter won out, which meant that I limited myself to my Fuji X100F and my iPhone, and my big heavy cameras and lenses usually stayed back at the cabin. Maybe in the future I can find a way around that compromise, but since this was our first real visit to the Rockies we were still trying to figure all this out and see how things would work.

I shot this picture when we went for a drive on Trail Ridge Road, a winding route that takes visitors above the treeline and offers amazing views of the surrounding mountains and even some hidden surprises like a small patch of snow. (Side note: It was super fun to watch all our kids have a snowball fight in July.) We parked at the visitor’s center that sits at over 12,000 feet in elevation and some of us hiked up to the top of the nearby peak to take in the scenery while others stayed back at the van with the youngest kids. On our way back down we spotted this female elk grazing on the mountainside, and I don’t think I have ever wished I had a zoom lens more in my entire life. But the best I could do was my humble little Fuji.

No matter. When life gives you lemons, you make photographic lemonade, right? At least, that’s what I tried to do here. Since there was no way to zoom in on the elk I tried to take a different approach: how could I capture a complete scene using the elk as an anchor? I took a few shots with the animal in the middle as well as on the left side, but those just didn’t feel right at all. It was this shot here where everything came together: the elk, the sky, the diagonal horizon, and the green grass in the foreground peppered with yellow flowers. I really wanted to get a shot just like what you see here, where the elk was doing something more interesting than just hanging its head down to munch on grass, and after a bit of waiting it actually happened: she raised her head, looked out to the horizon, and I snapped this picture.

In the end I’m actually glad that I didn’t have a zoom lens. No seriously, I mean it. I really like this shot, and it’s a bit more interesting than just another zoomed-in shot of an elk which you can probably find all over the internet. This shot isn’t what I wanted, but it’s what I got, and I think I’m better off because of it.