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

One of the first posts I ever put up on Weekly Fifty was a shot (well, two shots) of a prairie dog from the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, OK. Those images were pretty neat for the time, especially considering how little I understood about photography as well as my gear: a humble Nikon D200 and a 50mm f/1.8 lens. I still have that lens and use it regularly, but have since replaced the D200 with other much more capable cameras, and have learned way more about photography as well. As such, it was fun to revisit that scene eight years later for the shot you see above. I took this picture of a prairie dog poking up between two rows of purple flowers at the same location as the original shots from 2013, but this time I was thinking about more than just the subject. I considered the whole frame: foreground, background, subject, angle of view, and of course the fundamentals like aperture, shutter, and ISO. The result is a much more interesting image but also one that could not have happened without first taking the original.

To get this shot I used my D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and my goodness it sure would have been nice to have a mirrorless camera with a flip-out screen! I had to get low to the ground for this shot which was difficult not just because of the fire ants, but because the optical viewfinder on a DSLR is so much better than using the LCD screen. I realized it was nearly impossible to shoot pictures of these fast-moving creatures using the slow, sluggish contrast-detect autofocus on the LCD screen which meant I had to use the optical viewfinder instead. And while that is normally just fine with me, it’s not so great when you have to basically lie in a prone position on hot gravel while getting bitten up by ants. I opted instead to crouch at a weird angle to get this shot instead of lying down, and while I think the end result is OK it did make me long for a Z6II :)

This was a fun one to shoot though, partly because these little prairie dogs are so darn cute but also because my kids were so excited to see them. It was basically a solid 15 minutes of “Hey Daddy, look over there!” and “Mommy, I see another one!” When I look at this picture I of course see an animal in its natural habitat but it’s those memories of spending time with my family that come flooding back to me, and are the real reason I enjoy pictures like this so much.

Way back in 2013 my wife and I took a weekend trip to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, Oklahoma, and it seemed like we stepped into some kind of warp in the fabric of spacetime. Oklahoma isn’t exactly known for its soaring peaks and grand scenic vistas, and yet, just two hours from our home is this beautiful, expansive, majestic spot tucked away behind an army base just waiting to be discovered. We visited again a few years later and this spring as we were eager to get out with our kids after a rather…different…school year we once again turned our attention to the Wichita Mountains.

The first spot we went was Jed Johnson Tower, an old fire watch tower that sits near a lake which bears the same name. We spent a few hours just hiking around, looking at scenery, and of course taking lots of photos. Unfortunately the tower is sealed off and visitors cannot enter, but it still makes for an amazing sight and the kind of thing you just don’t come across very often in Oklahoma. To get this shot I used my Nikon D500 and 70-200mm f/2.8 lens set to f/2.8 at 140mm. I thought carefully about the composition: I could have just zoomed in on the tower, but without context it would have been dull and almost meaningless. I wanted the tower to be set against an interesting background, and shooting at 140mm gave me just the right composition with the mountains in the rear, the tower to draw the viewer’s eye, and plenty of foreground vegetation and natural elements (including that beautiful dead tree just off center) to make the image more interesting. Shooting at f/2.8 gave me just enough depth of field to separate the subject from the background, and on that particular lens you don’t really sacrifice sharpness even when shooting wide open.

This spot, and the entire Wichita Mountains area, is filled with beauty both natural and man-made, and it really is worth the drive if you live anywhere near.

‘Tis the season for magnolia flowers! I always like taking my camera out in May and June when these giant flowers are in full bloom around campus, especially at Theta pond. I’ve taken many shots of magnolias over the years but there’s always something special about seeing these gigantic bursts of color often tucked away beneath brilliant layers of unfolding white petals. I don’t recall seeing magnolia flowers before moving to Oklahoma but now that we live here, and have lived here for well over ten years, I still never grow tired of looking at them or taking their photograph.

Every year I try to see these flowers a little differently or look for a bit more creative way to showcase them in a picture, and for this shot I used a lesson I have been learning (albeit slowly) over the last several months. It helps to get closer, but not too close, and help your viewers see your subject not in isolation but framed against larger elements of the image. Especially a colorful background, if at all possible. That last part is a little tricky with magnolias because of the enormous white petals that surround the bright center, but it was that challenge which led me to take the shot you see here.

I used my D750 and 50mm lens, natch, but augmented it with a +4 closer-up filter and a somewhat smaller aperture of f/4.8. Sharpness is a good thing, especially when shooting up close, and too often I have made the mistake of sacrificing extreme closeness with subject sharpness. I’m learning to dial it back a bit and quite like the results which you can see here: nearly the entire center portion of the flower is in focus while the petals in the foreground and background are not, and the points of light far in the background are brilliantly rendered heptagons that give a nice sense of context to the image. It took several attempts to get this shot but I’m very pleased with the result, and I hope I can snag a few more magnolia images before the season is over.

This photo can’t exist. What you’re seeing isn’t a real picture, but a combination of two images that I stitched together in Photoshop. Or, rather, overlayed on top of one another and then edited with a mask so one part of one picture was superimposed on top of the rest of the other picture.

So now the question: Do you know what part was Photoshopped? I’ll give you a hint: it has to do with depth of field.

When you take pictures at very close range, like I did here, you have to deal with a very unwieldy depth of field. That is, the in-focus part is so narrow that even with smaller apertures you can only get a fraction of the photo in focus. I shot this picture with my Nikon D750, 50mm lens, and either a +4 or +10 close-up filter. (I can’t remember exactly, but I think it was a +10.) and had a few items in mind:

• I wanted the edge of the mushrooms to be really sharp
• I wanted the foreground and background to be really blurry
• I wanted both mushrooms to be in focus

You can’t actually get all three of those in a single exposure; something has to give, and as a result I ended up taking two pictures. One focused on the mushroom in front, and another focused on the mushroom in back. Both were shot with the same exposure values and, even though I did accidentally move my camera just a bit between shots, both images were close enough for what I needed. Then I imported both into Lightroom, brought them into Photoshop, and performed the aforementioned image manipulation so as to get the best of both worlds: both mushrooms in focus with the foreground and background nice and blurry.

This is a technique known as focus stacking and it generally involves very still subjects, actual macro lenses (instead of close-up filters), a tripod, and dozens of exposures. This photo is actually a very poor example of focus stacking, but it hints at the possibilities that one can accomplish with this sort of process. It was fun to try it, and gives me some new things to think about for future images as well.

I talk a lot about learning from my past experiences as a photographer, and this picture is a good example of how I have tried to apply this principle in my daily life. Or at least my daily photography. Not long ago I shared a picture that I shot in my own back yard, with some purple flowers and an interesting style of background blur involving vertical slits of light from a fence. Today’s photo takes everything I learned when photographing the original and applies it to get what is, in my opinion, a much better picture.

These are flowers from a saliva plant, which is pretty common where I live in Oklahoma. Every spring the one we have in our backyard produces these brilliant purple flowers which attract bumblebees, honeybees, hummingbirds, and of course a certain photographer as well :) After taking a picture of purple flowers with the sun slits behind them I wanted to apply those lessons here, and I’m really pleased with how things turned out. I used a +4 close-up filter to close the distance between myself and the flower, and intentionally composed the shot so the flower would be between the balls of light in the background. (A process which would have been much easier with a proper mirrorless camera compared to a DSLR like my D750, which I used for this shot.) I moved around a lot, tried various apertures between f/2.8 and f/5.6, and even after I thought I had the shot and went inside I decided to return to the back yard and give it another go. I’m glad I did, as this image is one that I just might end up printing and hanging on the wall. It seems almost otherworldly, but the scene was so normal that I’ve seen it a hundred times and never thought it would make an interesting picture. And yet, with some practice and self-reflection, it turned out great.

For years we have seen this particular cat roaming around the neighborhood, often minding its own business and generally keeping to itself on a daily basis. My buddy next door has kind of adopted it, feeding him scraps of food and giving him shelter in his back yard, but we’re not sure who actually owns the cat or where it came from. Sometimes it hangs out on our front porch, and our doorbell camera is filled with videos of this cat lounging at night or tussling with other felines at all hours of the day. I don’t know his name and haven’t ever gotten close enough to pet it, but it’s nice to have this cat adding a bit of flair to the neighborhood. So on a nice overcast day this spring I was glad I had the chance to take its photo in a way that I haven’t really done before.

I have a handful of shots of this cat sitting or laying on the ground, but as my wife and I were heading out to go to the lake with our boys we saw the cat sitting on this brick pillar in the yard across the street. Like usual it was just hanging around not bothering anyone so I didn’t want to pester it with my camera, which meant there was only one good option: My D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens. That combination turned out to be ideal: I was able to get close enough to the cat to get his picture without scaring him, and also get a nice shallow depth of field as well. The cat’s eyes are tack sharp while his hindquarters and tail begin to recede into the blurry background, and he is sitting in a stance that says “I see you, and I’m not scared of you, but come any closer and I’m outta here.”

I didn’t spend more than 30 seconds getting this photo because we were trying to get going and everyone else was already loaded up in the car and ready to head out, but I’m glad I took the time to take the shot. It was a good chance to get on eye level with this cat and take a more interesting photo than just seeing him sitting on the grass, and also a fun opportunity to take a picture of an animal compared to all the flower shots I have been posting lately :)

This photo was an exercise in condensing years of photographic experience down to about a five-minute time span. In order to get this shot I had to think about lighting, aperture, depth of field, sharpness, background objects, foreground objects (which I finally had to just nudge aside) and even small breaths of wind. It seems like a pretty basic image, but a lot of thought and careful consideration went in to what you see here.

I was out for a walk around Theta Pond in late April, looking for natural colors amidst a sea of browns and greens, when I saw a small patch of purple flowers near the southeastern edge of the pond right by University avenue. Most of the flowers were open and drooping, but some, such as this one, had yet to spring forth which made them ideal photography subjects. I basically tried a series of techniques while working my way closer, closer, and closer to finally get this picture which was, literally, the last one I shot during my time at this particular spot. Out of 42 images this was the one I liked the most, and even though there’s just a few things I might have done differently in retrospect I really like the deep purples, rich greens, and contrast between dark and light.

When I saw this flower I first thought about the direction of light, and realized I would need to scoot around to a different part of the flower bed so the sun was over my left shoulder. I took a photo with my 50mm lens at f/2.8, getting about as close as I could to the flower, and ended up with this:

It’s not bad, but there’s way too much going on and it’s hard to find a subject amidst all the other elements. When this happens you have two options:

1. Crop the final image
2. Get closer to the subject

Cropping wouldn’t really solve the problem of the busy background, but thankfully I had my set of close-up filters in my pocket which would let me close the gap between my lens and the flower quite considerably. Taking a cue from my experience photographing the Indian Paintbrush flower that I shared on May 5, I attached my +2 filter which I thought would give me the picture I was going for:

While this second approach was certainly improved, I still wasn’t happy with the way the subject didn’t quite stand out from the background as much as I was going for. Also, as I was reviewing my photos on the spot I noticed that giant vertical bar of light which was hugely distracting. These problems were both mitigated by me switching to my +4 filter and scooting to the side just a bit so that background element was no longer in the shot. The result is the photo you see at the top of this post, which had a beautifully blurry background and required no cropping whatsoever. I shot it at f/2.8 which is kind of asking for trouble when shooting close-up, and you can see one problematic artifact as a result: the depth of field is so shallow that the top of the flower is just a bit out of focus. I think if I were to re-do this shot I would go with f/4 to get a sharper subject, but that might compromise the beauty of the background…and I’m not sure that’s a tradeoff I’d be willing to make.

This type of shot (single subject, blurry background) is one I have done many, many times over the years on Weekly Fifty but it’s a composition that I really like returning to because the results just make me happy. It’s really fun to get shots like this, and it’s a great showcase for the versatility of the classic Nifty Fifty lens :)

I didn’t crop this photo. Not one bit, not even a single pixel. And that’s something I can almost never say. Nearly every one of the shots I share on Weekly Fifty is cropped, even if only just a little bit, and it almost felt like cheating to post this image without any cropping at all. I tried a few different times, but no matter what I did I always ended up preferring the original, and that really surprised me. I don’t know what kind of flower this is but it was super small, and I was only able to get this picture thanks to my +10 Close-Up Filter on my D750 + 50mm lens. I was walking through one of the gardens on campus when I saw this small purple plant hanging its head low in the afternoon shade, and thought that a picture would be difficult but at least worth a try.

Getting this shot was actually a lot more complicated than it might appear. For one, this flower was only about eight inches off the ground which meant I had to somehow get underneath it to take a picture. That part wasn’t too bad since my D750 has a flip-out screen, but the +10 Close-Up filter made focusing and composing really tricky. Add to that the wind which was whipping this flower around all over the place, and the fact that my D750 only has super slow contrast-detect autofocus in Live View…let’s just say this wasn’t an easy shot to get.

I took a couple shots at f/4 but quickly realized that there was no way I could get a depth of field wide enough for the photo to work without stopping down. I went to f/5.6 which gave me a little more wiggle room, and that turned out to be just the ticket. Out of a dozen photos this was the last one I took, and I’m so happy with how it turned out. I like the monochromatic color scheme, the bright blue, and even the way the flower points downward is pretty neat. It almost has a sense of kinetic energy, as if it’s a Kingfisher diving downward for a quick snack. The closed flower in the background seems like its watching or waiting, and the orange building in the background makes the bright blue just pop out of the screen.

I dunno…this one just might end up printed and going on my wall :)

A lot of things happened in the very short time that it took me to take this photo. And while I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite picture of a duck that I’ve ever taken, I do like the results and this image was only possible thanks to others that I have shot, and learned from, in the past. I was out for a walk around Theta Pond on the OSU campus one afternoon in April, armed with my D750 and an episode of MacBreak Weekly on my AirPods when I saw three ducks just hanging out by the sidewalk. I literally just walked on past, minding my own business and leaving them to mind theirs, when I realized that they didn’t flinch one bit as I strode by. It occurred to me that I might be able to get a picture if they were willing to sit still while I pointed my camera at them, so I figured I might as well give it a try. I went back, lowered my camera to the ground, put it in Live View, flipped out the rear screen, and snapped a couple pictures.

The duck didn’t budge an inch, so I pressed my luck just a bit. I crept ever so slightly closer, took another photo, and then the duck clearly started to notice me. I didn’t make any sudden or threatening movements, but I could tell this duck (and its friends) were a little skittish at this tall dude with a big camera intruding on their personal space. I held my breath (literally), placed my camera on the sidewalk, tilted it up at the duck, and took just a couple shots at f/1.8 with the focus point sitting squarely on the duck’s eye. And by golly, as my Dad would say, it worked.

I knew I was pressing my luck a bit by shooting at f/1.8, but the results speak for themselves. I’m telling you, even after owning this Little Lens That Could for nine years it still surprises me :)

This was a photo I didn’t plan, didn’t prepare for, and didn’t even think I could take. It was a nice moment of photographic serendipity that served as a good reminder of why I like this hobby so much, and something I’d like to try again in the future. You’re looking at a small patch of purple flowers in the corner of my backyard, and even though these things show up every year I still don’t know what they are or how to get a good picture of them. It’s not like last week’s shot where you can just point your camera at one of these and get a nice picture almost every time. Instead, these purple flowers are grouped together in tight masses, and what you usually end up with is a mass of muddy purple instead of a well-composed photograph. Nonetheless, on a warm April evening while my wife was reading to our youngest son in the backyard I thought I would grab my camera and see if I could wrest a photograph from this patch of purple flowers somehow.

I got down low, activated Live View on my Nikon D750, put a +2 close-up filter on my 50mm lens, tilted the rear screen up, and took a few pictures. It wasn’t really working out though, and as I reviewed my images I just wasn’t happy with what I was getting. It was, as I expected, mostly just a purple blob in the lower half with a light brown blob (i.e. my fence) in the top half. I kept at it though, and soon stumbled across another element I had not considered: the setting sun.

Turns out that the light streaming through the small spaces between my fence boards created a brilliant bokeh effect, but I didn’t realize it at first because (and I know this sounds dumb but it’s true) I was facing the wrong direction. I never considered composing my shots such that the sunlight was in the background, and as soon as I tried this new approach everything changed. I’m thrilled with the vertical out-of-focus light strips in the background, which look almost otherworldly and give this simple picture a mood that I would have never predicted. The one thing I’d like to re-do in the future, if I get the opportunity before these plants wilt, is find a way to isolate one single flower much like last week’s image of an Indian Paintbrush. This picture isn’t great in its own right, but it hints at greatness and gives me some fun new things to think about for future photos that I had not previously considered.