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

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.

Another Spring, another photo of a Castilleja flower. Known as an Indian Paintbrush around here, these things show up all over the place in April and May, but their beauty is in no way lessened due to their prominence. This, like other similar photos I have taken and shared in the past, was shot in my neighbor’s field right across the street. It was early evening and I was outside with my two boys, mostly just passing the time with some unicycle-riding before bed, when I suggested we go over to the field and take some pictures. I had my D750 and close-up filters, just in case I wanted to do something slightly different than in the past. My oldest son grabbed his little Canon Powershot pocket camera while my youngest was content to just come with and look at the flowers, and the three of us ran across the street to see what we could find.

It’s not hard to take a great picture of these flowers. It’s really just a matter of finding one (or several, depending on the shot you are going for) and pointing your camera and pressing the shutter button. You’ll get a winner almost every time. And honestly, I think that’s part of the appeal for me: with very little effort anyone can take a beautiful flower picture, even if all you have is a simple mobile phone. In this case I show a few frames at f/2.8 and was decently happy with the result, but then I wondered what would happen if I got just a bit closer. The minimum focusing distance on my 50mm lens is about a foot and a half (I think, anyway. I haven’t checked in a while) which means to get a ton of background blur you have to use a super-wide aperture, which means the depth of field is really shallow, which means the flower isn’t as sharp as you might like.

Enter the magic world of close-up photography :)

I think I used a +2 filter on this, which made the minimum focusing distance much closer and gave me a ton of background blur and subject separation while also giving me some latitude to work with a smaller aperture and make the subject sharper. I shot this at f/6.7, even though it looks like it was f/1.8. That’s entirely due to the close-up filter, and even with such a small aperture you can still see that some parts of the flower are not in focus. The critical parts are though, and that’s what matters to me.

It took some experimentation and several attempts to get what is, at the end of the day, a really basic photo, but it’s one that I really like and a good reminder that photography doesn’t have to be complicated or produce wall-worthy artwork to be rewarding. If you can get a shot you like and learn something in the process, then that’s all you need.

I’m still finding out interesting ways to use my 10-stop ND filter, and most of them involve running water. Not that there’s a ton of that sort of thing where I live, but the opportunities I do have often give me some interesting results or at least some things to think about. Aside from the fountains in Theta Pond, the other easily accessible scene on campus that lends itself to long-exposure photography is the fountain at the south entrance to Low Library. I walk or bike past it most days, but it runs dry during the winter months because freezing water is pretty bad for pipes. In early April the powers-that-be decided to unleash the circulating torrent for the season, and once I saw that the fountain had been turned on I immediately thought about getting a long-exposure shot of it.

Initially I was going to use my D7100 but thought that its 75mm equivalent field of view would be too constricting, so when I did get the opportunity to take this shot I made sure to bring my full-frame D750 instead. I thought about shooting this scene during the early morning hours as I biked across campus, but thought that a picture later in the day would be more interesting. There’s a light pole just outside my window at my office and as the morning passed I waited until its shadow was pointing due north, and then grabbed my camera, tripod, ND filter, and went to the library to get to work.

I had a pretty good understanding of what I was aiming for, but there were some variables I couldn’t plan for or control. For one, pedestrians. The lawn in front of the fountain is usually full of students but on this particular day it was relatively empty. So that was definitely a win. Also, plentiful passers-by posed a problem but that was partly mitigated by the six-second shutter speed; unless someone stood still or walked very slowly, they were unlikely to leave their imprint on the image. Fortunately when I shot this there was an honest-to-goodness break in foot traffic, which was another unexpected win. Finally, the element of positioning: where to place my camera? I went as far back as I could without running into the steps leading up to the main doors, and tried to center the fountain in the frame as evenly as possible. In hindsight I wish I would have scooted over juuuuuuust a bit to the right, as my slight OCD tendencies cause me to clam up a bit when I look at this photo and realize that the fountain is ever so slightly off-center. However, I partially blame the landscape planners for that one: the footpath through the formal gardens in the background isn’t actually centered with the library. Still, it would have been nice if everything lined up just so.

I got about five images (all at f/16, ISO 100, 6 second shutter speed) but this one stood out for one reason: the lack of wind. In each of the other images a gust of wind blew the water to the left which looked kind of neat at first, but the more I looked at this picture the more I appreciated its simplicity and symmetry. I like the pillar of water in the middle and the slight skirt of water gently cascading off the pedestal, and it gives the scene just a hint of movement while also appearing calm and serene at the same time. The clear blue sky, green grass free of people, and smooth surface of the square collecting pool were icing on the cake, and in the end this is probably one of my favorite photos I have taken of this view of the OSU campus.

One fun thing I enjoy shooting from time to time is backlighting. It’s not that I don’t have the opportunity, just that I forget to take these kinds of shots even when they are right before my eyes. I especially enjoy photos of backlit flowers, but since we don’t really have any in our yard I like to keep my eyes open for situations like this and be ready when they arise. These flowers are just down the street from my house in the same field where my wife and I take our kids sledding in the winter, and each spring there is a patch of tulips and…um…other flowers that is fun to go look at. Two years ago I went down to this spot with my niece to help her understand some basic elements of exposure and depth of field, and sometimes it’s hard not to get a great shot when you have flowers like this. Still, it’s always worth trying to find a way of shooting familiar subjects in a bit more of a creative manner, and backlighting is a great tool to make that happen.

I shot this in the early evening on the first day of Spring, and while my wife was playing with our youngest son I asked our older son if he would want to bike down to this small field for some photos. He happily obliged, and we raced down the street to this spot where I quickly found myself on the ground and contorting myself in strange ways to get some photos. This was my favorite of the bunch for a couple of reasons. First of all, the backlighting. (Naturally.) The sun was just out of the top-right corner of the frame which gave these flowers a brilliant translucent glow, and I like how the five flowers display this to varying degrees. The foremost is almost transparent, and as you look farther back in the image you see others that are different degrees of opacity. It adds a three-dimensional feel to the image that I quite enjoy.

The one thing that really makes this image, though, is the tree branch arching over the top of the scene. That was most definitely intentional, though quite difficult to frame since I was working with the rear LCD screen on my Nikon D750 and it was not exactly easy to see with the bright light. Still, I am mostly satisfied with the way the tree feels like a protective arm covering the scene and telling the flowers Nothing bad’s going to happen to you. Not on my watch.

Longtime Weekly Fifty readers know I rarely post pictures of my kids, and when I do you can’t see their faces. That’s because this blog isn’t for me to show off my family, but to share my love of photography and my journey to continually learn more about it. However, every now and then a picture comes along that happens to have my kids in it that I feel justified in sharing here. So that’s one fairly unique thing about this photo.

The other singular characteristic of this picture is how it was shot. I took it with my iPhone, and I can count on one hand the number of times I have posted a mobile phone photo here. Not that mobile phone cameras are any less worthy of being counted among their large-sensor brethren; I just find my particular photographic learning path to involve more DSLRs and fewer iPhones. That’s just me though.

With that out of the way, let me take a minute and explain what’s going on here. This is the fourth week in a row that I’m sharing a picture taken from a very frozen Lake Carl Blackwell when it froze solid back in February. If you’re tired of seeing shots of frozen lakes, maybe next week’s image will be more to your taste. But I’m not, especially since this so rarely happens here in Oklahoma :) As we were out walking around near (but never on) the lake we came across a bit of an outcropping–a mini promontory, if you will–and I thought it would make for a really interesting photo with the boys’ backs to my camera. It’s all about context, after all: the same picture without my kids would look uninteresting, with no sense of size or place to help orient you, the viewer. But with these two kids looking out you get a sense of scale, and their stances impart a bit of emotion and feeling onto whoever sees the image. Or at least, I hope they do. I didn’t tell them to pose or do anything at all except just stand there and look out at the lake, and this was the result. I didn’t spend more than five seconds taking this picture but I’m pleased with the result, with one exception: I should have held my phone about two inches higher to eliminate the awkward intersection of the horizon line with the head of my son on the right. It’s such an obvious mistake and would have been so simple to remedy, but alas, it is what is. And I’m not going to spend my time picking that particular nit lest it ruin my enjoyment of the image.

This photo is unedited too–no cropping, color adjustment, or even straightening of the horizon. It is how it was shot, and it’s a good reminder that the right composition with the right light can allow mobile phones to work wonders. You’d never be able to get the depth of field in a shot like this from an iPhone that you could get with a dedicated camera, a wide (but not too wide) lens, and a big aperture, but then again, you can’t fit that setup in your pocket either. And sometimes convenience just wins.

When we were gathering up the kids to take them out to Lake Carl Blackwell, I had to make a choice: what camera/lens combination to bring. Maybe the X100F since it would give me more candid-style shots? Or the D750 and 50mm lens for that classic not-too-wide, not-too-narrow look? What about the 70-200 for wildlife? I really didn’t know what to do, so I ended up toting my D7100 and 50mm lens mostly for the sake of simplicity and also because if I accidentally dropped it on the ice (a very real possibility, given how slick everything was) I wouldn’t be out thousands of dollars.

That combination was great for the entire time we were out at the lake…right until about five minutes before we left. My youngest son wanted to walk out on a peninsula that jutted out into the lake, and as we got near the end my wife spotted this bird standing near the edge just minding its own business. We were pretty sure it noticed us, but it just kept to itself as we stopped and stared. I didn’t want to scare it, but I really wanted to get a picture.

And that’s when I started kicking myself for not bringing my zoom lens.

The only way to get a picture of a wild animal with a 50mm lens is to get close. Very close. And then you have to crop the dickens out of the image and hope there’s enough pixels left to salvage something. I very slowly, very quietly, walked nearer to the bird while pausing every few seconds to get a few shots. He eyed me cautiously for a few minutes and then crouched down, stretched his wings, and took off. I had my camera in high-speed shooting mode and just held down the shutter as long as I could, hoping to get one image that might work. And the result is what you see here: a 3.4-megapixel image (cropped down from a 24-megapixel original) of a bird in flight, taking with a crop-sensor Nikon D7100 and a lowly 50mm lens.

While the shot isn’t perfect, it’s way way better than anything I thought I would be able to get. I’m still not entirely sure how I ended up with this shot, especially since the continuous high-speed shooting on that D7100 is pretty slow and the buffer maxes out at about 7 images. But somehow it all worked out, and the frozen lake in the background makes this an image I don’t think I’m likely to repeat anytime soon, if ever.

Thanks, kind bird, for helping me get a really cool photo.

This is another look at a very cold lake in Oklahoma. In other words, this is something you just don’t see very often down here. As with last week’s photo, this is Lake Carl Blackwell completely frozen, a few days after one of the longest stretches of cold weather in recent memory. When my wife and I took our kids out to the lake just to walk around and look at the strange sights, we didn’t really know what to expect other than that the surface of the water would be smooth. Which it was. And covered in snow. Which it also was. But this thing? No, I can safely say I had no idea I would see this.

So what is it? Good question. I think, though I’m not entirely certain, that this is some kind of plant or shrub that was covered in a layer, or many layers, of ice. And I mean that ice was thick. We tried whacking it with a pretty large stick, and it didn’t budge. I don’t know what weather conditions would cause a bush (albeit having lost its foliage to the winter season) to freeze such that it looks like this, but it wasn’t at all what I expected. I also have a hunch that winds from the lake battered this plant, and the rocks against which it is nestled, with a freezing mist for several days as well which led to such a thick covering of ice.

The trick was to find a way to photograph it, and I think I did OK except for one thing: I should have used a smaller aperture. I shot this at f/4 but f/8 would have been a little better, mostly because the background would be a lot sharper. Normally I’m a big fan of blurry backgrounds, but not in this case. I think the shallower depth of field belies just how smooth the surface of the lake really was. I have to give myself a bit of grace though, since I had never taken a picture like this and wasn’t really sure what exposure settings would be ideal. In fact we so rarely get any significant snowfall down here that any photo of snow is somewhat of a challenge I think I did OK though, and hopefully next time (if there is a next time, which, Lord willing, won’t be for many years!) I’ll have a better sense of just what to do to get a good shot of a scene like this.

During the extreme cold snap of mid February I didn’t actually take many photos. It was just too cold! Even though I often thought about going out with my camera while we were stuck inside huddled under blankets trying to conserve power, I mostly just erred on the side of comfort at the expense of photographic creativity. That changed a bit as the weather warmed, and when temperatures rose into the 40’s my wife and I took our boys out to Lake Carl Blackwell west of town just to let them see what a frozen lake looked like. Living in Oklahoma you just don’t see things like this too often, so we wanted to take the opportunity while it was available.

And nature did not disappoint!

Ok so first things first: we did not go on the ice. Even though it seemed plenty thick for walking around, and it certainly withstood being pounded with pretty large rocks, there’s no telling when you could come across a weak spot or a crack or other such unforeseen issue, the results of which would be cold at best and tragic at worst.

What we did do, however, was spend a while just walking around and admiring the scenery while letting the boys whack the ice with long pieces of wood we brought with. I also kept my eyes open for photographic opportunities, the first of which you see here. I really liked the contrasting elements, particularly the deep shadows along the left side. The lake itself is smooth as glass, and the undulating ice-covered mounds are so starkly different they almost seem photoshopped in. I was using my D7100 which does not have a flip-out screen, which was a big miss on my part. I really should have brought my D500 or D750! I had to get down low to get this shot, which was nearly impossible on the outcropping I was standing on, which meant I had to use Live View. And since the glare was so bad I literally could not see what I was photographing. I also didn’t know what aperture to use. I stopped down to f/8, focused on the closest ice mound, lowered the camera, and took a few shots. This one actually worked! How, I’m not exactly sure. But it was neat to see this scene and capture it to show people someday who might not believe that back in 2021 Lake Carl Blackwell really did freeze over.

I shot this in mid February when Oklahoma was in the middle of one of the longest and harshest cold snaps in recent memory. We had a near-record number of days below freezing, some with a high hovering around Zero. (If you live in the midwest United States you know what I’m talking about–we had it easy compared to states farther north!) My wife and I didn’t leave the house for a few days, and neither did our kids, but I really wanted to find a way to document the cold and snow and generally really bad weather conditions. I wasn’t about to spend more than two minutes outside in order to do it though! Then one evening I noticed this thing in the backyard and realized it might have the answer.

What you’re looking at here is a simple weather vane my youngest son did as a school project back in October. The idea was that with a pencil, a pin, a straw, and some cardstock he could create a basic weather vane to show wind direction. It was one of those simple school projects that I would never have thought of on my own, but ended up being a pretty cool demonstration of some basic science principles. He stuck this thing in the ground, recorded a few measurements, and then just sort of left it sit.

And sit it most certainly has. This weird little school project has survived rain, wind, ice storms, snow, and record freezing temperatures and (as my dad would say) by golly it still works. And I’ll be darned (another dad-ism) if that straw doesn’t keep on rotating to show wind direction even after all this time. For whatever reason this thing is like a Timex watch (have I shown my age yet?) and I’m curious just how long it will hang in there. So it made sense to me to use it as a way of showing a bit about the strange winter we have been having.

To get this shot I grabbed my D750 and 50mm lens, ran outside with the sun at my back, angled myself so my own shadow wouldn’t be in the picture, flipped down the rear screen, turned on Live View, and started shooting before my fingers froze into little pink popsicles. I didn’t really think too much about creating a compelling composition–mostly I just wanted to get back inside. I did wait just a few seconds for the wind to aim the arrow sideways because the other shots where it was facing towards or away from the camera just didn’t seem all that interesting. I shot at f/2.8 to balance sharpness and depth of field, and used continuous high-speed shooting in the hope that something would turn out. And I’ll be a monkey’s uncle (I’m now officially my dad) if this photo wasn’t almost exactly what I hoped it would be.

Something kind of interesting happened as I was out shooting with my 10-stop ND filter on a chilly February morning. I didn’t have anything specific in mind other than to shoot a picture of this particular fountain on campus, but once I got there and set up my tripod I wondered if there might be a way to incorporate geese into the shot. I took a few shots and liked how the swimming geese added some interesting streaks across the image, but something about the end result just seemed cheap and boring. I thought I could do better. Trouble is, geese aren’t really known for cooperating or doing what you want them to do at all. They mostly just kind of ignore you, hiss at you, or run away. Still, I did think I could get something if I worked at it for a bit.

As I reviewed my images briefly on the back of my camera I thought it would be kind of neat if I could get a shot where one goose was frozen (not literally, but you know what I mean) but everything else was smooth and showed motion. I didn’t know what I could really do to make that kind of a shot happen though, but after some experimenting I realized I would need to strike a balance with my shutter speed: too long and there’s no way a goose would be still in the image. Too short and the picture wouldn’t show movement the way I was hoping. And then there’s the matter of the animals, and trying to work around their obtuse agenda in order to get a shot.

Finally one goose did swim by and, as luck would have it, actually held still for a bit. I quickly dialed in a shutter speed of four seconds and an aperture of f/4.8, and hoped for the best. I pretty much just sat there and held my breath while the shutter was open, hoping against all odds that the goose would remain still. And I’m telling you, not one second after the shutter clicked and the exposure ended that goose in the foreground turned and swam away. It was almost like it was staring at me as I stared back, or maybe it was even posing for the shot. Whatever the case may have been, it resulted in a shot that that, while not perfect, does fill me with a sense of pride and gives me some new techniques to try as I explore the concept of long exposures.

Also on an unrelated note, this post marks the completion of eight years of doing this blog. Eight years, gone in a flash. I’ve learned an awful lot and I appreciate all the comments and questions from you, my readers, and look forward to many many more years of doing Weekly Fifty.