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

So this is a huge departure for me. If you have been following Weekly Fifty for any length of time at all, you have probably never seen a picture like this before. But my goodness, you’ll probably see a lot more like this in the coming weeks and months :) It all started with a promotional video that I did for work back in April. Well, I didn’t actually do the video. I was asked to be in it for a few seconds, talking about one of my favorite books from when I was younger. As the videographer was setting up her gear I noticed that she had some small tube-shaped lights placed throughout the space, so I asked if I could look at one of them a bit more in depth. She gladly obliged and handed me one for me to check out while she told me a bit more about it. These lights (Nanlite PavoTube II 6C, along with one or two larger versions she had for the video shoot) could change colors at will, hold that color at a specific level of brightness, and even had built-in magnets for attaching to surfaces.

I was hooked.

It didn’t take me long to get a couple of my own, and the results have been incredible. I’m getting shots that I never knew were possible, all thanks to these little battery-powered bulbs that I didn’t even know existed. Paired with my macro lens, these lights immediately opened up entirely new worlds of photographic possibilities unlike anything I had experienced since I got the macro lens itself back in the fall of 2021. I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend these lights since everyone’s photographic needs are unique, but I sure am having fun playing around with them and exploring a whole new side of photography.

Case in point: the Super Nintendo controller you see above. This is one of the first shots I took with the lights, but I think it turned out really well. I dug out this old video game controller (well, semi-old. It’s from our 2016 SNES Classic Edition but we do still have our original controllers in the closet somewhere) and set it on top of our washing machine to get a smooth, white, reflective surface. Then I set one light to purple and the other to a deep orange, mounted my D750 and 105mm macro lens on a tripod, and took a series of images that, in the span of a few minutes, blew my mind wide open.

I have some external flashes but I never considered how the careful manipulation of colored light could create such a dramatic effect on photography subjects. The rich colors, deep shadows, and highlights on the L/R shoulder buttons make this image spring to life in a way that I had previously only seen on the cover of magazines. Taking this shot was a revelation, and I’m absolutely stunned to think about the types of shots I might be able to take the more I practice.

This is going to be fun :)

This was one of those unplanned moments of image-making serendipity that is so much fun, and one of my favorite aspects of photography in general. It came about completely and entirely by chance while I was completing some routine chores in the kitchen like washing dishes and helping our kids with their lunch on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I was refilling the soap dispenser in the sink when I noticed something kind of cool that never crossed my mind before: little bubbles, almost frozen in time, slowly wandering up through the translucent liquid on their way to the surface. It almost didn’t even register as a picture opportunity, but then I remembered one of the lessons from my brother’s recent visit: look to the familiar. And then look again.

I knew right away that I had to try to take a photo.

Here’s the setup I used:

I quickly discovered that this was going to be much more tricky than I initially realized. For starters, when viewed super duper up-close the bubbles moved way faster than I anticipated. My initial idea of using a small aperture and slow shutter was definitely not going to work. Also, even getting a clear bubble to focus on proved exceedingly tricky because they were so small and depth of field was so thin. Finally, I was hungry and didn’t want to spend hours composing a simple shot :)

I solved the first problem by moving the soap dispenser from the table over to the window as you can see in the above behind-the-scenes image. That gave me a lot more light to use, but then I realized another problem about the aperture. Even though I could now use a small aperture and a fast shutter speed, shooting at f/19 or f/22 meant that way too many bubbles were in focus and the resulting image was just kind of a mess without anything really interesting to look at. I dialed in a wide aperture of f/6.7 and slowly turned the manual focus dial on my lens while also rotating the soap dispenser until finally one bubble, the one you see in this week’s shot, became tack-sharp. I wish it had been a little bigger but, alas, that’s just the way things go in Albuquerque when taking pictures.

The large aperture meant that the one bubble, and pretty much only the one bubble, was sharp and focused which is exactly what I was hoping to do. The angle of my camera, and the backlighting of the sun, transformed all the other hundreds of tiny bubbles into beautiful out-of-focus blurry spots and the result is an image that I find fascinating and I hope you do too. Your eye is immediately drawn to the bubble, and then you (hopefully) start to notice other things like the bokeh on the left side and the variation of bokeh shapes from circles to footballs throughout the image.

That just leaves one big issue to address: the color of the image. It’s blue but, as you can see in the behind-the-scenes image, the original soap color is kind of a syrupy yellow. I used Photoshop (solid blue layer on bottom, and a blend mode of…I forget, honestly) to change the color to blue. Something about a close-up shot of yellow liquid just didn’t look all that great even though it was clearly much more representative of real life. Is it cheating to change the color to blue? I don’t know, and honestly, I don’t really know if I want to know. I like this color better, so I’m going with it :)

As a photographic experiment I would classify this as a resounding success, and as just something simple and fun to try I can confidently say it exceeded my quite meager expectations. Maybe I’ll try it again someday with soap of a different color and see what happens. Hmm.

One thing about living in central Oklahoma that I never knew until we moved here in 2009 is that most homeowners wage a continual war against the little purple plant you see here. Henbit is a scourge among front lawn everywhere, and as the days lengthen and the sun crawls back from the winter doldrums, this plant inevitable returns to almost any grassy area untouched by the herbicide sprayed by the truckload by homeowners and groundskeepers all over town. My wife and I have never been ones to douse our yard with weed killer and instead just kind of do our best to ignore the henbit and other similar annoyances until they fade away by the start of summer, and that means we get to (have to?) see these little violet buds all over the place in springtime. And when my brother and his family were visiting in mid-March, I discovered how beautiful these can be as photo subjects.

There’s only a few minutes each day when you can take a picture like this one, and it’s all due to the angle of the sun. This henbit flower is usually found, as is the case here, about 2-4 inches from the ground. During most of the day the sun is at too high of an overhead angle to get the nice backlighting you see here, and in the early morning or evening as the sun is at just the right angle it quickly moves away from that position rendering this type of picture nearly impossible. As my brother and I were walking around outside while our kids threw frisbees and kicked soccer balls, he made a remark about the purple flowers and it got both of us thinking about possible macro shots. I got way down low (I can’t remember if I actually laid on the ground, but I might have. I know my brother did.) and dialed in a pretty small aperture of f/19 and took a few shots. It quickly became clear that the main issue here was the angle of my camera, not the sun. I had to shoot almost directly into the sun in order to capture the backlighting, but also be careful to not wash out the image with excess lens flare. After some experimentation I got the shot you see here, and I think it works really well.

This is the final of a series of pictures that I’m posting here on Weekly Fifty from my brother’s visit, and I can confidently say that I did indeed learn an awful lot while he was here. Not necessarily from a photography perspective, but more about observing the world around me and taking advantage of opportunities I often miss. Seeing the world through fresh eyes, especially my own yard, helped me find picture ideas I have overlooked hundreds of times over the years. And besides that, it’s just super cool to hang out with my brother and his family :)

I’m not sure what to think about this picture. It reminds me of a similar shot I took years ago with my 50mm lens and set of close-up filters, though the visual qualities (save for the amount of color) in this one far surpass the original: it’s much sharper with a more pleasing background falloff, which is what you get when you use an actual macro lens instead of faking it with filters. However, when you consider that the latter costs a mere fraction of the former, you can’t point out too many flaws and even after all this time I’m still surprised at how effective those little glass screw-on macro filters can really be. It’s a lesson in one of my favorite aspects of photography, that of growth and change. Rather than looking at the original shot and thinking about its faults, it’s much more useful to see a progression over time and evidence of learning and, ultimately, change, as a result.

Anyway, so back to this bolt on a fence post :)

I shot this when my brother and his family were visiting in mid March, and I was once again reminded of the joys of discovering photo opportunities right in your own back yard. Or, rather, your neighbor’s back yard. He has a macro lens also, and whenever he and I get together we make it a habit of just wandering around and seeing what pictures present themselves even when we least expect it, and the result of such searching is what you see here. We were walking and chatting and photographing while all our kids played frisbee in the field across the street, and he pointed out this rusty bold on a fence that I have probably seen a thousand times over the years but never considered as a picture subject. I brought my lens close, adjusted the aperture, shifted the angle that I was pointed at, and fired off a handful of clicks on the shutter while continuing to play around with my exposure values.

What I noticed right away was that the pictures I took at much smaller apertures were…well, they weren’t great. I have learned that when I take close-up pictures I generally need the aperture to be much smaller than traditional images, but shooting at f/11 seemed to be ideal here. It struck a good balance between subject sharpness and background blur, whereas f/22 made the chain links behind this bolt much clearer and, as a result, more distracting. I also intentionally composed the image such that there was a bit of foreground blur as well, which is something I have learned I quite enjoy including in macro shots. In the end this won’t go down as one of my top-ten favorites or anything, but it was a fun learning experience and helped me to see some progression since getting those screw-on filters years ago. And it’s that sense of growth and change which makes all the difference.

This is a style of picture that I have found I really enjoy creating with my macro lens. It’s a pretty basic composition, with one clear subject in the middle isolated almost entirely from the background, and a secondary object (in this case, a tree branch) going through the frame to catch the viewer’s gaze after initially focusing on the primary subject. It’s not a complicated composition and, in fact, it’s remarkably similar to what I put up on Weekly Fifty last week, but it’s a fun type of picture to create and I still find it challenging and rewarding even after all these years.

There were several things to consider when I took this picture: which group of bulbs to use as my subject (the tree I was standing near was positively brimming with these little flower clumps), how to position myself so the branch was at just the right angle, what to have in the background behind the subject, and how much to isolate the main clump of buds from the rest of its counterparts all over the tree. I took a few shots a bit farther out that showed more of the branch and some additional surroundings, but as I was looking through my pictures I decided that this one was really the standout since it left no question as to what was the focal point of the image while also including just a bit of color in the foreground and background to add a smidgen of context.

As with any macro shot the aperture was of primary consideration, and thankfully even though the sky was overcast there was still plenty of light to shoot at f/13 and still get a nice low ISO of 360. The single bulb in the foreground (which was less than 1/4″ in diameter, just to give a sense of the small size of what you’re looking at) is nice and sharp with the rest slowly becoming blurry, and that was precisely the effect I was aiming for. I’m pleased that it worked out well, though if I could change one thing about this image it would be the bland background. My shot from last week had a nice bright blue sky and a bit of backlighting, and I think that kind of effect would have been fun to see here. I guess I’ll just have to keep my eyes open for similar opportunities in the next few weeks as things warm up and spring starts to show its colors all around.

I used to think these flowers were from the Dogwood tree, but I’m pretty sure they are actually found on Bradford Pears. I think. Like I’ve said many times on here I’m no botanist or arborist or any kind of -ist, really, but I do like going out and taking pictures (photographist?) of the world around me and that’s really all I did here. This is almost an example of the kind of picture you can get right in your very own back yard, but to apply that common description would be a bit misleading here: this is not, in fact, my own back yard. However, the tree does belong to my neighbor and this branch was hanging over the fence into my yard so I guess it’s really an issue of semantics. In any case, this flower was practically begging to be photographed when I saw it on a bright sunny Saturday afternoon in mid-March and I was glad to oblige.

One of my favorite ways to enjoy photography is simply doing it with another person, and that’s exactly how this image came about. I often find that when I’m walking around taking pictures with someone else I’m able to see things, even familiar everyday objects and scenes, with a fresh, new perspective that brings out a lot of picture-taking opportunities I don’t usually see. I shot this while hanging out in the yard with my brother, his wife, and their kids who came down for a visit over Spring Break while my brother and I were just kind of walking around, our cameras at the ready, catching up on life and looking for some fun photo opportunities. He saw a branch full of flowers bending lazily over the fence, brought his camera and macro lens up to his eye, and started taking some pictures. I felt almost a bit silly right there in the moment: for all my talk about looking for photo opportunities in everyday life, here was a great one that I see literally every single day but didn’t even think about until my brother showed up and put a new perspective on the ordinary.

I quickly followed his lead and started taking some shots of my own, not really expecting much or thinking they would turn into anything particularly special, but when I loaded my RAW files into Lightroom I was pleasantly surprised at what I saw. The rich purples on the petals, the bright blue sky, and the tree branch bisecting the frame and adding a bit of energy to the image, all came together to form a macro shot that I like a lot. It was a really fun reminder about one of those fundamental aspects of photography that I need to remember more often.

If this pictures gives you a bit of deja vu, your brain is probably on to something. It’s remarkably similar to this one I took back in November, and that’s actually the reason I almost didn’t take this week’s picture at all. It seemed too derivative, too uninspired, and possibly even too boring to be an interesting shot. But the thing is, when I saw this jar of sugar sitting on the counter one warm Saturday morning while I was eating breakfast with my son, it just seemed like it was begging to be photographed. So I picked up my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, clicked the shutter a few times, and got the image you see here. I like to think of it more as a shot that was inspired by the original five months earlier rather than a cheap sequel or copy of it. Perhaps that’s just some kind of semantic nonsense, but I felt like I learned something by taking this picture and that’s all I need :)

The original shot used a 20-ounce soup mug that I used for tea as its main subject, but in the months since then I have migrated to coffee which I like to sweeten a teaspoon of sugar and a bit of half-and-half. I keep the sugar in this little jar that you see here and, after pouring my second cup of coffee for the morning, I scooped out a bit of sugar and left the jar sitting on the counter while I talked with my son over breakfast. The sun soon cast its morning rays through the kitchen window and the sugar jar began to take on an almost otherworldly appearance: glowing in the golden rays, the sugar inside taking on what almost seemed like its own inner light, the silverware sitting in the dish rack behind sparkling with a particular vibrance that only shows up in that special slice of time right as the day is getting started.

Clearly, I had to capture the moment in photo form.

I shot this at f/3, 1/180 second, ISO 160, and from just a slight upward angle as if to heighten the presence of the jar and showcase the bright points of light dancing off the forks and spoons in the background. I think the shot works pretty well as-is, but if I had to do it again I might do more of a straight-on composition to make the scene feel more homely and less monolithic, like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even so, the shot does a pretty solid job of capturing the essence of the scene as I saw it while sitting at the table, and is a fun reminder of the beauty that we can find even in everyday ordinary things around us. Like a little jar of sugar.

There are certain immutable, unchangeable, perpetual signs of spring that come around each year regardless of whatever natural circumstances might befall our front yard. Henbit will always cast its purple pass over the brown buffalo grass, thunderstorms will always roll and echo across the plains, and these little yellow crocuses or, as I like to say however outdated and deprecated the plural may be, croci, will burst forth in the alcove between our garage and the east wall of our house. The delicate yellow flowers appear as though on cue, spread their petals during the day, close up tight at night, and then return to the ground after less than a week to remain in hiding until another year passes. It’s natural clockwork, and a fun reminder that winter will certainly end and the cold will too yet pass, and a harbinger of mild days and long evenings soon to come.

The thing is, each year when these little flowers show up I’m just not quite sure what to do with them–photographically speaking, anyway. I always think they will be cool photo opportunities, but when I bust out my camera and get down on the ground and take a few shots, the results never quite look like how I want them to look. I find that it’s often helpful to envision some kind of end result when taking photos and then basically work backwards from there: what do I need to do with my exposure settings, choice of focal lengths, etc., in order to make that happen? Those thoughts usually drive the process and, hopefully, lead to some kind of pleasing end result. With the croci (crocuses?) both the journey and the destination are always a bit of a muddle. That said, I still do enjoy the process and even the end result even if I don’t quite know what I have in mind or what I’m actually doing.

I normally post photos in the order that they were taken. If I take a picture at 2:30pm and then another one at 2:35pm, my usual course of action is to post the first one first, and the second one second. Sometimes it’s just easier to do it that way since it makes logical sense in my mind, but there’s also the educational angle I like to consider too: the latter image will often be informed by something I learned when composing the former image. And while that progression is certainly the case when looking at this week’s image next to last week’s image, I ended up posting them out of order just because I really liked the second one more than the first. And because it’s my blog, I figure…why not :)

Side note in case you’re wondering: These are not mushrooms, nor is there a gorge anywhere nearby. Rather, they remind me of a particularly memorable course from Mario Kart Wii. Not a particularly awesome course, but one that sticks in my mind due to the way it sends all the racers bouncing atop giant mushrooms sticking far into the air. Also, my oldest son wanted me to mention that there is, and I quote, “an insane wall-clipping glitch” on that level that he and his brother invented.

In a lot of ways this is the photo that could have been. It’s a good start, but I think if I could do it differently I would have changed a few things to get a better end result. Overall the composition is fine, but there are two main factors that make this about a C+ or B- instead of a solid A. The first is the focus: At f/9.5 the depth of field is fine, but a smaller aperture would have yielded a much sharper subject while still, I’m pretty sure, giving plenty of blur to the background. Even after more than a year I still don’t quite have a good sense of how apertures work when shooting at very close range on my macro lens, and I almost always end up taking pictures at wider apertures than I really need to. In this case, had I shot at f/16 or f/22 I think I would have gotten a much better result without much in the way of compromise.

The other factor that hinders this image is the exposure. I should have underexposed it slightly and then adjusted in Lightroom, but as it stands the subject is a bit too overexposed and there’s nothing I could do to get it under control. Despite shooting in RAW and having access to all the data captured by the camera sensor, there aren’t really any viable options when there is no data to use at all–which is exactly what you see in the blown-out highlights.

So what do I like about this photos? For one, I think the huge circle of sun blur right behind the subject is pretty awesome. I don’t think I could have planned that better even if I had tried, and it’s something that I am probably not likely to replicate any time soon. I also like the subject in the center paired with another one of these plant-thingeys off to the side and behind it. It lends a sense of three-dimensional space that I think is really cool. Also, I like that my wife said she likes this picture, and at the end of the day I trust her judgement much more than my own :D

Photography is all about capturing light. In fact, the word photography literally means drawing with light. One of the always-challenging but ever-rewarding aspects of learning photography over the years has been refining my ability to see the light in a given scene: where is it coming from? Where is it, like Unicron or Cotton-Eyed Joe, going? Where is the subject in relation to the light? What will happen if I reposition myself, or the light, to change the mood and composition of the image? So many things to think about and, often, so little time during which to think about them. At least that was the case with this week’s photo, anyway. I shot this while out hiking with my family at Lake Carl Blackwell, and while walking down the path I came across this scene:

It wasn’t much to look at, and I nearly just kept on going without giving this dried-up plant any consideration whatsoever. Then I thought about the light and what effect it was having on this subject, and paused to consider this rather unremarkable scene from a photographer’s perspective. From one angle, such as the iPhone shot you see directly above, there was nothing interesting going on whatsoever. But from another angle, with the subject backlit, the entire scene was transformed into something else entirely. No longer a small collection of dry, dusty flora: instead the image came alive with bright highlights around the edges, rich color gradations, and a beautifully-blurred background. I had my Nikon D500 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens with me, but rather than trying to get as close as possible to this plant I instead just attempted to create an interesting composition regardless of how close or far away I was. What I got is what you see here, albeit with a slight crop in Lightroom in order to remove some empty space on the left. I shot this at f/8 but also took some at smaller apertures and, once again, I was reminded by my macro lens how rarely I really need to shoot with a wide aperture. Even at f/8 the center is tack-sharp while the leaves (or whatever you call them) just to the right and to the left are ever so slightly blurry, which lends a sense of depth to the scene that is, as Goldilocks might say, just right.