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

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.