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

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.

Before I really dive into this week’s picture, I just want to take a minute and thank everyone who has been a part of Weekly Fifty over the years. This post marks ten years of this blog–slightly more, in fact, because the first post was on March 5, 2013. In the months and weeks leading up to today’s picture I thought about ways to comemmorate the occasion: a look back at my favorite shots, a highlight video of my best audio descriptions, a Buzzfeed-style list like the Top Five Things I Learned About Photography…you get the idea. In the end I decided to not really do anything except this writeup that you are reading now (or listening to, as the case may be) and just sort of continue with business as usual. I think it’s good to mark and take note of occasions like this, but sometimes I feel like the best thing to do is just keep the status quo going. I certainly have learned a great deal, and taken many shots I’m proud of, and gotten to meet so many encouraging, helpful, curious, and just plain nice people over the years (Special thanks to D. Welker, who follows me on my YouTube Channel, for sending me a 2023 calendar of his amazing pictures of Utah) and largely it’s that community that keeps me going. Your comments, questions, words of encouragement, and helpful tips over the past decade have been downright inspiring and I don’t think I can adequately express just how much I have appreciated all your input and support. Weekly Fifty wouldn’t be the same without you, and I’m so glad to have you along for the journey.

With that being said, I do want to, you know, talk about this week’s photo since that’s kind of the whole point of the blog :) I have tried shots like this from time to time, occasionally with my close-up filters and sometimes with a normal lens but cropped way in, and they have never quite worked out how I hoped. With the former I could never seem to quite get my shot composed properly, or focused right, or just…looking good. With the latter, well, cropping is fine but it’s not a great substitute for a true close-up lens. But when you have a macro lens…*chef’s kiss*

I took this photo while my family and I were out hiking at Lake Carl Blackwell. I brought my D500 and 105mm f/2.8 Macro lens (The former in case I needed to fire off lots of picture of wildlife in rapid succession, the latter in case I saw any opportunities for close-up shots) and while I never did encounter any fauna worth photographing, I did stumble upon a couple of opportunities for shots of static subjects such as the one you see here. We were rounding a bend in the path: water to the north, open fields to the south, and a thicket of brambles on our left that reminded me of one of the most difficult levels of Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest. A level that, to this day, has one of the most mesmerizing soundtracks I have ever heard in a video game.

I thought it would be fun to try to take a close-up picture of one of the thorns, particularly with of its deep red color paired to a beautiful backlight as the sun crept downward. I asked my oldest son to hold one of the branches steady while I lined up a shot, and while I fidgeted with aperture values he told me about some boss battle strategies he has been using in Breath of the Wild. (Side note for parents: video games make for outstanding conversation topics. Just show a bit of interest, ask some questions, and your kids will happily share all day long. It’s great.) I angled my field of view just a bit to get some foreground and background blur on the branch, and thus direct the viewer’s attention directly to the prickly spire in the middle. I did have to crop the picture just a bit to get the result you see here, but I think it turned out about as well as I could have hoped and, as is often the case, this picture does give me some ideas of things to try next time :)

And with that, I just want to thank you again, dear readers (and listeners), for being part of Weekly Fifty for what I can now accurately say describe as more than a decade. When I look back to my early shots and think about how much I have learned in the past ten years, it makes me extraordinarily optimistic for what lies ahead. In some ways I feel like I have only just begun to learn about photography, and I’m glad to have you along for the ride :)

Fro about the past three years my wife and I have enjoyed going on hikes with our kids at Lake Carl Blackwell just west of town. At some point in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic we discovered the many equestrian trails that snake around the countryside close to the shore out there, and have made hiking them a weekend afternoon staple ever since. We like to head out there in the winter months since it’s much nicer to layer up and then unzip jackets as the day warms up than it is to drench our clothes in sweat in the 100-degree summer afternoons, but one tradeoff of hiking in January is that photo opportunities are a bit more tricky to discover. Not that they don’t exist, mind you, but it’s not as easy to make interesting images when the scenery all around you is mostly browns and grays. It just means you have to look a bit harder sometimes :)

This little moss tuffet was just to the side of the path about an hour into our hike, and initially I just sort of noted it in my mind and walked on by. After quick consideration I grabbed my camera, hollered to my wife and our kids that I would catch up with them in a minute, and knelt down to see if this bit of greenery would make an interesting photo subject. What caught my eye wasn’t the color but the lighting: the angle of the sun lent an almost otherworldly glow to the green velvet texture, and I thought it might be cool to catch it in a picture. I only spent about 15 seconds composing, and taking, this shot so the results aren’t as perfect as I would have preferred, but I’m pretty pleased with it nonetheless. Unlike most of my macro photos I used my Nikon D500 here, since the APS-C sensor essentially multiplies the focal length of any attached lens by 1.5. (I know it doesn’t literally do that…) That’s a good thing for wildlife pictures which is why I had it on the hike, but in general I just like the look of my full-frame D750 when shooting macro. I used Live View which is a bit snappier on my D500 compared to my D750, and took a couple initial images at f/4 thinking that it would give me a good balance between sharp subject and blurry background. Then just for good measure I dialed in an f/8 aperture and took one or two more photos, and tossed my camera back in my bag and ran to catch up with my family.

Turns out the last picture I shot, out of roughly one dozen, was the only one that worked. All the rest were focused either a bit too close or a bit too far, and this one struck an ideal balance that I don’t think I could have done better if I had tried. I was really happy with how the shot came out, especially with the top of the tuft kind of glowing green, and I also liked that I didn’t have to spend too much time on it either. And if you squint really closely, this image kind of looks like the top of a green gnome’s head, sticking out of the ground as if to get the lay of the land before going back into hiding for a little while.

I wasn’t sure about posting this photo. On the one hand, it’s a perfectly acceptable image of a bird in the winter, complete with snow flurries falling across the frame. It’s fine, right? Well, for the most part, sure. But looking at this image makes me think of the shot that could have been which, I am somewhat loath to admit, is a sentiment that creeps into my mind a bit too often. I suppose that’s probably not entirely uncommon for many photographers, but still, I try to look at my not-quite-great shots as more of learning opportunities than regrets and as such that is the angle with which I am attempting to approach this one. I mean, even if the image doesn’t hold up under strict scrutiny, it was a fun shot to take and one that is rather unique in my portfolio :)

I shot this while looking through the window of an Airbnb in the middle of Missouri on a chilly December morning just a few days before Christmas. It was one of the coldest and snowiest days of the season so far, and my wife and I were planning our day and when to go visit her mom and stepdad while our boys played Wind Waker HD on the Nintendo that came with the place. As we talked she paused and motioned for me to get my camera and look out the window, and I was shocked to see a few birds just hanging out and minding their own business, feathers fluffed and eyes alert, as the snow fell all around. I only had my D750 and 105mm macro lens (I mean, I also had my Fuji X100F but that was not suited for this kind of photo at all) but like any good photographer I just tried to make the most of what I had at my disposal. I took several shots of the birds and while most of them were obscured by leaves or branches, this one actually turned out pretty well.

The issue I have with this picture is…well, I kind of cheated. I mean, not really, but here’s the thing: This shot is cropped way, way down from the original which meant it was a little fuzzy and low-resolution. To compensate I used the Enhance feature in Lightroom to essentially create an artificially-rendered image that generated details where none existed. The result is an image that looks fine, but makes me wonder what I could have gotten if I brought my 70-200 f/2.8 instead of the macro lens. I mean, it’s not like this is some kind of AI-generated fake image or anything like that. It did get a bit of a computational boost though, and I suppose as long as I’m being upfront about that then I can sleep well enough at night :)

There’s so much story behind this picture I almost don’t even know where to start. In fact, I really don’t know where to start so instead I’ll just talk about the particulars of the image you see and then get to the backstory in a bit. Though I should caution you: don’t examine this picture too closely or the many flaws will become immediately apparent, and what is seen most definitely cannot be unseen. I almost didn’t even put this picture up but since Weekly Fifty is all about learning and improvement, I do like sharing images that serve more as examples of that process than a highly-polished end result.

A few weeks ago I shared a picture that I created using a technique called Focus Stacking, but that was more of a happy accident than anything. For this shot of an old AA battery I knew in advance that I would need to use focus stacking so I approached the entire composition with that in mind. And even though the end result is far from ideal, it’s still a good example of my educational process and hence worth sharing here. Let’s just say that I clearly still have a lot to learn :)

Alright so let’s get down to it: This is the third version of this picture. I created the first with six exposures shot at f/22, with the battery about six inches from my 105mm f/2.8G ED macro lens attached to my Nikon D750. I thought six images would be enough to work with, but when I stacked them in Photoshop the result was far from ideal:

To do proper focus stacking, I am learning, requires enough in-focus elements to be blended seamlessly and that’s precisely what is missing here. Just look at all those seams visible between the letters, the jagged edge of the pink plastic below the battery, and the A in ULTRA skewed like someone banged the printer as the label was rolling off. My solution was simple but flawed: repeat the shot with a lot more exposures. Twelve, to be exact, all at the same aperture:

This image, while better, was still far from ideal. I was kind of running low on patience though since each shot required a ten-second shutter while my kids tiptoed around the living room so as to not shake the tripod. I wasn’t happy with the rough transitions between the letters and the blemishes on other parts of the image, but I had to admit that it was, in fact, an improvement. Still, I knew I could do better.

For my third and final attempt I repeated the process with a smaller aperture of f/32 so as to get a wider depth of field, though it meant a 20-second shutter at ISO 100. The result was 15 separate exposures combined using Focus Stacking in Photoshop and, after some minor tweaking and color adjustment in Lightroom, ended up with what you see as this week’s featured photo. It’s closer to what I had in mind when I shot it but still a far cry from what I was actually hoping for, though I don’t want to be too hard on myself. It’s not bad, and the overall shot does show some promise, but I know I can do better and I certainly aim to try :)

So why this particular picture?

People of a certain age, like myself, remember a time when Toys R Us was the place to go for video games. They had rows of NES, SNES, Genesis, and N64 cartridges along with playable demo stations that could easily occupy a kid for an entire afternoon. I remember seeing a Sega Saturn for the first time at Toys R Us, and being floored at Panzer Dragoon and Nights into Dreams. I even got an N64 from Toys R Us three days before the launch day because back in the mid 90’s that just wasn’t something that stores cared about like they do today. My buddy Drew spent years working up the ranks at Toys R Us and stayed with the company until it filed for bankruptcy in 2017, and he even met his wife there. I think it’s probably safe to say that when I was a kid, Toys R Us was my favorite store to browse and wander around in except for, possibly, Best Buy :)

Recently we were looking to acquire some Nintendo Wii controllers for our Wii-U (we don’t have a Switch yet; we’ll get there someday) and lo and behold, Drew and Casey had several that they no longer needed! We gladly accepted their offer and, upon testing them out, realized that some of the batteries needed to be replace. And as luck would have it, one of the little AA power cells hailed from Toys R Us. Just seeing this battery brought back so many memories of a simpler time, and a place that had an outsized impact on the lives of Drew and Casey and so many others as well.