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

As we hiked on various paths and trails on our visit to the Rocky Mountains, one thing quickly became abundantly clear to me: I had to balance my desire to take camera gear with my desire to have food and water. Usually the latter won out, which meant that I limited myself to my Fuji X100F and my iPhone, and my big heavy cameras and lenses usually stayed back at the cabin. Maybe in the future I can find a way around that compromise, but since this was our first real visit to the Rockies we were still trying to figure all this out and see how things would work.

I shot this picture when we went for a drive on Trail Ridge Road, a winding route that takes visitors above the treeline and offers amazing views of the surrounding mountains and even some hidden surprises like a small patch of snow. (Side note: It was super fun to watch all our kids have a snowball fight in July.) We parked at the visitor’s center that sits at over 12,000 feet in elevation and some of us hiked up to the top of the nearby peak to take in the scenery while others stayed back at the van with the youngest kids. On our way back down we spotted this female elk grazing on the mountainside, and I don’t think I have ever wished I had a zoom lens more in my entire life. But the best I could do was my humble little Fuji.

No matter. When life gives you lemons, you make photographic lemonade, right? At least, that’s what I tried to do here. Since there was no way to zoom in on the elk I tried to take a different approach: how could I capture a complete scene using the elk as an anchor? I took a few shots with the animal in the middle as well as on the left side, but those just didn’t feel right at all. It was this shot here where everything came together: the elk, the sky, the diagonal horizon, and the green grass in the foreground peppered with yellow flowers. I really wanted to get a shot just like what you see here, where the elk was doing something more interesting than just hanging its head down to munch on grass, and after a bit of waiting it actually happened: she raised her head, looked out to the horizon, and I snapped this picture.

In the end I’m actually glad that I didn’t have a zoom lens. No seriously, I mean it. I really like this shot, and it’s a bit more interesting than just another zoomed-in shot of an elk which you can probably find all over the internet. This shot isn’t what I wanted, but it’s what I got, and I think I’m better off because of it.

And now, as Monty Python might say, for something completely different. I have only seen the mountains a few times in my life: once on a trip out to Seattle with my wife in 2016 and…well, maybe one or two other times but I guess it sort of depends on your definition. I have flown over mountain ranges on the way from A to B, and have also had layovers in Denver, but I don’t think I have ever really spent time in the mountains, so to speak. That all changed this summer when we took our kids out west to spend a week in the Rockies with some friends of ours from way back in the day. (After all, friends from back in the day are some of the best you’ll ever have.)

We stayed at YMCA of the Rockies which was surrounded on all sides by breathtaking views of the mountains, but also took three separate trips to Rocky Mountain National Park which was about a four-minute car ride. On a warm Tuesday afternoon we hiked a few miles on Bear Lake Road to Emerald Lake, which is where I shot the picture you see here. I had thought about picking up a wide-angle lens for this trip, and kept my eye on the Nikon 20mm hoping it would go on sale but alas, it was not meant to be. No big deal though: I did just fine with my Fuji X100F and…my iPhone.

Yeah, I’m not afraid to admit it: I used my iPhone SE 2020 for more of these kinds of landscapes more than I thought I would, but it was mostly because its 28mm-equivalent lens was wider than any other lens I own. But even that wasn’t enough to capture this view, which meant I had to resort to a feature common on most mobile phones but not many DSLRs: I used Panoramic Mode. It took me a few attempts to get the scene just right, but in the end I’m pretty happy with what I was able to capture. The mountain is crisp and sharp, the lake is smooth, the sky is bright and blue, and most importantly, this image helps me remember the scene as I saw it on that day.

This is the kind of picture you almost never see here on Weekly Fifty because, as you probably know by now, I like to keep things mostly people-free and stick to nature and objects and other things of that nature. When I do post pictures of people, especially my kids, I don’t use faces. This one is an exception though, not because of the person specifically but because of all the elements that went into taking this shot. I have a side project taking portraits (not really a business, since I only do a couple photo sessions a year) that allows me to flex my creative muscles in a bit of a different way compared to photos of flowers and animals and this is an example of the type of portraits I really enjoy doing.

A few weeks before our annual extended family trip to Kansas my sister-in-law asked me if I would take photos for her son who is about to enter his senior year of high school. I gladly obliged and immediately turned down any offer of payment since I like to do this kind of things for free when family is involved, and set about getting my gear ready and thinking about the kinds of shots I would want to take. The day before I took this picture I was out walking around the resort with my brother, my wife, and some of the nieces and nephews when I saw a wall of trees with sunlight poking through the branches and thought it would make for a nice portrait location. I had my D750 and 50mm lens with me, and asked my niece if she would basically serve as a stand-in while I evaluated the lighting and took some test shots. The next day when we were doing the photo shoot my nephew and I went to the same spot, albeit with some upgraded camera gear, and took a bunch of shots similar to what you see here.

I took this with my favorite portrait setup, the amazing Nikon 70-200 f/2.8G ED VRII, and my D750 with the battery grip (which helps balance out the weight of the lens. Oof, that thing is a heavy beast.) I zoomed in all the way to 200mm and shot wide open at f/2.8 because I wanted to get the spots of light as bokeh-tastic as possible, and it worked like a charm. The slightly overcast sky also gave us plenty of dispersed light such that even though he was backlit his face is still evenly lit with enough contrast to give him plenty of depth and dimension. The light on his right shoulder (on the left side of the composition) adds another layer of depth to the image and is a good example of why backlighting can be so effective. Finally, I made sure to position him and myself in such a way that the background blobs would be dispersed around his head and not directly behind his head—though there is a bit of an exception on the top-left side of the frame.

Shooting portraits with that lens, especially at 200mm and f/2.8, can be tricky due to the extraordinarily shallow depth of field but if you have a subject who is able to take direction (unlike, say, a young child) the results can be amazing. I know other photographers prefer to shoot at 85mm or 135mm, and those are great too, but I continually come back to the versatility, utility, and just plain sharpness of that 70-200 f/2.8 lens. It’s amazing :)

Every year my family goes to Milford Lake, Kansas, to spend a few days catching up on things, fishing, swimming, boating, tubing…all the normal kinds of things you might do while vacationing at the lake with siblings, nieces, nephews, and parents. And the occasional four-legged family member too :) Normally I return from those trips with a handful of shots to put up here on Weekly Fifty, but this one was a little different. I found that, contrary to most of our trips over the years, I did not take as many shots of the world around me and instead most of my pictures were the people around me. Not that vacation-based photography has to be one or the other, but I didn’t find that I had my usual inspiration or creative spark for taking photos of nature, even with my macro lens that I specifically brought with on the trip for that exact purpose.

The exception to all of this is the shot that you see here, which is one of the last pictures I took during the entire trip. It was a warm Monday evening in late July and those of us who were left at the cabin, after some others had gone home due to work and other obligations, were sitting by the campfire watching the light fall and the fireflies begin their daily dance while we roasted marshmallows and chatted about life. As the sun settled behind the horizon I saw a great opportunity to take a picture before the last bits of daylight faded away, so I ran to the cabin, grabbed my tripod and Fuji X100F, and hightailed it to the beach to take a few pictures.

The key to shots like this is a long shutter, which smooths out any ripples or imperfections in the surface of the water, and it’s the kind of scenario that the X100F is practically made for. It’s built-in 3-stop ND filter means you can leave the shutter open for much longer than normal, and get some great results that are basically impossible with a smartphone. I ended up shooting this at f/16, ISO 200, with a 13-second shutter and I’m super pleased with how things turned out. (After a bit of tweaking the RAW file in Lightroom, of course.) You know what I really like about this though? The reflections of the grass, or whatever those things are, in the water. The stalks are still but the reflections are blurry, because there actually were some subtle movements on the surface of the water. It lends an almost dreamlike quality to the image that isn’t present in a lot of my other sunset pictures I’ve taken over the years, and while I didn’t expect it I do quite like it.

I was looking through my gallery of macro shots recently and discovered something a little surprising: I had no close-ups of mushrooms! The last time I got low on the ground to take a macro picture of fungi it was this shot from May 2021, and that was with my 50mm lens and close-up filters. (And also my first real experimentation with focus stacking, something I have not done since. Mostly because it’s more work than I’m used to doing, not because it’s particularly difficult to get the hang of the basics.) So when the sun was rising on a warm June morning, after a couple of rainy days to really get the ground nice and soaked, I ran outside and took this photo of a mushroom that had recently popped up in my back yard. Only this time I did it with my 105mm macro lens, which made a pretty big difference :)

I want to stop short of comparing the two images, since a discussion about which one is better kind of misses the point. Both are similar and unique in certain ways, and I used the former to inform my compositional and exposure choices about the latter. In short, they’re both good images and I see some things to like and appreciate in either one. As for this specific picture though, there are some things that I quite like. I used an f/11 aperture to get the front mushroom tack sharp which still left a depth of field shallow enough so as to make the blades of grass just a bit out of focus. (Something I continue to learn about shooting close-up images is that even smaller apertures can still give you razor thin depth of field. It’s still weird to wrap my head around that.) I intentionally composed the shot with one mushroom in front and another in the back to give a sense of space to the composition: foreground elements, subject, and background elements all working to form a complete picture. The only real issue I had when taking this picture was related to ISO: I didn’t want to go super high and lose detail or editing headroom, but 1400 on my D750 works just fine and has hardly any of the problems that can be associated with high ISO shots.

Mushrooms don’t pop up too terribly often in my daily life so when they do it’s fun to go out and take pictures of them, especially in the early morning while the dew is still fresh and the sunlight is just barely poking over the horizon. I hope I get more opportunities to take pictures like this soon :)