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

Alright, enough with the Wichita Mountains pictures of sunsets and bison and lizards…here’s a classic Weekly Fifty shot like you might expect when you come to the blog, check my YouTube channel, or open up the email that shows up in your Inbox every Wednesday morning. The composition here is simple, classic, and highly effective: a clear subject, something in the foreground, a rich and layered background, and some cool bokeh to boot. This won’t win awards for creativity, but I’d be lying if I said that pictures like this aren’t a ton of fun to take.

Every spring we see an emergence of Indian Paintbrush flowers all over the state, but despite being quite commonplace their simple beauty is always pleasing to look at. I have taken lots of pictures of these flowers over the years and shared many of them here on Weekly Fifty, but never with a true macro lens. Not that there’s anything particularly macro about this shot, just that I was able to compose this image without any considerations for, or concessions being made because of, the distance between my camera and the flower. Instead I simply looked at the basics: subject, lighting, and exposure settings. I used an aperture of f/5.6 to get a relatively sharp image while still leaving plenty of headroom for creating beautiful background blur, and intentionally shot into the sun to capture the glistening droplets in the early morning after it had rained the night before. I think my favorite individual aspect of this image isn’t the flower but the bright spots of light dotting so many aspects of the composition, which is something you can only get under specific post-rain conditions like this. It elevates the shot above a simple flower photo, and when you add in other subtle details like the frizzy edges of the flower illuminated with white light and the stalk of green in the foreground on the right side, the result is a picture that just about captures everything I had hoped to on this warm April morning.

If you have been following Weekly Fifty for any length of time you know that I’ve never posted an image like this. At all. Nearly every picture I take is fairly simple and, to be perfectly honest, kind of similar. There’s usually a clearly-understood subject, some foreground and background elements, and often some additional things that add a bit of context. I don’t like to go for abstract art and I’m not one for over-complicating the image-making process. Normally, and especially since I got my macro lens, I just take simple pictures of things I see in my daily life.

Not this time.

I took this picture at the top of Mount Scott right as the sun was setting on the evening of our final day in the Wichita Mountains. I actually have a few shots that include the sun, but decided to specifically compose this image (as well as crop it in Lightroom) so as to exclude our closest star. It felt more interesting to just show the mountains without the sun, and in fact the sun ended up distracting the viewer from the rest of the scene with the mountains and hills slowly receding into the distance. It was incredibly windy throughout the day, which lent an ethereal, almost otherworldly, quality to the atmosphere thanks to all the dust and other particles that were mixed in with the air.

I’m not going to say that this is one of the best pictures I have ever taken (far from it!) but it ranks among the most unique and singular images in my entire collection. I don’t think I have ever been able to capture a picture of a hazy sunset from the top of a mountain, and even if we make it back to Mount Scott I don’t think I’ll be able to get a shot like this unless the weather is just right. One thing that took a bit of experimenting with this composition was the exposure settings, and in the end I think it came out fairly well. I shot this at 116mm, f/8, 1/1000 second, with an ISO of 720. I prefer not to use high ISO values on my D500 and while I could have used a slower shutter speed to get something like ISO 200 or 400…I just plain forgot about it. I had my Auto-ISO set to a minimum speed of 1/1000 second thanks to some pictures I was taking earlier in the day, and I didn’t even realize it until we were back at the Airbnb later that evening and I was looking through my shots on the rear screen of my camera. As it turned out, I was able to get a more-than-usable image with ISO 720 and plenty of room to edit the shadows and a bit of highlights too, and end up with the shot you see here. I’m quite proud of it, and if I may say so I do think it would make for a good phone or desktop background. Feel free to click on the picture and download the original from Flickr, and make sure to let me know if you do use it on your device :)

This shot strikes me as something unique to the American west, even though I suppose it’s possible to get similar pictures elsewhere in the world too. The grassy plains in the foreground, the mountains in the background, and of course the gigantic bison at roughly the bottom third of the picture all combine to create a scene that makes the viewer think of an Old West aesthetic: Native Americans, cowboys, frontiers, and untamed wilderness beckoning one to adventure. That might seem a bit grandiose, and perhaps it is especially considering that I took this shot not from horseback but from the side of an air-conditioned Subaru, but it makes me think about things much bigger, and much older, than this present time and that’s something I find to be incredibly powerful.

I took this picture one morning on our trip to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge when my wife and I loaded up the kids and decided to get started with our hiking early so as to avoid the hundred-degree temps that were predicted within a few hours. We drove through the refuge for several miles on our way to Elk Mountain Trail, but found our drive unexpectedly interrupted by a herd of bison: some on the road, some grazing on grass, one one that was using a 20MPH speed limit sign as a scratching post. My wife pulled the car to a stop on the side of the road and all four of us just kind of sat there in the relative safety of the Subaru while watching these massive beasts go about their business, and making sure to keep our distance, ready to hightail it out of there at the first sign of trouble. After a minute I stepped out with my D500 and 70-200mm f/2.8 lens to see if I could get a few shots of these animals, and eventually got the picture you see above.

What really sells the image, at least in my opinion, is the sense that it is a complete composition. It’s not just two bison on the prairie. It’s the entire scene, in which the bison are but component parts. All the elements (sky, mountains, trees, grass, and bison) work together to create a complete whole and the animals, necks bent and tails wagging, are just as essential as any of the other parts. It’s a visual representation of 1 Corinthians 12, and a reminder to me of why it’s important to have something greater in mind than just the subject you are photographing when you take out your camera and start to click away.

This is the first of a couple pictures I’ll be posting over the next few weeks which were all taken at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, Oklahoma. I’ve used a few shots from trips to this place here on Weekly Fifty in years past and it’s always fun to go down there with my family and a few cameras and take pictures that I can’t get anywhere else. Well, certainly not in the city where I live. Your mileage may vary :)

This year, as with last year, I only brought two cameras: My Fuji X100F, and my Nikon D500 with the 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. Based on my experiences in previous trips to the Wichita Mountains I didn’t think I would need multiple DSLRs or lots of lenses, since the Fuji/D500 combination would probably cover everything I wanted to do, and that turned out to be the right course of action. I didn’t even bring my macro lens since this was primarily a trip for me, my wife, and our two kids and not a photo-taking excursion. As such I wanted to make sure I spent as much time as possible with my family and not wandering off by myself taking pictures while they waited for me, but even so I did manage to come across a huge number of photo opportunities such as the one you see here.

These little collared lizards were everywhere down in the rocky terrain of the wildlife refuge, but most skittered away when we got close. This one was content to just hang out on a red rock while we walked by, and one of my kids spotted it and mentioned that it might make for a good picture. He was right! I used my D500 and zoomed in to 200mm while keeping the aperture locked at f/2.8, and crept ever closer while snapping pictures the whole time. I eventually got the shot you see here, with the lizard’s eye tack sharp while the rest of its body fades away into a blurry background.

This was a good reminder to me of the versatility of the 70-200 f/2.8 lens. It’s by no means useful for close-up macro-style shots, but it is far more versatile than just a sports and action lens. I could have used a zoom lens with a smaller (and variable) maximum aperture, like an 18-250, but without that f/2.8 it wouldn’t have given me a picture quite like this. I bought this lens a few years ago intending to use it for action shots of my kids, but it continues to impress me with how it can go way beyond that.

This is the kind of unplanned, serendipitous shot that I really appreciate being able to capture every now and then. I’ve taken a few pictures of moths and butterflies sitting on flowers before and it’s kind of fun because, like opening up a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get. Sometimes these little creatures hold still, and other times they scurry about, landing for one or two seconds before fluttering away on to seek out the next flower. There’s also weather-related complications like wind, rain, bumblebees, and even the direction of the sunlight to contend with. But every so often I have been able to take a picture kind of like what you see here, where everything is clear, sharp, and conveys something more than just a simple snapshot.

I took this at the Botanic Garden on the west side of town on a warm May evening while my kids played in the treehouse-slash-playground and I spent a few minutes looking for some photo opportunities I might not get in my normal daily life. I first noticed this small white moth (butterfly?) going from one clump of purple flowers to the next, but didn’t immediately think about how it would look in a photo. I mostly just wanted to watch it float around from one spot to the next. A minute later I got out my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens to see if maybe, just maybe, I could get a good picture from what I saw in front of me.

Soon the moth landed on the flowers you see in the shot and as luck would have it, the creature was perfectly perpendicular to my particular point of view. Yes! I knelt down, raised my camera, set the aperture to f/8, and fired off a series of shots in rapid succession before adjusting my view just a bit and repeating the process. I didn’t know if they would turn out or whether my depth of field would be too small to get good results, but when I reviewed the images in Lightoom I found that a good number of them really did look good. This was my favorite of the batch, because if you look really closely you can see its tiny little proboscis extending in a loop on its way down to drink some nectar from the flower. It’s a small detail, but it adds a lot to the image and turns it into something just a bit more special. And when you can capture a shot that goes even slightly above and beyond what you might expect, then I consider that a win.