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.