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

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.

Note: I know it’s a little odd to have a post about Christmas in early February but as longtime visitors of Weekly Fifty probably know, I schedule my posts way in advance. It’s the only way I can keep this blog going :) If I didn’t have a bit of slack built in to the nature of my posts I think Weekly Fifty would have folded years ago.

When we were visiting my in-laws over Christmas I noticed a pair of unused, unlit green candles sitting on the dining room table when we first arrived. I wasn’t sure if they were holiday decorations or would serve some kind of functional purpose, but over the next two days I kind of forgot about them amidst the proverbial hustle and bustle of the Christmas season. Each of the candles was small, only four or five inches from top to bottom, and placed so unobtrusively as to be easily overlooked when the table was piled full of food, toys, newspapers, and books. Which it often was.

On Christmas Eve right before we sat down to dinner my wife’s mother struck a match and lit both candles, and immediately my first thought was that one of them would make for a really cool close-up shot. I knew we had a few minutes to spare before the food was ready so I ran to get my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, set the aperture to f/4, made sure image stabilization was enabled, lowered myself such that my lens was level with the flame, and took this photo:

As soon as I looked at the picture on my camera’s rear LCD screen the first thing I noticed was not the candle in the foreground, but the one in the background. It was about three feet away and its flame created an amazing round light, almost like a full moon, that I had not even considered when I composed the shot. For about one or two seconds I thought about adjusting my view so as to remove that background light from the image entire, but then I realized that it would serve as an ideal complement to the flame in front.

Since everyone was ready to eat dinner I didn’t want to make the rest of the family wait while I putzed around with my camera, so I made a couple of decisions in rapid succession and fired off a bunch of shots in an effort to take something that would look good. I tried various apertures from f/4 to f/8 and focused primarily on the bright burn mark on the tip of the wick, but also on the wax in the foreground too. I also moved myself steadily closer to the flame and kept shooting, and finally I got the image you see here. It’s the last one I took and, in my opinion, the best of the bunch. I shot it at f/6.7, 1/180 second, ISO 400, and that aperture at such a close distance meant that the glowing red wick was the only thing in focus while the rest of the image, even the wax just barely in front of it, was beautifully blurry. The glowing light behind looks like a giant harvest moon just beginning to wane, and the flame angled to the right adds a sense of dynamic energy to the shot as a whole. To wit: I did not crop or rotate this shot at all, and my camera was, as far as I can tell, level with the table.

I’m really happy with how this shot turned out, and it made me think once again (it’s a lesson I continue to learn over and over and over) about how to keep the entire frame in mind when composing an image. There’s so much more than just the subject, and taking everything else into account can transform an average photograph into something much greater.

Last week you met Tucker. This week I present to you his roommate Hildi, a capricious little pup who is actually much more advanced in years than what that adjective might imply. Still, her size and agility merit the description of a dog much younger than her actual age would imply, thus the three-letter description remains quite apt. She has lived with my in-laws for several years and, much like her white-haired counterpart, I wanted to take advantage of our Christmas visit to get a picture of her. Also like Tucker, I initially thought I might try to get some kind of close-up with my 105mm macro lens but soon realized that I don’t really know how to create a compelling image consisting of just the eye of a dog. Maybe one day I’ll get it figured out but for now, I was content to just scoot back a bit and do more of a traditional portrait as it were.

The trickiest part about getting a good shot of Hildi was finding a way to make sure she was well-lit, relatively still, and looking in my general direction. All three conditions, in ascending order, presented somewhat of a challenge. Finding a spot to take the picture wasn’t that difficult, though with the other activity in the house (mainly from my two kids who were running around with Nerf guns) it did take a bit of patience from both me and Hildi to find a spot where we could have a few minutes of solace to shoot the photo. We ended up in her favorite spot to sit and sleep: an old chair which has belonged to my wife’s mother for decades. A fitting place of repose, especially for a furry four-legged friend such as Hildi.

Since my wife and I don’t have any pets I am not in the habit of taking their photos, and thus when presented with a seemingly simple scenario such as this I found myself a bit confused: why didn’t Hildi remain in one spot long enough for me to take her picture? Why did she feel the need to constantly turn her head from side to side, shuffle around on the chair cushion, and occasionally jump down only to want to get right back up? Dog owners are probably used to this kind of behavior and might be chuckling at this post right now, but the experience did leave me just a bit flustered and confused, though I did enjoy it and tried to take it all in stride.

The final piece of the puzzle, then, involved finding a way to get Hildi’s attention such that she would look in my general direction long enough for me to snap the shutter. I tried whistling, calling her name, snapping my fingers, and even enlisting my kids for help. It ended up being an exercise in trial and error, mostly the latter as opposed to the former, but the result is a photo that I think works quite well. Her eyes are tack sharp and the pattern of the chair behind her lends a nice bit of color contrast to her dark fur. When the puppy portrait session was all done I patted her head, thanked her, and let her be with a few things to think about for next time :)

Before I go any farther with this post, I have to send a huge shout-out to my in-laws who we had the opportunity to visit over Christmas break. My wife and I don’t have pets of our own so whenever we have the opportunity of being around other people’s pets, I like to use them as photography subjects and see what kind of shots I can get. As such my pet (and, let’s be honest, my entire collection of animal-based photography) is not nearly as refined as that of other, more experienced, photographers. I’m not really sure what compositions work best, what focal lengths to use, or even how to get the animals to look where I want them to look in order to get an interesting picture of them. Not having pets of our own, I just don’t get much practice with these sorts of things.

So with that being said I present to you: Tucker. He’s a spry little fellow with a penchant for poking at, and picking up, any food one might happen to drop while cooking and a nose for endless curiosity that can sometimes take him just one step too far :) So how to photograph a dog like this? Good question. I don’t know if I got it right, but I did get something, and that’s what you see here. I tried sitting on the floor and making noises to get him to look in my direction with a window behind me to light up his eyes, to no avail whatsoever. He cared not for my camera and was not about to alter his agenda just so I could get a few photos with my macro lens. (Which was, I should probably say, the only lens I brought for my Nikon D750. Would a different lens have worked better? Perhaps. Maybe I’ll try something else on a future visit.)

Eventually I just asked my oldest son to hold Tucker while sitting on the sofa. It was an inelegant solution but it worked, and I think it does lend a bit of a compelling element to the photo: the blue fabric of my son’s coat (it was the day of that massive arctic blast we had shortly before Christmas and there was no escaping the cold, even indoors) tells a subtle story about the context of the photo and the nature of Tucker that could be described in words, but is somehow better when shown and not told.