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

One of my favorite spots to take pictures is our local botanic garden, which is on the west side of town tucked between a highway and a small creek. As much as I enjoy taking photos near Theta Pond, I mostly just go there because it’s convenient. The botanic garden is stuffed to the brim with flowers, plants, native grasses, decorations, artwork, and offers a huge variety of photo opportunities you can’t really get anywhere else. One evening in late May my wife was on the phone with her parents and our kids were getting a bit restless, as kids tend to do, so we hopped in the car and drove down to the garden where they played in the treehouse and I walked around with my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens to look for some photo opportunities.

Believe it or not, this is a cactus. A very close view of a cactus, but a cactus nonetheless. I don’t know what type or variety of cactus you’re looking at here, but my kids would probably describe it as “large and in charge.” It might be something called a Grafted Moon (which, in turn, sounds like something out of Elden Ring) but I’m not sure and, to be honest, it doesn’t matter a whole lot to me. What matters is that this is a pretty cool picture and I’m glad I got the chance to take it even though the particulars of the plant evade me at present. The orange bulb looks a bit like a flame frozen in time admist a sea of otherworldly spikes and spires, and while that’s a far cry from the truth it is fun to use photography to see somewhat normal sights in a slightly new light like this.

As for the particulars of the picture, I went back and forth between f/11 and f/18 (with a few at f/4 just for fun, and as you might imagine those did not look good at all since the depth of field turned the entire image into a blurry mess) and while my f/18 shots turned out nice and sharp, I did like the slightly thinner in-focus area of this shot compared to its smaller-aperture counterparts. The sun is behind me and to my right which gave everything a bright even lighting effect, though I do wonder what this scene would look like if I re-shot it late in the day when the sun is low on the horizon to get a backlit scene. I didn’t want to take too long getting this shot and eventually just went back to wandering around looking for more pictures and, of course, my kids who were happy to get a bit of unsupervised playtime :)

When I was a kid I worked at a grocery store called Russ’s Market. It was about a half mile from my house and I started there the same week the local newspaper quit doing the afternoon edition, which I had delivered, along with most of my siblings as well, throughout middle school and junior high. There weren’t too many places keen on employing 15-year-olds in the mid 1990’s, but somehow the grocery store was able to skirt regulations to some degree or other and as long as I didn’t work past 7pm or more than 20 hours in a single week, I was allowed to be gainfully employed receive a regular paycheck. I bagged groceries, ran the checkout, mopped floors, cleaned restrooms, brought in carts from the parking lot, and generally did whatever odd tasks needed doing on any given shift. Over the years I worked my way up the ranks a bit, eventually taking care of the dairy cooler, the customer service counter, and even the video rental department–a corner of the store where people could rent VHS tapes for a couple of bucks. I worked there for nearly nine years, paying my way through college and making some good friends along the way.

One of the coveted jobs at that grocery store was managing the Garden Tent, a pop-up operation that appeared every spring and lasted through the middle of summer before disappearing altogether with nary a trace of its existence to be found. I knew nothing about plants, flowers, shrubberies, soil, or anything related to gardening but volunteered to take care of the tent every opportunity I had since it meant I could spend my shift outdoors watering flowers and chatting with customers and, most importantly, wear ratty jeans and worn-out sneakers instead of the usual khakis-and-blue-shirt uniform. I don’t miss much about working at the grocery store but if I had to make a list, the Garden Tent would be on it.

When I bike to work I usually ride past a grocery store at roughly the halfway mark, and like clockwork there is a Garden Tent that shows up each spring just like the one I used to work at back in the day. One morning in late April I decided to stop and see if I could use all the flowers, along with the morning sun, to get an interesting picture. I knew I wanted to get a backlit image of one of the flowers…but which one? And what else should be in the frame? What angle should I shoot it from? What about other light sources aside from just the sun? So many questions to consider, and since I was en route to my office I didn’t want to spend more than a minute or two pondering the possibilities. I took several pictures as I wandered around the outskirts of the tent, and then realized I could make use of a trick that I have really come to appreciate more and more: taking advantage of the sun reflecting off of passing cars. While the overhead sun gave this orange and yellow flower a brilliant glow, it was an automobile driving on the nearby road that provided the bright yellow circle of light that adds a much-needed dynamic element to the image. That added touch, the pièce de résistance, is what transforms this from an ordinary image into something really special and I’m glad I got the chance to take this photo.

I don’t have a clue what these flowers are, but I do know that they are small. Very small. Each of the little white pods you see here is about 1/4inch from front to back, and this plant was absolutely full of similar clusters like the one in the picture. When I saw them I immediate knew I wanted to take a picture but I wasn’t really sure how to go about making that picture look particularly interesting. I mean, it’s a bunch of white flowers. What am I trying to get you, the viewer, to look at? Is the subject of this image the whole bunch of flowers or just one single flower? Where should I focus: the flowers in front, the flowers on the side, the green stalk holding everything up, or something else? And, perhaps most importantly when shooting close-up, what aperture should I use to get the right depth of field?

So many questions, so little time. Seriously. I didn’t want to spend an hour contemplating all of this! I just wanted to take a picture and get back to doing other things.

I quickly decided that I wanted to get the frontmost flower in focus, and shot with an aperture of f/22 in order to err on the side of caution and also make sure enough of the flowers were sharp and easy to see. And even at f/22 the depth of field was still pretty shallow, enough that the front of the flower in the middle is tack sharp but the back is not despite the entire flower being smaller than my little fingernail. I am pretty happy with how this turned out and I quite like that you can see right down the middle of the flower in front.

Editing this image in Lightroom proved surprisingly easy, thanks to the new Select Subject feature that debuted about six months ago. Originally the sky was kind of a dull gray but I wanted to add a bit of vibrance to the image, so I clicked the “Select Sky” option and…well, it really was that simple. It immediately gave me an editing mask for just the sky, and a few quick adjustments of the White Balance slider gave me the final result you see here. Note that I’m not shilling for Lightroom here, but as someone who has been using that program for about six years I continue to be impressed with how well it fits my particular workflow.

This picture shares a couple similarities with the Goose photo I posted in mid-May, in that it doesn’t seem like an especially complicated picture to take but it required a bit more than what you might think. As you might have guessed, the setting for this was none other than Theta Pond where about 90% of my images are taken, and on this particular day I had my camera with me but nothing specific in mind for a photo. It was just me and my usual combination of D750 and 105mm f/2.8 lens out for a stroll, and for the most part I really didn’t see anything that caught my eye as photo-worthy. No big deal though: the weather was great and it was a good day to be out for a stroll, and sometimes that’s all you want or need.

As luck would have it (which is not uncommon for a lot of my Theta Pond photos) I came across this squirrel chewing an acorn as he made his (her? I have no idea.) way up the trunk. Even though there are students and pedestrians perpetually patrolling the perimeter of the pond, the animals are still fairly skittish and don’t like it if you come too close. But this squirrel, kind of like the goose from last month, must have figured I was not much of a threat. After reaching a branch about six feet off the ground he paused and just kind of looked at me for a few seconds. I grabbed my camera, quickly checked that I was shooting as wide as possible, and fired off a couple shots. Maybe a dozen in total; I can’t exactly remember and I don’t really want to load up Lightroom to check. Initially I was just thrilled at the idea of getting any shots of this squirrel, but after half a moment I came to my senses and focused right on his eye hoping that even one of the shots would turn out.

And one did! Not only is the squirrel’s eye in focus, but the rest of the image works pretty well from a compositional standpoint. The tree branch going upwards diagonally through the frame is distinct and separate from the animal’s fur, which I chalk up to more of a happy accident than careful planning. I like that the squirrel looks as though he is on the edge of skittering away, which lends a sense of tension and pent-up energy to the photo. And the diagonal stance draws your eye naturally to his, while the depth of field is just shallow enough to get the important parts of his face in focus while the rest of him gently fades away. For a picture that had no planning whatsoever, this turned out really well and is a good reminder to me that macro lenses are good for more than just macro photography.

Any idea what this is? Go ahead and guess, I’ll wait.

Personally I think it looks like some kind of alien life form, or perhaps a poisonous plant from a sci-fi movie just waiting to release toxic fumes on our band of unsuspecting heroes. Or maybe it’s the fabled jewel at the end of the rainbow, a yellow bulb of replenishing life force for a famished warrior at the end of an arduous trek across the desert.

Or…it’s entirely possible that this is just a close-up picture of a Black Cotton plant, shot in early Spring with a bright overhead sun. The world may never know. Or maybe the world will know, since that’s exactly what it is :) I was walking through the garden just west of the Atherton hotel on the Oklahoma State University campus when I saw this plant with rich purple leaves accented by tiny yellow flower buds, and thank goodness I had my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens with me because it ended up being a really cool photo opportunity.

I normally use autofocus for most of my photography, but that was a little tricky here since there were so many little wisps and whirls in the flower bud that my camera didn’t really know what to focus on. I decided to give manual focus a try which seemed a little tricky given the extremely shallow depth of field, but the results ended up looking pretty good. What really does it for me in this picture are the out-of-focus yellow spots on the right side. They add a really nice sense of depth that was missing in some of the other versions of this image that I took from more of a head-on perspective, and help reinforce the otherworldly appearance of this little flower bud.