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

One of the most difficult, but most essential, components of landscape photography is establishing a sense of scale. When you see a grand scene or sweeping vista in person you can tell how vast it is by comparing it to other things in your immediate surroundings: trees, buildings, animals, people, roads receding into the distance, even the clouds in the sky can help establish a sense of scale. But how do you convey that to an audience who might be viewing your picture of the landscape on a tiny little phone screen? It’s not easy, but it’s essential for your photos to be impactful and meaningful. I’m not sure if this picture accurately conveys a sense of scale or not, but I certainly tried to and I hope it comes across even in some small way.

What you’re looking at here is a view of some huge mountains near Denver. I shot this when my family and I, along with my cousin and her husband, went on the Georgetown Loop Railroad on a warm Saturday afternoon in late July. It’s kind of a tourist-ey activity, but the older I get the more I have learned to embrace those kinds of things from time to time. Did we really need to spend money on train tickets to go a few miles up a mountainside and then right back down to the start 45 minutes later? Probably not, but it was fun and everyone enjoyed the time spent together, so why not? I had my Fuji X100F and my iPhone mostly just to take pictures of our kids on the train, but I wanted to keep my eyes open in case other photo opportunities presented themselves. While pictures of mountains aren’t super difficult to come by, the bridge in the distance helps establish a sense of scale that’s not easy to get across and it’s the reason I took this shot in the first place.

As we rounded a curve on the mountain and I saw this bridge appearing in the distance–the same bridge we crossed a few minutes earlier–and I had maybe 20 seconds to think about the shot, adjust my camera, and hope I could get the image I was aiming for. I The train cars in which we were riding had no windows so there were no issues of glare, dirt, or color tint so at least those didn’t need to be considered but I did have to think about the basics. Always the basics. No matter what you do in photography, you always have to keep coming back to the basics: aperture, shutter, and ISO. I wanted to freeze the motion of the entire scene with no motion blur in the foreground, and I wanted to use a low ISO to get a nice clean shot. I dialed in an aperture of f/2.8 just to make absolutely sure there would be no motion blur, focused on the bridge, and took the shot.

It worked :) What you see here is exactly what I shot—no cropping or editing. It almost looks like the bridge is Photoshopped, but it’s not. Everything you see is exactly as it was, and a few seconds later the scene disappeared entirely as we went around the bend and continued our journey in the train. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get a shot like this again, and but I sure hope I can sometime. The mountains are absolutely beautiful.

This is a picture that seemed a lot more interesting in my mind, and while the final result doesn’t stand up when too well when compared against some of my other images, it’s not bad and at the very least it does remind me of a fun family trip. And if that’s all it does, then it has accomplished its mission. I shot this after a day of driving and hiking near Denver with my wife, our kids, my cousin, and her husband and despite our general sense of exhaustion near the tail end of a busy but enjoyable day, I wanted to take one last opportunity to get a picture of the scenery. This small river was near the road we took down a mountain and after catching a few glimpses of it over the course of 10 or 15 minutes I asked if anyone would mind stopping for a quick photo opportunity. We pulled over near a trailhead and I hopped out, grabbed my Fuji X100F and tripod, and ran down to the river to take a few pictures.

The first mistake I made is neglecting to shoot in RAW. Normally I use JPEG on the Fuji because the results almost always come out looking fantastic, but this time was one of the exceptions. I wish I had more latitude to recover the blown-out highlights in the sky and warm up the foreground a bit, but as is the case with many things in life, you live and learn. The next mistake I made, which maybe wasn’t a mistake but more of an example of my inexperience, was not knowing how to compose the shot. I wasted about ten minutes taking pictures of the river that just didn’t look all that great, and then I found the spot you see here with some rocks jutting out on the right-hand side. That gave me the focal point I didn’t realize I needed, and I used that to basically anchor the viewer’s attention and give people something to catch their amidst the chaos of the rushing water. Had I thought about that sooner I would have taken greater care to compose more images like this one, but in the end this is what I got so this will have to do.

It’s not that this is an awful picture, just that I see it as more of an example of unused potential: there’s a much better image waiting to be uncovered here, and if I’m ever in the position to shoot a scene like this again I’ll have a better sense of what to do. And as for the answer to that question–what to do–I did take a few steps to at least ensure that the rushing water appeared as you see it. I activated my camera’s 3-stop ND filter, set the ISO to 200, and the aperture to f/16 in order to limit the light as much as possible. I also used a two-second self-timer to make sure any vibrations I might have made when pressing the shutter button did not affect the image. Finally, I didn’t spend any time at all thinking about what would happen if I got my tripod wet :) It dried out just fine! I’m glad we pulled over to get this shot and, as I often do here on Weekly Fifty, I’m using it as a fun learning opportunity.

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 :)