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

In some ways, this is the photo I have wanted to take for years. Way back in 2014 I shot this image in my backyard of a single drop of water on a long blade of grass, and even way back then I recall being a little frustrated that the picture I was imagining in my mind was just not quite materializing. At the time I knew nothing about the physics of how lenses bend light and couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get a great shot of a single drop of water. I think I had the right idea in terms of some compositional elements, but all I had was my D7100 and 50mm lens (not even my set of close-up filters) so that picture was, quite literally, the best I could do.

In the years since then I have learned an awful lot about many different elements of photography, and acquired some cool new gear too. Like my 105mm macro lens, which is ideal for the kind of picture I was aiming for all the way back in 2014 when I went out to my back yard after a rainstorm. I have also learned a lot of new techniques too, one of which I put to use for the first time to get the shot you see above.

One issue with close-up photography that has come into play over and over again since I got my macro lens is the delicate balancing act that photographers must perform when trying to decide between a wide aperture and a wide depth of field. Wide apertures obviously let in more light and give a more blurry background, but the depth of field is so razor-thin when shooting close-up at f/2.8 or f/4 that it’s almost unusable. Even smaller apertures, like the f/9.5 I used when taking this picture, are still wide enough to produce depth of field that is just impractical. And that also makes shots like this literally impossible.

Thankfully, there’s a cool technique called focus stacking which allows you to get the best of both worlds: the blurry foregrounds and backgrounds of wide apertures, with the larger depth of field of smaller apertures. In other words, the image you are seeing this week is not one image but a composite of nine images stacked together in Photoshop where the in-focus elements are combined and the out-of-focus elements are blended together to produce the final result you see here. I also tweaked the resulting image in Lightroom a bit, with some alterations to exposure, saturation, highlights…the usual.

I have toyed around with focus stacking here and there over the past year, but this was my first time really putting it to the test and I must say I am very happy with the results. And this was just my first attempt—shot handheld, sans tripod—which makes me pretty optimistic for other similar shots I might take down the road.

We’ve just begun the new year and I’m already learning new things :)

If you looked at this picture and did a bit of a double-take, thinking that it bears more than a passing similarity to the image I used to close out 2022, you would not be incorrect. I used a very similar process to create both images, and while they are clearly related in terms of compositional elements, I think both are distinct enough from one another to use them as separate Weekly Fifty shots. I actually considered swapping the order such that this image would be used last week and vice versa, but in the end I’m just using them as-is and moving on with things. I really don’t like to over-analyze my photography that much :)

The techniques I used to create this shot are pretty similar to what I did last week: find a small Christmas Tree ornament and place it in front of my macro lens. Then find a few other ornaments to augment the background, adjust a couple of the small colored lights on the tree, adjust the aperture, set the self-timer, and take the shot. As I am wont to do when shooting close-up subjects, I adjusted the aperture from very large to moderately small in order to get just the right combination of subject sharpness and background blur, all while leaving my ISO set to 100 and using a shutter speed of as long as I needed in order to get a properly-exposed image. Even the overall setup, as you can see below, looks pretty similar to last week:

So why use both images, given that they share so many similarities? The answer lies in something I most certainly did not expect, but have really come to appreciate: this week’s photo looks entirely different when viewed on a small screen. I didn’t see it initially when I edited the RAW file on my 27″ iMac, but when I shrank this image down to just a few inches to send it to my brother Phil, I noticed an entirely new composition that was hidden right in front of me the whole time.

Initially, I just saw this as a cool shot of a tiny moon-shaped ornament with some blurred lights behind it. But when I looked at the same image on my iPhone instead of a giant computer monitor, it morphed into an interstellar scene complete with at least two planets and perhaps even a sun. The silver ball I hung in the background to create a lighting effect suddenly looked like a ringed planet–a miniature Jupiter or Neptune–and the colored lights dancing on its surface might as well be lightning storms in space. I was shocked, and thought about the many times that I have encouraged people to click through to Flickr from this website to look at the full-resolution version of an image but this might be the first time ever I am openly asking people to do the opposite and view a picture on a very small screen :)

Anyway, I thought this was a fun and unexpected moment of photographic serendipity, which would be a neat way to ring in the new year and think about other picture opportunities that lie ahead in the coming months.

I have said time and time again, and I continue to mean what I say, that I don’t make a habit of having posts on Weekly Fifty coincide with specific times of the year or other such milestones. That being said, I do still get a bit wistful near the end of December and maybe, just maybe, try to take a picture or two that hearkens to this particular season. Not always, mind you, but occasionally. Sometimes. Every now and then.

And this, as you can probably tell, is one of those such times. I don’t know that anything about this picture has to do with closing out the year 2022, but I do hope the subject matter, the colors, the contrast between light and dark…the whole composition, really…makes you think about chilly winter nights and maybe, just maybe, a cozy evening by the Christmas tree with family and friends.

Or maybe not. Maybe this doesn’t do anything for you at all, and if that’s the case, then that interpretation is completely valid and as good of a way of interpreting meaning from this image (if any is able to be gleaned at all) as any other. Anyway, what you’re looking at here is a close-up shot of a Christmas ornament hanging from our tree. The setup is pretty simple, as you can see here:

Just to be clear: this shot was no accident. I created the image using a specific combination of ornaments, lighting, and the position of my camera (as well as the usual exposure settings, of course) and also no small degree of patience. I don’t remember where we got this particular ornament but I enjoy its message, despite living in Oklahoma where we only rarely get snow and even more rarely have snow on Christmas. Perhaps it’s the Minnesotan in me still poking out every now and then :) In any case, the ornament by itself didn’t make for all that interesting of a picture. What I really tried to do here was craft a complete composition using other objects in the background—namely the red wire tree, but also a silver bell, of sorts, that is hanging just behind the red tree which you can’t really see in the shot. I positioned those background ornaments, as well as some of the lights on the tree, to create a scene that was full of multicolored points of light reflecting off the surface of the ornament and also creating something to look at besides just the main subject.

I shot this at f/11 on my 105mm macro lens, ISO 100, and a 2-second exposure which is where my patience really started to wear thin. The ornament had a habit of twisting back and forth at the smallest provocation, which meant that even my kids walking through the other room created enough vibration to sully the shot. However, it didn’t take long until I had the image I was going for and was able to put away my camera and get back to what really matters: my family.

And with that I hope you had a good Christmas and are looking forward to a 2023 full of new opportunities, surrounded by love from family and friends. May God bless you now and throughout the new year, whatever that may bring.

If you saw last week’s photo, this shot of a leaf on the water should be pretty familiar to you. And to be honest, I thought about not using it at all for this week’s picture because not only is it so similar to last week’s, but I shot it about five minutes after taking the other one too. Is it really fair to put up two photos that are so alike, taken in such close (physical and temporal) proximity? Well it is my blog, and I do get to decide…so why not? :) Also, though this post is coming a mere four days before Christmas, the theme of the photo is decidedly unrelated to the impending holiday. Read nothing into that! I schedule my Weekly Fifty posts several weeks in advance, and as I write this on November 11, there just isn’t too many Christmas-related photo opportunities around me.

Anyway, on to the photo. Though it bears more than a passing resemblance to its counterpart from last week, it also contains some notable differences. The first, and most noticeable, is obviously the presence of many other objects on the surface of the water. Namely, several brown cypress needles along with one bit of greenery that hasn’t quite given up the ghost. Or, at least, had not as of the time I took the photo. There’s clearly one main subject–the yellow leaf–but lots of other things on the same focal plane almost as if to complement the subject or at least add some context and visual flair to the photo. Subtle indentations in the surface tension are a bit more abundant in this image as well, and one thing you don’t see are the (probably more than one hundred) bits of dirt and dust that I removed from the image in Lightroom. There’s always more, but at some point it becomes a bit reductive, and at some point I just said “enough is enough” and uploaded the picture to Flickr in the state that you see it here.

Just like last week’s, this was a lot of fun to take. I bent out over the bank of Theta Pond with my D750 and macro lens held up to my eye, used my traditional technique of back-button-focusing to keep the leaf nice and sharp, and fired off a couple dozen shots as the scene shifted and changed below me right before my eyes. I like that this shot has basically two distinct layers: the surface of the water and everything underneath, which was only a few inches away but very blurry due to the ultra-shallow depth of field inherent when taking close-up shots like this.

Since taking this shot the weather has shifted and I think the throngs of winter might finally be here to stay, though doubtless we will still see plenty of pleasant days over the next several months. Even so, I think the photo opportunities around me will start to change dramatically, and as always at this time of year I’m excited to see what’s coming just around the corner.

Merry Christmas, everyone. God bless you all :)