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

Note: This post marks nine years of Weekly Fifty. I never would have guessed in the spring of 2013 that this blog would still be going almost a decade later, but here we are :) Thank you, readers, for all your comments, questions, and kind words over the years and here’s looking ahead to ten years and beyond! *clinks glass*

Sometimes I take my camera with when I go out for a short walk around campus (usually by Theta Pond) and just come up empty. I walk around looking for photo opportunities and nothing really happens. No bright colors, no interesting subjects, no mix of light and shadow…nothing. Not that photo opportunities aren’t everywhere, just that some days I have a harder time seeing them compared to others. That’s what was happening when I took this picture, and while this isn’t the most groundbreaking photo I have ever taken it does serve as a reminder to me that even in times of photographic famine there are still images to be made.

Often when I’m looking for a picture opportunity one thing that I consistently come back to is light. I mean, of course photographs must involve light but I try to look for ways in which lighting is being used a bit differently, or how I can see something from a unique angle, thanks to light. The dying leaf you see here is nothing special–just a withering bit of greenery on the ground, the kind of thing you might see almost anywhere you look during fall or winter. What transforms the leaf from mundane to photo-worthy is lighting. By shooting the leaf from a low angle with the sun behind, it appears to glow almost as though it has summoned some speck of new life despite the decay. But wait, as Ron Popeil might say, there’s more.

A few years ago I shot this picture which, as you can clearly see, shares a ton of similarities with the photo features for this week and I absolutely had the original shot in mind when I took the new one. As I framed the leaf in my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, I noticed bright spots of light pop up behind it every few seconds. Vehicles driving east on University Avenue reflected the sun right into my camera, just as they did in the shot of the flower I took exactly two years earlier. (Seriously, they were both taken on January 31 two years apart.) Those brilliant points of light added an amazing extra element to the shot, and elevated it to a whole other plane. Within the span of roughly three minutes I went from not seeing any photo opportunities to creating an image I would be proud to print and hang.

Sometimes you just have to keep your eyes open and be willing to see something familiar, differently :)

One thing I am enjoying about my macro lens is re-thinking shots, or general compositional concepts, that I have taken before with other gear. Sometimes with my normal 50mm lens, other times with some close-up filters, but usually without the right equipment to really capture what I was thinking in my mind at the time. This is kind of one of those moments. About a year ago I took this picture at Lake Carl Blackwell after a particularly nasty cold snap, and while it’s an OK picture it’s not at all the shot I wanted to take. What I wanted to capture was a super close-up image of a very tiny frozen part of the plant, but that just wasn’t possible with the gear I had at the time. So when I came across a somewhat similar scene at Lake McMurtry when I was out on a hike with my wife and our kids recently, I took the opportunity to make up for the shot I wasn’t able to get the first time around.

There were several things working to my advantage for the shot you see here. First, the weather was much nicer which always makes photography more enjoyable. I think it was about 50 degrees and most of the lake wasn’t even frozen except for a few shady spots near the shore. Also, the sun was bright and the sky was clear, which made for much better lighting than the bland, overcast sky of the shot from February 2021. I also had my D750 instead of my D7100 which meant I could use the flip-up screen to help me compose the shot, which was extraordinary helpful since this frozen drop of water was just a few inches off the ground. Finally, and this is the most important factor, I had a true macro lens this time around :)

Initially I wasn’t sure what to use as the subject for this composition, and tried a couple shots with the opaque stalactites on the right. It was OK but something just wasn’t working out quite right. My shots just looked kind of…bland and uninteresting. Then I realized that the single clear drop would make a much more interesting image especially with the rich browns on the left and the white ice on the right. I took a few shots, inched closer, took a few more shots, and repeated the process until I got the image I was happy with. While I’m pleased with how this turned out, I’m glad it didn’t take too much time since I wanted to get back to my wife and kids who were busy tossing rocks into the lake to see if they could break the ice. That turned out to be a lot more fun than taking pictures anyway :)

This is one of those photos that’s not so much about the image, but the story behind the image. It’s a gingerbread house, and not a super fancy or extraordinary one at that, but what you’re actually seeing here is the end result of a fun project that our kids got to do with their grandparents when we went up to visit them over Christmas break. They had been given a gingerbread house kit by a friend who knew their grandchildren were coming for a visit and might want a fun project to do, and it ended up being exactly that: an enjoyable activity for, and I’m not even kidding about this, the whole family to enjoy. I realize that might seem slightly cheesy to say (and read, in your case) but it’s true: my kids had a great time assembling this decoration with their grandparents over the course of a few days. As a bit of caution to errant passers-by one of my kids put the warning phrase “Don’t eat” on top, spelled out in icing and candy. Not that anyone was in the house aside from us, but still, eight-year-olds sometimes have their own sense of logic and you have to just go with it every now and then. When I see this picture, what makes it meaningful isn’t the colors or the lighting or the composition, but the memories. And that, it seems to me, is one of the best gifts that photography has given to all of us.

I brought my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens along for the trip even though I knew there probably wouldn’t be too many opportunities to use it, but the beauty of driving instead of flying when you go on any sort of trip is that you have a lot more luggage-related wiggle room compared to flying. Though that camera and lens mostly stayed in my bag for much of our visit, I thought this gingerbread house would be a great opportunity to use and I wasn’t at all disappointed with the results. Quite the opposite, in fact. Even though this is hardly a macro photo, that’s kind of beside the point: macro lenses are great for much more than just close-ups! I couldn’t do much in the way of customizing the lighting or even the background, but I thought that if I set this confection on a small table with the fireplace in the background it would make for at least a slightly more interesting overall composition. I shot this in manual with ISO 100 and a few different apertures values with my camera firmly mounted on a tripod so as to make shutter speed more or less irrelevant.

As usual my first instinct was to shoot wide open but, of course, the depth of field I was getting was simply far too shallow even with my camera being several feet away from the gingerbread house. (That’s what you get when you shoot with a 105mm lens, after all😁) I honestly didn’t even know what to focus on–the green window trim, the colored candy on top, the roof line, or even the candy cane fence protruding from the front. F/8 kind of took care of most of those issues for me, thankfully. I focused on the big green rectangular blobs that my youngest son put on as windows and doors and enough of the house was sharp to make for a quality end result.

I’m not sure about this picture. I mean, it’s not a bad shot but it feels like there’s a much better image hiding underneath or just out of reach. In recent weeks I have posted a lot of shots taken with my macro lens that I am proud of, but this…well, it’s not one of them. Still, this picture was part of my photography journey so that alone is all the reason I need to share it here.

Here’s what I was going for when I took this shot: I wanted an image of this red flower as the subject, and the fountain in the background as sort of a secondary subject. What’s that…you don’t see a fountain? Well look again! It’s that white blob just to the right side of the red flower. I mean, maybe this could have been an interesting image but it just doesn’t quite get there. The flower and the fountain are too close, almost like they are competing to occupy the center of the frame. The horizon is tilted just enough to look like an accident instead of intentional. The lighting is harsh and uninviting. I could go on. And yet, it’s not entirely a lost cause because I did learn something when I took this shot.

It was really tricky to get the aperture just right, and in the end I don’t think I quite got there. I wanted the flower to be sharp and the fountain to be blurry, but still actually look like a fountain. I succeeded at making the flower sharp but I think I could have stopped down a bit more to make the fountain a little clearer. What I learned was that I need to be a bit more intentional when taking shots like this, and to stop down more than I might think is necessary. F/22, as opposed to f/13, would have probably resulted in a better image and of course shooting at a different time of day (or on a different day altogether, one with more clouds) would have no doubt helped with the lighting. While this won’t be anywhere in my top images of the year, it is a shot I’m glad I was able to take and I think it will help me improve my future photos–and sometimes that’s worth more than having an image turn out spectacularly.

One thing I’m enjoying about my Macro lens is looking for photo opportunities close to the ground. Not necessarily finding things that are hidden or unseen, but things that I would normally just kind of overlook on a day-to-day basis. Not that such subjects are inherently more interesting or valuable or special than anything else, but just that it’s kind of fun to see what there is to see at your feet instead of at normal eye level. That’s how I came across this shot, which is some kind of plant (obviously) just poking out from a covering of leaves and wood chips on the south end of the Oklahoma State University campus.

Longtime Weekly Fifty readers know how often I have posted photos that I took while walking around Theta Pond, and this one continues the tradition quite nicely. I took this picture on a warm December afternoon when I needed to get out of my office and stretch my legs for a bit, so I put on a podcast (probably an episode of The Delta Flyers) and grabbed my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens and went for a bit of a stroll. As usual I just sort of ended up at the pond because it’s one of my favorite spots on campus, and noticed a patch of these brown-colored plants and thought I might be able to get a good shot of them.

One thing I’m still learning about my macro lens is how to effectively utilize and manipulate the aperture of my lens to get the shot I want. The 105mm focal length lets me get very close to subjects which means I have to be very careful when shooting wide open. Not necessarily for sharpness, but for depth of field–though sharpness too, but kind of as a byproduct of DOF since this lens is really sharp even wide open. I put my camera on the ground, flipped out the rear screen, set the aperture to f/8, focused on the red leaf in the center, and took a few photos.

No good. Depth of field was simply too shallow.

I ended up with an aperture of f/16 which I almost never shoot at on my 50mm lens, but I’m finding is much more reasonable on this macro lens than shooting at f/4 or f/2.8. I really like the colors, the leaves in the foreground, the white-and-brown background, and the overall mood and tone of this shot. It just feels like autumn and yet, also feels like something new and exciting is just around the corner too.