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

This is not a black and white photo.

It looks entirely monochromatic, sure, but the image you see here is exactly what I saw in person when I took this shot. It’s also, contrary to what one might assume, not a picture of the moon. This is the sun peeking through layers of clouds and fog on a Thursday morning in mid-October, and it’s a shot I never even considered until one of my kids made a rather astute observation.

To set the scene: K-12 schools were closed on this day due to Fall Break, and I was out in the front yard tossing the football around with my boys while my wife was inside getting some research done for her job. It had rained the previous day but overcast skies kept the humidity level high, and the next morning the whole neighborhood was enveloped in fog was so think we could hardly see our neighbor’s house. The stillness of the air, combined with the near-zero visibility, created an almost otherworldly scene punctuated with the sounds of my kids saying “Look at that spiral!” and “Good catch!”

I was right there in the mix with my boys with my mind split between tossing the ball and marveling at the fog, when my oldest son cried out “Dad, look at the sun!” I turned my gaze eastward and saw a bright patch of light in the clouds, but then I looked closer and realized that through all the haze we could actually look directly at the sun. I ran inside, grabbed my D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and hurried back outside to see if I could get a good shot.

I have learned from lots of pictures of the moon that it helps to have something in the foreground to create a sense of scale and context. (A picture of a bright circle in the sky is, in and of itself, just not that interesting.) I shot through a gap in the branches of the pine tree in our front yard at f/2.8, and quickly realized that aperture was way too small. The foreground was a blurry mess and didn’t look interesting at all. I quickly dialed my lens down to f/22, shot another picture, and the needles were too sharp. The Goldilocks-style sweet spot was f/11 which gave me just enough foreground blur (but not too much) and a clear shot of the sun, and I positioned myself so it looked like the sun was cresting a foggy hill–notice how the lower third is just a bit darker than the rest.

Five minutes later this scene was gone, and while I don’t know when I will get the chance to shoot a photo like this again I was thrilled to have the opportunity and know how to operate my camera, and make use of the elements around me, to get an interesting picture.

Many years ago I was traveling from Oklahoma to Nebraska when I came across an interesting street sign on Highway 36 just west of Washington, Kansas. It bore the name of an all-too-familiar recurring track in the Mario Kart franchise–the bane of many a racer’s existence, and the cause of more than a few controllers’ untimely demise after being hurled against the wall. Even so, Rainbow Road holds a special place in the heart of many Mario Kart players–perhaps precisely because of the challenge–and I was stunned to see an actual Rainbow Road street sign IRL, as kids these days might say.

Alas, when I first drove past that sign it was dusk and I had a schedule to keep, so I didn’t stop to get a picture. Over the years I took that route through Kansas on more than one occasion specifically to get a shot of the street sign, though my efforts were stymied every time. So when I found myself driving, once again, through Kansas earlier this year I made it a point to see if I could get a shot of this sign. However, I didn’t take my normal route. Instead, I went north through Washington on a small two-lane road which, after a few miles, turned to gravel, veered east, and then back north after joining up with–you guess it, Rainbow Road.

There’s a few miles of this stretch of road before it meets up with a highway that make for great photo opportunities such as the one you see here. I don’t know that this is the best shot one could get along this drive, but this scene certainly did make for an interesting picture in and of itself. I pulled over, got out my Nikon D500 and 70-200mm lens, and got to work composing this shot. It turned out to be trickier than I thought, though thankfully the sky was cloudy enough to case a nice diffused light over the entire scene. The challenge became how to capture an interesting shot of this street sign: what angle do I shoot from? What focal length do I use? What aperture and, as a result, what kind of depth-of-field am I going for? I ended up opening the door of my car so I could kind of half-climb into it, basically using the rear seat as a ladder, so I could get my eyes level with the street sign. I wanted a shot of the road going off into the distance, and I liked the two yellow markers on either side indicating the presence of a ditch. I like how it turned out, and I think it captures the essence of the scene quite well.

Two other notes: First, the road you see isn’t actually Rainbow Road. It’s 28th Road. Rainbow Road is the one I’m driving on, and you can’t actually see it in this shot. Kind of counterintuitive, but it’s true :)

Second, I had to do a bit of retouching on this picture to remove a day/date indicator on the stop sign that someone had written in marker, as well as a rusty bolt on the lower-right part of the N. Notice how there is only one bolt holding the sign to the post: that’s not how street signs are attached. There are almost always two bolts, as you can see on the 28th Road sign, but I didn’t like the unsightly rust on the lower bolt. Enter Photoshop, and thanks Adobe for making this possible :)

One final note to any who find themselves on this stretch of gravel in the middle of Kansas…make sure to watch out for errant turtle shells or ill-placed banana peels. And if you see a blue shell flying overhead, it’s best to run for cover.

After weeks of photos featuring airplanes and wind turbines, this image is much more simple and also serves as the final shot in this series of photos from my trip to Nebraska. This was also, fittingly, the last thing I shot before putting my camera gear away and just focusing on getting back home. I think this was off of Highway 77 but I don’t remember exactly, though it was definitely somewhere in Kansas. From a compositional perspective this is about as simple as you can possibly get: the windmill lining up on the left third of the image, and the grass exactly filling the bottom third. There’s a clear subject, a sense of perspective with the grass in the foreground blurred out due to depth of field, and a wide open sky on the right side. No clouds, no birds, no trees, just a simple shot of a windmill on the prairie. And I like it that way.

While I appreciate the sheer size of the metal wind turbines so prominent across the midwest, there’s something special about a simple windmill–rusty after years of being blasted by the elements–sitting in a grassy field against a deep blue sky that seems distinctly Middle American. This image could have been taken 100 years ago and it would look almost the same, and hopefully 100 years from now this windmill will still be here for future generations to consider.

I shot this with my Nikon D500, 70-200 f/2.8 lens, at 200mm with an aperture of f/2.8. Is that lens overkill for such a photo? Maybe, but then again, without the f/2.8 aperture it wouldn’t have the delicious foreground blur that helps you feel like you are part of the photo. Shooting this was a good way of going back to basics, so to speak, and using fancy gear to take a very simple but very effective picture. I hope I can stop and see this windmill again on my next trip to Nebraska, and hopefully people will still see it standing tall for years to come.

If you’re tired of wind turbine photos, don’t worry: this is the final one I plan on posting. Maybe. Hopefully. Who knows. In any case, here’s yet another photo of the Kansas prairie and some wind turbines, but just like the others I have shared recently, this one is distinctly different in a way that I haven’t yet been able to photograph until now.

In a way this isn’t a picture of wind turbines or hay bales or anything like that. It’s a picture of scale. It’s meant to display the vastness of the rolling hills in Kansas, in a way that you can’t really get without something in the foreground and something else way in the background. Out west you can get these kinds of shots with mountains in the background that clearly conveys a sense of scale, but what do you do when you trade high peaks for open blue skies? Simple: find something else to use instead.

I shot this on my Nikon D500 at 200mm on my 70-200 f/2.8 lens, with the aperture set to f/8. I tried a wider aperture but the wind turbines in the distance were too fuzzy to even tell what they were, and f/8 gave me just the right combination of sharpness and background blur. If you look closely though, you’ll notice something interesting about the turbines: they’re blurry, but not in the way you might expect. Rather than losing sharpness due to depth of field, the towering columns and spinning blades appear wavy and ill-defined due to the mirage effect that happens when hot air rises from the ground and causes light to bend.

I was trying to capture an image that, like some of my other recent images, shows the sheer vastness of the midwestern vistas. It’s tricky to do that with a telephoto lens, but I think this picture does a pretty decent job due to the compositional elements of foreground and background. At the lower portion of the photo you can see hay bales receding into the distance, followed by rolling hills and then two layers of wind turbines: the two in the middle are closer and the two on the edges are father away. It all comes together to form an image that slowly recedes away from the viewer and, in doing so, helps illustrate just how big this scene really is.

If there’s one thing I’m not happy about in this picture it’s the editing artifacts where the sky meets the ground. I darkened the sky just a bit in Lightroom to make it look more like when I actually took this picture, and there’s a bit of a white line or some kind of border as a result that seems a bit artificial. I don’t care for it, but I also don’t care enough to spend a long time tweaking the original RAW file. I’m happy with the shot as-is, and that’s good enough for me :)

One strange problem with photographing wind turbines is how to deal with the position of the blades. What position should they be in for a cool-looking picture? If you have never taken a picture like this before you might think that you would want the blades of your subject (in this case, the large turbine near the right side) to be positioned just like the one on the left: one blade straight up, and the other blades at the four- and eight-o’clock positions. Here’s the thing though…that position doesn’t convey movement. It’s weird, but it’s true. When you look at the turbine on the left it looks static and unmoving, even though in reality it was turning and churning in the breeze just like the rest. So what do you do?

You could try to invert the position of the blades such that one is straight down and the other two are at the classic 10:10 orientation, but that doesn’t work either. The result is a turbine with what appears to be only two blades since the third, the one that is straight down, isn’t immediately noticeable. This position also makes the turbine look odd and off-kilter, though I don’t exactly know why.

My best advice when shooting pictures of a three-bladed turbine is to take the shot when the blades are just like you see here: one at the 1:00 position, one at the 5:00 position, and one at the 10:00 position. (Roughly speaking, that is.) It looks like they are on the move, going places, doing things, and generating power in such a way that other positions just don’t seem to convey. Since the blades were, in fact, spinning kind of rapidly when I took this I just set my camera to rapid-shot mode, held down the shutter, and fired off about 30 images. One of them turned out great–the one you see here–and I hope it gives you even a small sense of scope and scale that I got while standing in this field by the road.