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

This is one of those photos that started as something very different than how it turned out, and is significantly better as a result. I was pulling out of my driveway on a very cold morning in February, and noticed that the ground was covered with a light layer of frost. That doesn’t happen too often here in Oklahoma, and I think it came about because of a bit of rain followed by sub-freezing temps overnight, but this being a photo blog and not a weather blog, I suppose the cause isn’t nearly as important as the result. And the result, if I do say so myself, is pretty cool. I saw this leaf sticking up and thought it would make for a neat picture, but what I had in mind in that moment was pretty different from how it actually turned out.

Originally I was just going to take a shot of the leaf by itself with my macro lens, and hopefully get an interesting view of its frost-tinged edges and veins. I immediately thought of this shot that I took in 2015 and wondered if I could replicate it, so to speak, but with a macro lens. Or at least take another image that was inspired by the earlier one, as I have had the habit of doing recently here on Weekly Fifty. I put my car in park, got out, grabbed my D750, got down low, put the camera in Live View…and that’s when I noticed it. Not the leaf and the frost, but the sun behind it. Good gravy.

The unexpected image of the sun coming up over the horizon immediately transformed what I was thinking about as I took this shot. Instead of being about a frosty leaf, the photograph became an entirely different image of a sunrise in the background, a leaf in the foreground, and a monochromatic yellow-and-black color scheme that is kind of different and unique for me in my photography. I took a couple pictures with a somewhat wide aperture because, well, bokeh, but then I realized I could do something even greater and make an image that was a lot more interesting if I stopped down my lens a bit.

I ended up going with f/38 which still had an impressively shallow depth of field, but also served to turn the sun into a brilliant multi-pointed star with rays emanating out in all directions as it crested my neighbor’s house. A minute later and this shot was gone, having turned from dawn to day, and I was back in my car on the way to work. But for just a moment this everyday pedestrian scene in my front yard mere inches from my driveway was transformed into something much greater, and I consider myself fortunate that I was able to capture it in my camera.

I got my macro lens right when everything was turning brown and gray for the winter, which meant that I had to wait months until shots like this would be possible. I don’t know if I would say without qualification that it was worth the wait, but I will say that as things green up a bit and colors start showing up, I’m having a lot of fun taking pictures of it all with this lens. I’ve taken shots like this before with close-up filters, but the rendering of the out-of-focus elements (i.e. the foreground and the background) has always been rather subpar. Close-up filters are also much trickier to work with in general, and offer much less latitude in terms of focusing and depth of field, whereas an actual macro lens gives you a ton of freedom for experimentation and creativity. (Though to be fair, the latter is also much more expensive than the former; if you just want to get started with close-up photography, you can’t go wrong with close-up filters.)

When I saw this flower close to the ground, I was a little unsure of what exactly should be the point of focus. I tried a couple of things and eventually landed on the stigma, which seemed appropriate since it was a little different in both size and color compared to the rest of the flower. It was tricky to get it in focus though, since I was shooting handheld and low to the ground. I couldn’t look through the viewfinder to focus which meant I had to use the flip-out LCD screen on my D750, which wouldn’t be a problem if the contrast-detect autofocus was more reliable and better suited to moving subjects. (Even micro-level movements matter a great deal when doing macro shots.) I compensated by using a small aperture and…well, just taking a ton of shots and hoping one would work out. And it did! I’m pretty happy with the result and it gives me ideas for other shots to try in the coming weeks and months.

This is more of an experiment than a photo, but given that the result turned out fairly well I’m happy to use it as this week’s image here on Weekly Fifty. Near the edge of Theta Pond on the OSU campus are a couple of odd, orange spheres about a foot in diameter sitting atop a low stone wall. They must be some kind of decoration because I don’t know what functional purpose they serve, but as purely aesthetic objects they have always seemed a bit out of place to me. Not that I’m a good judge of art or architecture; I just don’t know if I get these things on an existential level. I suppose I don’t have to though. Such accoutrements are often subjective in their interpretation, and it just so happens that I think I found an interesting way of photographing them.

As I was walking past one of these orange globes one afternoon I noticed the light reflecting off its surface in kind of an interesting way. The reflection was far from uniform, with spots of white light standing out against the deep orange, and a cracked texture just beneath the shiny surface. I had my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens with me so I got close, real close, to see if I could capture the essence of what I was seeing in the form of a photograph. I wanted to get the details of the leaflike webbing, but I also wanted to show some of the light spots in the foreground and background. I opened up the aperture on my lens as wide as it would go, stooped over, and took a few shots.

When I looked at the results on the rear screen of my camera, they didn’t quite look like how I had hoped. I realized the problem had nothing to do with my camera or exposure settings, but the way at which I was viewing the scene. I played around with a couple different ideas: standing up and looking down, shooting from different angles around the sphere, and so on. I also used manual focus and paid careful attention to the focal plane in the viewfinder, and eventually got the image you see here. It looks pretty cool and I’m not sure you would even know what this is at first glance, but it’s another example of how looking at familiar scenes with a macro lens really can have a transformative impact on your photography.

I didn’t want to post this photo. I don’t even like it very much. It’s not super sharp, it’s not super compelling, and I know I can do much better. And yet, I’m sharing it not because the image in and of itself is anything, but because it represents something. When I look at this shot I don’t see a water droplet frozen in time; I see a much better image that I’m going to take someday. In that regard I suppose you could call this shot a weird form of accountability: by posting it publicly here on Weekly Fifty, it’s almost like a personal challenge to me to create something better and I hope I can do it :)

On the north side of campus there is a water feature that involves a small curtain of drops falling onto a bed of rocks. It’s in a garden of sorts, and it’s kind of calming to look at. I thought it would be fun to try to take a picture of the water frozen in time, hovering inches above the ground with all else obscured in a beautiful blur. The reality of what I captured doesn’t reach those lofty heights, but again, this picture hints at greater things that I want to get someday soon. Below you can see the setup I used to take this shot.

I used my Nikon D500, 105mm f/2.8 Macro lens, and a tripod to get right up close and personal with the curtain of water. My idea was to get the plane of focus just right and then fire off a ton of shots in rapid succession, all at 1/8000 second in order to freeze the motion of the drops. I took nearly 400 images and while some were in focus, not a single one of them froze time in the way I had hoped. 1/8000 second is really fast, but when shooting very tiny objects at 105mm mere inches from the lens, even the smallest bit of movement is magnified to an extraordinary degree. I don’t know if, given the rules of light and physics, I will be able to get the shot I’m aiming for, but I’m going to try different setups and see what happens. (To wit: The above image was shot at 1/500 second with my iPhone and the drops are clearly frozen in time. But that was much father away and you can’t see the micro-level movements of the individual drops in the way that you can on a macro lens.)

So even though this is the one that got away, it’s still a picture worth sharing and one that I hope to return to over time as a bit of inspiration. Or perhaps more of a challenge. Either way, I’m determined to get the shot :)

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 :)