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

Anyone who has spent time up north is surely familiar with the call of the loon: the sound that signifies summer sunsets, evening campfires, and time spent with friends and family by the lake. I grew up in Minnesota and also lived there for five years as an adult, and all it takes is one high-pitched warble to immediately transport me a thousand miles to the north woods at dusk. I took this sound for granted most of the time I lived up in that part of the country but now, having spent more than a decade living in the sweeping prairie of Oklahoma, I miss it a great deal. And that’s why pictures like the one you see here are so special to me :)

While this might appear to be a loon swimming on a lake, that’s not actually the case at all. This is a small painted-wood replica of a loon, about 1.5 inches from beak to tail, sitting on top of an overturned glass bowl in front of a crumpled piece of aluminum foil.

This is a technique I have used before but never with an actual macro lens, and the results are kind of stunning. At least to me, anyway. I shot this at f/11 but it looks more like f/2.8 because the background is so blurry and the depth of field is razor-thin. That’s the benefit of using a macro lens though, especially a telephone one like the Nikon 105 f/2.8 FL-ED. It lets you get super close to subjects, even tiny things like this little loon, and get amazing photos without the need to zoom in or crop in post. Originally I had not planned on using an overturned bowl but I kind of like the effect, almost like this is a real loon making ripples on the surface of a calm lake.

Incidentally, I got this loon from my mom years ago and I love having it sit on our shelf in the living room–If you’re reading this entry, thank you Mom!

If you have been following Weekly Fifty for a while, you know how much I enjoy doing close-up shots of…well, pretty much anything. I got a set of close-up filters way back in…2015? 2016? I can’t remember anymore but my goodness I have used those things a lot over the years. It’s so fun to discover the beauty in everything around us that is often overlooked simply because aren’t looking close enough. Ordinary objects like pencils and toys and flowers become works of art when viewed up close, and a cheapo set of screw-on filters can help you unlock this magical world just waiting to be discovered.

But you know what’s even better? An actual macro lens :)

In October I finally got a lens I have been looking at for a long, long time: The Nikon 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED. I know there are newer F-mount macro lenses with similar focal lengths from third parties like Sigma and Tamron, but I have had my heart set on this particular lens and was glad to finally pick it up when Nikon had a sale recently. And my goodness, this thing is incredible. What you’re seeing here is the first of many close-up shots you are likely to see over the coming weeks and months, all thanks to this lens. This was actually one of the first pictures I took with it, and it showed me how incredible this lens is but also how much I have to learn. And when it comes to photography, I sure do enjoy learning.

A couple of things to note here: First, this was shot at f/19. Seriously. That just goes to show just how insane things like depth of field are when working at close distances. This piece of candy is less than an inch from front to back and yet, only about half of it is in focus. Maybe a third. And that’s at f/19! I used a tripod, ISO 100, and a 3-second exposure to get this shot and it hopefully gives you an idea of how little the margin of error is when working at such close distances. This is just an ordinary piece of candy, but it could almost be a work of art just because we are seeing it so close.

Yeah…I’m looking forward to learning more about this lens :)

I just love shooting pictures in the fog. It’s one of the most challenging conditions in which to take photos, but the results are singular. There’s just no other way to get shots like this unless conditions are just right. You can’t fake this, and most of the time you can’t even plan for it. You just have to keep your eyes open, recognize these opportunities when you see them, and have your gear ready (along with a knowledge of how to use it) to get a shot. When my kids and I went outside on this particular morning in mid-October during the fall of 2021 I didn’t even have any specific intention to take this picture, but as soon as we left the house and started playing in the street we all realized just how incredibly thick the fog was. We could barely see across the street, much less down the street to our neighbor’s house. Right away I knew I could get an interesting photo but it would require some quick thinking before the fog evaporated.

I told my oldest son to get my bike, ride to the corner, and then cycle back slowly so I could take a few pictures. While he was on the way down I grabbed my d500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and after a little while I honestly couldn’t even see him through the thick cloud that had descended on our neighborhood. He soon turned around and started the return trip, and I basically just fired off dozens of shots at f/2.8 hoping I would get one where he was right in the middle of the street like you see here. I didn’t want to bark orders to him about where to go and how to look, since the entire scene had a strange, calm stillness to it that was almost palpable. The result is something that looks like a shot out of a scary movie, and one that I don’t think I’ll be able to repeat any time soon…if ever.

Three notes about the image: Yes it has been edited to remove my son’s face. I don’t post pictures of my kids online publicly, but I really wanted to share this particular image, so the result is the compromise you see here. I used Photoshop to essentially copy/paste some fog over his head so you can’t see his face, and if that’s too much editing…well, it’s a creative choice I can easily live with. The other note concerns the car in the background, which you might not even notice at first. It’s actually much farther away than it might seem, and I can assure you my son was not in danger at all. A few seconds after this I did let him know that a car was coming up the street, and he had plenty of time to pull over and let it pass. I think it adds kind of an interesting layer to the image though, almost like he is being stalked by a nameless monster–one that you might not even see at first but is definitely there once you look a bit closer. Finally, even though this looks like it was edited to be black-and-white, I can promise you that what you see here is what we saw on this morning: a world shrouded in fog, devoid of color. It was really cool.

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.