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

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I started playing guitar, but it was at some point during my high school years. My buddy Nick and I basically taught ourselves to play in each other’s basements and garages, and since most of the time we didn’t really know what we were doing when we plugged our cheap electrics into our amps and strummed away, Nick just called it “noodling.” I still use that term to refer to the act of just kind of playing the guitar aimlessly, picking strings or inventing chords or working through a scale or trying some new riffs that just sound good, even if you don’t know the musical theory behind it all.

That’s basically what’s going on here, though a bit more context is required to really make sense of this picture. As you may or may not know, my wife and I have a side project called Stevens Creek Photography which involves taking simple portraits of people around town. We don’t do weddings, and we don’t do birthday parties, and we don’t do any sort of big event photography at all. What do, though, is take great pictures of individuals and families. I don’t usually share these photos here on Weekly Fifty since it seems rather self-indulgent and not exactly in the best interests of my clients who pay me to take pictures for them, not for me to share on my personal blog.

Anyway, I recently did a high school senior portrait session for a young man who asked if he could bring his guitar along for the shoot. Of course I said yes, that would be just fine, and I ended up with this shot you see here which is, honestly, one of my favorite from the entire evening. Spoiler: this was the first time I used my macro lens on a portrait shoot, and I have a whole new level of respect for that lens and what it can do.

It started with a clear idea of the kind of picture I wanted to get: a close-up of this young man’s left hand on the neck, with his other hand strumming near the pickups. I asked him to sit on a bench and just kind of noodle away at his guitar, and then I got out my Nikon D500 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, and went to work. I set the aperture to f/4.8 since I wanted a nice balance between depth of field, low ISO, and fast shutter speed. That lens gave me the flexibility to shoot as close as I wanted to without even thinking about whether the pictures would be in focus, and I used continuous high-speed shooting to fire off dozens of shots hoping one would show his fingers in an interesting position while still, of course, being in focus.

In short, this picture was no accident. It was the result of months of practice with my macro lens, years of learning about exposure and manipulating the fundamentals of Aperture, ISO, and Shutter, and having a clear idea of the type of shot I wanted to get. There’s also lighting, composition, and the simple relationship-building that happens during a photo shoot. And it all worked out! I really like this shot and I hope my client does too :)

Before I get too far into this post, a reminder for anyone who is new here: I don’t really do abstract photography. I’m not one for making the viewer guess at my intentions or come up with their own deep interpretations of my work, or anything like that at all. I just like to take pictures of things I find interesting, whatever they happen to be, and hopefully learn a few things along the way so I can share those things with others. All you are seeing here is the result of that thought process: nothing more, nothing less. However, having said all that, feel free to draw meaning or create your own interpretations of this picture all you want. I don’t mind at all, but just know that’s not really the point of Weekly Fifty 📷

So what is this? I’m not exactly sure, to be honest. It’s some kind of trinket or party favor that one of my kids brought home from school. It’s about one inch wide, made from some kind of thin metal, and I think the idea is that you slip it on your finger, almost like a flexible ring, and then you have something cool to show your friends in the third grade. Whatever it is, and however it got to our kitchen counter, doesn’t really matter here. What does matter is that I thought it would make for a fun macro photo, and while I’m not sure I was entirely correct on that point, it was cool to experiment a bit and see what happened.

To get this shot I put this torus thingey on my iPad in order to get a clean surface with a nice-looking reflection, and then angled the iPad such that the shadow being cast was from top to bottom and not side to side. Then I put my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens on a tripod, set the ISO to 100, adjusted the aperture to f/16, and took a few shots. Even at f/16 the depth of field here is astoundingly thin, and a good reminder to me of something I keep learning over and over and over: macro is a whole different beast compared to normal photography. This shot required a four-second exposure in the middle of the day! In the end I don’t know that this is one of my favorite pictures ever–far from it, in fact. It was just a fun little experiment and, more importantly, gave me some interesting ideas to think about down the road.

After a summer of traveling and exploring different types of photography ideas and styles from Oklahoma to Kansas to the Rocky Mountains, this week’s shot takes it all back to familiar territory. I took today’s photo while out for a walk around OSU’s Theta Pond, and it felt nice to return to something a little more simple and take the kind of shot that just feels comfortable and familiar: a simple composition with a subject in the foreground and a nice blurry background. The kind of shot that my macro lens excels at :)

The basic idea here was pretty simple: a close-up picture of some leaves in the midst of shedding their summer greens for autumn yellows. As I crouched down to take this shot I didn’t even think about the bright spot of light in the background, but when I reviewed the picture on the back of my camera I knew I wanted to integrate that into the shot somehow. (If I had a proper mirrorless camera I would have seen that bright white spot of light right away, but that’s a discussion for another day. Where’s my Nikon Z8?) But how?

I honestly wasn’t sure what I wanted the final shot to look like when I was out by the pond, so I took a dozen photos and then looked for the best one in Lightroom. Below you can see nine of the options, but before I tell you why I opted for the one I did I’m curious which one you would have picked.

I ended up going with Number 9 in the lower-right corner because it was, in my opinion, a complete composition where the subject in the foreground and the spot of light in the background complemented each other and worked together to create a complete image. Most of the other shots felt like two separate entities captured in the frame–the golden leaves and the white spot of light. They were competing for viewer’s attention rather than cooperating to form a single shot. Image 4 was a little different in that I shot it with a much wider aperture and positioned the light to be directly behind the leaves, but that ended up diminishing the impact of the light entirely and somewhat deflated the impact of the final shot. The more I looked at Image 9, the more I liked how everything flowed together and created a beautiful final shot.

While all of these shots have merit, it was fun to select what I thought was the real standout among the bunch and a good reminder to me that sometimes it’s the subtle details that matter most, and can make the difference between a good picture and a great one :)

Ok so let’s get one thing out of the way right upfront: I’m really not the most creative person when it comes to naming my pictures. If anyone has a better suggestion for this shot, please feel free to share it :)

Alright so now that that’s out of the way, let’s get on to the picture. This is kind of a follow-up to last week’s shot of a green…um…something on a flower isolated against a uniform gray background. (I really don’t know much about flowers in case you can’t tell.) Today’s picture is from the same bunch of flowers that our neighbor picked from his garden and gave to us while we were out on a walk, and to get this shot I used some of the same techniques as last week but switched around a bit. Literally.

To get last week’s picture I used a giant translucent fold-out panel and put it between the plant and my main source of light, the kitchen windows. For this picture I moved my camera and tripod to the other end of the table so the window was behind me, which meant my subject was front-lit which is generally a good practice for most photos. Backlighting would have made no sense at all here. I raised up the central column of my tripod, aimed my camera down, put it in Live View, and focused manually until I got the composition you see here. And just for a sense of scale, the pink center portion ringed with curled yellow petals is smaller than a penny, which means depth of field had to be tightly controlled. I shot this at f/13 and even then you can see how razor-thin the area in focus actually was, and in order to get a clean image at ISO 100 it required a three-second exposure. No problem though–just set the self-timer to avoid any vibrations from my hand on the camera, and let the camera do the rest.

I took a bit of a break from macro photography this summer when we were traveling, but pictures like this remind me of how much I enjoy it and how eager I am to get back into it :)

A week ago as my wife and I were walking past my neighbor’s house with our boys, we stopped to chat with him while he was tending to his impressive flower bed in the front yard. He said he would cut a few for us to take home, and we gladly accepted his offer—who would turn down a vase of flowers from a neighbor? Of course my photographer’s eye thought the flowers would be a good opportunity to take some pictures, so a few days later on Sunday morning after church that’s exactly what I did. My wife went out to play with the kids while I set up shop on the kitchen table: Tripod, D750, 105mm macro lens, and a giant translucent reflector. (I have owned this thing for years but rarely use it, so I was excited at the opportunity to bust it out and harness its light-altering power. Mwa-ha-ha!)

My general idea was pretty simple: take a close-up shot of this green, leafy poart sticking up from one of the flowers. In typical fashion I couldn’t tell you what this is or even what kind of flower it’s from, but I do know that the entire green thing you see here is roughly one inch tall. Hence the need for a macro lens. While there’s nothing in the way of context clues to provide a sense of scale, I don’t think it’s really necessary for this shot and, in fact, almost makes the entire scene almost ethereal. Without any idea of how large this thing is, the viewer is free to draw his or her own conclusions and make of this what they will, which is kind of a cool departure for me since I so often speak of the importance of context when taking pictures.

But what of the reflector? I used it, but maybe not in the way you might expect. I intentionally composed this shot such that the plant was backlit, and used the translucent white reflector to create an even background in order to remove any and all sense of context. Normally I like to have a blurry out-of-focus background, but in this case I wanted to try something different and completely and totally isolate the subject with nothing else in the frame whatsoever.

In terms of exposure, I shot this at f/32 in order to get everything sharp after trying, unsuccessfully, to get similar pictures at f/11 and f/22. I set the ISO to 100 which meant I needed a ten-second shutter speed even though it was basically high noon when I took this picture. I focused manually using live view and used the self-timer in order to remove any chance of me vibrating the camera with my finger when I pressed the shutter button. I think the moral of the story here, other than that this was a fun picture to take, might be that you never know when you will be able to try new things with old photography gear. And to always be on the lookout for picture opportunities, especially if your neighbor gives you some flowers.