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

This photo changes things up in a different way than I expected. One fairly common thread that runs through a lot of my pictures recently is that many of them are improvements, so to speak, upon an original version that was created years ago. Some of these are intentional, others coincidental, but part of the continual journey of growth and improvement in photography, at least for most people, is learning from what you have done before and then building on it to create something even better.

This photo, however, changes things just a bit. It builds on an image of a coneflower from July 16, 2014, that I hot with my original camera kit: A Nikon D200 and 50mm f/1.8 lens. A combination that is positively ancient compared to modern gear, combined with almost no knowledge of light, exposure, composition, or any other fundamental elements of photography. I had no idea what I was doing, but I took a picture that I was proud of and have since printed to hang on my wall. I knew there was room for improvement though…

A few weeks ago as I walked from my car to my office on a rainy weekday morning, I saw a scene with some coneflowers that was not too dissimilar from the one I encountered over a decade ago. I had my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 lens in my backpack and thought that this would be a great opportunity to use my years of experience to take a picture of a coneflower that was even better than the original. I carefully composed the shot, taking into account things like the aperture (to control depth of field), the angle of light, the background, and the other flowers that might be in the frame, and took a dozen photos–my favorite of which you see featured above.

But here’s the odd thing: I still prefer the original. This doesn’t usually happen with my photography, and it’s got me thinking about things a bit differently lately. Normally a picture I take today, which was inspired by a similar shot I took years ago, is almost always improved in many ways. It’s normal for most photographers, and a sign of growth and change. It’s a good thing. But in this case, the opposite happened. The original has a lot more contrast, a lot more shadow detail, and also a bit more of something I can’t really quantify: character. It just feels more…moody, perhaps? Brooding, even? The petals have more life and texture to them, and I prefer the giant brush stroke (as it were) of dull red and green on the right side over the blurry yellows in the background of the new one. There’s even a glint of light on one of the flowers in the background, thanks to a bit of rain that had not yet rolled off, which adds to the overall tone of the original image.

This isn’t me trying to be self-deprecating or anything like that. It’s just an observation, and one that has got me thinking about my photography a little differently lately. Or maybe my editing style, which has, I think, grown a little punchier and brighter over the years. Maybe I need to tone things down a bit, and let my photos breathe a little instead of dialing the Lightroom sliders all the way to one edge or the other. Whatever it is, I do like that this photo gave me an opportunity to stop and contemplate things in a rather unexpected way.

This photo is mostly the result of some simple experimentation. A proof of concept, perhaps, to see if an idea I had would actually work out. In the end I’m not entirely sure it did, but at the same time, not altogether convinced it did not. If nothing else it was a fun picture to take and a good chance to come away from a walk around Theta Pond on the OSU campus with a cool picture and a bit of a story to tell, which means the whole exercise was time well spent. The trick here, which is the same as that on many a close-up photo, lies in the depth of field: how to get the right aperture, along with the proper distance from the subject, in order to get the shot I was aiming for. In this case there was a bit of an additional wrinkle added to the mix in that the subject, as it were, could be many things. Should it be just one purple flower? Perhaps two? What about the main portion of the plant or, perhaps, one of the unfolded flowers? What about using a small aperture so the entire plant? Lots of options to consider, for sure.

I ended up going with a pretty simple, perhaps obvious, solution: just use the most colorful part of the flower and go from there. I shot at f/8 to get a nice mix of subject sharpness and background blur, even though that meant most of the plant besides the purple petals was not in focus. It didn’t really matter to me after I decided to use the flowers as the subject, but what did matter was the background: I wanted to position the plant (or, rather, myself) such that everything behind it helped accentuate it while also adding some fun context. The bright white blur is one of the fountains in Theta Pond, and the dark vertical line is a cypress tree at the eastern edge of the water.

In some ways this is a bit of a classic Weekly Fifty composition: it’s certainly not the first time I’ve taken a picture at Theta Pond in the afternoon, of a bit of flora while facing west with a fountain in the background. Is it a complicated setup? Nope, not at all. But it’s fun style of picture to take, and it brings a smile to my face–not only while taking it, but viewing it afterwards.

Some of the best Star Trek episodes involve time: freezing it, traveling through it, jumping between various versions of it, and so on. The exploration of time in the context of a science fiction show where anything is possible, limited only by the imagination of the writers, is fertile ground for some incredible storylines that go well beyond the simple idea of galavanting across the galaxy while shooting lasers at Romulans. There’s a particular frozen-in-time scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation that has stuck with me for decades, and was certainly on my mind as I took this photo. Midway through the Season 6 episode Timescape, some of the crew come across a warp core breach in progress but, in a bit of a twist that can only happen in the realm of science fiction, extremely slowly. An incident that would normally happen in the blink of an eye is instead unfolding over the course of several hours, and Picard is so dumbfounded at the thought of the Enterprise exploding that he loses his mind for a bit and proceeds to, in one of the show’s stranger moments, draw a smiley face in the cloud of gas bursting forth from the dilithium chamber. The warp core, as Commander Data explained, has already exploded. The chain reaction is set, and nothing can be done to stop the sequence of events about to unfold. The only reason it appears to be paused to Picard, Data, and Troi is that they are merely experiencing it in ultra-slow motion.

The point is, and I don’t mean to get too sidetracked here, that taking a photograph is not too dissimilar from this fictional event. A singular mark in time is captured when you press the shutter, but even if the image is tack sharp it’s important to remember that time has not been captured in a frozen state. Even at 1/100 or 1/1000 of a second, a photograph is recording the passage of actual time–just slowed way down. And that, as it just so happens, brings us to this week’s featured photo.

If you think that this picture somewhat resembles an explosion, you’re not wrong. What you’re seeing is a small clump of seeds in the process of slowly expanding over the course of several days. Not long before this shot was taken, this was a ball about the size of a pencil eraser with some spiky protrustions all across its surface. A day or two later the spiny shape you see here will be a small stalk of grass with several tiny seed pods dangling from its tip. And during the in-between time, you get what you see in today’s shot: an explosion in slow motion, captured in a single photograph. It’s essentially the same as what Captain Picard saw, or will see hundreds of years from now, in the Engineering deck of the Enterprise.

To get this shot I positioned my Nikon D750 and and 105mm macro lens on a very tiny tripod a couple of inches away from the exploding ball of seeds, which was about a half-inch in diameter.

I used a two-second delay timer to minimize camera shake, and an aperture of f/32 to keep depth of field under control and get as sharp of an image as possible. I also shot with the sun behind the subject in order to get some backlighting, which helped accentuate the sharp edges and detailed textures that you wouldn’t see if the light was behind the camera.

One final fun note is that this was all in my own yard. I didn’t have to travel anywhere to get this shot–just keep my eyes open for what was right in front of me.

As with many of my photos, this one came about thanks to a simple walk around the pond on a break at work. I had my trusty Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens with me, and unlike some other photos I have taken recently, I didn’t have anything specific in mind. This particular perambulation was more about just getting out for a bit and, if I could get a picture along the way, great. Nothing really caught my eye though, until I saw this bug near the edge of the sidewalk. I don’t know what this thing is. I mean, I kind of do–it looks like a fly, right? That’s what I thought too, and it’s how I would describe it were it not for one key characteristic: this sucker was huge. Probably an inch long, and that’s not including the wings. My son thought it was a horse fly, but I’d say more like moose fly or an elephant fly given she sheer size of the creature. I’ve seen plenty of horse flies but none quite this bit. Not even close. But whatever this is, I know one thing for sure: when I saw it, I knew I had to photograph it. Fortunately, I just happened to have my camera with me because, if the best camera is the one you have with you, then I prefer to be prepared.

Whatever this was, it was not inclined to move around much which gave me a bit of time to compose a shot. I lowered my camera to the sidewalk and fired off a couple of shots, and quickly realized that I had somewhat of a perspective problem. This fly (I’ll call it that just to make things simple) was lower than my camera could go, which gave a point of view that was a bit too high. It felt more like a simple snapshot than a considered composition, but thankfully there was a solution at hand: the grass at the edge of the concrete. I realized that if I kind of nestled my camera on the ground next to the sidewalk it would give me a much better photo than I could get otherwise. This whole exercise also brought to the fore a somewhat intractible problem with my trusty D750: Live View shooting is bad. Really bad. For moving subjects, anyway. For stills it’s great, but the contrast-detect autofocus means the slightest hint of movement when shooting macro results in a big ol’ Rejected flag. There was no way I could compose this picture with the optical viewfinder so the flip-out LCD screen would have to suffice, limitations and all.

Thankfully this fly obliged my objective and held somewhat still for a few seconds, which was just enough time to get this shot. I didn’t really know what aperture to use so I went with f/8 (which is kind of my go-to starting point for macro shots) and took a couple of clicks before the fly repositioned itself at an angle which precluded any photographic possibilities. Turns out f/8 was…not quite right. I should have taken this at f/11 or smaller, as the depth of field is just way too shallow and the somewhat sickly color cast in the middle would have been somewhat ameliorated with a smaller aperture and, as a result, the light being just a bit more under control. It’s fine though, since I do think the shot turned out OK and was fun to take which, as any Weekly Fifty reader knows by now, is all that really matters to me :)

Nearly a decade ago, when I got a set of close-up filters for my 50mm lens, I took some photos of lily flowers that kind of took my breath away. Not because the images were particularly outstanding, but because of the realization that I could actually capture images of incredibly tiny objects with such clarity and beauty. I thought this was some rarified form of image-creation that was simply beyond the likes of mere mortals such as myself, but that was not the case at all. Anyone can do it; all it takes is the right gear and a willingness to experiment and try new things. And in the years since then I have found myself returning to many kinds of pictures I took back in the day, as they say, to put a more modern spin on them and revisit them with fresh eyes, better gear, and more advanced knowledge of concepts like light, color, exposure, depth of field, and so on. Not to erase the originals or diminish their impact at all, but to iterate on them and see if, and how, my photography skills have grown over time.

There’s a bit of hidden artificiality to today’s picture that you can’t really see, but I thought I would disclose it anyway for a bit of a peek behind the scenes. These lilies, while quite real, were sitting in a vase in our kitchen when I decided to take a picture of them. Or one of them, to be more precise. However, when I set up my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens on a tripod next to the kitchen table I soon discovered two things that made it quite challenging to get the kind of picture I was hoping for.

The first was the lighting. While the vase was near a window, most of the light was coming from the fixture overhead. The artificial nature of the light was far more apparent than I initially thought it might be, both because of the odd color cast but also the direction. It just didn’t look natural to have such harsh overhead lighting on the flowers, and the resulting contrast among the subtle texture variations in the petals came across as crude and garish. I tried adjusting the position of the vase and playing around with different overhead lights in the room to no avail. It just wasn’t working out.

The second problem was the background, which did not occur to me at all when I started thinking about creating this image. Since the vase was sitting on my kitchen table, the green areas you see behind the petals were a pale shade of dull brown–courtesy of the dining surface which has been well-used over the course of many decades, starting long before it was given to my wife and I by her father when we first got married.

Both the lighting and the background proved to be intractable problems and not easily fixed by simple repositioning of the vase. I was going to have to think outside the box on this one or, more accurately, outside the house.

I picked up the vase and tripod, went out to the back yard, and gave it another go to see if I could get a halfway decent shot. I had something specific in mind, which is pretty much exactly what you see here, but what I didn’t know is if I could actually get it given the shooting conditions. My efforts were stymied by the wind; the slightest whisper was enough to shake the delicate stamens, particularly the pollen-rich anthers balancing on top of each one. And when working with millimeter tolerances due to the close-up nature of the shot, well, let’s just say my patience rapidly began to wane. I set my aperture to f/11, used Live View to focus on the top of the pistil in the center, waited for a break in the breeze, and fired off a couple of shots. This was the only one that turned out and even so, if you visit the high-resolution original on Flickr you’ll see that it’s not quite as sharp as I would have preferred. That’s just my own nitpicking though, and the end I’m very pleased with the results I got here. I like the bright, vivid colors and the dual-tone palette dominated by yellow but accented by rich reddish-browns. The green background is a nice touch, and even though the flower petals are lost in a sea of background blur, I quite like the overall effect :)