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

Photography is all about capturing light. In fact, the word photography literally means drawing with light. One of the always-challenging but ever-rewarding aspects of learning photography over the years has been refining my ability to see the light in a given scene: where is it coming from? Where is it, like Unicron or Cotton-Eyed Joe, going? Where is the subject in relation to the light? What will happen if I reposition myself, or the light, to change the mood and composition of the image? So many things to think about and, often, so little time during which to think about them. At least that was the case with this week’s photo, anyway. I shot this while out hiking with my family at Lake Carl Blackwell, and while walking down the path I came across this scene:

It wasn’t much to look at, and I nearly just kept on going without giving this dried-up plant any consideration whatsoever. Then I thought about the light and what effect it was having on this subject, and paused to consider this rather unremarkable scene from a photographer’s perspective. From one angle, such as the iPhone shot you see directly above, there was nothing interesting going on whatsoever. But from another angle, with the subject backlit, the entire scene was transformed into something else entirely. No longer a small collection of dry, dusty flora: instead the image came alive with bright highlights around the edges, rich color gradations, and a beautifully-blurred background. I had my Nikon D500 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens with me, but rather than trying to get as close as possible to this plant I instead just attempted to create an interesting composition regardless of how close or far away I was. What I got is what you see here, albeit with a slight crop in Lightroom in order to remove some empty space on the left. I shot this at f/8 but also took some at smaller apertures and, once again, I was reminded by my macro lens how rarely I really need to shoot with a wide aperture. Even at f/8 the center is tack-sharp while the leaves (or whatever you call them) just to the right and to the left are ever so slightly blurry, which lends a sense of depth to the scene that is, as Goldilocks might say, just right.

Before I really dive into this week’s picture, I just want to take a minute and thank everyone who has been a part of Weekly Fifty over the years. This post marks ten years of this blog–slightly more, in fact, because the first post was on March 5, 2013. In the months and weeks leading up to today’s picture I thought about ways to comemmorate the occasion: a look back at my favorite shots, a highlight video of my best audio descriptions, a Buzzfeed-style list like the Top Five Things I Learned About Photography…you get the idea. In the end I decided to not really do anything except this writeup that you are reading now (or listening to, as the case may be) and just sort of continue with business as usual. I think it’s good to mark and take note of occasions like this, but sometimes I feel like the best thing to do is just keep the status quo going. I certainly have learned a great deal, and taken many shots I’m proud of, and gotten to meet so many encouraging, helpful, curious, and just plain nice people over the years (Special thanks to D. Welker, who follows me on my YouTube Channel, for sending me a 2023 calendar of his amazing pictures of Utah) and largely it’s that community that keeps me going. Your comments, questions, words of encouragement, and helpful tips over the past decade have been downright inspiring and I don’t think I can adequately express just how much I have appreciated all your input and support. Weekly Fifty wouldn’t be the same without you, and I’m so glad to have you along for the journey.

With that being said, I do want to, you know, talk about this week’s photo since that’s kind of the whole point of the blog :) I have tried shots like this from time to time, occasionally with my close-up filters and sometimes with a normal lens but cropped way in, and they have never quite worked out how I hoped. With the former I could never seem to quite get my shot composed properly, or focused right, or just…looking good. With the latter, well, cropping is fine but it’s not a great substitute for a true close-up lens. But when you have a macro lens…*chef’s kiss*

I took this photo while my family and I were out hiking at Lake Carl Blackwell. I brought my D500 and 105mm f/2.8 Macro lens (The former in case I needed to fire off lots of picture of wildlife in rapid succession, the latter in case I saw any opportunities for close-up shots) and while I never did encounter any fauna worth photographing, I did stumble upon a couple of opportunities for shots of static subjects such as the one you see here. We were rounding a bend in the path: water to the north, open fields to the south, and a thicket of brambles on our left that reminded me of one of the most difficult levels of Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest. A level that, to this day, has one of the most mesmerizing soundtracks I have ever heard in a video game.

I thought it would be fun to try to take a close-up picture of one of the thorns, particularly with of its deep red color paired to a beautiful backlight as the sun crept downward. I asked my oldest son to hold one of the branches steady while I lined up a shot, and while I fidgeted with aperture values he told me about some boss battle strategies he has been using in Breath of the Wild. (Side note for parents: video games make for outstanding conversation topics. Just show a bit of interest, ask some questions, and your kids will happily share all day long. It’s great.) I angled my field of view just a bit to get some foreground and background blur on the branch, and thus direct the viewer’s attention directly to the prickly spire in the middle. I did have to crop the picture just a bit to get the result you see here, but I think it turned out about as well as I could have hoped and, as is often the case, this picture does give me some ideas of things to try next time :)

And with that, I just want to thank you again, dear readers (and listeners), for being part of Weekly Fifty for what I can now accurately say describe as more than a decade. When I look back to my early shots and think about how much I have learned in the past ten years, it makes me extraordinarily optimistic for what lies ahead. In some ways I feel like I have only just begun to learn about photography, and I’m glad to have you along for the ride :)

Fro about the past three years my wife and I have enjoyed going on hikes with our kids at Lake Carl Blackwell just west of town. At some point in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic we discovered the many equestrian trails that snake around the countryside close to the shore out there, and have made hiking them a weekend afternoon staple ever since. We like to head out there in the winter months since it’s much nicer to layer up and then unzip jackets as the day warms up than it is to drench our clothes in sweat in the 100-degree summer afternoons, but one tradeoff of hiking in January is that photo opportunities are a bit more tricky to discover. Not that they don’t exist, mind you, but it’s not as easy to make interesting images when the scenery all around you is mostly browns and grays. It just means you have to look a bit harder sometimes :)

This little moss tuffet was just to the side of the path about an hour into our hike, and initially I just sort of noted it in my mind and walked on by. After quick consideration I grabbed my camera, hollered to my wife and our kids that I would catch up with them in a minute, and knelt down to see if this bit of greenery would make an interesting photo subject. What caught my eye wasn’t the color but the lighting: the angle of the sun lent an almost otherworldly glow to the green velvet texture, and I thought it might be cool to catch it in a picture. I only spent about 15 seconds composing, and taking, this shot so the results aren’t as perfect as I would have preferred, but I’m pretty pleased with it nonetheless. Unlike most of my macro photos I used my Nikon D500 here, since the APS-C sensor essentially multiplies the focal length of any attached lens by 1.5. (I know it doesn’t literally do that…) That’s a good thing for wildlife pictures which is why I had it on the hike, but in general I just like the look of my full-frame D750 when shooting macro. I used Live View which is a bit snappier on my D500 compared to my D750, and took a couple initial images at f/4 thinking that it would give me a good balance between sharp subject and blurry background. Then just for good measure I dialed in an f/8 aperture and took one or two more photos, and tossed my camera back in my bag and ran to catch up with my family.

Turns out the last picture I shot, out of roughly one dozen, was the only one that worked. All the rest were focused either a bit too close or a bit too far, and this one struck an ideal balance that I don’t think I could have done better if I had tried. I was really happy with how the shot came out, especially with the top of the tuft kind of glowing green, and I also liked that I didn’t have to spend too much time on it either. And if you squint really closely, this image kind of looks like the top of a green gnome’s head, sticking out of the ground as if to get the lay of the land before going back into hiding for a little while.

I wasn’t sure about posting this photo. On the one hand, it’s a perfectly acceptable image of a bird in the winter, complete with snow flurries falling across the frame. It’s fine, right? Well, for the most part, sure. But looking at this image makes me think of the shot that could have been which, I am somewhat loath to admit, is a sentiment that creeps into my mind a bit too often. I suppose that’s probably not entirely uncommon for many photographers, but still, I try to look at my not-quite-great shots as more of learning opportunities than regrets and as such that is the angle with which I am attempting to approach this one. I mean, even if the image doesn’t hold up under strict scrutiny, it was a fun shot to take and one that is rather unique in my portfolio :)

I shot this while looking through the window of an Airbnb in the middle of Missouri on a chilly December morning just a few days before Christmas. It was one of the coldest and snowiest days of the season so far, and my wife and I were planning our day and when to go visit her mom and stepdad while our boys played Wind Waker HD on the Nintendo that came with the place. As we talked she paused and motioned for me to get my camera and look out the window, and I was shocked to see a few birds just hanging out and minding their own business, feathers fluffed and eyes alert, as the snow fell all around. I only had my D750 and 105mm macro lens (I mean, I also had my Fuji X100F but that was not suited for this kind of photo at all) but like any good photographer I just tried to make the most of what I had at my disposal. I took several shots of the birds and while most of them were obscured by leaves or branches, this one actually turned out pretty well.

The issue I have with this picture is…well, I kind of cheated. I mean, not really, but here’s the thing: This shot is cropped way, way down from the original which meant it was a little fuzzy and low-resolution. To compensate I used the Enhance feature in Lightroom to essentially create an artificially-rendered image that generated details where none existed. The result is an image that looks fine, but makes me wonder what I could have gotten if I brought my 70-200 f/2.8 instead of the macro lens. I mean, it’s not like this is some kind of AI-generated fake image or anything like that. It did get a bit of a computational boost though, and I suppose as long as I’m being upfront about that then I can sleep well enough at night :)

There’s so much story behind this picture I almost don’t even know where to start. In fact, I really don’t know where to start so instead I’ll just talk about the particulars of the image you see and then get to the backstory in a bit. Though I should caution you: don’t examine this picture too closely or the many flaws will become immediately apparent, and what is seen most definitely cannot be unseen. I almost didn’t even put this picture up but since Weekly Fifty is all about learning and improvement, I do like sharing images that serve more as examples of that process than a highly-polished end result.

A few weeks ago I shared a picture that I created using a technique called Focus Stacking, but that was more of a happy accident than anything. For this shot of an old AA battery I knew in advance that I would need to use focus stacking so I approached the entire composition with that in mind. And even though the end result is far from ideal, it’s still a good example of my educational process and hence worth sharing here. Let’s just say that I clearly still have a lot to learn :)

Alright so let’s get down to it: This is the third version of this picture. I created the first with six exposures shot at f/22, with the battery about six inches from my 105mm f/2.8G ED macro lens attached to my Nikon D750. I thought six images would be enough to work with, but when I stacked them in Photoshop the result was far from ideal:

To do proper focus stacking, I am learning, requires enough in-focus elements to be blended seamlessly and that’s precisely what is missing here. Just look at all those seams visible between the letters, the jagged edge of the pink plastic below the battery, and the A in ULTRA skewed like someone banged the printer as the label was rolling off. My solution was simple but flawed: repeat the shot with a lot more exposures. Twelve, to be exact, all at the same aperture:

This image, while better, was still far from ideal. I was kind of running low on patience though since each shot required a ten-second shutter while my kids tiptoed around the living room so as to not shake the tripod. I wasn’t happy with the rough transitions between the letters and the blemishes on other parts of the image, but I had to admit that it was, in fact, an improvement. Still, I knew I could do better.

For my third and final attempt I repeated the process with a smaller aperture of f/32 so as to get a wider depth of field, though it meant a 20-second shutter at ISO 100. The result was 15 separate exposures combined using Focus Stacking in Photoshop and, after some minor tweaking and color adjustment in Lightroom, ended up with what you see as this week’s featured photo. It’s closer to what I had in mind when I shot it but still a far cry from what I was actually hoping for, though I don’t want to be too hard on myself. It’s not bad, and the overall shot does show some promise, but I know I can do better and I certainly aim to try :)

So why this particular picture?

People of a certain age, like myself, remember a time when Toys R Us was the place to go for video games. They had rows of NES, SNES, Genesis, and N64 cartridges along with playable demo stations that could easily occupy a kid for an entire afternoon. I remember seeing a Sega Saturn for the first time at Toys R Us, and being floored at Panzer Dragoon and Nights into Dreams. I even got an N64 from Toys R Us three days before the launch day because back in the mid 90’s that just wasn’t something that stores cared about like they do today. My buddy Drew spent years working up the ranks at Toys R Us and stayed with the company until it filed for bankruptcy in 2017, and he even met his wife there. I think it’s probably safe to say that when I was a kid, Toys R Us was my favorite store to browse and wander around in except for, possibly, Best Buy :)

Recently we were looking to acquire some Nintendo Wii controllers for our Wii-U (we don’t have a Switch yet; we’ll get there someday) and lo and behold, Drew and Casey had several that they no longer needed! We gladly accepted their offer and, upon testing them out, realized that some of the batteries needed to be replace. And as luck would have it, one of the little AA power cells hailed from Toys R Us. Just seeing this battery brought back so many memories of a simpler time, and a place that had an outsized impact on the lives of Drew and Casey and so many others as well.

Note: I know it’s a little odd to have a post about Christmas in early February but as longtime visitors of Weekly Fifty probably know, I schedule my posts way in advance. It’s the only way I can keep this blog going :) If I didn’t have a bit of slack built in to the nature of my posts I think Weekly Fifty would have folded years ago.

When we were visiting my in-laws over Christmas I noticed a pair of unused, unlit green candles sitting on the dining room table when we first arrived. I wasn’t sure if they were holiday decorations or would serve some kind of functional purpose, but over the next two days I kind of forgot about them amidst the proverbial hustle and bustle of the Christmas season. Each of the candles was small, only four or five inches from top to bottom, and placed so unobtrusively as to be easily overlooked when the table was piled full of food, toys, newspapers, and books. Which it often was.

On Christmas Eve right before we sat down to dinner my wife’s mother struck a match and lit both candles, and immediately my first thought was that one of them would make for a really cool close-up shot. I knew we had a few minutes to spare before the food was ready so I ran to get my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, set the aperture to f/4, made sure image stabilization was enabled, lowered myself such that my lens was level with the flame, and took this photo:

As soon as I looked at the picture on my camera’s rear LCD screen the first thing I noticed was not the candle in the foreground, but the one in the background. It was about three feet away and its flame created an amazing round light, almost like a full moon, that I had not even considered when I composed the shot. For about one or two seconds I thought about adjusting my view so as to remove that background light from the image entire, but then I realized that it would serve as an ideal complement to the flame in front.

Since everyone was ready to eat dinner I didn’t want to make the rest of the family wait while I putzed around with my camera, so I made a couple of decisions in rapid succession and fired off a bunch of shots in an effort to take something that would look good. I tried various apertures from f/4 to f/8 and focused primarily on the bright burn mark on the tip of the wick, but also on the wax in the foreground too. I also moved myself steadily closer to the flame and kept shooting, and finally I got the image you see here. It’s the last one I took and, in my opinion, the best of the bunch. I shot it at f/6.7, 1/180 second, ISO 400, and that aperture at such a close distance meant that the glowing red wick was the only thing in focus while the rest of the image, even the wax just barely in front of it, was beautifully blurry. The glowing light behind looks like a giant harvest moon just beginning to wane, and the flame angled to the right adds a sense of dynamic energy to the shot as a whole. To wit: I did not crop or rotate this shot at all, and my camera was, as far as I can tell, level with the table.

I’m really happy with how this shot turned out, and it made me think once again (it’s a lesson I continue to learn over and over and over) about how to keep the entire frame in mind when composing an image. There’s so much more than just the subject, and taking everything else into account can transform an average photograph into something much greater.

Last week you met Tucker. This week I present to you his roommate Hildi, a capricious little pup who is actually much more advanced in years than what that adjective might imply. Still, her size and agility merit the description of a dog much younger than her actual age would imply, thus the three-letter description remains quite apt. She has lived with my in-laws for several years and, much like her white-haired counterpart, I wanted to take advantage of our Christmas visit to get a picture of her. Also like Tucker, I initially thought I might try to get some kind of close-up with my 105mm macro lens but soon realized that I don’t really know how to create a compelling image consisting of just the eye of a dog. Maybe one day I’ll get it figured out but for now, I was content to just scoot back a bit and do more of a traditional portrait as it were.

The trickiest part about getting a good shot of Hildi was finding a way to make sure she was well-lit, relatively still, and looking in my general direction. All three conditions, in ascending order, presented somewhat of a challenge. Finding a spot to take the picture wasn’t that difficult, though with the other activity in the house (mainly from my two kids who were running around with Nerf guns) it did take a bit of patience from both me and Hildi to find a spot where we could have a few minutes of solace to shoot the photo. We ended up in her favorite spot to sit and sleep: an old chair which has belonged to my wife’s mother for decades. A fitting place of repose, especially for a furry four-legged friend such as Hildi.

Since my wife and I don’t have any pets I am not in the habit of taking their photos, and thus when presented with a seemingly simple scenario such as this I found myself a bit confused: why didn’t Hildi remain in one spot long enough for me to take her picture? Why did she feel the need to constantly turn her head from side to side, shuffle around on the chair cushion, and occasionally jump down only to want to get right back up? Dog owners are probably used to this kind of behavior and might be chuckling at this post right now, but the experience did leave me just a bit flustered and confused, though I did enjoy it and tried to take it all in stride.

The final piece of the puzzle, then, involved finding a way to get Hildi’s attention such that she would look in my general direction long enough for me to snap the shutter. I tried whistling, calling her name, snapping my fingers, and even enlisting my kids for help. It ended up being an exercise in trial and error, mostly the latter as opposed to the former, but the result is a photo that I think works quite well. Her eyes are tack sharp and the pattern of the chair behind her lends a nice bit of color contrast to her dark fur. When the puppy portrait session was all done I patted her head, thanked her, and let her be with a few things to think about for next time :)

Before I go any farther with this post, I have to send a huge shout-out to my in-laws who we had the opportunity to visit over Christmas break. My wife and I don’t have pets of our own so whenever we have the opportunity of being around other people’s pets, I like to use them as photography subjects and see what kind of shots I can get. As such my pet (and, let’s be honest, my entire collection of animal-based photography) is not nearly as refined as that of other, more experienced, photographers. I’m not really sure what compositions work best, what focal lengths to use, or even how to get the animals to look where I want them to look in order to get an interesting picture of them. Not having pets of our own, I just don’t get much practice with these sorts of things.

So with that being said I present to you: Tucker. He’s a spry little fellow with a penchant for poking at, and picking up, any food one might happen to drop while cooking and a nose for endless curiosity that can sometimes take him just one step too far :) So how to photograph a dog like this? Good question. I don’t know if I got it right, but I did get something, and that’s what you see here. I tried sitting on the floor and making noises to get him to look in my direction with a window behind me to light up his eyes, to no avail whatsoever. He cared not for my camera and was not about to alter his agenda just so I could get a few photos with my macro lens. (Which was, I should probably say, the only lens I brought for my Nikon D750. Would a different lens have worked better? Perhaps. Maybe I’ll try something else on a future visit.)

Eventually I just asked my oldest son to hold Tucker while sitting on the sofa. It was an inelegant solution but it worked, and I think it does lend a bit of a compelling element to the photo: the blue fabric of my son’s coat (it was the day of that massive arctic blast we had shortly before Christmas and there was no escaping the cold, even indoors) tells a subtle story about the context of the photo and the nature of Tucker that could be described in words, but is somehow better when shown and not told.

Rainy days, or perhaps more accurately, post-rainy days, are some of my favorite times to take photos. Even before I got my macro lens I enjoyed going out after a storm when the world is drenched and dripping wet to see what kind of shots I could get. The overcast lighting, the wet sheen on everything around me, the raindrops hanging from leaves, branches, fences, or pretty much anything you look at…it all adds up to some really great conditions for taking photos. Shortly after I took last week’s picture of some drops on a curved blade of grass, I saw this similar scene and wanted to try it out as well to see if it would make for a compelling image-creation opportunity.

On its own this blade of grass would probably not be all that interesting of a photo subject, but when paired with the drops of water and even, overcast lighting it took on a whole new appearance. Rather than take a head-on approach like I did with last week’s shot, I used. a technique I tried a few weeks ago where I basically tried to look straight down from on top of my subject. It worked OK for some shots of leaves in the water, and I figured I might as well try it here too. I used my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens, and tried to position myself so as to point my camera as straight-down as possible. I honestly didn’t know what aperture to use but I did want the subject sharp and the background, which was only a few inches away, to be nice and blurry so I tried several options between f/4 and f/11. I ended up with a final aperture of f/4.2 which worked pretty well, and allowed me to get the drops on the left tack-sharp while the drops on the right were just barely out of focus despite only being a fraction of an inch out of the focal plane. And then the blades in the background basically disappearing entirely, which I thought was really cool.

What makes this image particularly interesting, at least in my opinion, are the colors. The palette is really just three colors: yellow, green, and brown and all of them have a rich, earthy tone that I really like. Combine that with the precipitation, and the whole image just feels alive even though it is clearly quite static. This is the third time in recent memory that I have attempted this macro-straight-down technique, and I must say I’m really happy with what I have seen so far. I hope I can keep exploring this and, as I often say here on Weekly Fifty, finding new ways of looking at the world around me.

In some ways, this is the photo I have wanted to take for years. Way back in 2014 I shot this image in my backyard of a single drop of water on a long blade of grass, and even way back then I recall being a little frustrated that the picture I was imagining in my mind was just not quite materializing. At the time I knew nothing about the physics of how lenses bend light and couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get a great shot of a single drop of water. I think I had the right idea in terms of some compositional elements, but all I had was my D7100 and 50mm lens (not even my set of close-up filters) so that picture was, quite literally, the best I could do.

In the years since then I have learned an awful lot about many different elements of photography, and acquired some cool new gear too. Like my 105mm macro lens, which is ideal for the kind of picture I was aiming for all the way back in 2014 when I went out to my back yard after a rainstorm. I have also learned a lot of new techniques too, one of which I put to use for the first time to get the shot you see above.

One issue with close-up photography that has come into play over and over again since I got my macro lens is the delicate balancing act that photographers must perform when trying to decide between a wide aperture and a wide depth of field. Wide apertures obviously let in more light and give a more blurry background, but the depth of field is so razor-thin when shooting close-up at f/2.8 or f/4 that it’s almost unusable. Even smaller apertures, like the f/9.5 I used when taking this picture, are still wide enough to produce depth of field that is just impractical. And that also makes shots like this literally impossible.

Thankfully, there’s a cool technique called focus stacking which allows you to get the best of both worlds: the blurry foregrounds and backgrounds of wide apertures, with the larger depth of field of smaller apertures. In other words, the image you are seeing this week is not one image but a composite of nine images stacked together in Photoshop where the in-focus elements are combined and the out-of-focus elements are blended together to produce the final result you see here. I also tweaked the resulting image in Lightroom a bit, with some alterations to exposure, saturation, highlights…the usual.

I have toyed around with focus stacking here and there over the past year, but this was my first time really putting it to the test and I must say I am very happy with the results. And this was just my first attempt—shot handheld, sans tripod—which makes me pretty optimistic for other similar shots I might take down the road.

We’ve just begun the new year and I’m already learning new things :)