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

And now, as Monty Python might say, for something completely different. I have only seen the mountains a few times in my life: once on a trip out to Seattle with my wife in 2016 and…well, maybe one or two other times but I guess it sort of depends on your definition. I have flown over mountain ranges on the way from A to B, and have also had layovers in Denver, but I don’t think I have ever really spent time in the mountains, so to speak. That all changed this summer when we took our kids out west to spend a week in the Rockies with some friends of ours from way back in the day. (After all, friends from back in the day are some of the best you’ll ever have.)

We stayed at YMCA of the Rockies which was surrounded on all sides by breathtaking views of the mountains, but also took three separate trips to Rocky Mountain National Park which was about a four-minute car ride. On a warm Tuesday afternoon we hiked a few miles on Bear Lake Road to Emerald Lake, which is where I shot the picture you see here. I had thought about picking up a wide-angle lens for this trip, and kept my eye on the Nikon 20mm hoping it would go on sale but alas, it was not meant to be. No big deal though: I did just fine with my Fuji X100F and…my iPhone.

Yeah, I’m not afraid to admit it: I used my iPhone SE 2020 for more of these kinds of landscapes more than I thought I would, but it was mostly because its 28mm-equivalent lens was wider than any other lens I own. But even that wasn’t enough to capture this view, which meant I had to resort to a feature common on most mobile phones but not many DSLRs: I used Panoramic Mode. It took me a few attempts to get the scene just right, but in the end I’m pretty happy with what I was able to capture. The mountain is crisp and sharp, the lake is smooth, the sky is bright and blue, and most importantly, this image helps me remember the scene as I saw it on that day.

This is the kind of picture you almost never see here on Weekly Fifty because, as you probably know by now, I like to keep things mostly people-free and stick to nature and objects and other things of that nature. When I do post pictures of people, especially my kids, I don’t use faces. This one is an exception though, not because of the person specifically but because of all the elements that went into taking this shot. I have a side project taking portraits (not really a business, since I only do a couple photo sessions a year) that allows me to flex my creative muscles in a bit of a different way compared to photos of flowers and animals and this is an example of the type of portraits I really enjoy doing.

A few weeks before our annual extended family trip to Kansas my sister-in-law asked me if I would take photos for her son who is about to enter his senior year of high school. I gladly obliged and immediately turned down any offer of payment since I like to do this kind of things for free when family is involved, and set about getting my gear ready and thinking about the kinds of shots I would want to take. The day before I took this picture I was out walking around the resort with my brother, my wife, and some of the nieces and nephews when I saw a wall of trees with sunlight poking through the branches and thought it would make for a nice portrait location. I had my D750 and 50mm lens with me, and asked my niece if she would basically serve as a stand-in while I evaluated the lighting and took some test shots. The next day when we were doing the photo shoot my nephew and I went to the same spot, albeit with some upgraded camera gear, and took a bunch of shots similar to what you see here.

I took this with my favorite portrait setup, the amazing Nikon 70-200 f/2.8G ED VRII, and my D750 with the battery grip (which helps balance out the weight of the lens. Oof, that thing is a heavy beast.) I zoomed in all the way to 200mm and shot wide open at f/2.8 because I wanted to get the spots of light as bokeh-tastic as possible, and it worked like a charm. The slightly overcast sky also gave us plenty of dispersed light such that even though he was backlit his face is still evenly lit with enough contrast to give him plenty of depth and dimension. The light on his right shoulder (on the left side of the composition) adds another layer of depth to the image and is a good example of why backlighting can be so effective. Finally, I made sure to position him and myself in such a way that the background blobs would be dispersed around his head and not directly behind his head—though there is a bit of an exception on the top-left side of the frame.

Shooting portraits with that lens, especially at 200mm and f/2.8, can be tricky due to the extraordinarily shallow depth of field but if you have a subject who is able to take direction (unlike, say, a young child) the results can be amazing. I know other photographers prefer to shoot at 85mm or 135mm, and those are great too, but I continually come back to the versatility, utility, and just plain sharpness of that 70-200 f/2.8 lens. It’s amazing :)

Every year my family goes to Milford Lake, Kansas, to spend a few days catching up on things, fishing, swimming, boating, tubing…all the normal kinds of things you might do while vacationing at the lake with siblings, nieces, nephews, and parents. And the occasional four-legged family member too :) Normally I return from those trips with a handful of shots to put up here on Weekly Fifty, but this one was a little different. I found that, contrary to most of our trips over the years, I did not take as many shots of the world around me and instead most of my pictures were the people around me. Not that vacation-based photography has to be one or the other, but I didn’t find that I had my usual inspiration or creative spark for taking photos of nature, even with my macro lens that I specifically brought with on the trip for that exact purpose.

The exception to all of this is the shot that you see here, which is one of the last pictures I took during the entire trip. It was a warm Monday evening in late July and those of us who were left at the cabin, after some others had gone home due to work and other obligations, were sitting by the campfire watching the light fall and the fireflies begin their daily dance while we roasted marshmallows and chatted about life. As the sun settled behind the horizon I saw a great opportunity to take a picture before the last bits of daylight faded away, so I ran to the cabin, grabbed my tripod and Fuji X100F, and hightailed it to the beach to take a few pictures.

The key to shots like this is a long shutter, which smooths out any ripples or imperfections in the surface of the water, and it’s the kind of scenario that the X100F is practically made for. It’s built-in 3-stop ND filter means you can leave the shutter open for much longer than normal, and get some great results that are basically impossible with a smartphone. I ended up shooting this at f/16, ISO 200, with a 13-second shutter and I’m super pleased with how things turned out. (After a bit of tweaking the RAW file in Lightroom, of course.) You know what I really like about this though? The reflections of the grass, or whatever those things are, in the water. The stalks are still but the reflections are blurry, because there actually were some subtle movements on the surface of the water. It lends an almost dreamlike quality to the image that isn’t present in a lot of my other sunset pictures I’ve taken over the years, and while I didn’t expect it I do quite like it.

I was looking through my gallery of macro shots recently and discovered something a little surprising: I had no close-ups of mushrooms! The last time I got low on the ground to take a macro picture of fungi it was this shot from May 2021, and that was with my 50mm lens and close-up filters. (And also my first real experimentation with focus stacking, something I have not done since. Mostly because it’s more work than I’m used to doing, not because it’s particularly difficult to get the hang of the basics.) So when the sun was rising on a warm June morning, after a couple of rainy days to really get the ground nice and soaked, I ran outside and took this photo of a mushroom that had recently popped up in my back yard. Only this time I did it with my 105mm macro lens, which made a pretty big difference :)

I want to stop short of comparing the two images, since a discussion about which one is better kind of misses the point. Both are similar and unique in certain ways, and I used the former to inform my compositional and exposure choices about the latter. In short, they’re both good images and I see some things to like and appreciate in either one. As for this specific picture though, there are some things that I quite like. I used an f/11 aperture to get the front mushroom tack sharp which still left a depth of field shallow enough so as to make the blades of grass just a bit out of focus. (Something I continue to learn about shooting close-up images is that even smaller apertures can still give you razor thin depth of field. It’s still weird to wrap my head around that.) I intentionally composed the shot with one mushroom in front and another in the back to give a sense of space to the composition: foreground elements, subject, and background elements all working to form a complete picture. The only real issue I had when taking this picture was related to ISO: I didn’t want to go super high and lose detail or editing headroom, but 1400 on my D750 works just fine and has hardly any of the problems that can be associated with high ISO shots.

Mushrooms don’t pop up too terribly often in my daily life so when they do it’s fun to go out and take pictures of them, especially in the early morning while the dew is still fresh and the sunlight is just barely poking over the horizon. I hope I get more opportunities to take pictures like this soon :)

Alright, enough with the Wichita Mountains pictures of sunsets and bison and lizards…here’s a classic Weekly Fifty shot like you might expect when you come to the blog, check my YouTube channel, or open up the email that shows up in your Inbox every Wednesday morning. The composition here is simple, classic, and highly effective: a clear subject, something in the foreground, a rich and layered background, and some cool bokeh to boot. This won’t win awards for creativity, but I’d be lying if I said that pictures like this aren’t a ton of fun to take.

Every spring we see an emergence of Indian Paintbrush flowers all over the state, but despite being quite commonplace their simple beauty is always pleasing to look at. I have taken lots of pictures of these flowers over the years and shared many of them here on Weekly Fifty, but never with a true macro lens. Not that there’s anything particularly macro about this shot, just that I was able to compose this image without any considerations for, or concessions being made because of, the distance between my camera and the flower. Instead I simply looked at the basics: subject, lighting, and exposure settings. I used an aperture of f/5.6 to get a relatively sharp image while still leaving plenty of headroom for creating beautiful background blur, and intentionally shot into the sun to capture the glistening droplets in the early morning after it had rained the night before. I think my favorite individual aspect of this image isn’t the flower but the bright spots of light dotting so many aspects of the composition, which is something you can only get under specific post-rain conditions like this. It elevates the shot above a simple flower photo, and when you add in other subtle details like the frizzy edges of the flower illuminated with white light and the stalk of green in the foreground on the right side, the result is a picture that just about captures everything I had hoped to on this warm April morning.

If you have been following Weekly Fifty for any length of time you know that I’ve never posted an image like this. At all. Nearly every picture I take is fairly simple and, to be perfectly honest, kind of similar. There’s usually a clearly-understood subject, some foreground and background elements, and often some additional things that add a bit of context. I don’t like to go for abstract art and I’m not one for over-complicating the image-making process. Normally, and especially since I got my macro lens, I just take simple pictures of things I see in my daily life.

Not this time.

I took this picture at the top of Mount Scott right as the sun was setting on the evening of our final day in the Wichita Mountains. I actually have a few shots that include the sun, but decided to specifically compose this image (as well as crop it in Lightroom) so as to exclude our closest star. It felt more interesting to just show the mountains without the sun, and in fact the sun ended up distracting the viewer from the rest of the scene with the mountains and hills slowly receding into the distance. It was incredibly windy throughout the day, which lent an ethereal, almost otherworldly, quality to the atmosphere thanks to all the dust and other particles that were mixed in with the air.

I’m not going to say that this is one of the best pictures I have ever taken (far from it!) but it ranks among the most unique and singular images in my entire collection. I don’t think I have ever been able to capture a picture of a hazy sunset from the top of a mountain, and even if we make it back to Mount Scott I don’t think I’ll be able to get a shot like this unless the weather is just right. One thing that took a bit of experimenting with this composition was the exposure settings, and in the end I think it came out fairly well. I shot this at 116mm, f/8, 1/1000 second, with an ISO of 720. I prefer not to use high ISO values on my D500 and while I could have used a slower shutter speed to get something like ISO 200 or 400…I just plain forgot about it. I had my Auto-ISO set to a minimum speed of 1/1000 second thanks to some pictures I was taking earlier in the day, and I didn’t even realize it until we were back at the Airbnb later that evening and I was looking through my shots on the rear screen of my camera. As it turned out, I was able to get a more-than-usable image with ISO 720 and plenty of room to edit the shadows and a bit of highlights too, and end up with the shot you see here. I’m quite proud of it, and if I may say so I do think it would make for a good phone or desktop background. Feel free to click on the picture and download the original from Flickr, and make sure to let me know if you do use it on your device :)

This shot strikes me as something unique to the American west, even though I suppose it’s possible to get similar pictures elsewhere in the world too. The grassy plains in the foreground, the mountains in the background, and of course the gigantic bison at roughly the bottom third of the picture all combine to create a scene that makes the viewer think of an Old West aesthetic: Native Americans, cowboys, frontiers, and untamed wilderness beckoning one to adventure. That might seem a bit grandiose, and perhaps it is especially considering that I took this shot not from horseback but from the side of an air-conditioned Subaru, but it makes me think about things much bigger, and much older, than this present time and that’s something I find to be incredibly powerful.

I took this picture one morning on our trip to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge when my wife and I loaded up the kids and decided to get started with our hiking early so as to avoid the hundred-degree temps that were predicted within a few hours. We drove through the refuge for several miles on our way to Elk Mountain Trail, but found our drive unexpectedly interrupted by a herd of bison: some on the road, some grazing on grass, one one that was using a 20MPH speed limit sign as a scratching post. My wife pulled the car to a stop on the side of the road and all four of us just kind of sat there in the relative safety of the Subaru while watching these massive beasts go about their business, and making sure to keep our distance, ready to hightail it out of there at the first sign of trouble. After a minute I stepped out with my D500 and 70-200mm f/2.8 lens to see if I could get a few shots of these animals, and eventually got the picture you see above.

What really sells the image, at least in my opinion, is the sense that it is a complete composition. It’s not just two bison on the prairie. It’s the entire scene, in which the bison are but component parts. All the elements (sky, mountains, trees, grass, and bison) work together to create a complete whole and the animals, necks bent and tails wagging, are just as essential as any of the other parts. It’s a visual representation of 1 Corinthians 12, and a reminder to me of why it’s important to have something greater in mind than just the subject you are photographing when you take out your camera and start to click away.

This is the first of a couple pictures I’ll be posting over the next few weeks which were all taken at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, Oklahoma. I’ve used a few shots from trips to this place here on Weekly Fifty in years past and it’s always fun to go down there with my family and a few cameras and take pictures that I can’t get anywhere else. Well, certainly not in the city where I live. Your mileage may vary :)

This year, as with last year, I only brought two cameras: My Fuji X100F, and my Nikon D500 with the 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. Based on my experiences in previous trips to the Wichita Mountains I didn’t think I would need multiple DSLRs or lots of lenses, since the Fuji/D500 combination would probably cover everything I wanted to do, and that turned out to be the right course of action. I didn’t even bring my macro lens since this was primarily a trip for me, my wife, and our two kids and not a photo-taking excursion. As such I wanted to make sure I spent as much time as possible with my family and not wandering off by myself taking pictures while they waited for me, but even so I did manage to come across a huge number of photo opportunities such as the one you see here.

These little collared lizards were everywhere down in the rocky terrain of the wildlife refuge, but most skittered away when we got close. This one was content to just hang out on a red rock while we walked by, and one of my kids spotted it and mentioned that it might make for a good picture. He was right! I used my D500 and zoomed in to 200mm while keeping the aperture locked at f/2.8, and crept ever closer while snapping pictures the whole time. I eventually got the shot you see here, with the lizard’s eye tack sharp while the rest of its body fades away into a blurry background.

This was a good reminder to me of the versatility of the 70-200 f/2.8 lens. It’s by no means useful for close-up macro-style shots, but it is far more versatile than just a sports and action lens. I could have used a zoom lens with a smaller (and variable) maximum aperture, like an 18-250, but without that f/2.8 it wouldn’t have given me a picture quite like this. I bought this lens a few years ago intending to use it for action shots of my kids, but it continues to impress me with how it can go way beyond that.

This is the kind of unplanned, serendipitous shot that I really appreciate being able to capture every now and then. I’ve taken a few pictures of moths and butterflies sitting on flowers before and it’s kind of fun because, like opening up a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get. Sometimes these little creatures hold still, and other times they scurry about, landing for one or two seconds before fluttering away on to seek out the next flower. There’s also weather-related complications like wind, rain, bumblebees, and even the direction of the sunlight to contend with. But every so often I have been able to take a picture kind of like what you see here, where everything is clear, sharp, and conveys something more than just a simple snapshot.

I took this at the Botanic Garden on the west side of town on a warm May evening while my kids played in the treehouse-slash-playground and I spent a few minutes looking for some photo opportunities I might not get in my normal daily life. I first noticed this small white moth (butterfly?) going from one clump of purple flowers to the next, but didn’t immediately think about how it would look in a photo. I mostly just wanted to watch it float around from one spot to the next. A minute later I got out my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens to see if maybe, just maybe, I could get a good picture from what I saw in front of me.

Soon the moth landed on the flowers you see in the shot and as luck would have it, the creature was perfectly perpendicular to my particular point of view. Yes! I knelt down, raised my camera, set the aperture to f/8, and fired off a series of shots in rapid succession before adjusting my view just a bit and repeating the process. I didn’t know if they would turn out or whether my depth of field would be too small to get good results, but when I reviewed the images in Lightoom I found that a good number of them really did look good. This was my favorite of the batch, because if you look really closely you can see its tiny little proboscis extending in a loop on its way down to drink some nectar from the flower. It’s a small detail, but it adds a lot to the image and turns it into something just a bit more special. And when you can capture a shot that goes even slightly above and beyond what you might expect, then I consider that a win.

One of my favorite spots to take pictures is our local botanic garden, which is on the west side of town tucked between a highway and a small creek. As much as I enjoy taking photos near Theta Pond, I mostly just go there because it’s convenient. The botanic garden is stuffed to the brim with flowers, plants, native grasses, decorations, artwork, and offers a huge variety of photo opportunities you can’t really get anywhere else. One evening in late May my wife was on the phone with her parents and our kids were getting a bit restless, as kids tend to do, so we hopped in the car and drove down to the garden where they played in the treehouse and I walked around with my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens to look for some photo opportunities.

Believe it or not, this is a cactus. A very close view of a cactus, but a cactus nonetheless. I don’t know what type or variety of cactus you’re looking at here, but my kids would probably describe it as “large and in charge.” It might be something called a Grafted Moon (which, in turn, sounds like something out of Elden Ring) but I’m not sure and, to be honest, it doesn’t matter a whole lot to me. What matters is that this is a pretty cool picture and I’m glad I got the chance to take it even though the particulars of the plant evade me at present. The orange bulb looks a bit like a flame frozen in time admist a sea of otherworldly spikes and spires, and while that’s a far cry from the truth it is fun to use photography to see somewhat normal sights in a slightly new light like this.

As for the particulars of the picture, I went back and forth between f/11 and f/18 (with a few at f/4 just for fun, and as you might imagine those did not look good at all since the depth of field turned the entire image into a blurry mess) and while my f/18 shots turned out nice and sharp, I did like the slightly thinner in-focus area of this shot compared to its smaller-aperture counterparts. The sun is behind me and to my right which gave everything a bright even lighting effect, though I do wonder what this scene would look like if I re-shot it late in the day when the sun is low on the horizon to get a backlit scene. I didn’t want to take too long getting this shot and eventually just went back to wandering around looking for more pictures and, of course, my kids who were happy to get a bit of unsupervised playtime :)