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

Longtime Weekly Fifty readers know I rarely post pictures of my kids, and when I do you can’t see their faces. That’s because this blog isn’t for me to show off my family, but to share my love of photography and my journey to continually learn more about it. However, every now and then a picture comes along that happens to have my kids in it that I feel justified in sharing here. So that’s one fairly unique thing about this photo.

The other singular characteristic of this picture is how it was shot. I took it with my iPhone, and I can count on one hand the number of times I have posted a mobile phone photo here. Not that mobile phone cameras are any less worthy of being counted among their large-sensor brethren; I just find my particular photographic learning path to involve more DSLRs and fewer iPhones. That’s just me though.

With that out of the way, let me take a minute and explain what’s going on here. This is the fourth week in a row that I’m sharing a picture taken from a very frozen Lake Carl Blackwell when it froze solid back in February. If you’re tired of seeing shots of frozen lakes, maybe next week’s image will be more to your taste. But I’m not, especially since this so rarely happens here in Oklahoma :) As we were out walking around near (but never on) the lake we came across a bit of an outcropping–a mini promontory, if you will–and I thought it would make for a really interesting photo with the boys’ backs to my camera. It’s all about context, after all: the same picture without my kids would look uninteresting, with no sense of size or place to help orient you, the viewer. But with these two kids looking out you get a sense of scale, and their stances impart a bit of emotion and feeling onto whoever sees the image. Or at least, I hope they do. I didn’t tell them to pose or do anything at all except just stand there and look out at the lake, and this was the result. I didn’t spend more than five seconds taking this picture but I’m pleased with the result, with one exception: I should have held my phone about two inches higher to eliminate the awkward intersection of the horizon line with the head of my son on the right. It’s such an obvious mistake and would have been so simple to remedy, but alas, it is what is. And I’m not going to spend my time picking that particular nit lest it ruin my enjoyment of the image.

This photo is unedited too–no cropping, color adjustment, or even straightening of the horizon. It is how it was shot, and it’s a good reminder that the right composition with the right light can allow mobile phones to work wonders. You’d never be able to get the depth of field in a shot like this from an iPhone that you could get with a dedicated camera, a wide (but not too wide) lens, and a big aperture, but then again, you can’t fit that setup in your pocket either. And sometimes convenience just wins.

When we were gathering up the kids to take them out to Lake Carl Blackwell, I had to make a choice: what camera/lens combination to bring. Maybe the X100F since it would give me more candid-style shots? Or the D750 and 50mm lens for that classic not-too-wide, not-too-narrow look? What about the 70-200 for wildlife? I really didn’t know what to do, so I ended up toting my D7100 and 50mm lens mostly for the sake of simplicity and also because if I accidentally dropped it on the ice (a very real possibility, given how slick everything was) I wouldn’t be out thousands of dollars.

That combination was great for the entire time we were out at the lake…right until about five minutes before we left. My youngest son wanted to walk out on a peninsula that jutted out into the lake, and as we got near the end my wife spotted this bird standing near the edge just minding its own business. We were pretty sure it noticed us, but it just kept to itself as we stopped and stared. I didn’t want to scare it, but I really wanted to get a picture.

And that’s when I started kicking myself for not bringing my zoom lens.

The only way to get a picture of a wild animal with a 50mm lens is to get close. Very close. And then you have to crop the dickens out of the image and hope there’s enough pixels left to salvage something. I very slowly, very quietly, walked nearer to the bird while pausing every few seconds to get a few shots. He eyed me cautiously for a few minutes and then crouched down, stretched his wings, and took off. I had my camera in high-speed shooting mode and just held down the shutter as long as I could, hoping to get one image that might work. And the result is what you see here: a 3.4-megapixel image (cropped down from a 24-megapixel original) of a bird in flight, taking with a crop-sensor Nikon D7100 and a lowly 50mm lens.

While the shot isn’t perfect, it’s way way better than anything I thought I would be able to get. I’m still not entirely sure how I ended up with this shot, especially since the continuous high-speed shooting on that D7100 is pretty slow and the buffer maxes out at about 7 images. But somehow it all worked out, and the frozen lake in the background makes this an image I don’t think I’m likely to repeat anytime soon, if ever.

Thanks, kind bird, for helping me get a really cool photo.

This is another look at a very cold lake in Oklahoma. In other words, this is something you just don’t see very often down here. As with last week’s photo, this is Lake Carl Blackwell completely frozen, a few days after one of the longest stretches of cold weather in recent memory. When my wife and I took our kids out to the lake just to walk around and look at the strange sights, we didn’t really know what to expect other than that the surface of the water would be smooth. Which it was. And covered in snow. Which it also was. But this thing? No, I can safely say I had no idea I would see this.

So what is it? Good question. I think, though I’m not entirely certain, that this is some kind of plant or shrub that was covered in a layer, or many layers, of ice. And I mean that ice was thick. We tried whacking it with a pretty large stick, and it didn’t budge. I don’t know what weather conditions would cause a bush (albeit having lost its foliage to the winter season) to freeze such that it looks like this, but it wasn’t at all what I expected. I also have a hunch that winds from the lake battered this plant, and the rocks against which it is nestled, with a freezing mist for several days as well which led to such a thick covering of ice.

The trick was to find a way to photograph it, and I think I did OK except for one thing: I should have used a smaller aperture. I shot this at f/4 but f/8 would have been a little better, mostly because the background would be a lot sharper. Normally I’m a big fan of blurry backgrounds, but not in this case. I think the shallower depth of field belies just how smooth the surface of the lake really was. I have to give myself a bit of grace though, since I had never taken a picture like this and wasn’t really sure what exposure settings would be ideal. In fact we so rarely get any significant snowfall down here that any photo of snow is somewhat of a challenge I think I did OK though, and hopefully next time (if there is a next time, which, Lord willing, won’t be for many years!) I’ll have a better sense of just what to do to get a good shot of a scene like this.

During the extreme cold snap of mid February I didn’t actually take many photos. It was just too cold! Even though I often thought about going out with my camera while we were stuck inside huddled under blankets trying to conserve power, I mostly just erred on the side of comfort at the expense of photographic creativity. That changed a bit as the weather warmed, and when temperatures rose into the 40’s my wife and I took our boys out to Lake Carl Blackwell west of town just to let them see what a frozen lake looked like. Living in Oklahoma you just don’t see things like this too often, so we wanted to take the opportunity while it was available.

And nature did not disappoint!

Ok so first things first: we did not go on the ice. Even though it seemed plenty thick for walking around, and it certainly withstood being pounded with pretty large rocks, there’s no telling when you could come across a weak spot or a crack or other such unforeseen issue, the results of which would be cold at best and tragic at worst.

What we did do, however, was spend a while just walking around and admiring the scenery while letting the boys whack the ice with long pieces of wood we brought with. I also kept my eyes open for photographic opportunities, the first of which you see here. I really liked the contrasting elements, particularly the deep shadows along the left side. The lake itself is smooth as glass, and the undulating ice-covered mounds are so starkly different they almost seem photoshopped in. I was using my D7100 which does not have a flip-out screen, which was a big miss on my part. I really should have brought my D500 or D750! I had to get down low to get this shot, which was nearly impossible on the outcropping I was standing on, which meant I had to use Live View. And since the glare was so bad I literally could not see what I was photographing. I also didn’t know what aperture to use. I stopped down to f/8, focused on the closest ice mound, lowered the camera, and took a few shots. This one actually worked! How, I’m not exactly sure. But it was neat to see this scene and capture it to show people someday who might not believe that back in 2021 Lake Carl Blackwell really did freeze over.

I shot this in mid February when Oklahoma was in the middle of one of the longest and harshest cold snaps in recent memory. We had a near-record number of days below freezing, some with a high hovering around Zero. (If you live in the midwest United States you know what I’m talking about–we had it easy compared to states farther north!) My wife and I didn’t leave the house for a few days, and neither did our kids, but I really wanted to find a way to document the cold and snow and generally really bad weather conditions. I wasn’t about to spend more than two minutes outside in order to do it though! Then one evening I noticed this thing in the backyard and realized it might have the answer.

What you’re looking at here is a simple weather vane my youngest son did as a school project back in October. The idea was that with a pencil, a pin, a straw, and some cardstock he could create a basic weather vane to show wind direction. It was one of those simple school projects that I would never have thought of on my own, but ended up being a pretty cool demonstration of some basic science principles. He stuck this thing in the ground, recorded a few measurements, and then just sort of left it sit.

And sit it most certainly has. This weird little school project has survived rain, wind, ice storms, snow, and record freezing temperatures and (as my dad would say) by golly it still works. And I’ll be darned (another dad-ism) if that straw doesn’t keep on rotating to show wind direction even after all this time. For whatever reason this thing is like a Timex watch (have I shown my age yet?) and I’m curious just how long it will hang in there. So it made sense to me to use it as a way of showing a bit about the strange winter we have been having.

To get this shot I grabbed my D750 and 50mm lens, ran outside with the sun at my back, angled myself so my own shadow wouldn’t be in the picture, flipped down the rear screen, turned on Live View, and started shooting before my fingers froze into little pink popsicles. I didn’t really think too much about creating a compelling composition–mostly I just wanted to get back inside. I did wait just a few seconds for the wind to aim the arrow sideways because the other shots where it was facing towards or away from the camera just didn’t seem all that interesting. I shot at f/2.8 to balance sharpness and depth of field, and used continuous high-speed shooting in the hope that something would turn out. And I’ll be a monkey’s uncle (I’m now officially my dad) if this photo wasn’t almost exactly what I hoped it would be.