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

One of the first posts I ever put up on Weekly Fifty was a shot (well, two shots) of a prairie dog from the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, OK. Those images were pretty neat for the time, especially considering how little I understood about photography as well as my gear: a humble Nikon D200 and a 50mm f/1.8 lens. I still have that lens and use it regularly, but have since replaced the D200 with other much more capable cameras, and have learned way more about photography as well. As such, it was fun to revisit that scene eight years later for the shot you see above. I took this picture of a prairie dog poking up between two rows of purple flowers at the same location as the original shots from 2013, but this time I was thinking about more than just the subject. I considered the whole frame: foreground, background, subject, angle of view, and of course the fundamentals like aperture, shutter, and ISO. The result is a much more interesting image but also one that could not have happened without first taking the original.

To get this shot I used my D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and my goodness it sure would have been nice to have a mirrorless camera with a flip-out screen! I had to get low to the ground for this shot which was difficult not just because of the fire ants, but because the optical viewfinder on a DSLR is so much better than using the LCD screen. I realized it was nearly impossible to shoot pictures of these fast-moving creatures using the slow, sluggish contrast-detect autofocus on the LCD screen which meant I had to use the optical viewfinder instead. And while that is normally just fine with me, it’s not so great when you have to basically lie in a prone position on hot gravel while getting bitten up by ants. I opted instead to crouch at a weird angle to get this shot instead of lying down, and while I think the end result is OK it did make me long for a Z6II :)

This was a fun one to shoot though, partly because these little prairie dogs are so darn cute but also because my kids were so excited to see them. It was basically a solid 15 minutes of “Hey Daddy, look over there!” and “Mommy, I see another one!” When I look at this picture I of course see an animal in its natural habitat but it’s those memories of spending time with my family that come flooding back to me, and are the real reason I enjoy pictures like this so much.

Way back in 2013 my wife and I took a weekend trip to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, Oklahoma, and it seemed like we stepped into some kind of warp in the fabric of spacetime. Oklahoma isn’t exactly known for its soaring peaks and grand scenic vistas, and yet, just two hours from our home is this beautiful, expansive, majestic spot tucked away behind an army base just waiting to be discovered. We visited again a few years later and this spring as we were eager to get out with our kids after a rather…different…school year we once again turned our attention to the Wichita Mountains.

The first spot we went was Jed Johnson Tower, an old fire watch tower that sits near a lake which bears the same name. We spent a few hours just hiking around, looking at scenery, and of course taking lots of photos. Unfortunately the tower is sealed off and visitors cannot enter, but it still makes for an amazing sight and the kind of thing you just don’t come across very often in Oklahoma. To get this shot I used my Nikon D500 and 70-200mm f/2.8 lens set to f/2.8 at 140mm. I thought carefully about the composition: I could have just zoomed in on the tower, but without context it would have been dull and almost meaningless. I wanted the tower to be set against an interesting background, and shooting at 140mm gave me just the right composition with the mountains in the rear, the tower to draw the viewer’s eye, and plenty of foreground vegetation and natural elements (including that beautiful dead tree just off center) to make the image more interesting. Shooting at f/2.8 gave me just enough depth of field to separate the subject from the background, and on that particular lens you don’t really sacrifice sharpness even when shooting wide open.

This spot, and the entire Wichita Mountains area, is filled with beauty both natural and man-made, and it really is worth the drive if you live anywhere near.

‘Tis the season for magnolia flowers! I always like taking my camera out in May and June when these giant flowers are in full bloom around campus, especially at Theta pond. I’ve taken many shots of magnolias over the years but there’s always something special about seeing these gigantic bursts of color often tucked away beneath brilliant layers of unfolding white petals. I don’t recall seeing magnolia flowers before moving to Oklahoma but now that we live here, and have lived here for well over ten years, I still never grow tired of looking at them or taking their photograph.

Every year I try to see these flowers a little differently or look for a bit more creative way to showcase them in a picture, and for this shot I used a lesson I have been learning (albeit slowly) over the last several months. It helps to get closer, but not too close, and help your viewers see your subject not in isolation but framed against larger elements of the image. Especially a colorful background, if at all possible. That last part is a little tricky with magnolias because of the enormous white petals that surround the bright center, but it was that challenge which led me to take the shot you see here.

I used my D750 and 50mm lens, natch, but augmented it with a +4 closer-up filter and a somewhat smaller aperture of f/4.8. Sharpness is a good thing, especially when shooting up close, and too often I have made the mistake of sacrificing extreme closeness with subject sharpness. I’m learning to dial it back a bit and quite like the results which you can see here: nearly the entire center portion of the flower is in focus while the petals in the foreground and background are not, and the points of light far in the background are brilliantly rendered heptagons that give a nice sense of context to the image. It took several attempts to get this shot but I’m very pleased with the result, and I hope I can snag a few more magnolia images before the season is over.

This photo can’t exist. What you’re seeing isn’t a real picture, but a combination of two images that I stitched together in Photoshop. Or, rather, overlayed on top of one another and then edited with a mask so one part of one picture was superimposed on top of the rest of the other picture.

So now the question: Do you know what part was Photoshopped? I’ll give you a hint: it has to do with depth of field.

When you take pictures at very close range, like I did here, you have to deal with a very unwieldy depth of field. That is, the in-focus part is so narrow that even with smaller apertures you can only get a fraction of the photo in focus. I shot this picture with my Nikon D750, 50mm lens, and either a +4 or +10 close-up filter. (I can’t remember exactly, but I think it was a +10.) and had a few items in mind:

• I wanted the edge of the mushrooms to be really sharp
• I wanted the foreground and background to be really blurry
• I wanted both mushrooms to be in focus

You can’t actually get all three of those in a single exposure; something has to give, and as a result I ended up taking two pictures. One focused on the mushroom in front, and another focused on the mushroom in back. Both were shot with the same exposure values and, even though I did accidentally move my camera just a bit between shots, both images were close enough for what I needed. Then I imported both into Lightroom, brought them into Photoshop, and performed the aforementioned image manipulation so as to get the best of both worlds: both mushrooms in focus with the foreground and background nice and blurry.

This is a technique known as focus stacking and it generally involves very still subjects, actual macro lenses (instead of close-up filters), a tripod, and dozens of exposures. This photo is actually a very poor example of focus stacking, but it hints at the possibilities that one can accomplish with this sort of process. It was fun to try it, and gives me some new things to think about for future images as well.

I talk a lot about learning from my past experiences as a photographer, and this picture is a good example of how I have tried to apply this principle in my daily life. Or at least my daily photography. Not long ago I shared a picture that I shot in my own back yard, with some purple flowers and an interesting style of background blur involving vertical slits of light from a fence. Today’s photo takes everything I learned when photographing the original and applies it to get what is, in my opinion, a much better picture.

These are flowers from a saliva plant, which is pretty common where I live in Oklahoma. Every spring the one we have in our backyard produces these brilliant purple flowers which attract bumblebees, honeybees, hummingbirds, and of course a certain photographer as well :) After taking a picture of purple flowers with the sun slits behind them I wanted to apply those lessons here, and I’m really pleased with how things turned out. I used a +4 close-up filter to close the distance between myself and the flower, and intentionally composed the shot so the flower would be between the balls of light in the background. (A process which would have been much easier with a proper mirrorless camera compared to a DSLR like my D750, which I used for this shot.) I moved around a lot, tried various apertures between f/2.8 and f/5.6, and even after I thought I had the shot and went inside I decided to return to the back yard and give it another go. I’m glad I did, as this image is one that I just might end up printing and hanging on the wall. It seems almost otherworldly, but the scene was so normal that I’ve seen it a hundred times and never thought it would make an interesting picture. And yet, with some practice and self-reflection, it turned out great.