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

I’ve said before that sometimes it feels like photos of ducks by Theta Pond on campus feels a bit like cheating. Visit the pond on any given day and you’re liable to get at least one good shot of a duck or goose doing something interesting, and if not you can always just bring some food with you to get their attention. A minute later and you’ve got yourself an instant photo-op. Still, there are a few types of waterfowl photos that are a little trickier to get, particularly with a 50mm lens. Even though these animals live on a college campus they are still a bit skittish around people and it’s hard to get a great shot of a duck or goose really close up, and even when they do get close they’re often moving around so quickly you can’t really get a great photo. All that leads me to this week’s shot.

I took my Classic Combo (D7100 and 50mm f/1.8 lens) to work with me on a rainy day in mid-September, thinking I might be able to get a shot of a flower or thistle glistening with precipitation. I brought it in my bag when I went to teach my class and after the students left I took the long way around Theta Pond back to my office. It had stopped raining but the sky was still quite overcast, and I was hoping I could get a shot of some kind of bright, colorful flower amidst all the gray. As I walked along the edge of the pond I stepped quietly past this duck who, in a rather strange twist of fortune, barely acknowledged my presence. Normally any ducks on the footpath scatter when they see people coming, but not this one. Maybe it was the rain, maybe it was the calm weather, maybe it was the relative lack of college students thanks to a semester in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Who knows. But for some reason this duck just stayed put while I walked by, so I thought I might as well try to take its picture.

I held my camera pretty close to the ground, engaged Live View, set the aperture to f/2.8, focused, and took a shot. It was OK, but I knew I could do better.

I put my camera on the ground, tilted it up, engaged Live View, set the aperture to f/2.4, and took a shot. It was a little better, but I knew I could keep going.

I scooted a few inches closer and repeated the same process, but with the aperture varying between f/1.8 and f/2.4. I knew 1.8 would give me a super blurry background, but at the cost of overall sharpness, and yet I found myself taking more than a few shots wide open nonetheless. I kept the framing in mind, making sure to get the entire duck in the shot with a little space on either side, and much to my surprise the duck just sat there unmoving, except for a bit of preening. I wonder if it was just as curious about me as I was of it, but for some reason it just stayed there while I took my photos, quietly minding her business while I went about mine.

A minute later I got up, grabbed my bag, and went on my way. When I loaded my images into Lightroom I could hardly believe the results: the most important part of the image–the duck’s eye–was sharp. Tack sharp. The background had a beautiful mix of rich greens and light accents, and the foreground was as smooth as butter. Everything really seemed to come together and work out with this shot, and I don’t imagine I’ll get the opportunity to take another photo like this again anytime soon.

Thank you, Duck, for letting me take your picture. It’s really cool when things just work out :)

Photographing the fountains at Theta Pond is so overdone it’s practically cliché, and yet, just because a million and one pictures have been taken of these fountains at this pond doesn’t make any additional pictures any less valuable. Whether you’re new to the OSU campus or you’ve been here ten years, there’s a good chance at least one picture on your camera roll will have the Theta Pond fountains in it. We all know I’ve had my fair share of such images here on Weekly Fifty over the years, and yet, that doesn’t mean I don’t like photographing them. Especially when I come across a new way of doing so.

That’s kind of what happened here: I was looking for a shot of some magnolia seed pods which are always a favorite subject of mine at this time of year, but I kept coming up empty. Sure I got a few photos here and there but nothing that really stood out to me as all that interesting. Or even good, if I’m being honest. That’s when I noticed, almost as if for the first time, these cypress tree fronds dangling with one of the two main fountains in the background. Let’s be clear: I’ve been around this pond, and probably stood in this exact spot, many times over the years. But I never thought about using the fountains as the background to accentuate a subject in the foreground quite like this.

After a bit of looking around I realized I could essentially frame one particular branch with the fountain serving as a brilliant white background much like you see here. At least that was the idea, but I wasn’t sure how it would look in an actual photograph. Having never taken a shot like this before I didn’t quite know what aperture to use, only that I wanted the background to be obliterated with the leaves as crispy and crunchy as a bowl of dry breakfast cereal. F/2.8 was the logical choice for maximizing background bokeh with subject sharpness, but I also shot a half dozen frames at f/1.8 just in case. Turns out those final images were the real keepers.

When I got back to Lightroom I noticed that while I liked the f/2.8 versions, the f/1.8 shots were on a whole other level. The images, and this one in particular, turned out precisely how I had hoped they would…with one glaring exception: that classic photographer foe known as chromatic aberration. If you look closely (or maybe even not all that closely) you’ll see that many of the wisps of green have a strange purple fringe around their edges, which is what happens when a camera lens tries its level best to bend and warp the incoming light at the largest possible aperture. In low-quality glass like my classic 50mm f/1.8G lens the tradeoff for a cheap price is the presence of this type of optical imperfection especially at maximum apertures, and while Lightroom can do a bit to fix it you’ll never get rid of it entirely on a picture like this without a lot of time spent in Photoshop. And that was time I didn’t really want to spend.

I ended up picking this image as my favorite despite the optical abnormalities because from a purely compositional standpoint this picture was everything I wanted it to be. I decided I could live with the tradeoff, and use it as a challenge to try and find a way to improve my shot the next time.

While this picture might seem, at first glance, somewhat similar to the two images posted in previous weeks I can tell you that any overlap is (mostly) coincidental. Contrary to how the two previous images were shot, this one was a bit more planned-out. If not the specific details, at least the general idea. To be sure I didn’t set out to get this exact image, but I did have some ideas in mind and I’m happy with how everything turned out.

It’s always fun to photograph sunflowers: big, bright yellow petals, lots of contrast with the greens and browns, and they bloom in a nice time of year when the seasons are changing and the weather takes on a certain crispness that you can practically feel in the air just by breathing deeply. It makes the act of photographing sunflowers much more than just snapping the shutter, and lets you step back and think about nature and your place in the world if only for a little bit. And perhaps that’s reading a bit too much into it, but in a post-COVID world it can be the little things like this that add a lot of meaning and perspective to what might otherwise be just another normal day.

This was taken by a ditch behind next to a parking lot behind a strip mall not far from my house–not exactly a nature preserve or wildlife refuge. Still, this hopefully illustrates a point that I have made repeatedly on Weekly Fifty over the years: you don’t need exotic locations to get great photos. Just a good eye and a bit of creativity. My family biked past this spot on a Monday evening and thought it would yield some interesting photographs so I made sure to pass by it the next morning on my way to work. There were dozens of small sunflowers all in fairly close proximity, so I had to scoot around a bit to find a good vantage point from which to capture just a single one. It was a little tricky since many of their heads were turned downwards while also being grouped together, but after a minute or two I saw this one that I was pretty sure would work. I shot a handful of pictures at f/2.4 and f/2.8 and liked this one the best, mostly because of the angle. By stooping low and shooting upwards it gave a sense of character and, if I may be so bold, even a hint of majesty to this relatively ordinary flower. I think I might have also had this shot in mind, at least on a subconsicous level, so maybe today’s image could be seen as an homage to one of my earliest photos from Weekly Fifty.

Not exactly the world’s most creative title, eh. What can I say? I’m a photographer, not a poet.

If this picture looks a bit like last week’s image, just know that any similarities are entirely intentional. In fact, I got this about a minute after last week’s photo and used much of the same thought process too: isolated subject in the foreground, blurry balls of light poking through trees in the background. As George Michael might say, it’s a formula but it works.* The difference here is that I didn’t need to experiment: Having just shot the coneflower photo I knew exactly what I wanted when I came across this kniphofia flower which was, incidentally, about ten yards from the coneflower.

Knowing what kind of shot I was going for, I immediately set to work: I stooped low, engaged Live View, used my left hand to gently brush away a foreground flower, adjusted the parameters of my Auto-ISO with a minimum shutter speed of 1/500 in order to compensate for my shaky hand (you try holding a DSLR in one hand, back-button-focusing, while brushing aside another flower all while crouched down awkwardly) and took a few shots. I was able to find an angle where the flower was, for the most part, ringed by blurry balls of light just like the coneflower. I didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel or do anything dramatically different, just practice my skills with a new subject and see what would happen.

Oddly, I actually got a good shot at a wider aperture of f/1.8 but I ended up using this shot at f/2.8 because the background was just too blurry in the other one. Instead of discrete balls of light there were blown-out circles crowding everything else in the frame, and it didn’t have a certain sparkle or charm that this image has. Also, the depth of field problem reared its head with the f/1.8 shot. While this image isn’t going to win any awards for creativity (It’s a near-identical version of the Indian Paintbrush picture I posted in early September, but obviously with a different subject) it did make me happy to take it and was a fun way to get out and see nature for a bit before heading back to the office.

*old-school SNL Dana Carvey reference there. Not sure if George Michael actually said that or not.

I know it’s been a while since I said this…but I shot this photo on a walk around Theta Pond on the Oklahoma State University campus. Prior to the pandemic I would often go for a quick stroll around the pond while taking a break from work, but in this age of COVID I just haven’t been on campus very much. I’m in the office two days a week and at home the rest of the time, which means the time I do have at OSU is pretty full and doesn’t lend itself to the occasional walk around campus like before. So when I had the opportunity to step out for about five minutes on an early September morning I was armed and ready with my Classic Combo: My D7100 and 50mm f/1.8 lens. I didn’t know if I would find anything worth photographing, but I knew that if I were to have any luck at all it would probably involve the pond.

Soon I came across a small patch of coneflowers which looked bright and colorful–the type of subject certainly worth photographing. So I pointed my camera down and got this shot:

I knew I could do much better than that, so I started following the advice I have given here on Weekly Fifty so many times: I looked at the subject from a different angle. Coneflowers are short, so I wondered what would happen if I got my camera super low to the ground. I held my D7100 pretty low, activated Live View because there was no way I could get my eye to the viewfinder, and just started seeing what various compositions I could come up with on the spot. It took about 30 seconds before I saw that the sunlight poking through a group of magnolia trees in the background provided me with a hugely improved picture opportunity.

With the coneflower in the foreground and the trees in the background I then had to decide what aperture to use. While f/1.8 might seem like a good choice, the tradeoff with that was super shallow depth of field which wasn’t worth it. At least not to me, anyway. I wanted the center of the flower to be tack sharp and a bit of the petals as well, and f/1.8 just didn’t give me enough leeway to do all that. So I stopped down to f/2.4 which was a great compromise (while also experimenting with some smaller apertures just for fun) and gave me the blurry background and subject sharpeness I was aiming for.

One other question remained: How to frame the subject against the background? I wanted the bright balls to form a ring around the flower without intruding on it, and while this wasn’t complicated (all I had to do was shift my camera around a bit) it was an added element to make this picture everything I was aiming for. I have a few other shots where the orange petals overlap the bright spots in the background and it just doesn’t have the same level of polish to it.

So here’s to changing seasons and new perspectives. Hope you all are doing well and staying healthy.