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

Earlier this year I posted a photo of some water droplets suspended in midair that I shot near the southeastern corner of the Oklahoma State University campus. Even though that image didn’t turn out exactly how I had hoped, I treated it as a learning experience and wanted to find ways to improve on the overall concept, since what good is it, I ask you, if we learn nothing from our mistakes? (A rhetorical question, obviously, but one that is always worth asking no matter how often it is repeated.) More than anything, I wanted to solve the issue of the water droplets in the original being just slightly blurry—the result, so I thought, of Vibration Reduction accidentally being enabled on my lens while shooting with a tripod. So I returned to the same spot weeks later with the same gear (105mm f/2.8 Macro lens and my Nikon D500) to see if I could rectify my mistakes and produce a better image.

In short…I did not. Despite shooting at 1/8000 second and disabling Vibration Reduction, the same problem remained: a slight bit of motion blur on the water droplets. I was a little surprised at the result since I had been so certain of the cause of the motion blur, but rather than pack my bags and head out I instead decided to go for something different entirely. Rather than use the water drops as my subjects, I found a tiny purple flower about one inch in diameter and decided to shoot that while using the the falling water as a background. I think it worked, but this gives me even more ideas to try in the coming weeks and months…

Probably the trickiest part about getting this shot was focusing on the flower. I had to use Live View since the whole setup was about 18 inches off the ground and I couldn’t really hunch down to look through the viewfinder, but unfortunately the Live View focusing in DSLRs is pretty bad for moving subjects like a tiny flower in the midst of a blowing breeze. I played with the aperture a bit, erring on the smaller side to give me a bit more depth of field wiggle room, and after many shots I finally got the one you see here. Strangely, the one thing that makes this photo work is the one thing I didn’t consider at all: tiny itty bitty drops of water on the flower itself. There were a couple of shots without those drops and they just don’t have the same punch or visual impact as this one, and I’m super thankful for that bit of serendipity that ended up elevating this image from mundane to…well, something a lot more interesting to look at :)

It’s interesting where you can find inspiration for photography sometimes. My brother Phil and his wife came down for a visit recently and over the course of a few days he and I spent a lot of time talking about photography techniques, experiments, and of course, gear. We played around with my 105mm f/2.8 macro lens a lot, finding interesting ways to shoot everyday subjects and looking for creative photographic possibilities out in the yard or just around the house. One such opportunity cropped up when the four of us (me, him, and our wives) were played a board game called Concept late into the evening after all the kids were asleep. The game itself was really fun, but what captured our interest even more was the colorful translucent pieces that you place on the board throughout your turn.

The more we looked at the rich greens, blues, reds, and yellows the more we thought they would make for an interesting close-up shot. We started with one single piece—the green question mark—and worked outward from there, with my Nikon D750 resting on the table in Live View as we composed the various elements of the shot. Phil toyed around with foreground and background elements, namely the little colored squares and tall exclamation marks, while I tried different solutions for how to light the image. We ended up using an iPhone in flashlight mode off to one side to get the lighting just right, and Phil carefully arranged pieces in the foreground and background until they looked like what you see here. We shot with an f/3.3 aperture which seemed a bit overkill at first due to super shallow depth of field, but the background out-of-focus elements looked so smooth that we didn’t want to go any smaller than that.

This is one of those shots that works fairly well on its own, but also tells a fun story if you know the context for the image. When I look at this I of course see a green question mark but what comes to my mind is a fun evening of hanging out with family, and that means a lot more to me than any one simple photograph.

There are some types of images that I have realized I just enjoy taking. And, conversely, there are some styles of photography that don’t interest me whatsoever. Street photography definitely falls into the latter category for me, as does most animal and wildlife photography: I don’t really have the patience for either one, and when it comes to taking pictures of random pedestrians and passers-by, I just feel icky. (I know some people are great at street photography, but it’s just not my thing.) This image, however–the one you see at the top of this post–is one that I find great joy in capturing. It’s simple, straightforward, and in my opinion, interesting to look at. It invites no deep interpretation and offers no life lessons to the viewer, but it makes me happy to take pictures like this and that’s all I need.

I shot this not by my traditional location of Theta Pond on the OSU campus, but just south of the Whitehurst administration building. I was walking past a tree with a friend of mine when I saw this one single orange leaf hanging out all by its lonesome amidst a sea of its green counterparts, and thought it would make an interesting photo. I had my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 lens with me and quickly realized that the sun was at a good spot on the horizon for me to capture the leaf with a pleasant amount of backlighting. One thing I really appreciate about shooting with my macro lens is that I don’t have to compromise in terms of distance to my subjects. I can get super close, super far, or anywhere in between. Sure the lens works great for getting really close, but it doesn’t have to be used that way. You can take normal shots of everyday things as close or as far as you want, and it’s fine. And that’s how I got this image you see here.

The usual questions applied: aperture, shutter speed, etc. (I never think about ISO anymore.) F/2.8 didn’t work since almost none of the leaf was in focus, so I stopped down to f/4. Same result. F/8 was the sweet spot: a good balance of subject sharpness and background blurriness. All this came together in a matter of seconds, perhaps a minute at best, and then my buddy and I resumed our walk. It’s nice to have the tools and experience to be able to capture photos like this without making a big deal out of it :)

This is one of those photos that started as something very different than how it turned out, and is significantly better as a result. I was pulling out of my driveway on a very cold morning in February, and noticed that the ground was covered with a light layer of frost. That doesn’t happen too often here in Oklahoma, and I think it came about because of a bit of rain followed by sub-freezing temps overnight, but this being a photo blog and not a weather blog, I suppose the cause isn’t nearly as important as the result. And the result, if I do say so myself, is pretty cool. I saw this leaf sticking up and thought it would make for a neat picture, but what I had in mind in that moment was pretty different from how it actually turned out.

Originally I was just going to take a shot of the leaf by itself with my macro lens, and hopefully get an interesting view of its frost-tinged edges and veins. I immediately thought of this shot that I took in 2015 and wondered if I could replicate it, so to speak, but with a macro lens. Or at least take another image that was inspired by the earlier one, as I have had the habit of doing recently here on Weekly Fifty. I put my car in park, got out, grabbed my D750, got down low, put the camera in Live View…and that’s when I noticed it. Not the leaf and the frost, but the sun behind it. Good gravy.

The unexpected image of the sun coming up over the horizon immediately transformed what I was thinking about as I took this shot. Instead of being about a frosty leaf, the photograph became an entirely different image of a sunrise in the background, a leaf in the foreground, and a monochromatic yellow-and-black color scheme that is kind of different and unique for me in my photography. I took a couple pictures with a somewhat wide aperture because, well, bokeh, but then I realized I could do something even greater and make an image that was a lot more interesting if I stopped down my lens a bit.

I ended up going with f/38 which still had an impressively shallow depth of field, but also served to turn the sun into a brilliant multi-pointed star with rays emanating out in all directions as it crested my neighbor’s house. A minute later and this shot was gone, having turned from dawn to day, and I was back in my car on the way to work. But for just a moment this everyday pedestrian scene in my front yard mere inches from my driveway was transformed into something much greater, and I consider myself fortunate that I was able to capture it in my camera.

I got my macro lens right when everything was turning brown and gray for the winter, which meant that I had to wait months until shots like this would be possible. I don’t know if I would say without qualification that it was worth the wait, but I will say that as things green up a bit and colors start showing up, I’m having a lot of fun taking pictures of it all with this lens. I’ve taken shots like this before with close-up filters, but the rendering of the out-of-focus elements (i.e. the foreground and the background) has always been rather subpar. Close-up filters are also much trickier to work with in general, and offer much less latitude in terms of focusing and depth of field, whereas an actual macro lens gives you a ton of freedom for experimentation and creativity. (Though to be fair, the latter is also much more expensive than the former; if you just want to get started with close-up photography, you can’t go wrong with close-up filters.)

When I saw this flower close to the ground, I was a little unsure of what exactly should be the point of focus. I tried a couple of things and eventually landed on the stigma, which seemed appropriate since it was a little different in both size and color compared to the rest of the flower. It was tricky to get it in focus though, since I was shooting handheld and low to the ground. I couldn’t look through the viewfinder to focus which meant I had to use the flip-out LCD screen on my D750, which wouldn’t be a problem if the contrast-detect autofocus was more reliable and better suited to moving subjects. (Even micro-level movements matter a great deal when doing macro shots.) I compensated by using a small aperture and…well, just taking a ton of shots and hoping one would work out. And it did! I’m pretty happy with the result and it gives me ideas for other shots to try in the coming weeks and months.

This is more of an experiment than a photo, but given that the result turned out fairly well I’m happy to use it as this week’s image here on Weekly Fifty. Near the edge of Theta Pond on the OSU campus are a couple of odd, orange spheres about a foot in diameter sitting atop a low stone wall. They must be some kind of decoration because I don’t know what functional purpose they serve, but as purely aesthetic objects they have always seemed a bit out of place to me. Not that I’m a good judge of art or architecture; I just don’t know if I get these things on an existential level. I suppose I don’t have to though. Such accoutrements are often subjective in their interpretation, and it just so happens that I think I found an interesting way of photographing them.

As I was walking past one of these orange globes one afternoon I noticed the light reflecting off its surface in kind of an interesting way. The reflection was far from uniform, with spots of white light standing out against the deep orange, and a cracked texture just beneath the shiny surface. I had my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens with me so I got close, real close, to see if I could capture the essence of what I was seeing in the form of a photograph. I wanted to get the details of the leaflike webbing, but I also wanted to show some of the light spots in the foreground and background. I opened up the aperture on my lens as wide as it would go, stooped over, and took a few shots.

When I looked at the results on the rear screen of my camera, they didn’t quite look like how I had hoped. I realized the problem had nothing to do with my camera or exposure settings, but the way at which I was viewing the scene. I played around with a couple different ideas: standing up and looking down, shooting from different angles around the sphere, and so on. I also used manual focus and paid careful attention to the focal plane in the viewfinder, and eventually got the image you see here. It looks pretty cool and I’m not sure you would even know what this is at first glance, but it’s another example of how looking at familiar scenes with a macro lens really can have a transformative impact on your photography.

I didn’t want to post this photo. I don’t even like it very much. It’s not super sharp, it’s not super compelling, and I know I can do much better. And yet, I’m sharing it not because the image in and of itself is anything, but because it represents something. When I look at this shot I don’t see a water droplet frozen in time; I see a much better image that I’m going to take someday. In that regard I suppose you could call this shot a weird form of accountability: by posting it publicly here on Weekly Fifty, it’s almost like a personal challenge to me to create something better and I hope I can do it :)

On the north side of campus there is a water feature that involves a small curtain of drops falling onto a bed of rocks. It’s in a garden of sorts, and it’s kind of calming to look at. I thought it would be fun to try to take a picture of the water frozen in time, hovering inches above the ground with all else obscured in a beautiful blur. The reality of what I captured doesn’t reach those lofty heights, but again, this picture hints at greater things that I want to get someday soon. Below you can see the setup I used to take this shot.

I used my Nikon D500, 105mm f/2.8 Macro lens, and a tripod to get right up close and personal with the curtain of water. My idea was to get the plane of focus just right and then fire off a ton of shots in rapid succession, all at 1/8000 second in order to freeze the motion of the drops. I took nearly 400 images and while some were in focus, not a single one of them froze time in the way I had hoped. 1/8000 second is really fast, but when shooting very tiny objects at 105mm mere inches from the lens, even the smallest bit of movement is magnified to an extraordinary degree. I don’t know if, given the rules of light and physics, I will be able to get the shot I’m aiming for, but I’m going to try different setups and see what happens. (To wit: The above image was shot at 1/500 second with my iPhone and the drops are clearly frozen in time. But that was much father away and you can’t see the micro-level movements of the individual drops in the way that you can on a macro lens.)

So even though this is the one that got away, it’s still a picture worth sharing and one that I hope to return to over time as a bit of inspiration. Or perhaps more of a challenge. Either way, I’m determined to get the shot :)

Note: This post marks nine years of Weekly Fifty. I never would have guessed in the spring of 2013 that this blog would still be going almost a decade later, but here we are :) Thank you, readers, for all your comments, questions, and kind words over the years and here’s looking ahead to ten years and beyond! *clinks glass*

Sometimes I take my camera with when I go out for a short walk around campus (usually by Theta Pond) and just come up empty. I walk around looking for photo opportunities and nothing really happens. No bright colors, no interesting subjects, no mix of light and shadow…nothing. Not that photo opportunities aren’t everywhere, just that some days I have a harder time seeing them compared to others. That’s what was happening when I took this picture, and while this isn’t the most groundbreaking photo I have ever taken it does serve as a reminder to me that even in times of photographic famine there are still images to be made.

Often when I’m looking for a picture opportunity one thing that I consistently come back to is light. I mean, of course photographs must involve light but I try to look for ways in which lighting is being used a bit differently, or how I can see something from a unique angle, thanks to light. The dying leaf you see here is nothing special–just a withering bit of greenery on the ground, the kind of thing you might see almost anywhere you look during fall or winter. What transforms the leaf from mundane to photo-worthy is lighting. By shooting the leaf from a low angle with the sun behind, it appears to glow almost as though it has summoned some speck of new life despite the decay. But wait, as Ron Popeil might say, there’s more.

A few years ago I shot this picture which, as you can clearly see, shares a ton of similarities with the photo features for this week and I absolutely had the original shot in mind when I took the new one. As I framed the leaf in my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, I noticed bright spots of light pop up behind it every few seconds. Vehicles driving east on University Avenue reflected the sun right into my camera, just as they did in the shot of the flower I took exactly two years earlier. (Seriously, they were both taken on January 31 two years apart.) Those brilliant points of light added an amazing extra element to the shot, and elevated it to a whole other plane. Within the span of roughly three minutes I went from not seeing any photo opportunities to creating an image I would be proud to print and hang.

Sometimes you just have to keep your eyes open and be willing to see something familiar, differently :)

One thing I am enjoying about my macro lens is re-thinking shots, or general compositional concepts, that I have taken before with other gear. Sometimes with my normal 50mm lens, other times with some close-up filters, but usually without the right equipment to really capture what I was thinking in my mind at the time. This is kind of one of those moments. About a year ago I took this picture at Lake Carl Blackwell after a particularly nasty cold snap, and while it’s an OK picture it’s not at all the shot I wanted to take. What I wanted to capture was a super close-up image of a very tiny frozen part of the plant, but that just wasn’t possible with the gear I had at the time. So when I came across a somewhat similar scene at Lake McMurtry when I was out on a hike with my wife and our kids recently, I took the opportunity to make up for the shot I wasn’t able to get the first time around.

There were several things working to my advantage for the shot you see here. First, the weather was much nicer which always makes photography more enjoyable. I think it was about 50 degrees and most of the lake wasn’t even frozen except for a few shady spots near the shore. Also, the sun was bright and the sky was clear, which made for much better lighting than the bland, overcast sky of the shot from February 2021. I also had my D750 instead of my D7100 which meant I could use the flip-up screen to help me compose the shot, which was extraordinary helpful since this frozen drop of water was just a few inches off the ground. Finally, and this is the most important factor, I had a true macro lens this time around :)

Initially I wasn’t sure what to use as the subject for this composition, and tried a couple shots with the opaque stalactites on the right. It was OK but something just wasn’t working out quite right. My shots just looked kind of…bland and uninteresting. Then I realized that the single clear drop would make a much more interesting image especially with the rich browns on the left and the white ice on the right. I took a few shots, inched closer, took a few more shots, and repeated the process until I got the image I was happy with. While I’m pleased with how this turned out, I’m glad it didn’t take too much time since I wanted to get back to my wife and kids who were busy tossing rocks into the lake to see if they could break the ice. That turned out to be a lot more fun than taking pictures anyway :)

This is one of those photos that’s not so much about the image, but the story behind the image. It’s a gingerbread house, and not a super fancy or extraordinary one at that, but what you’re actually seeing here is the end result of a fun project that our kids got to do with their grandparents when we went up to visit them over Christmas break. They had been given a gingerbread house kit by a friend who knew their grandchildren were coming for a visit and might want a fun project to do, and it ended up being exactly that: an enjoyable activity for, and I’m not even kidding about this, the whole family to enjoy. I realize that might seem slightly cheesy to say (and read, in your case) but it’s true: my kids had a great time assembling this decoration with their grandparents over the course of a few days. As a bit of caution to errant passers-by one of my kids put the warning phrase “Don’t eat” on top, spelled out in icing and candy. Not that anyone was in the house aside from us, but still, eight-year-olds sometimes have their own sense of logic and you have to just go with it every now and then. When I see this picture, what makes it meaningful isn’t the colors or the lighting or the composition, but the memories. And that, it seems to me, is one of the best gifts that photography has given to all of us.

I brought my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens along for the trip even though I knew there probably wouldn’t be too many opportunities to use it, but the beauty of driving instead of flying when you go on any sort of trip is that you have a lot more luggage-related wiggle room compared to flying. Though that camera and lens mostly stayed in my bag for much of our visit, I thought this gingerbread house would be a great opportunity to use and I wasn’t at all disappointed with the results. Quite the opposite, in fact. Even though this is hardly a macro photo, that’s kind of beside the point: macro lenses are great for much more than just close-ups! I couldn’t do much in the way of customizing the lighting or even the background, but I thought that if I set this confection on a small table with the fireplace in the background it would make for at least a slightly more interesting overall composition. I shot this in manual with ISO 100 and a few different apertures values with my camera firmly mounted on a tripod so as to make shutter speed more or less irrelevant.

As usual my first instinct was to shoot wide open but, of course, the depth of field I was getting was simply far too shallow even with my camera being several feet away from the gingerbread house. (That’s what you get when you shoot with a 105mm lens, after all😁) I honestly didn’t even know what to focus on–the green window trim, the colored candy on top, the roof line, or even the candy cane fence protruding from the front. F/8 kind of took care of most of those issues for me, thankfully. I focused on the big green rectangular blobs that my youngest son put on as windows and doors and enough of the house was sharp to make for a quality end result.