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

I often talk about how you can find photo opportunities almost anywhere, even in your own backyard. That was certainly true in this case, as this horse is almost literally in my own back yard. Almost, but not quite. There’s a big field behind our house in the middle of the block, I’m guessing maybe ten or fifteen acres, and for as long as I we have lived here there have been a couple of horses living there. I know it’s silly but even after more than ten years and getting to know almost all our neighbors I’m still not exactly sure who owns the horses, but there they are: hanging out, doing their thing with plenty of room to run around and enjoy life.

So when we woke up to a fresh coat of snow one morning in early February I thought about getting a picture of one of the horses. We only get snow once or twice a year here in Oklahoma, and even then it’s usually gone by mid-afternoon, so I knew that if I wanted to get a picture of this horse walking through the fresh powder I wouldn’t have much time. Schools were closed but the library was open, so I hopped in the car with my kids to go return some books, and brought my D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens in case the horses were out enjoying the snow.

They were, but it didn’t really work to get a picture. The horses were at the far end of the pasture and even zoomed in to 200mm on a crop-sensor camera I wasn’t really able to get a great shot of them. No worries, I thought. We’ll come back a bit later.

After returning the books and heading back home, the boys wanted to get outside and play so we bundled them up and spend the next hour or two throwing snowballs, pulling sleds, and just running around. After a little while I asked everyone if we could walk down to the edge of the pasture to get a picture, and my wife and the kids were all for it. So we went down…and no dice. The horses were standing around a pile of dirt too far away to get a good shot. I thought that would be the end of it.

Later that day after a round of sledding on a nearby hill and just as the boys were getting hungry for lunch I asked my wife if she wouldn’t mind one last attempt at a horse picture. It was still cold and overcast, so we all walked down and I think at that point the horses had decided we weren’t going to give up on this photo opportunity quite so easily. They saw us at the fence line on the eastern edge and slowly walked over to say hello. And that’s when I got this shot.

The D500’s focusing area covers almost the entire frame so I was able to focus on the horse’s head and keep it locked as it got closer, and I basically just fired off a lot of shots at f/2.8 in the hope that one would work. And this one sure did! I like that you can see the horse’s eye so clearly, as well as the foreleg kicking up a bit of snow as it’s walking towards us.

I think I’m going to use this as an opportunity. I’m going to track down the owners of these horses and share this picture with them. Hopefully they will enjoy looking at it as much as I enjoyed taking it :)

I wish I had taken a picture of what this looked like from a normal vantage point, just walking by and looking down at the flower on the ground. What you’re seeing here isn’t anything special at all, just a pink and yellow flower huddled among the bushes, and I almost passed by without giving it a second thought before I paused to take this picture. What gave me pause was something I had actually been thinking about a few minutes earlier: backlighting. I don’t normally use backlighting on my photos because I like my subjects to be lit normally. As in, from the front. But on this day near the end of January as I was walking around Theta Pond I got to thinking about some of the ways in which the tree leaves and other objects had a bit of a glow to them when I positioned myself in such a way that they were lit from behind.

Then I came across this flower and thought it would make an interesting picture because of the way it demonstrated the same phenomenon. I got down low and shot a few images with my D7100 and 50mm lens at f/2.8 looking through the viewfinder, but wasn’t super happy with what I was getting. At f/2.8 the depth of field was a little too wide and it was difficult to isolate the subject in the frame. So I set my aperture to f/1.8, set my camera way down on the ground, enabled Live View, and took a couple pictures.

Much better.

On these f/1.8 shots the flower really stood out and everything else, both foreground and background, melted away in a greenish blur. I even liked how part of the flower was obscured by a few leaves in the foreground, almost as though the flower itself was poking its head out to say Hello. And that’s when I noticed something I did not intend: a bright spot of light in the background. It appeared only for a half second when a car drove past on University Avenue and the sun reflected off its windshield, but that bright spot made a huge difference in one of the photos I shot. I realized that was the key to the image.

I went back into Live View, set my camera to Continuous High Speed drive, and waited for a car to drive past. A minute later the light at the intersection turned green and a white sedan came down the street, at which point I held down the shutter to fire off a half-dozen frames. When I loaded them in Lightroom I realized that I got the exact image I was aiming for, and the one you see here. The flower is the main subject, but that pair of overlapping white blurry circles just above it and to the left served as an ideal complement to the flower. All the elements–the white spots in the background, the green foliage in the foreground and background, and the backlit pink petals, come together to form a complete picture. All of this took place within the space of about 90 seconds, and then I stood up, put my camera in my bag, and went about my day. It was another reminder, and one I have been learning continually over many years, that photography opportunities really are all around us if we just keep our eyes open.

This isn’t really about the picture, but the story behind it. The picture isn’t all that great, but making it was a bit more interesting than the image itself.

Every now and then I make the drive to Tulsa and about 40 minutes into the trip is a causeway across Keystone Lake. Immediately afterwards there is a gentle incline and at the top of the hill, a small road that turns south. If you look upwards as you cross the lake you can see a few houses on the bluffs overlooking the waterfront, and I have often thought about pulling over to take a picture. As with many photography situations there are always a thousand reasons to say no to that little voice in your head, but this time I decided to answer the call. Photographically speaking, that is.

I came prepared for the occasion too, with my X100F and a tripod and a plan. Well, sort of a plan. I had never been up to that neighborhood before so I didn’t really know what to look for or where to take pictures. I did some investigating on Google Earth and found what I thought would be a good vantage point, and before I left home I also set my camera just how I thought it would need to be when I got to the location: ISO 200 (base ISO for that camera), f/11, auto shutter speed, and ND filter activated. I had everything all ready to go, and was excited for a brief little photo adventure when I finally turned onto that little road at the top of the hill.

Almost immediately I ran into an issue I had not considered. The road was basically lined with a number of signs indicating that visitors were, in no uncertain terms, not welcome. I passed several Neighborhood Watch signs and got the feeling that my short visit to take a photo would be allowed a very little leeway. I don’t know how many signs I went past indicating that I should get back to the turnpike and mind my own business, but I got progressively more nervous with each one. Worse, I didn’t see any locations that would be good photo opportunities. I drove in a loop and eventually got back to the main road having never left my car but glad to have just made it out of there alive.

Then on the way back I realized…might as well go for it. If anyone asked me who I was or what I was doing I would just tell them I am taking a picture and hopefully that would be enough. I headed out from Tulsa, got to the road, turned south, and drove through the neighborhood with the (fake) confidence of someone who had lived there for ten years. I drove as far west as I could before coming across a sign that said “Prayer is the best way to meet God. Trespassing is the fastest.” That’s where I took this picture, taking care to stay on the road and not actually trespass on anyone’s property.

I was more than a little nervous so I didn’t spend too much time there. I hopped out, grabbed my camera and tripod, fired off a couple shots, and hightailed it outta there. (Tom Frye, if you’re reading this, you would have been proud.) I would have liked to spend some time walking around, looking for a better vantage point, and maybe even getting to know the residents but on this occasion I was happy just to have had the experience of taking a picture that was a little bit off the beaten path.

Sometimes it’s fun to just go out and shoot normal things at super wide apertures. That simple concept helped foster my love of photography several years ago, and to this day it remains a fun way to use my camera while seeing the world around me in a bit of a different light. When I shot this picture I had my D7100 and 50mm lens, and noticed a bush with yellow dried up leaves scattered all around its edge. It was the type of conventional, unassuming scene I would normally just stroll past but I saw that the leaves were slightly backlit and it made me wonder if it would be an interesting picture as a result. So out comes my camera, and a few shots later I ended up with this.

But what exactly is this? I’m not entirely sure. Most of my photos have a clearly-understood subject, and I think that was partly my intent here with the upper leaf being the first thing to draw your attention as a viewer. But as I keep looking at this shot the less I think it even has a subject at all, and the two yellow leaves are just part of the larger composition but not any more or less integral than anything else. Basically I don’t think this picture has one single subject, but the whole image kind of stands on its own as a complete entity with many different parts to draw your attention.

I mean, it’s just a brown plant. I’m not trying to make a grand statement here, but this is a bit of a different type of picture compared to what I’m used to shooting. There’s almost a sense of kinetic energy despite everything being dull and brown-toned, and I think that energy stems from the diagonal lines on the left and right side that almost look like cascading waterfalls. About a year ago I was fortunate enough to test the Sigma 40mm f/1.4 Art lens for a few weeks and I took some shots kind of like this, and even though this 50mm f/1.8 picture isn’t as sharp or compelling as what I could get with that other lens, I like it anyway :)

This is the one that almost got away.

As I left for work on a mild January morning a few months ago I noticed as soon as I opened the garage door that something wasn’t quite right. The whole neighborhood was shrouded in a thick fog, the kind that we only get a few times a year. I ran inside and told my two boys to come here, quick, and don’t worry about your shoes! They raced outside and immediately saw and felt what I was talking about. There’s a certain stillness unique to foggy mornings, where you can literally feel the air like a thin wet blanket as you move around beneath the trees. I had to get going so we didn’t spend too much time dwelling on it, but I was glad I got to share that quick moment with my kids before I left for the day.

A few minutes later I was driving south towards campus when I came across the scene you see above. It reminded me of the train scene in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, shot by the great Roger Deakins whose use of light and shadow in cinema is the stuff of legend. As I drove down the road, the light coming through the tree branches was almost breathtaking and it really felt like I was in the middle of a movie.

So what did I do? I thought about taking a picture, and then just kept on driving. I don’t know why, but it seemed to me in the moment that there wouldn’t be any way that I could actually capture a picture of the scene I saw before me, so why even bother trying?

And that’s when I stopped, turned around, and went back to get the shot.

Since I got my new Nikon D500 I’ve been keeping my D7100 and 50mm lens with me a little more often when I go to work, and thank the Lord I had it with me in my bag on this particular morning. I pulled on to a side street, grabbed the camera, ran out to the middle of the road, and snapped a few pictures. I didn’t have much time to plan or even think, but I knew I would need a large aperture to let in enough light for a fast shutter speed. I knew those tree branches had to be sharp. I shot a few pictures at f/1.8 and checked the LCD screen, and then quickly stopped down to f/2.8 in order to get the picture a little sharper since the trees in the foreground were just a little too blurry at such a wide aperture. I also moved my camera position, and instead of holding it I literally set it down on the road and pointed it upwards so I could get a more interesting point of view. I back-button focused on the street light, put the camera in continuous high-speed mode, and fired off about ten shots until the internal buffer filled up.

Why take a series of continuous shots? Because I’ve realized that when dealing with slow shutter speeds on a camera without a tripod or lens or sensor stabilization, your best chance at getting a sharp picture is to just take a boat-load of pictures :)

I shot this, like most of my pictures, in Aperture Priority with Auto-ISO and the resulting exposure of 1/60 second and ISO 3200 worked just fine. A little cropping and some other tweaks in Lightroom resulted in the picture you see here, which I think turned out beautifully. I kind of wish the power lines weren’t there but I didn’t want to go to the trouble of removing them in Photoshop, and I think they do help sell the idea that this is in an urban setting along with the street lights.

I’m so glad I turned around to get the shot.