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

I realize that this picture seems like it has very little to do with perambulating, but part of the title is just the simple fact that I’m not very good at coming up with titles. In typical Simon fashion I don’t know what kind of flower this is, but I do know that it’s big. Large. Huge. At least by my reckoning, anyway. My wife and I walk by this flowering plant every morning on our usual route while our kids bike up ahead, and for a while now I’ve thought about taking a picture because it’s just such an interesting flower to look at. Most days I simply forget to bring my camera and on days when I do remember there’s usually some kind of aesthetic issue: bad lighting, harsh shadows, or the flower itself is a bit closed-up and not very photogenic.

On this particular morning I don’t think I struck photographic gold or anything, but it was a rainy, overcast morning and I do think it made for some good lighting and a nice bit of texture with the damp petals making the pinks and reds just a shade or two richer. I brought my D500 and 85 f/1.8 lens so I could get some shots of the kids on their bikes, but turns out that camera/lens combo worked great for this picture too. I shot this at f/2.8 because that lens isn’t all that sharp wide open and depth of field is super difficult to control at f/1.8, and f/2.8 still gave me plenty of background blur while making all important parts of the flower as sharp as a tack. I played around with composition a bit, shooting from different angles until I got a background that I liked: the street receding into the distance, with the flower mostly against dark earthy colors instead of the sky. I kind of wish it were a bit more isolated with that second flower in the background not present, but I didn’t want to go altering the scene or, worse, damaging the plant just to get a shot. Besides, I know the guy who lives here and I don’t think he would like it too much if I went around bending and poking his plants while snapping some photos.

This is another classic example of the type of photo I find myself taking so often: it’s a rather normal subject, in a rather unremarkable situation, that I see on a fairly regular basis, and yet I thought it would make for an interesting photograph. And I think it worked out pretty well. If you scroll back far enough here on the blog you will see a handful of similar photos–that is to say, Indian Paintbrush flowers in the morning light, including one of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken. These flowers practically litter the countryside here in Oklahoma, but it wasn’t until the night I shot this image that I even found out their name–a bit of trivia that came about during a conversation I had with my neighbor after I put my camera away and got on my bike to ride back home after taking this shot.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself here. The point is, there isn’t anything inherently unique about this flower or this setting, and yet it made for a pretty cool shot.

So about the image: Each spring my neighbor lets a rather large patch of his two-acre lawn go unmowed which means we get a little sliver of honest-to-goodness wildflowers and other flora just across the street. It doesn’t take long for this spot to fill with flowers of all types including the one you see here, and as we were walking past his house after dinner I thought it would be fun to go back the next day and take a couple of shots. (We’re good friends with these neighbors, and I did clear it with him to make sure he didn’t mind me poking around on his grass with my camera.) The next evening as the kids were getting ready for bed I hopped on my bike, pedaled a few hundred yards, and started snapping some shots. I even found myself literally on the ground in a prone position trying to line up everything just so.

I probably took about 50 shots of flowers, both Indian Paintbrush and otherwise, and this one rose to the top as my personal pick of the litter. I followed the same principle as the dandelion image from earlier this year in that I realized I could make the flower stand out a bit more if I put it against a darker background. While the dandelion had a much greater degree of contrast with the tree behind it, this flower enjoys the advantage of having some really cool rim lighting around the petals which was really fun in its own right. I used the trust old D7100 and 50mm lens and shot this at f/2.4 so as to get the flower tack sharp without getting too carried away with depth of field. I tell you what man, that camera and lens combination isn’t fancy but it sure does get the job done. Not even in a pinch either–just for general photography.

It did feel a little weird crawling, literally, in my neighbor’s field for 15 minutes but I’ve really tried to abandon any sense of self-consciousness I used to have about that sort of thing. I had permission to be there, I wasn’t causing any harm to anyone, and as I was leaving I ended up having a really pleasant conversation with a neighbor across the street whom I did not know but now wave at every time we go past his house. No big moral or grand lesson here, other than to say that it’s fun to take photos, even of familiar subjects in familiar settings, and see what happens as a result :)

Look, I don’t want to sit here and read too much into things that are really just simple photographs. After all, sometimes (I would argue most of the time) a cigar is just a cigar. And yet, it’s fun to let your mind run wild every now and then and imagine characters, dialog, emotions, and entire scenes where none really exists. I think that’s what makes this picture kind of interesting to me. Someone can look at this and just see two flowers after a bit of rain. Someone else might see a different scene entirely.

But first, the photo itself.

I shot this in a vacant lot while out on a walk with my wife and kids–a lot that, after walking past it many times over the past few weeks, I knew contained a lot of flowers. (Side note: Notice a trend here? I used to take lots of photos while out walking around Theta Pond on the OSU campus. That was before the pandemic…) I brought my D500 with, partly because I really like the images it produces but also because it has a decent degree of weatherproofing which I thought might come in handy if the rain started back up again. Also, because I knew before we left that I might end up taking a shot of some flowers I thought the flip-out screen might come in handy. And sure enough, it did :) Soon we came across the lot and I stayed behind for a bit to take a few shots while the rest of my family went on ahead, and even though the lighting was great and there were indeed a lot of flowers, I found that I had a bit of trouble actually getting a good shot.

Maybe I just didn’t know what I was going for other than to take a picture of some flowers, but for some reason things just weren’t quite clicking. I moved around a bit, tried a few different angles, and eventually came across the scene you see here. If I didn’t have the D500 it would have been pretty tricky and I most likely would have found myself on the ground, but the flip-out screen made this shot a lot easier. Normally I would take a shot of the flower in the background but I thought it was kind of neat how the flower in the foreground was closed in on itself and covered in rain drops. It almost looked like it got into an argument with the flower behind it, and turned away while shedding some tears. If you wanted to extrapolate a bit further you could even go so far as to say that the flower in the background is pleading with the other one: I didn’t mean what I just said! I’m sorry…can you forgive me?

But then, interpretations like that are best left to English majors and poets, not yours truly. To me it’s just a couple of flowers on a rainy day, but it can be fun to speculate :)

Ok, this isn’t what you think. Or, perhaps I should say, it probably isn’t what you think. This isn’t some state-of-the-art macro setup with fancy lighting. It’s pretty basic, to be honest. So basic it’s almost funny: I shot this with my Nikon D500 (though it could have been any crop-sensor DSLR, even my old D7100, as nothing about this image required a D500) and my old 50mm f/1.8 lens and a set of el cheapo close-up filters. The same close-up filters I’ve had for years and you have, no doubt, read about many times here on Weekly Fifty. The location? The glass door leading out to our back porch. The time? After dinner one evening back in June. Anyone could have taken this shot, I just happened to be the one who clicked the shutter button.

But that doesn’t necessarily diminish the value of the image, because it was a fun shot for me to take regardless of the level of technical difficulty or prowess required. My wife and I were in the living room with our boys after dinner, and we were either playing a board game or watching them play Super Nintendo when one of us noticed this light green moth hanging out on the glass door. As usual I ran to get my camera and, having taken a few shots of insects and bugs before, knew to grab my +4 close-up filter because the +10 would be too much for this insect that was about three-quarters of an inch from wingtip to wingtip. I held my camera relatively close to the glass, fired off a few shots at f/4, checked the shots for focus and sharpness on the rear LCD screen, stopped down to f/8, took a few more, and that was it. All told it was about two minutes of shooting, and in the end I got this shot right here:

Not that great, eh? When I loaded the RAW into Lightroom I quickly cropped and did my usual set of basic adjustments (lower the highlights, raised the whites, lowered the blacks, and raised the shadows along with a bit of sharpening) and then set to work on the tedious task of removing all those little scratches with the Spot Healing brush. A few minutes of clicking away was all I needed to realize that this was going to take a super long time, and I didn’t know if I had the patience to deal with it.

Then I realized the obvious: I could, quite literally, just photoshop all the dust and scratches out of the image. With a quick right-click on the image I opened it in Photoshop, duplicated the background layer, applied a super over-the-top dust and scratches filter, and then quickly masked out the moth itself so it wouldn’t appear as a giant blurry blob. In a few minutes I took care of all the little nicks and dings and spots and got a finished image that I liked quite a lot. I edit almost all of my pictures a bit, even just basic things like color tweaking, but I don’t often photoshop them. This one called for a bit more drastic measures though, and sometimes it’s fun to bust out the big guns even for something simple like this shot here.

You might be seeing a pattern here: this is the third sunset photo in as many weeks, much like my series of cardinal bird shots from a little while ago. While those avian images were somewhat planned, in that I knew as I was looking through them that I would end up posting at least three, this was more serendipitous though just as enjoyable for me to shoot the photos. While my two earlier sunset pictures were taken at Caribou Lake in the Boundary Waters, this was shot on my drive home somewhere in Iowa. I don’t remember exactly, but judging by the timestamp I think it was maybe an hour north of Des Moines. I was driving south on Interstate 35 when I saw a field of wind turbines set aglow in the fading sunlight, so I looked for a spot to pull over and take a picture.

One thing about shooting photos while on a road trip: you have to keep safety as the top priority. I didn’t want to endanger any other drivers or myself, so I needed to find an exit and a side road from which to take the shot. When you’re on back roads this isn’t much of an issue, but on mainline arteries like the interstate it’s critically important that you prioritize safety when doing any type of photography. As such, I kept driving until I saw an opportunity to leave the road and then, as luck would have it, I ended up on another side road that went north which gave me a clear view of the horizon. (My guess is I took 270th street and then turned north onto Underwood, but I can’t remember for sure.)

The sun sets quickly, often much faster than you might think, so I knew I only had a few minutes to take some shots. I got out my D750 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and did everything I could to limit the amount of light coming in. When you’re essentially shooting straight into the sun, the best option is an ND filter but absent that option you have to stop down your aperture, increase your shutter speed, and lower the ISO as much as possible. I don’t remember my initial exposure settings but I did dial in -5EV for exposure compensation, and I was hoping I could get a good shot of the sunset with the clouds and wind turbines.

I knew from previous wind turbine shots that the position of the blades can be a little tricky so I used a continuous high-speed burst, hoping one of my pictures would turn out. I fired off a dozen shots, adjusted my composition, engaged the continuous shutter again, and that’s when this moment happened: a flock of birds flew by right as I was pressing the shutter. I was astounded, having never seen this happen in any of my photos before, and desperately hoped that one of my pictures would turn out. I got exactly two frames with birds in them, and of those two this is the one I liked best.

The birds add such an incredible dynamic element to this shot, and I like how everything is silhouetted against the brilliant setting sun. The clouds give off a beautiful glow, and even the foreground has a bit of light right at the base of the image. I have seen shots like this but never thought I would be able to get one, and I still can’t quite believe it happened. One fraction of a second later and the birds were gone, leaving what was still a good shot of the wind turbines and setting sun, but without that sense of life and energy with the birds.