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

So here’s something you might not know about me…I get really nervous when I go out and take pictures in public. It’s one reason you rarely see photos of people here on the blog, and it’s something I’ve been trying for years to overcome to varying degrees of success. I just feel kind of self-conscious when I’m using my DSLR (or even my phone camera) in a public setting, as if everyone is watching me and wondering why I’m taking pictures of such boring, mundane objects. And I really don’t feel comfortable taking photos of people public parks or gathering areas. It feels like I’m intruding on their own personal space, even if they’re just in the background of a picture I happen to be taking and not actually the subject of my photo at all.

I shot this picture on a rainy afternoon after I got off work and was waiting for my wife to meet me outside her office. There’s a covered walkway between two buildings on campus where we meet up after work sometimes, and she told me it would be just a few minutes so I grabbed my D7100 and 50mm lens from my bag and looked around for something to shoot. After a few seconds I found it, right in front of me: the railing at the edge of the walkway. I thought the rain on the black paint made an interesting texture, and the autumn colors beyond the railing were a neat mix of greens and oranges that I really liked.

I set my exposure (f/1.8, 1/250 second, Auto-ISO value of 180) and snapped a single photo…and heard a door open just to my left followed by footsteps heading my way. Normally I would have taken a few more pictures, adjusting the aperture to see what results I could get at f/2.8 or even f/4, and maybe changed my angle of view, but as soon as another person entered my peripheral vision I immediately put down my camera and stood up. I went from feeling creative to feeling awkward, even though to the other person I was probably not on their attention radar one iota. He probably didn’t care one bit that there was a person taking pictures of a railing. He almost certainly had other things on his mind, and some dude with a camera wasn’t even close to registering on the scale of things that mattered.

And yet…I still felt the need to stop everything for the sake of…what? I don’t honestly know. This doesn’t have anything to do with the picture, but I thought I’d share it here and I’m wondering if any of you feel a similar way.

As for the photo, I like that it almost feels like two pictures. First, the obvious: a rainy railing overlooking an autumn scene. But it also looks like the panes of a frosted glass window, which is due to the huge aperture (and, thus, very shallow depth of fiend) and it’s a look I didn’t anticipate when I took the photo but in hindsight I think is pretty cool.

I don’t like taking pictures that are basically carbon copies of earlier photos, but I do enjoy paying homage to previous photos by way of making images that are inspired by their forebears. The photographic pronoun to a visual antecedent, if you will. When I shot this picture (about three minutes before last week’s photo, as a matter of fact) I specifically had another shot on my mind which I took almost exactly three years earlier. What attracted me to the initial image from November 2016 was a sense of color and backlighting, and I liked the contrasting colors too. So when I came across a similar scene near Theta Pond I wanted to use some of my lessons I learned taking the earlier photo in what was, hopefully, some new and interesting ways.

First of all, the subject. The original had a wide blade of yellow grass slicing vertically through the image, and when I saw a yellow leaf doing kind of the same thing I thought it would make for a similarly interesting picture. The original image also has a heavy mix of subject and background colors, and as such I wanted the background to play a key role here as well. I stood on my tiptoes to get this shot, with the goal of getting the balls of light (which was sunlight being reflected off of car headlights on University Avenue) in just the right spot so as to complement the leaves. I don’t know that it entirely worked, and I did end up with one image that I think is better in terms of subject-and-background composition, but in that one the leaf was just a little out of focus. So in the Rejected pile it goes!

I wouldn’t say that this picture is better than the original, and in some ways I actually prefer the 2016 incarnation, but I was making a clear attempt to take a picture based on lessons learned from three years prior. Sometimes the things I do when taking a picture are quite unintentional, or perhaps more along the lines of muscle memory, but other times I specifically try to incorporate things I have picked up along the way. If it works, cool. If not, no big deal. I still got to use my camera, and that’s always a win :)

Just as I don’t usually take photos with specific days or times of the year in mind for posting, I also don’t usually take them with the intention of showing them together as a specific group. This changes from time to time, like when I did my series of sunset images last summer, but for the most part I just post pictures here on the blog in no particular order and with no real rhyme or reason. However, when I shot this image I thought it would serve well as somewhat of a companion piece to last week’s photo of a magnolia seed pod.

As often happens with my Weekly Fifty photos I was out on a short walk around Theta Pond on campus and I saw this husk resting on a stone ledge, having long since served its purpose of creating seeds for eventual dissemination. Magnolia flowers, and their resulting central pods, are really a sight to behold but I don’t often think of these remnants as being photogenic or noteworthy at all. However something about this rather unremarkable scene gave me pause, and I’m glad I stopped to investigate.

I had my D7100 and 50mm lens with me at the time, and after using that thing combination for over six years I think my only real complaint, in terms of daily photographic use, is that the rear screen doesn’t flip out. Most modern cameras offer this feature and while Nikon DSLRs aren’t exactly known for their prowess with Live View (that’s what their new mirrorless Z system is for!) it is useful to compose with the rear screen from time to time. And when that happens, a flip-out screen sure would be nice. Such was not the case here so I made do with what I had, and despite having to contort myself at kind of an awkward angle I think I got a pretty good shot nonetheless.

I shot this at f/1.8 because I wanted maximum background blur, and really I think that’s the standout feature of this picture: not the subject, but the background. It’s almost like the purpose of the subject is specifically to draw your eye to the greenery behind it, and that’s something I don’t often think about when composing photos. I tried a few shots at f/2.8 but it just didn’t give me that silky smooth look I was going for (unlike last week when I specifically chose f/2.8) and I actually did end up moving the seed pod just a bit so I could get that brown curled-up leaf in the shot as well.

In looking through some of my photos from Fall 2019 I realized I didn’t have too many of one of my favorite subjects, that of magnolia seed pods as they begin to constrict and force out the beautiful red seeds that lie within. I’ve posted several images of these seed pods over the years here on Weekly Fifty and maybe that’s why I wasn’t all that interested in taking more pictures of the same subject again. It felt like a been-there-done-that scenario, and I don’t want to shoot the same pictures of the same things over and over.

When I went out for a short walk around Theta Pond in mid November I certainly didn’t plan on taking a picture of yet another magnolia seed pod. In fact, most of the trees had long since shed their seeds which eliminated even the opportunity of getting the same type of picture I had gotten many times before. I had my D7100 and 50mm lens just in case I saw something interesting, and after some rather boring photos of geese wandering around I found this one single seed pod that had not yet fallen to the ground, and realized that I actually could make something interesting and new from a very familiar subject.

The thing I realized I could do to make this picture a bit more compelling, as opposed to just a bunch of red seeds sticking out of a brown husk, was to adjust my position (as well as the aperture of my lens) such that the background would be more than just blue sky or green leaves. Far above this seed was a cypress tree spreading a beautiful canopy of brown feathers across the sky, and I realized that was the key to the whole operation.

This seed pod was about ten feet in the air which meant I had to use Live View, and on a D7100 (remember, this camera came out in 2013) that’s not exactly a task that requires minimal patience. It’s slow, clunky, and choppy and forget about using a zoomed-in view to check focus. As such I decided to shoot at f/2.8 in order to get a little more room for error in terms of depth of field, which turned out to be a good thing because the shots at f/1.8 had a background that was just a giant brown blurry mess. It wasn’t pleasing to look at in the least, whereas the bokeh was rendered much more beautifully at f/2.8.

See those white parts on the left–the balls of blurry light that seem as if they frame the seed pod? Yeah, that was completely intentional on my part. After about a dozen shots I discovered that I could position myself in such a way as to make the seed pod show up between those highlights, as well as the one on the right, and the result is actually quite similar to my mockingbird picture from last week. A good picture isn’t just about the subject, but the other elements in the frame that serve to augment the image. That’s what I tried to do here and I think it worked pretty well.

As I mentioned in my photo commentary last week, I don’t usually schedule specific pictures for certain days just like my photo from last week I’m making an exception here. I didn’t take this picture so I could use it as the first image of 2020, but as I was looking through my image collection I thought it might be an appropriate way to ring in the new year. So here you go :)

I shot this back in the fall of 2019 in mid afternoon on a sunny day, and the composition was a bit different for me because of how the light hits the flower. Typically I don’t use backlighting very much but I thought it would work pretty well in this case, and think it makes the resulting image look a bit more interesting and dynamic as a result. If the sun were behind me it would have illuminated the entire flower evenly, but as such I like the white glow around the edge and, as a bonus, the fun highlights behind it in the background. Aperture selection on my 50mm lens here was a little tricky since I knew I wanted a nice blown-out background, but I also wanted the flower to be fully in focus and f/1.8 would have made this almost impossible. F/4 seemed like a bit too far the other way, so I compromised with f/3.3.

I think it worked out fairly well though I must say the background, while being bright and colorful, is a bit too busy and cluttered for my taste. In any case I hope this flower helps bring a smile and sense of optimism to you as you start 2020, and here’s to a year full of new life and new possibilities :)

Cheers!