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

I’m not really sure what to think about this one. On one hand, it’s kind of a neat picture of a red leaf in the middle of a sea of yellow and orange, but on the other hand it really wasn’t anything special when I shot the photo. It was just a plant I happened to walk by on campus one day, and since I had my camera and 85mm f/1.8 lens I figured I might as well try to take a picture. I knew I wanted the red leaf to be sharp and focused, but it was really tricky to nail down because of a stiff breeze that kept confounding matters.

I usually just shoot through the viewfinder on my DSLRs because it just works well, and I don’t need a live histogram or focus peaking or other benefits that you get when shooting Live View. Not to mention Live View on my D7100 (which I used to take this picture) is pretty spotty. It’s slow to activate and the screen has a noticeable jelly effect where the image kind of wobbles around, much like you would find on an old cell phone. Which kind of makes sense considering the D7100 came out in 2013 :)

Anyway, I did actually need Live View here because nailing focus was so tricky. With all the various leaves in the picture swaying back and forth my camera had trouble nailing and locking focus. I switched to Live View, nailed focus as best I could, and fired off a few frames. If you zoom in really close you’ll see that the red leaf is juuuuuust a little blurry but it’s nothing that would ruin the image, and in the end I got a picture that I’m pretty happy with despite a few imperfections.

Last year the annual monarch butterfly migration kind of caught me off guard, so this year I was determined to be a little more prepared when the orange-winged creatures started fluttering through town. I used a migration tracker map to figure out when a good time would be to start looking, and made sure to have my camera with me and ready to go. The day I shot this, in early October, was a bit warm after a few rather chilly afternoons but despite the nice weather and my map-based planning I really didn’t see many butterflies at all when I took a stroll through campus after lunch. I had my D7100 and 85 f/1.8 lens which I knew would help me get a good shot without getting too close to any butterflies and, hence, scaring them away, and it would have worked great if only I had seen more butterflies. Alas, I think I only saw one or two and they weren’t near enough to get a good shot, and the few times they landed in what would have been good photo locations I would have had to trample the flowers just to get near.

As I was heading back to my office I finally found a nice large monarch butterfly hanging out on some flowers near the formal gardens in front of our student union and immediately started firing away. I didn’t know what would come of the pictures since the lighting was less than ideal and there were students walking around, but as the saying goes you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. (“‘Wayne Gretzky’ – Michael Scott”) I set my aperture to f/2.8 so I could get a blurry background with a depth of field that was a little more forgiving than f/1.8, and managed to get about a dozen pictures before the butterfly went on its way.

I didn’t think I captured anything worth saving at all until I saw this particular picture in my Lightroom library, and the more I looked at it the more I liked it. The wing in the foreground is completely sharp, the colors pop and bring life to the scene, and the student in the background (which my mom said looks like an alien) lends a sense of kinetic energy that I didn’t plan on at all. The human/alien form also helps you, the viewer, understand a bit more about the angle from which this was shot: it was clearly low to the ground in order to have that type of view of the person. This photo turned out much better than I had planned, and on Instagram one of my followers asked if they could use it as the featured image in an article. So that was cool. I think my favorite part of this picture was that it came out of nowhere and I didn’t think anything would amount from it at all, but it turned out to be one of my favorite shots I’ve been able to get recently :)

I don’t really know how I got this shot. I mean, I know how I got it in a mechanical sense, but the fact that I was standing right in the middle of a venn diagram consisting of so many disparate elements still kind of boggles my mind.

I leave for work about the same time each morning: 7:10 to 7:15am. That means twice a year there is a window of about one week where I have the opportunity to get shots of the sunrise, barring any atmospheric troubles like stormy or overcast skies. On the morning of September 19, 2019, I could see a bit of fog left on the ground as the sky turned from black to gray while I was getting ready for work, so after hugging my wife and kids I grabbed my Nikon D750 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens to see if I might be able to catch something in the way of a foggy scene on the way to work.

Normally I bike to work but on this morning I had to drive, so used the opportunity to turn east out of my driveway instead of west. Two blocks later I was looking out over a field on one of the north/south streets that passes along the edge of town, and I pulled over to get this shot of the fog hovering around the low-lying grassy areas.

I didn’t really know what type of picture I was going for but this seemed fine, and I was glad I had the chance to capture this scene right as the sun was coming up. So I got in my car and went on my way only to pull to an almost-screeching halt about 100 yards later. On my left was one of the most beautiful sunrises I could recall seeing, partly because of the brilliant oranges reflected on the clouds but also because of the foggy mist in the foreground. I ran across the street with my camera in hand, dialed in a few settings, and started shooting.

I zoomed in all the way to 200mm and shot at f/11, ISO 100, but even then the sun was so bright that the picture was overexposed and I knew I’d never be able to recover enough highlight information to get a good image. Rather than adjusting my settings manually (I almost always shoot in Aperture Priority with Auto-ISO) I dialed in a -2EV exposure compensation which got me just the right image. The foreground was almost completely black but the sun and the sky were properly exposed, and then with a little fiddling on the RAW file in Lightroom I was able to get just the right end result. Not a minute later and this scene was entirely gone, with the sun too far up on the horizon and the fog beginning to clear, and I was so incredibly grateful I was able to get the opportunity to shoot this. It was a good reminder that God’s mercies are new every morning, and a good reminder to thank and praise Him for each day we have on this earth.

One of the reasons I don’t share pictures of my kids on Weekly Fifty is because I want these pictures to be about the art and craft of photography, not a way for me to show off or draw attention to my family. Even when I do have pictures of my kids I don’t show their faces partly because I like to keep the focus on other elements of the picture, but mostly because at heart I’m still one of those paranoid Xennials who isn’t quite comfortable sharing photos of his children for the whole world to see. This one, though, I thought was worth putting up.

When I was a kid one of my favorite comics was Calvin and Hobbes. I remember reading it religiously in the newspaper each morning, laughing at the zany antics of the yellow-haired six-year-old and his tiger friend, but entirely missing the deep layers of subtext and social commentary hidden just beneath the surface of the pen-and-ink drawings and words of dialogue. Several years ago my wife’s parents bought me the Complete Calvin and Hobbes, a boxed set of every comic ever written as well as several pages of introductory text from the author Bill Watterson, and it has held a special place in my heart ever since. I read the set through a few times and kept it safe and sound, hoping that one day my own kids might get just as much enjoyment out of it as I did when I was young.

I don’t remember when my oldest son, who is now 8, took an interest in those comics but he took to them almost immediately, burning through all three books in a matter of about two weeks. He has re-read them several times over the years, and most nights he lugs one of the books up to his top bunk and ends his day chuckling at the situations Calvin and his tiger find themselves in while his little brother slips off to sleep below. Like most siblings, the younger one often follows in the footsteps of the older, and even though he can’t read he loves looking through the books nonetheless and gleaning bits of story from the exaggerated images on the pages. That’s what I found him doing on this morning when I wondered why he wasn’t up yet before I left for work. I quietly peered through his bedroom door only to find that he was he was awake, just reading Calvin and Hobbes quietly to himself in his bedroom.

Knowing that these moments can pass so quickly and with little warning, I ran as fast and as quietly as I could do get my Nikon D750 and affix the 85mm f/1.8 lens so I could get a picture of my youngest son lost in his own little world of adventure, excitement, and animal-assisted interplanetary exploration. The light was so dim I knew I would need all of it that I could get, so I shot at f/1.8, ISO 6400, and even then I settled for a 1/20 second shutter speed. The only reason it worked was because I was able to rest my camera on the door frame, otherwise the end result would have been too blurry from camera shake.

As soon as I shot this picture the moment was lost, since he heard my camera shutter and immediately turned around to see what was happening. (Something that wouldn’t have happened if I shot with a mirrorless camera like the Sony a9, but that’s an issue for other websites to explore.) He looked up with a huge grin on his face, and went back to reading. I went back to breakfast, also with a big smile, thinking that it was going to be a good day. And it was.

If this picture seems similar to the one from October 16, it’s because they were shot in relatively close proximity about two minutes apart. This one actually inspired the other one, but I’m posting it second because I like the other one better :) This was about 6:55am on a warm August morning and I wanted to get a picture of this flower with my D7100 and 50mm lens, but I also wanted to get something interesting in the background instead of just having the flower be the sole source of interest for the viewer. I started by taking a similar picture of the same flower, checking it out on my camera, and then realizing that the yellow light way in the distance would provide the dynamic element I was really looking for.

I’ve noticed this about pictures I take of flowers–I like them to be a little more than just a flower, which is partly why I was surprised that my recent image of a yellow burst of petals floating in a field was more interesting to me than I initially thought. In this case I didn’t just want the red petals by themselves, and on their own they didn’t look all that interesting. But combined with the yellow lights in the background, the flowers got a lot more compelling.

That’s one of the lessons I continue to learn as I take pictures: you might have an interesting subject, but if there’s not a secondary element to punch things up a bit it might not be all that great of a photo. Sometimes, sure, but as in the case of my image of fireworks with the moon poking through the bottom I sometimes find that it’s those extra bits that push an image from 10 to 11. Not that this picture is either of those (I’d give it more like a 5 or 6) but it’s still something worth paying attention to when you take a picture. What else, besides the main subject, can you get in the frame or otherwise add to the picture to make it just a bit more compelling?