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

The third and final image from my series of photos taken while traveling from Nebraska to Oklahoma, this one is a bit different in that it’s actually not off the beaten path at all. It’s not taken from a dirt road, winding highway, or secret spot of any kind. In fact it was taken on a very busy stretch of Interstate 35 just south of the Oklahoma border, and this is a scene I have probably driven past dozens of times over the years and never really thought about very much. But when you look at the world around you in terms of photography opportunities, it’s interesting what can really jump out at you.

If you saw last week’s photo you know the sky was kind of overcast on this day but at this point it had stopped raining outright, leaving some good lighting conditions for taking photos. Since I was on the interstate at this point, having left Highway 77 in favor of faster speed limits, I was really just wanting to get back home and not really interested in taking pictures anymore. But when I noticed this oil pump just west of a rest stop (one of those parking-only deals where you can pull off the road and stretch your legs, but not much more) I really wanted to get a picture of it because…well, once that photography bug bites you it’s hard to ignore.

It wasn’t until I got out and was framing the shot in my camera that I noticed the wind turbine in the distance behind the pump, and I thought the contrast between old and new would make for an interesting image. I wasn’t really sure about the aperture to use though, because I didn’t want to blur the windmill too much but I also wanted to make sure the pump was firmly established as the focal point. I ended up shooting this at f/4.8 but to be honest it didn’t turn out that different from others shot at f/2.8. What really mattered to me in the end, as I was looking through the images on my computer, was the position of the blades on the turbine.

It’s difficult to explain, but in a lot of the pictures the blades just didn’t look interesting. They seemed static and lifeless, or just plain weird such as one blade pointing straight down with the other two angled upward. This picture somehow conveys a sense of movement and depth in the turbine blades, which combined with the pump fully above the horizon (this was also moving up and down as I took pictures) resulted in an image that seemed much more interesting to me than some of the others.

All my photos and audio commentaries are now available at the Weekly Fifty YouTube Channel:

Weekly Fifty on YouTube

When I started Weekly Fifty nearly six years ago I also included a podcast with my audio commentary tracks, but I did this more as a curiosity than anything. I always knew it wasn’t super practical to have audio-only tracks where I would talk about pictures that the listener wouldn’t be able to see, but I figured it wouldn’t really hurt to make this sort of thing available anyway in case some people happened to prefer it. Occasionally I thought about putting my photos and accompanying commentaries on YouTube but the longer the blog went on the more this seemed like an insurmountable task: it would require me creating a QuickTime file for every single picture and audio track, now numbering over 300, and then uploading them and including a link back to the blog for each one as well. It just didn’t seem like it was worth the effort.

Over time though I started to think a little more about this and eventually realized that the work required for each individual image wouldn’t be that much, it would just take a while to do it for every photo. So as with any daunting task I started with a single picture and slowly expanded over time until I had all my images online. I’m going to do this for every photo from here on out as a way of offering these images and commentaries for people who want a more convenient way of accessing them other than the blog, and doing it on YouTube means people are (in my estimation) more likely to go back and look at images from past years instead of just the most recent one.

This isn’t going to change anything about the blog, and the best place to see these images is always going to be here where you can also click through to the high-resolution Flickr version and read the commentary as well as listen to it. But for those people who prefer to see all of these images and hear what I have to say on YouTube, well…now you’ve got a way to do that :)

The second in my series of images shot on my way home to Oklahoma, this one was in Beatrice, Nebraska, looking east from where Highway 77 crosses the Big Blue River. If you click on that link it will load the Google Maps Street view of this scene which, as you might notice, is vastly different in terms of lighting and overall colorization compared to what you see here. Just like last week’s image the weather here was overcast and drizzly, and since I had driven over this bridge many times in recent years I certainly wasn’t expecting to stop and take pictures. But as I crossed the river and looked off to the west I realized that the scene could make for an interesting photo opportunity.

Whenever I’m driving solo I have to balance the time I spend driving with the time I spend stopping, and all the little 5- and 10-minute respites to take photos can really add up and have the unfortunate side effect of stretching a 6.5-hour drive into an 8-hour drive, and that was certainly on my mind here. Was this bridge really worth stopping for? I didn’t know for sure, but after I parked my car in a nearby lot I literally ran over to the spot where I shot this photo so I could make this little side jaunt as brief as possible. I had my D750 and 70-200 lens and as I took a few images I quickly realized that it wasn’t necessarily the old rail bridge that was going to make for an interesting picture but also its reflection. Somehow that seemed to add a unique element to the photo, so I zoomed out and took a few more pictures at about 75mm which is what you see here.

In thinking about this image after the fact I realized that this same photo could have been taken with my Nikon D200 and 50mm lens, since the focal length I ended up using on my full-frame camera is very close to shooting 50mm on a crop-sensor camera. Basically, even though I was shooting with a couple thousand dollars worth of camera gear I could have done the same thing with a camera/lens combination one-tenth the price. It was a healthy reminder to me, even after all these years, that good pictures don’t require fancy cameras or expensive lenses. Certainly those elements can help, but often it’s just seeing the opportunity for a picture and then taking the time to capture it that really makes all the difference.

This is the first in a series of three photos I’m going to be posting here over the next few weeks that were all taken on the drive home from a recent trip to Nebraska. When I left for this particular visit I switched things up just a bit by bringing my Fuji X100F as well as my Nikon D750 + 70-200 2.8 lens, partly because I wanted to have the ability to switch things up from the Fuji but also because I don’t think I have ever travelled with that particular camera combination before. That particular combination of cameras and lenses is my go-to setup when I do portrait photography but the idea of taking the D750 and that particular lens with me on a trip was something that hadn’t really occurred to me before. And while the results weren’t always what I was expecting, in truth I didn’t really know what to expect so in that sense I suppose you could say that everything worked out great :)

When I left Nebraska on a foggy Sunday morning to begin the drive back to Oklahoma I thought that the overcast skies and rainy weather would preclude me from taking any photos of significance, but then I realized that this was somewhat of a unique opportunity since it’s usually bright and sunny when I make this particular drive. That said, as I was driving south on Highway 77 between Lincoln and Beatrice I saw this scene on the west side of the road that was quite unlike most other scenes I can recall photographing. The gray sky gave an otherworldly feeling to the prairie, and the tree poking up in the middle of the horizon helped give a nice clear focal point to what otherwise might be a somewhat less-than-interesting image.

I shot this at 200mm, f/4, ISO 100 and even though that gave me a nice clean image with plenty to work with in Lightroom I found that I didn’t need to do much at all to get the image to look like the scene I can recall seeing so vividly from the side of the highway. Of the ten or so pictures I shot before I got in the car I chose this one as my favorite because of how much empty space there was at the top, as opposed to other images where the horizon basically bisected the frame. The empty gray space seemed like it added to the otherworldly feeling of the picture as a whole, and I hope the image captures a sense of calm and stillness that was almost palpable as I stood there on the side of the road.

If I had to define the word serendipity I would use this picture as an example. I shot this when I was on my way to Nebraska recently to see family, and as I often prefer to do I took back roads and highways instead of main roads and interstates. Those routes are often more direct as the crow flies but take a little longer due to reduced speed limits and small towns, but they more than make up for it (in my opinion) simply due to the scenic nature of the drive. Case in point: I had no idea that my trip through Kansas would end up taking me past a vast field of sunflowers, and because I was on a barely-paved two-lane highway I was able to easily stop, get out, and shoot some photos.

First off: I don’t really want to say exactly where in Kansas I got this picture because of stories like this where tourists and Instagrammers overwhelmed and basically destroyed a similar location in Ontario. But it was definitely off the proverbial beaten path, and not at all something that most people would end up driving past. And as I got out my camera I quickly realized one problem: I had no idea how to capture this scene.

When I first drove past the field on my way to Nebraska I got out my D750 + 70-200 lens because…well, I don’t really know why. I thought that it would be a way to capture the vast scene in front of me but when I got to my parents’ house and looked through some of my images I realized that even shooting at 70mm was far too narrow to really showcase the scope of the sunflowers, and my shots at longer focal lengths mostly looked like a yellow and green mess. Depth of field was all weird too, and even shooting at f/11 the DOF was so narrow that much of the sunflower field looked blurry and uninspiring.

On my return trip to Oklahoma I made a point of driving past the same field but this time used my Fuji X100F and was able to get what were, in my opinion, some much better images. I had to move physically closer to the sunflowers but this gave me the best of both worlds: I realized that I could make one single sunflower the focal point of the image while still showing the vastness of the sunflower field as a whole. Or, at least that was my goal here. I expect the next time I drive past this scene the flowers will be long gone, but it’s kind of cool knowing where to find this spot for similar shots years down the proverbial road…