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

This photo was a good example of how a lot of the images I’ve taken and posted here on Weekly Fifty have helped me learn practical skills as a photographer that ended up directly impacting the occasional work I do for clients. I don’t have a macro lens, and I don’t exactly plan on getting one any time soon, but every now and then a situation arises in which I need to take close-up shots of something. Usually nature, but sometimes small objects and, occasionally, something like the image above where you can see a little baby clasping a parent’s fingers.

When a friend of ours asked if I would take some photos of their two-week-old son I was glad to oblige, and I felt a lot more prepared for this one than I have for similar sessions in the past. I went with my D750 and 50mm lens, foregoing my 85 because I just like the look of that particular focal length when working with infants, and also because I wanted something a lot more light, nimble, and let’s face it, practical than my 70-200 f/2.8. (I mean seriously, who shoots an infant session with that lens? Some people, I suppose, but not me!) I also brought my Fuji X100F just in case, but I ended up not needing it at all as the Nifty Fifty did everything I needed.

After several shots of the baby all snuggled in a big fluffy blanket from lots of different angles, I wanted to switch things up a bit so I reached for my set of close-up filters to get some more intimate photos of his eyes, fingers, and other features. Thanks to all the trial-and-error with those filters over the years here on Weekly Fifty I already had a pretty good idea of the exposure settings I would need to get the shots I was aiming for:

• F/5.6 to get a reasonably wide depth of field and to allow for a little wiggle room when focusing.
• 1/90 second to get a sharp, wobble-free image
• Auto ISO with max value of 6400 because the D750 is so good at high ISO values it’s not even funny. Even modern image sensors have a tough time beating the rock-solid sensor in the D750.

I was really happy with the results I got, and the parents were too. A true macro lens would have definitely helped in this situation but these opportunities present themselves so rarely that I’m fine with just sticking with the close-up filters. For now, anyway :)

If you’ve been following along the last few weeks you’ve seen that the recent set of pictures has had a distinctively midwestern theme, with images of windmills and trucks and cotton and other items indicative of the Great Plains. This picture is a departure, or rather, a return to the more normal types of photos I enjoy taking. It’s a simple scene and, like a lot of my Weekly Fifty photos, entirely unplanned with what I hope are some interesting results.

On a Friday evening earlier this year my brother and his girlfriend were down for a visit, and we spent a while playing the board game Ticket to Ride with our kids. It’s kind of like a super duper basic version of Settlers of Catan in that you have to connect various regions on a map with roads or, in this case, train routes. We didn’t quite finish the game since the kids had to go to bed, but we left it out for the next morning which seemed like a good compromise for everyone. After waking up and making my way to the kitchen the next day I thought that the colors of the trains, lit by the glow of the early morning sun, would make for an interesting photo but instead of reaching for my Fuji I went for the classic Nikon + 50mm. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…something about that lens is just kind of magical. It’s not what I prefer for general-purpose everyday shots, but it’s amazing when you want to get a little artistic and creative.

So I set the camera on the table, dialed in an aperture of f/2.8 (I knew f/1.8 would be waaaaaay too big and leave almost nothing in focus) focused using Live View, and took a shot. Sure enough, even at f/2.8 the depth of field was too shallow so I closed it down to f/4 and left the ISO at 100, which meant I needed a super long shutter speed of 1.5 seconds. No matter, though. Just set the self-timer, press the shutter, take your hands off, and you’re good to go. (Sorry for my use of the second-person pronoun. Sometimes it just works better.) My oldest son, who was awake and watching me take this picture, was eager to get going with breakfast so I quickly put the camera away and set about taking care of some of the usual morning routine activities, but it was nice to get a shot of this almost-completed train route before everyone else woke up and the moment faded away.

I’m really not sure what to make of this image, to be perfectly frank. I was, once again, driving south on Highway 77 (side note: this is the last in a series of photos that I took while on a drive to Nebraska and back earlier this year) when I went right past this truck sitting by the side of the road with a For Sale sign hanging from its rear-view mirror. Something about the scene just caught my attention and I decided to stop for a picture, though I couldn’t quite explain why. Maybe it was the well-worn nature of the vehicle, a truck that had worked hard and served its owner well but was ready to move on to another stage of its life. Maybe it was the way the metal structure behind it rose like a stairway into the sky. Maybe it was the brown, earthy tones of the ground that seemed to match the well-used nature of the truck. Whatever the reason, I decided to stop and get a picture because…well, why not :)

Composing this picture was a little tricky because I really wanted to shoot the truck low to the ground and from this specific angle, which meant I was kind of stuck with whatever background elements were in the frame. I couldn’t move anything but myself, though I could (and did) change focal lengths on my 70-200mm lens which sort of helped, I guess. I ended up shooting this at 98mm with an aperture of f/2.8 to get a little bit of blur in the background but I wasn’t, and still am not, quite happy with the placement of the truck relative to the structure. I wish I could have separated the two a little more, but if I moved to the left then the truck ceased to be at this particular angle and that was a sacrifice I wasn’t really willing to make. I also wish the green street signs and yellow arrow (which you can only barely see anyway, since it’s obscured by another sign) weren’t in the picture but…well, what can you do.

Pictures like this might evoke some particular sentiments about the midwest, and while some of them might be true the irony is that things really aren’t like this around here. Sure we have our share of plains and cornfields and old trucks and whatnot, but a few months from now this composition will look entirely different. You would see a scene full of life, vibrant and colorful, with a blue sky stretching to the endless horizon. Sure there are signs of the past if you look for them, like an old truck or a rusty three-story pole barn, but just underfoot you’ll find plenty that points to an exciting future too.

I’m not kidding, that’s literally the name of this waterway and I have always thought that this scene would make for an interesting photo opportunity, but I’ve never really had the time or gear or weather conditions to get this shot. I’ve driven over this spot a dozen times in recent memory and I have a hunch that this is all that remains of a once-great reservoir, much like Milford Lake just to the south, but that has now been returned to a state that resembles, more or less, how it might have looked long ago with a small stream cutting a meandering path through the Kansas wilderness.

As I was driving from Nebraska to Oklahoma in early February I knew that the weather would be good enough for me to at least pull over and see if I could get some type of shot here, but I wasn’t quite sure just what I was going for. I knew I would want something on the wider end of the spectrum so I grabbed my Fuji X100F, got out of my car, and made my way to the edge of the bluff you see in the foreground. I fired off a couple shots but something wasn’t quite working out and I wasn’t able to put my finger on it…and then I realized was going on. It was the curve of the river.

This shot, much like most of my images up to this point, didn’t do a good job of capturing the scale of the scene because the river just sort of wandered off the frame without going into the distance. It just wasn’t working, but I wasn’t really sure what to do about it. Kind of on a whim I decided to move even closer to the edge and also scoot up to the bridge a little bit too, so it didn’t take up quite as much room in the frame. The result is the picture you see at the top of this post, and it’s very close to what I’ve been seeing in my mind whenever I’ve thought about getting a photo of this location. Not much is different between the two pictures you see here–both have a bridge on the right, a river in the middle, and roughly the same horizon–but the one on top does such a better job of capturing the expansive nature of the scene.

I’d like to revisit this when the grass is greener and the sky is bluer, and hopefully use what I learned here to get an even better shot someday :)

I’m telling you…Highway 15 is the gift that keeps on giving, photographically speaking. Every time I travel on that road I end up finding some type of scene worth photographing, and it almost always happens when I least expect it. I was heading southbound on a Sunday afternoon when off to my left as I saw this scene that looked like it was ripped straight from the pages of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book or maybe even a Coen Brothers movie. There was no shoulder to speak of and I didn’t want to slow down and be a bother to other cars, so I drove another mile, found a side road to turn around, waited for a group of vehicles to pass, and made my way back to a spot where I could pull off into the grass and take a picture of the windmill.

Several months ago I posted a couple pictures of windmills that were also shot in midwestern Kansas and those were certainly on my mind when I took this one, but there was something different and quite unique about the scene here. The two shots I posted earlier didn’t have much in the way of context, and you know how I’m such a big proponent of context :) What really stood out to me here was the hill in the background, which helped give a sense of scale to the picture that the other ones just lacked. You see the windmill, you see the little shed, and then you see the hill slightly out of focus (yay for the 70-200 f/2.8!) and then you hopefully get a sense for just how vast these windswept plains really are. You might even notice the grass bending over to complete the scene, and if it wasn’t for the Wildcat logo on the rudder you might even think this was some kind of centuries-old daguerrotype.

This picture shows something that I’ve really come to appreciate about doing Weekly Fifty, that of progress. One, two, four, or six years ago I would have never made the compositional choices I did to get this shot nor would I have had the gear to take this picture either. It’s fun to think about the things I’ve learned over the years, and even more fun to think about everything there is still left to learn :)