To wrap up 2019* I wanted to take a look back at the past year, and even farther, and talk about where things with Weekly Fifty have been, where they are now, and where I see them going in the new year and beyond.
*I know we still have almost two weeks left in the year, but I figure this is close enough :)
Sometimes I really wish I had a proper macro lens. There aren’t too many occasions on which it would be useful, but this was definitely one of them. I made do with my usual 50mm lens and close-up filters, but good gravy I think an actual macro lens would have been so much better! Maybe someday :) In the meantime I have fun with my cheapo close-up filters and I do enjoy getting shots like this, if nothing else for the sheer challenge of it all.
The sun was going down one evening early in November and I had just come from inside the house with a garbage bag full of trash that was bound for the bin, but I stopped short when I saw this wasp sitting on the black lid. He was just sort of minding his own business and didn’t seem interested in stinging anyone, so I ran inside and grabbed my D7100, which already had my 50mm lens attached, screwed on a +10 filter, and ran back (though tiptoeing the last few yards) to see if I could get a shot of this little bug before he flew away. I didn’t know how long I had to take the shot so I tried to act quickly, and thankfully the results were decent enough when it was all over.
I don’t often use my +10 filter because the depth of field is just too unwieldy, but I knew that for a shot like this it was going to give me a lot better results than a +4 filter. I also don’t like using wide apertures with a +10 filter because, again, depth of field. But because there wasn’t much sunlight left, and because I was shooting with my D7100 and not my D750 (and, hence, couldn’t raise the ISO very much without the picture becoming mired in digital noise) I ended up shooting at f/4. In fact, I shot this scene in Manual as opposed to Aperture Priority because I wanted to make sure I was getting the precise results I was hoping for. My final exposure settings were 50mm, f/4, 1/125 second, ISO 400, a little energon, and a lot of luck.
I used Live View as well, which is super unwieldy on the D7100, but it was the only way I could be sure of getting anything close to in focus. I knew I wanted the eye to be as sharp as possible so that was my main goal, but this was made even more tricky since the wasp wouldn’t hold still and kept on crawling, slowly, around the textured trash can lid. I wish the lighting would have been just a bit better but in general I’m pretty happy with how this turned out, and it was fun to get the chance to use my (very limited) macro gear for something a bit different than I usually shoot.
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.