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

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…

I don’t know quite what I was going for here, so I can’t say if it worked or not, but I do kind of like the image I was able to capture. I shot this right before the autumnal equinox (almost exactly one year after I captured this similar photo) and didn’t plan on taking any pictures at all until I was out the door on my bike and heading to work. As soon as I got to the end of my driveway I looked to the east and saw a fantastic sunrise just beginning, with nary a camera on me. I quickly turned around, ran back inside, and grabbed my D750 + 70-200mm lens to see if I could capture even the faintest hint of what this scene looked like in real life.

In the one minute it took me to get my camera and return to my bike the sun was already well over the horizon, and the view I saw from my driveway was already subsiding so I frantically rode my bike south a few blocks and was able to take some pictures looking down the east/west road that I take to campus. I don’t like that there’s so many power lines crisscrossing the entire image but after a few shots I tried to embrace the urban elements a little bit since there was no way to actually get rid of them. To that end I specifically tried to take some pictures with cars in them, as a way of adding a bit of life and activity to the sunrise. I mean, if it’s clearly an urban scene anyway (power lines, street signs, etc.) then why not embrace it all the way?

I underexposed the image while shooting at f/2.8 and ISO 100 in order to get a clean picture, not overexpose the sun, and add a bit of foreground blur just for fun. Shooting at a smaller aperture might have resulted in a bit sharper image overall but it would have made the Jeep more in-focus, and I like that it ended up being just a bit blurry in the final image. If you click on the picture and view the full-size original you might notice a glow on the undulating power lines extending to the horizon which was certainly not intended on my part but ended up being kind of interesting as well.

It’s always fascinating to me how quickly scenes like this disappear. Five minutes later this was entirely gone and it was just another sunny morning like any other, but for a brief window it was downright inspirational and a great way to start the day. It’s a good reminder that from the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord God is to be praised.

Sometimes you will hear people talk about how it’s possible to get great pictures in your own backyard, but the term backyard is used somewhat loosely and what people really mean is you don’t have to travel very far outsize of your normal daily travels. In this case though, I was able to get what I think is kind of a cool picture literally in my own back yard. Or, my back porch to be more specific.

Every morning my routine follows a somewhat similar pattern: Get up, shower, and sit in a particular spot in our living room to spend some time in prayer before making breakfast. Two days before taking this picture I was praying while looking at the night sky through the sliding glass door to the back porch and noticed that I could clearly see the Orion constellation hanging low above the neighbor’s tree. The temperature was mild, the wind was quiet, and the sky was crystal clear which, I thought, would make for a cool photo. I brought my X100F and tripod outside, took a few shots, and wasn’t really happy with the results. It seemed kind of boring and uninteresting, which was kind of the opposite of what I was aiming for.

The solution, I realized, was to take a long-exposure shot of the same scene with clouds moving across the sky to add a sense of motion and scale to the image. The next morning I set out to do just that, but was foiled due to the total lack of clouds for the second day in a row. While normally it’s kind of neat to be able to see a clear late-summer sky and gaze up at the stars, I was hoping for some clouds to obscure things just a bit. Thankfully the third day, the morning of September 13, I got just what I was hoping for.

After experimenting with a couple different exposure settings I found that 15 seconds at f/8 and ISO 1250 was giving me an ideal mix of starry sky and cloud movement. Much longer and the trees started to show too much motion blur, while much shorter shutter speeds didn’t give me the kind of cloudy streaks I was aiming for. Of the ten images I shot on my back porch I liked this one the best because it seemed as though the clouds were drawing my attention to Orion while also showing the silhouettes of the two trees for a sense of space and context. When I processed this image in Lightroom I found that the clouds were a bit too noisy for my taste so I moved the Luminance slider all the way to 100 (which I almost never do as it gets rid of far too much detail and texture) and that gave the clouds a smooth, dreamlike quality that I thought was really cool.