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

It’s safe to say you can file this under the category of “Pictures you can’t get with a 50mm lens.” And as I’ve said before it’s not that any one lens is better or worse than any other lens, just that each lens, with its unique combination of focal length and aperture, has its own strengths and weaknesses that need to be taken into account when shooting photos. In this case I had my 70-200 lens and wanted to get kind of a different type of picture compared to what I normally shoot, and I wanted to see if I could use it to put the Low Library on campus in a bit of a different context.

I’ve taken pictures of the Library before, but it’s hard to convey a sense of scale with just little image on a blog or website so for this picture I wanted to give viewers an idea of how massive and imposing the library is, even though you can only see just a small part of it. To get this picture I stood back….waaaaaay back…and used back-button-focus to lock focus on the path on which the woman is walking. Then I waited for people to walk across it and, with my camera set to continuous high-speed shutter, snapped several images in quick succession. For comparison, I took this picture with my iPhone at the exact same spot:

I was standing about 400 feet away from the library and about 100 away from the path, but zoomed in to 200mm on my crop-sensor D7100 helped create a picture that, I hope, really put things in perspective. It’s an interesting way to look at a familiar building and one that I hope conveys a sense of scale without actually seeing much of the library itself. I don’t know how our minds process these sorts of images, but by seeing the woman clearly in focus with the doors out of focus behind her it gives a sense of scale and distance that isn’t really present in other pictures I have taken.

I also shot this at f/2.8 in order to get the smallest possible depth of field which, even at these distances, was still a relatively small 8.5 feet. Shooting at f/4 would have increased the DOF by about 50% to just over 12 feet and made the building less blurry too, which would have resulted in a noticeably different picture. In the end I don’t know that there’s a whole lot to this picture other than just me playing around with a particular camera and lens combination I happen to like, but then, if photography isn’t fun and interesting why bother doing it in the first place? :)

I’ve been talking a lot about my Fuji X100F on the blog lately, but for this week’s photo I wanted to take things in kind of the opposite direction. I didn’t shoot this with my Fuji or even a 50mm lens. Instead instead I used my 70-200 lens on my D7100, and even though that combination is overkill for getting pictures of flowers it’s so much fun to go out and shoot with I figured…well, why not?

When I checked the forecast on this particular morning and saw that it would be in the low 70’s I decided to bring out the big guns, photographically speaking, just for the fun of it and see if I could get any interesting pictures during the day. As sometimes happens I ended up going for a short walk around campus in the early afternoon and soon came upon the dogwood trees just to the west of Low Library. These flowers only appear for a couple days during the year and it’s fun to get pictures of them while they last, and even though it was quite windy I thought I would give it a try.

As much as I like prime lenses (and you know I like prime lenses!) there is something nice about having a zoom lens sometimes, and because this flower was pretty high up from the ground there was no way I could have gotten this shot with my usual 50mm. I stood back about ten feet, zooming in and out until I had the composition I was looking for, and snapped a couple pictures before the wind started whipped the flower back and forth again. I ended up shooting at 165mm, f/2.8, using a 1/250 second shutter and I think the end result worked out fairly well, though from a compositional standpoint I do wish I would have been able to get the purple flower just a bit to the right so it was not encroaching on the visual space occupied by the branch behind it. I do like the image as a whole though, and even though I tried a couple shots with a brick background I much prefer the purple standing out like a splash of color against a sea of green.

First, a disclaimer: I did not plan on doing two back-to-back photos of very similar scenes at the OSU campus. When I wrote this post I didn’t even realize that last week’s post was taken at almost the exact same spot using the same camera, but facing a different direction. So if you’re tired of pictures of OSU with the sun in the background, just wait until next week when I’m sure there will be an entirely different image :)

The act of taking this photo was somewhat serendipitous, as I didn’t intend to take it at all but things just sort of worked out to allow it to happen. I was biking to work on March 22, one day after the start of Spring, and saw that the clouds in the eastern sky were lit up like a fireworks show because of the sunrise in the west. I thought it might be an interesting photo opportunity so I parked my bike on the west side of Boone Pickens Stadium, got out my X100F…and it was a total bust. The lens on that camera is so wide that in addition to the clouds the picture also contained construction equipment, street lights, cars, and a host of other distracting elements in the foreground that detracted from the majesty of the scene. Plus, it was kind of cold and I just wanted to get to the office.

I hopped back on my bike and continued across campus when I saw another sight that I thought would make for an interesting photo: some tree flowers budding in the early morning light. So once again I got off, pulled out my camera…and it just wasn’t happening. What seemed like a scene that would make an interesting picture in my mind just wasn’t all that compelling when I tried to capture a photo with my camera. Then, as I was about to finish riding to my building, I turned around, looked to the east, saw the sunrise over the new Spears School of Business building and about lost my mind.

As with most sunset images this one doesn’t do justice to the actual scene, but I did take a few lessons into account that I had learned from earlier attempts at photographing similar settings. I shot RAW, underexposed the scene to preserve the highlights, used a smaller aperture of f/5, shot at a low ISO of 200, and most importantly, I didn’t spend too much time putzing around with my camera because in a few seconds I knew the scene would disappear as the sun crept over the horizon.

I did tweak the image a bit in Lightroom (you pretty much have to when working with sunrise/sunset photos to make the most out of the dynamic range captured by the image sensor) and removed a couple distracting elements like the blue campus emergency lights and…well, you can see the original here if you want:

Does my editing ruin the integrity of the image? I don’t think so, and even if it does, it’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make to get a picture like this. I hope you like looking at it as much as I liked taking it :)

This was a bit of an unexpected photo that didn’t really turn out how I was hoping, but then, I’m not exactly what I was even aiming for in the first place so I can’t really complain. I took this when my wife and I were walking around campus with some friends in mid-March and I noticed these flowers on a tree which, combined with the setting sun and the relatively empty brick pathway, made for what I thought would be an interesting composition. I had my X100F with me since it’s my go-to camera for everyday casual shooting and while it worked OK on this image I think using a 50mm on my D750 would have been a little better for what I had in mind.

Nevertheless, they say the best camera is the one you have with you, so I tried to make the most of what I had. Using my X100F I stopped down to f/11 to get a bit of lens flare and also keep the background blur from getting too out of control, and also switched from my usual Classic Chrome simulation to Velvia which is, as I understand it, better suited for nature and landscapes. I actually shot a couple similar images using Classic Chrome and didn’t really like the colors that much but Velvia gave me an image that was at least closer to what I was imagining. I also overexposed the image by more than two stops in order to keep the white flowers from being too dark.

This image represents a departure from the workflow I’ve used for several years now, which has been like this:

• Shoot in RAW, import to Lightroom, edit, export

Lately I just haven’t been as interested in the painstaking process of editing so I’m using JPEG more and more, and trying to get as much right in camera as I possibly can. So for this, and most of my casual (i.e. not for clients) shots my workflow is now this:

• Shoot in JPG, import to Lightroom or my phone, export

I know I could use RAW+JPG on my camera but in truth I just don’t care about editing the RAW files mostly because it takes so much time, and if I can get the picture right when I take it then I’m perfectly happy to forego the editing process altogether. It’s fine for casual shooting but on a picture like this, which probably should have some editing done to it, I’m finding that my new workflow isn’t quite ready for prime time. Perhaps I need to find more of a middle ground, or learn to use my camera better, or even just be happy with the results and move on. Either way it’s a fun process and I’m enjoying the ride :)

A few years ago my parents decided to replace their aging clothes washer with something a bit more modern and efficient, and they ended up getting one of those top-loading models without the giant central agitator that most washing machines have had for decades. My dad, his feet firmly planted in the concrete foundations of The Old School, didn’t trust that thing at all. When they first got it he was appalled at how little water it used and he thought there was no way it could clean his clothes, so he removed the magnetic latch from the top door in order that he might inspect its handiwork firsthand. He literally sat on a stool and watched it do an entire load of laundry just to make sure the washer was doing its job and, while they still have the machine, I’m not entirely sure he trusts it even to this day.

So, when we were visiting in March of this year my boys were fascinated at how they could watch the device clean clothes with the lid open. Just like their grandpa, they sat and watched it as it went through a load of laundry (fill-swish-rinse-drain-etc.) and I thought it would make for an interesting photo opportunity since you don’t normally get to see the inside of a washing machine. I used my Fuji X100F to get this shot which was great since the lens was wide enough to get a good view of the washer and I could use the rear screen to compose my shots too.

The only major issue was focusing, since the constant spinning motion confused my camera and never quite allowed for good autofocus. I ended up focusing manually and just kind of eyeballing it (even the focus-assist features, like peaking, were having trouble with the washer) and got several shots at various shutter speeds–some too fast, some too slow, and other like this one that were juuuust right. But you know what did it for me in this particular image? The fact that the three center…uh…arms, or whatever they are, are sitting right about at 10, 2, and 6 o’clock. I had other shots where they didn’t have that kind of symmetry and it just didn’t look right, but something about the way they lined up here was really pleasing from a visual standpoint.

So yeah, the next time you want an interesting photo-op, just try doing a load of clothes!