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

I spent my first few years at OSU working as kind of an all-in-one tech guy for the distance learning program at the Spears School of Business. I made videos, took photos, ran a/v equipment for conferences, and did tech support for our learning management system and made a lot of good friends in the process. Just as I was transitioning to another job on the other side of campus the Business School jump-started their plans to construct a new building and four years later, in the spring of 2018, it was finally completed. Classes were held in the new location starting in January of 2018 but it wasn’t until the middle of April that the building was officially declared “Open for Business” by Dean Eastman at a ceremony involving hundreds of alumni, staff, students, and donors.

Like most days I had my camera with me when I went to work that morning but didn’t really plan on getting a shot like this during the ceremony, and in fact through most of the speeches and video presentations I was standing on the north side under balcony trying to avoid getting rained on! Thankfully the storms just grazed Stillwater that afternoon and as the clouds were lifting and the events were starting to draw to a close I ran over to the middle of the second floor balcony, switched my Fuji X100F to RAW, and fired off a couple shots before heading back to join some of my friends where I had been standing. A few minutes later the program ended and everyone dispersed to see the new location.

Once I loaded this image up in Lightroom I was a little worried that I didn’t quite get what I was hoping for, mostly because the sky was kind of an overexposed horizontal patch of white. Thanks to the magic of RAW I was able to recover a huge amount of color information and, along with a couple other editing tweaks, ended up with the picture you see here. Sure a wider lens would have been nice like the 17-40mm that one of the Spears photographers used on these shots, but that wouldn’t have been nearly as portable and unobtrusive as my little X100F.

It was fun to get this shot and see the new home of my former workplace, and more importantly to spend time with so many good people who help make the OSU campus a great place to work :)

This was a fun opportunity to get out the 50mm lens with some close-up filters, and also an example of why it’s important to to look around you and see what’s happening so you don’t miss a shot if one presents itself. These flowers are about the size of a pencil eraser and they are on a tree that’s about 20 feet from my building at work, and I don’t think I would have taken much notice had circumstances not lined up just right. I went across campus one afternoon with a coworker who pointed out the super tiny but really pretty petals on this one particular tree, and I realized right away that this would be a fun photo opportunity with the right gear. The next morning I returned to work with my 50mm lens and +4 close-up filter in order to see if I could capture these flowers on film. (Digitally speaking, that is.)

As I walked around the tree looking for some shots there was a bit of an issue in that there were almost too many opportunities from which to choose. Flowers just like the one you see here were everywhere on this tree, which made things a little difficult because virtually any of them could have resulted in good pictures. I soon realized that despite having a thousand potential subjects, I had to really look close to find one that would actually work for a photo.

Getting this shot required looking at all elements within the frame: the subject, the lighting, the background, the aperture size, and even the direction that the flower was pointing. I ended up shooting almost straight into the sun which resulted in quite a lot of backlighting, but the tradeoff was a nice blurry background and a white backdrop for the pink flower in the center. Most of the other angles from which I tried taking pictures resulted in images that were too muddled, too bright, or too disjointed to really function as proper photographs.

The very next day when I walked up to my building I saw that most of these pink flowers were gone–they fell off, closed up, or turned a light shade of brown. I was able to get this picture in a relatively fleeting moment that won’t come around for another year, and when it does you can bet I’ll be there with my camera to see it :)

I took this not too long after shooting another photo of a similar flower, but I much prefer this image to the former which you can see if you scroll back a couple of weeks here on the blog. When these flowers open up in early Spring you don’t have much time before they whither away–maybe two days at the most–so when I brought my 85mm lens to campus I specifically sought out these flowers as photo subjects. Luckily I was able to get this image before I even got to work! I was biking past the east side of Low Library and saw one of these trees in full bloom with this particular flower right at eye level, and I really liked how it caught the morning light which made the colors have a richness to them that I don’t always see at other times of the day.

I shot this wide open at f/1.8 which can be a bit of a gamble on the Nikon 85mm lens since it’s a bit stronger and sharper at slightly smaller apertures, but I’m glad I went all the way on this because I really wanted to isolate the subject from the background. A smaller aperture might have resulted in a slightly sharper image but at the cost of some background blur which was a tradeoff I did not want to make.

More than anything I’m happy with how the compositional elements came together on this one. The flower is very close to (but doesn’t quite touch) the branch on the left, nor does it encroach on the purple flower in the background. It does overlap the green leaf behind it but that serves to make the purple stand out even more. I don’t know how well I actually planned those elements when I took the shot and though I wish I could take credit for all the stylistic elements of this picture I think simple luck might have been in play 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.