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

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.

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 :)