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

My kids have a habit of calling rodents and squirrels by the name “Peanut” ever since reading the Magic Tree House books where the two protagonists, Jack and Annie, adopt a mouse by that name. (Turns out the mouse is much more than meets the eye, but you’d have to read the books to find out why.) Hence the name of this week’s picture which is really just a quick snapshot I happened to fire off before this squirrel scampered off to find food, shelter, or maybe just a playmate elsewhere on campus.

I often talk about the benefits of having your camera with you and here’s a prime example of why it matters so much. In the four and a half years I’ve been at my current position at OSU I’ve seen squirrels wander outside on the ledge of my third-floor office maybe a half-dozen times. It’s just not something that happens very often, and when it does I always like to pause what I’m doing and just sort of watch the little creatures do what they do. It’s a fun little distraction to see them up close, and they usually just stick around for ten or 15 seconds before going back to whatever it was that they were doing.

When I took this I had my D7100 + 50mm lens with me and even though there are two panes of glass between me and the squirrel (with about four inches of space between the panes) I was able to get a fairly decent image. I didn’t have time to do much in the way of composition but I knew I wanted to get his (her?) eye in the shot so I crouched down low, put my aperture at f/2.8, and focused right on the eye with the hope of getting a nice sharp shot. There was a ton of glare from the window in the original RAW file but nothing that a little Lightroom editing couldn’t fix–mostly by adjusting the Highlights/Shadows/Lights/Darks sliders.

It might be a while before this opportunity presents itself again and if so, I’m happy to have gotten this shot while I was able to. It’s fun to try things like this (I almost didn’t even reach for my camera, thinking there’s no way I could get a good picture) but I’m glad I went for it anyway.

I also want to note that this picture marks five years of doing this Weekly Fifty blog. Five years. I must admit that when I set out to do this blog so long ago I had no idea what was in store at all, and the entire time my goal has been simple: I wanted to use this blog as a way of holding myself accountable for taking pictures on a regular basis. Has it done that? Absolutely. But it’s turned in to so much more, with a fantastic group of followers and commenters who have such nice things to say both here and on other social media platforms. (Mostly Instagram, though I try to keep the Facebook page updated too.) I can say with certainty that I am a better photographer now than when I started, and I appreciate all the comments, tips, kind words, and helpful suggestions so many of you have left for me over the past five years. I’m excited for the next five years and I’m so thankful to have all of you along for the ride :)

On November 17, 2011, a small four-person airplane carrying Oklahoma State University women’s basketball coach Kurt Budke along with his assistant Miranda Serna crashed in Perry County, Arkansas, killing the two individuals along with the pilot, Olin Branstetter and his wife Paula. I remember the incident mostly because I was taking a graduate class here at OSU at the time and one of my fellow students was on the basketball team, which gave the tragedy a more personal connotation than it otherwise might have. The days and weeks after the crash were difficult for many people on campus especially since it was almost exactly ten years after another plane crash took the lives of ten individuals on the men’s basketball team, whose lives are celebrated each year at OSU’s annual Remember the Ten Run.

In any tragedy such as this we have to figure out a way of going forwards with our lives while also memorializing those who were lost, and learn to hold on to the past while not letting ourselves become crippled by it. Easy words to type, certainly, but a lot more difficult in practice, and I don’t know that there’s ever going to be an easy or simple answer for how to move on after the loss of loved ones. And if there is, I’m not sure I even want to know it.

In the wake of the plane crash in November 2011, OSU sought a way to pay respect to the fallen and honor their memories and the memorial you see pictured above is the final result. Construction was finished a few months ago and I have biked past many times while also stopping to look at the pictures and read about each one of the individuals via the epitaphs engraved on each of the markers. It’s a somber scene, but serves as a way for me to think back on these lives while also serving as a reminder to hug my wife and my two kids a little closer each day when I get home from work.

On the morning I took this picture I had just biked past the memorial when I noticed the buildings in front of me, as I faced west, turn a deep orange almost like the Lord pushed the saturation slider all the way to the right. I stopped, turned around, and saw one of the most stunning sunrises I can recall in recent memory which I quickly attempted to capture with my D7100 and 50mm lens. I reversed course and crouched down in the parking lot just to the west of the memorial, moving myself around a bit so as to position the slabs of granite between two trees while also getting a good view of the sky behind them.

If this picture looks photoshopped, I promise you it’s not. Well, not very much anyway. I adjusted the black levels just a bit but otherwise what you see here is pretty much exactly what I got to see on this chilly January morning. The memorial is bathed in a perpetual white thanks to the light fixtures installed around it, which highlights them in stark relief next to the brilliant orange and purple sky.

As I got back on my bike and continued my ride around the stadium I was struck by how quickly the scene changed, and in less than two minutes the sun was over the horizon and the richness of the morning colors had faded away. It was a quick reminder of how fleeting so many things in life are, and also how important it can be to pause for a minute and spend time to appreciate what we have right in front of us before it’s gone.

This was a picture that I had in mind from the moment I grabbed my camera on a chilly January morning earlier this year, and I think the end result is just about what I hoped it would be. The mercury bottomed out at nearly zero overnight and before I left work work (in the car, not on my bike!) I grabbed my D750, attached my 50mm lens, and tossed my Gorillapod in the front seat for good measure. I knew that Theta Pond would have a nice coat of ice when I arrived on campus and would hopefully give me an interesting photo opportunity as a result. I also knew that if I got there before the sun came up I could get some nice motion trails on the fountain by stopping my lens way down and shooting at ISO 100.

Most of the time when I shoot photos at Theta Pond I can’t get motion trails like this since I don’t have an ND filter for my 50mm lens and the light is so bright that exposures of longer than 1/30 of a second are kind of impossible. This was one of the big reasons I was excited about taking this particular photo–I knew the dim daylight would permit a longer exposure and I also knew that the ice would add an interesting element that you don’t normally see at this particular location.

Even though I was born in Minnesota and spent five years living there in my 20’s I’m kind of a wimp when it comes to cold weather, and I was certainly eager to get this shot and put my camera away as quickly as possible to warm my fingers up. I walked to the edge of the pond, set down my tripod with camera attached, and took two pictures at about 1.5 seconds each (I used the self timer to eliminate any vibration from my jittery fingers as I pressed the shutter button) before packing up and heading to my building at work. I like this picture but I do think it would be fun to revisit with an ND filter which would let me get similar results at wider apertures, thus giving the scene a shallower depth of field as opposed to this which was shot at f/16.

All in good time, I suppose, and if I ever do get myself some proper ND filters it would be fun to revisit this scene and see what I could get. But hopefully on a warmer day!

I didn’t really know what to expect when I shot this, and I guess that kind of makes sense because I didn’t even plan on taking this picture at all in the first place. This was on a Sunday afternoon in January when, oddly, we were caught in a bit of a spring rain as opposed to winter snow. My wife was running a few errands and I had just returned home from the hardware store with our kids when they asked if they could ride their bikes around in the rain. Even though it was a bit chilly I told them to go right ahead since, let’s be honest, there’s few things more fun when you’re a kid than tearing through puddles on a bike :)

I did some work in the garage as they were zooming around and soon noticed a steady drip-drip-drip near the corner of the driveway where a bit of water was falling from the gutters overhead. I ran in to get my camera to see if I could capture one of the drops as it hit the tiny pool of water gathered below the gutter, and ended up with what you see here. It’s an interesting image but has some technical issues that are difficult for me to overlook, mainly the prominent back-focusing and the fact that I ended up using a slightly higher ISO than I’m normally comfortable with on my D7100. But it served as an interesting proof-of-concept and is something I’d like to explore a bit more in the future.

To get this shot on my D7100 I held it low to the ground and flipped over to Live View in order to get it focused properly. I could have used the optical viewfinder but didn’t feel like laying down on the soaking ground, and Live View turned out to work just fine especially considering that I’m a back-button focuser anyway :) I put my camera in Continuous High Speed mode and held the shutter down every time a drop was about to hit, which fired off a half-dozen pictures before filling the painfully small buffer on the camera. Doing all this in Live View was painfully slow so eventually I just used Live View to nail focus and then switched it off to fire off my bursts of shots. That’s probably what caused the focusing on this particular picture to be off by just a bit, and even though I wish I could have gotten a slightly clearer image I guess I don’t mind all that much and it’ll help me to work just a bit harder next time to make sure I really get things right.

Any idea what’s going on here? Go ahead, take a minute to think about it.

If you’re like me you might have drawn a rather violent conclusion–an explosion of some kind, or perhaps an earthquake or other such disaster. The relatively intact nature of the tree in the foreground as well as the structural integrity of the building in the background seem to point to an isolated incident that only affected a portion of the building, and the sheer level of debris and rubble makes one think of a scene that might have been played out on World News Tonight with an on-location reporter telling stories of conflict from deep inside a war zone.

Or, perhaps, the truth could be something else entirely. Watch what happens when I go back and reverse two key editing choices that I made during postproduction.

Aside from some color adjustments, the key things to note here are the fence in the foreground with the “Danger: Construction Zone” sign as well as one other notable difference: the Permit Parking Only notice affixed to the post. What you’re actually looking at here is the planned demolition of Cordell Hall, a building on the OSU campus that has been slated for removal for quite some time now. I first heard news that this building was going to come down several years ago but it wasn’t until January of 2018 that the process actually began, and from what I’ve heard it will be replaced with a lush green lawn adorned with perhaps a statue or other such ornament to honor one of OSU’s big donors, T. Boone Pickens.

The reason I posted it here on Weekly Fifty is partly because it’s not often I get the chance to take a picture of a building in mid-demolition, but also to demonstrate the power of photography and visual storytelling and the effect that a few simple edits can have on how a viewer interprets an image. I know I’m guilty of drawing conclusions almost immediately when I see pictures posted on social media and even in print, but if I take a little more time to investigate the story behind the image it might not be as strange or shocking as I might think. Some would say that the act of cropping a picture just a bit, or removing an unsightly blemish such as a metered parking sign, is merely an artistic choice and doesn’t impact the image as a whole. I would say that, as photographers, we just need to be careful and be aware of how our edits (and even our initial compositions, as I could have easily just moved to a different position when I shot this instead of cropping it and ended up with the same result) can change how our images are seen and interpreted.

That being said, it sure was fun to see this demolition as it progressed. My wife and I even drove our kids over, parked the car, and just watched as excavators and dump trucks laid waste to this building. It was like the world’s biggest IMAX screen, and I would be lying if I said the kids were the only ones who were enjoying watching it come down :)