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

Sometimes it’s fun to let your kids take the lead and see what happens.

I shot this when I was downtown with my wife and kids one warm November afternoon (a phrase that you wouldn’t hear too often back in Minnesota where I was born) on a fact-finding mission to the bike shop to see how much it would cost to repair my bicycle that had developed a pretty bad wobble in the rear wheel. After we dropped the two-wheeler off my wife went to another shop to look at clothes while I took the boys on a short walk just because it was nice out. We were thinking about going to a winter display that the city had set up a few blocks away but with kids it’s more about the journey than the destination, so when they asked if they could take a detour and explore a long space between two buildings I figured…well why not?

I had my D7100 with me and didn’t really plan on spending any significant time taking pictures, but it never hurts to be prepared. As the kids cautiously made their way into the narrow corridor I took out my camera and kind of crouched down close to the ground to follow them, almost like I was waddling like a duck. It only took a few seconds for them to throw caution to the wind and just run at full tilt down the passageway to the light on the other side, at which point they reversed course and came right back at me kicking leaves and debris up on all sides. It was a fun moment of serendipity and would have never happened had I insisted that they stay on the sidewalk :)

This photo also illustrates a big reason why I use auto-ISO in just about every shooting situation. The ISO performance of modern cameras is so good that, in my opinion, it’s just not worth worrying about anymore. I almost always use a minimum shutter speed of 1/160 (or faster) so I’m confident I will get as little motion blur as possible, which means all I need to do is set the aperture on my camera in order to get the right depth of field. As I pulled out my camera in is concrete-and-brick hallway I quickly dialed in an aperture of f/4 and let my camera take care of ISO and shutter speed, and the results speak for themselves. And for the record there are still instances when I like to take full manual control over my exposure settings, but honestly most of the time I just like to get on with my day, and get back to playing with my kids, rather than fiddling with buttons and dials on my camera.

This picture is kind of a cop-out, because it’s not exactly difficult to get. Sort of. I mean, it’s the Low Library on the OSU campus and anyone can walk by and snap a photo of it any time they want, so why bother using as this week’s photo here on Weekly Fifty? Because even though this is, by most accounts, a relatively common and simple picture there were some thing that made it unique such that I felt like it deserved a spot here on the blog.

I shot this on a foggy morning right before work when I had my camera with me and noticed the particular way in which the library and its well-lit interior stood in stark contrast to the dull gray sky and otherwise rather bland surroundings. I’d guess that in any given year we have maybe five to ten morning that are just thick with low-lying clouds, and often the light just doesn’t quite work out to get any type of interesting image before sunrise, so to get the library looking like this actually is somewhat different from the norm. Also there are no students present in the foreground, or really any people in the picture at all, which as anyone who has ever been to OSU will tell you is not all that common. Finally the uniform dull orange of the grass in the foreground, coupled with the gray overcast sky, gave the entire composition a feeling of cool melancholy that I found to be strangely compelling.

The editing was also a bit different for me, since I normally like a little more color and saturation in my images. Here I actually reduced the overall saturation just a bit and added a twinge more vignette than I usually do, because it really felt like it suited the mood of the photo. And maybe that’s the big takeaway for me here: this picture isn’t about creating art or a visually pleasing image per se, but more about capturing a mood. I’m not sure how well I actually succeeded, but if nothing else I hope it helps you the viewer think of an early morning with a bit of a slow pace–a hush or a held breath before the start of a busy day.

I gotta say, these little squirrels are tricky! They’re all over the place here at OSU and sometimes they literally let you walk right up to them without moving an inch. But then other times they scurry away at the first sign of a human! It’s like Forrest Gump said, you never know what you’re gonna get. That was certainly the case here, especially since I wasn’t actually trying to get a picture of a squirrel at all. I saw this little guy sitting on a cypress knee munching on some kind of nut or acorn, and had one of those “I can’t believe I might get this shot” moments. Every element was lining up perfectly: I had my camera, the light was good, the squirrel was kind of unaware of my presence, and…then I remembered I had my 50mm lens instead of something much better suited for this type of picture. But heeding Gump’s Words of Wisdom I went ahead and fired off a few shots (at f/1.8 to get a shallow depth of field even though I risked getting an out-of-focus rodent) and hoped for the best.

I wasn’t all that optimistic for the picture until I loaded it up into Lightroom and found that I could get away with cropping it quite a bit and still have a decent picture. That’s the problem with a 50mm lens: it’s just not that good for shooting long-distance shooting images of, say, a squirrel on a wooden stalagmite. But the nice thing about using it on a 24mp camera is that you can crop in quite a bit and still have plenty of sharpness and detail, provided you get your settings right and don’t miss focus. Such was the case here and even though a longer lens would have helped isolate the squirrel from the background I think I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Sometimes I read posts on various internet forums (or is it foræ? fora? I dunno) wherein people bemoan the fact that there just isn’t anything interesting to photograph where they live and work. And to be honest I feel the same way at times, and I’ve been known to go for a walk, camera in hand, and return with nary a photo to show for my effort. It’s a common rut in which to be stuck with no easy way out, and that’s what I was feeling on the day I took this particular photo of some rather uninteresting leaves on what was quite a nondescript tree in the middle of the OSU campus.

I wasn’t really intending to capture this specific image, but as I walked around and noticed the vibrant colors of fall all around me I kept my eye out for a way in which I could photograph what I thought was the essence of the season. While the photo itself was kind of a happy accident, once I saw these leaves on a tree I did make some intentional compositional decisions in order to get it to look just how I wanted. Shooting with a 50mm lens doesn’t really let you get the kind of wide perspective that’s really necessary for a sweeping vista with rich colorful trees, so I took the opposite approach and tried for just a couple leaves instead. I didn’t use a close-up filter to get this shot, and instead tried to get as close as I could while also shooting wide open to get the brilliant football-shaped bokeh balls in the background.

In the end I’m not sure if this photo quite works or not. On a larger screen like a desktop monitor or even a laptop I think it’s fine, but as I was playing around with it in Lightroom I zoomed out so it would be about the size of a mobile phone screen at which point it looked more like a muddy yellow mess than a collection of fall leaves. So your interpretation of this photo might be totally different depending on how you view it, which is something that I need to keep in mind more often nowadays as it’s becoming increasingly common to view images on smaller screens.

I don’t usually get too symbolic here on Weekly Fifty, and I don’t make it a habit of scheduling the photos in order to coincide with specific times of the year, which is why it’s the first post of 2018 and you’re seeing a field full of flags. I thought about using a post that would serve as a more symbolic way of ringing in the new year, but then I realized I would just post the next photo in my list and let the interpretive chips fall where they may. Hence this week’s image of a bunch of flags on January 3.

There is, as you might have guessed, a great deal of symbolism in the flags themselves even though it has little to do with this particular day. These were placed on the OSU Library Lawn in observance of Veteran’s Day in order to honor the lives of the nearly 7,000 soldiers who have died since the United States started fighting the War on Terror. As my friend Ryan pointed out it might have been more appropriate to display these at Memorial Day instead, but…well, it is what it is. I felt a little strange taking pictures of these flags because this scene is one of remembrance and contemplation, and getting out my DSLR to snap some photos just felt kind of cheap. However, as I walked around on a chilly November afternoon looking at the flags and examining the pages of two large volumes containing the names of all the soldiers, I noticed several other people taking photos, kneeling to place memorabilia, and pausing to consider the meaning of the scene. I also saw plenty of passers-by who went about their business. In short, everyone was free to interpret, photograph, and interact with this scene however he or she saw fit. For me that involved my camera.

One tricky part of photographing a scene like this with a 50mm lens is that you just don’t have a very wide field of view. This image cuts the sides off the flags which essentially omits hundreds of them from the scene altogether, which is a direct result of the 50mm lens as opposed to something wider like a 35 or 28. In fact, I saw photos on Instagram and Facebook of this same scene–photos that were taken with iPhones and pocket cameras–that I thought were far superior to this in terms of composition and overall emotional impact. Here the flags seem cold and distant, and there is literally a wall of separation between me and the subjects. Shooting with a wider lens would have let me get closer to an individual flag while also showing the broader context, but alas, this is Weekly Fifty not Weekly Thirty-Five.

The challenge, then, was how to photograph the flags in a meaningful and respectful way while working within the limitations of my gear. They went in the ground on a Wednesday and I happened to have my D7100 with me, which I quickly realized would not get me the shot I was looking for due to its even more limited field of view because it is a crop-sensor camera. I also knew I wanted a shot without any people in it, so I returned with my full-frame D750 the following morning on my way to work (I bike past this spot almost every day) and climbed up to the terrace in front of the library to get this shot. I actually stood in front of the fountain right where the arrow is pointing in the picture below, with my feet in a bit of water, in order to get the angle of view I wanted.

I believe I shot this at f/4 or f/8 to get the image nice and sharp, and had to boost the shadows while bringing down the highlights in the sky in Lightroom in order to arrive at a finished image that I felt accurately represented the scene. Taking this picture was an exercise in planning, knowing my gear, and understanding some basics about composition and I’m glad I got the opportunity to do it.

I just wish the flags didn’t have to be there at all in the first place.