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

Sometimes I write about how unique and fascinating it can be to work on a college campus, and this shot is a good example of what I mean by that. There I was, walking to work on a drizzly Wednesday morning when lo and behold I came across an airplane sitting in the lawn just north of Theta Pond. (Look closely in the background and you can see one of its fountains.) At first I was a bit confused, and then when I noticed a tent on one side and a hammock on the other side, I was even more befuddled. Then I remembered that about this time in 2016 the OSU aviation students, otherwise known as the Flying Aggies, had parked the same plane at the same spot in order to spread the word about who they are and what they do.

I had a few minutes before I was supposed to be at work so I crossed Monroe, got out my D750 + 50mm lens, and took a few pictures. At first, like most people, I stood and shot from eye level and ended up with a couple images like this:

It’s not a bad shot and in some ways I kind of prefer it to the one I actually posted for this week because the trees and tents serve to create a somewhat unique and compelling story. Ultimately I decided that there was just too much going on in the frame, and with the colors of the tents being so similar to the surrounding scenery anyway I thought it would be best to just focus on the airplane. Basically, the one taken from eye level looked more like a snapshot whereas the one I decided to actually use felt more like an actual composition. I don’t know if I’m just grasping at straws here, and I might be, but I really do feel like there’s a substantive difference between the two.

I walked a bit closer to the plane, crouched down on the ground, and fired of a couple shots that I still wasn’t quite happy with. I was using f/1.8 to really bring the front of the plane in focus while getting a bit of foreground and background blur, which is difficult to do when your subject is so large and you’re standing several feet away, but something about the perspective just wasn’t working for me. Thankfully my D750 has a little flip-out screen which I rarely use, but when I need it oh boy does it ever come in handy. I literally set my camera on the sidewalk, angled it up, switched on Live View, popped the screen out, and voilà. I got the shot I was aiming for. The low angle and closer perspective helps isolate the plane and give it a sense of power and presence that the other shots lacked, and I’m happy with how the tail is perfectly visible but slightly blurry too.

Ah, yet another in the long-running series of shots brought to you by my set of close-up filters. This one was a bit of a surprise for me for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is the sheer amount of pink and red in the image. I mean, wow. It kind of hurts my eyes just to look at it which is why I nearly dismissed the picture entirely upon seeing it in my Lightroom catalog. And yet I decided to keep it, edit it, and ultimately post it here on Weekly Fifty because of reason two. When I was looking around one of the gardens on campus armed with my D7100, 50mm lens, and close-up filters I was only looking for some flowers and not anything in the way of animal life since at this point I’ve basically ruled out the possibility of capturing bees, bugs, flies, or anything of that nature with the skill and equipment I have. I mean seriously, when there are photographers who can do stuff like this, it simultaneously inspires me while also making me want to chuck my camera in the trash because I’ll never be that good.

But as I often tell my five-year-old son, it’s not a competition. If I’m using my camera to capture images I like, then it’s all good. Hopefully I’m also getting inspired and challenged by other photographers and using their works as creative outlets to explore personally, and that all goes back to Reason Number Two which you might have noticed I haven’t exactly articulated  yet.

See that little bug in the lower-left of this photo? I kid you not, I didn’t even notice it (he?) was there when I shot the image. He must have been about 1/8″ long and I was concentrating so much on the center of this rose that I didn’t even notice the insect crawling outwards towards the sunlight. It was only afterwards in Lightroom that I saw the little fella boldly bolting towards the outskirts of the flower, and thought it added an interesting dynamic element to an otherwise fairly simple shot. I’m a little disappointed that the bug is not in focus, but it’s close enough and while I wouldn’t go with close enough when working with clients, it’s just fine here since I see it as a demonstration of my learning and photographic progression.

I do think I need to take more time and really see the world around me, especially when shooting subjects at close distances, and now I wonder how many other little hidden secrets like this I’ve been missing. It makes me want to get my camera out and start crawling around on the ground just to see what I can find :)

Keen readers may recognize this picture, or have a sense of déjà vu when seeing it, because it’s not the first time I’ve used a shot of a drop of water on a blade of grass as the subject for a photo. There’s something about the act of capturing the organic elements in a state like that that I really enjoy, and I think the contrast between the bright whites of a drop of water and the deep greens of the grass on which it sits are always fascinating to me. On another level, it’s just a lot of fun to shoot photos like this and I find it to be a fun and interesting way of exploring the ways in which such a tiny, singular object can be photographed.

The name of this week’s picture comes from the black hole in the movie Interstellar, which came to my mind as I was editing this picture in Lightroom. The way the light curves and bends around the droplet really struck me, and I like how if you look closely (click on the picture and zoom in to 100% on the Flickr version) you can get a sense of the trees and clouds overhead that are being changed and distorted when reflected in the drop. It’s a cool thing to think about, that such a tiny drop of water (it was probably about 5mm in diameter) could contain, in a sense, the vastness of the sky above. I mean, I get that this is wading perhaps a bit too far into the deep end of the interpretational pool, but looking at such a huge expanse reflected in such a tiny drop is kind of humbling.

Anyway, when I shot this I was kind of on a mission to explore what I could do with my 50mm lens and +10 filter–a creative mechanism that I don’t often find myself employing on my photographic endeavors due to how unwieldy it can be to use given its super thin depth of field. I spent about 10 minutes walking through the garden near the Alumni Center on the OSU campus with no particular photographic vision in mind, but curious to see what I could see. After shooting some flowers I was about to leave the area when I saw the drop-of-rain-on-grass scene and wanted to give it a try. I had a couple of things to consider such as the angle of view (I ended up almost laying on the ground) and my position in relation to the sun, as well as what aperture to use. I often use my +10 filter at f/8 because any shallower results in a degredation of overall sharpness as well as a much-too-shallow depth of field, and on the afternoon I shot this there was plenty of light to give me a good shutter speed despite the constricted aperture.

I deliberately shot this such that the droplet was slightly backlit in order to catch a glint of sunlight on the left side, and I think it worked out well despite the ugly dark shadow you can see next to it. I guess you could say the sun was more overhead than behind it, but still, I tried moving around to get a different angle but I didn’t like the lighting in those tests, and I also appreciated how in this version you can see the blade of grass receding into the background along with the bokehlicious heptagon of light in the top-right corner.

If the title of this week’s photo seems rather unremarkable, it’s because the subject matter depicted in the picture is equally unremarkable. It’s a pair of sunglasses I got at Ross for $11, and behind them you can kind of make out my car keys while the foreground contains a document I had printed off for a meeting. I snapped this picture after I got to work on a recent Thursday morning when the sunlight was just beginning to creep in through my eastward-facing window, which cast a calm yellow glow over everything in my office and pretty much the whole of Stillwater for a few precious minutes. I realized that the stage had been set for a quick photo opportunity, so I grabbed my D7100 + 50mm lens and started clicking away.

My first thought was “I need to move those keys!” but then I started thinking about where that would lead, and I didn’t like how it ended up. I thought if I moved the keys around it might create a more pleasing composition. Then I thought I might move the paper a bit. And while I’m at it, I should reposition the sunglasses to catch some more like. And I could shift the entire scene a bit to capture more of the sun’s rays. And the background should probably be changed too…and on and on. I had this little internal debate for about 15 seconds before I shut the whole thing down and just took a few pictures of the scene as-is without changing anything. I realized I didn’t want to create a scene, so much as I wanted to capture a scene. What you’re seeing here is exactly what my desk looked like when I walked through the door and set my keys and sunglasses down, and I think there’s something to be said for photos that capture an image of things as they are as opposed to how we would like them to be.

Granted this is just one little example with a few inanimate objects, and one could of course argue (quite correctly) that there is still a great deal of manipulation going on here. I chose to shoot this at f/2.8 in order to get a shallow depth of field. I chose to have the foremost nose guard in focus. I chose to shoot from a low angle, a short distance away, in order to get one particular perspective. I even chose to edit the picture in Lightroom and make a few tweaks to the white balance and other settings. And if I’m being entirely honest I did actually move a couple of miscellaneous office trinkets (I think one was a binder clip, perhaps) out of the way so as to not clutter the frame.

What you have, then, is an artificial construct that represents an organic scene. In one sense nothing was manipulated, and what you see here is as it was. But in another sense, lots of things were manipulated and what you’re seeing here is not at all like how things actually were. But that’s the beauty of photography and indeed all art: it is what you want, and others can interpret it however they see fit.

I realize this is kind of a lofty discussion over what is, essentially, a quick snapshot of a pair of cheap sunglasses, but sometimes I do get to thinking about the power we wield as photographers, the artistic choices we make often without thinking, and the message we are choosing to convey simply by snapping the shutter. And with that I hope you, after you’re done reading this, go grab your camera, take a few photos, and see how you can convey the world around you :)

I hope you don’t mind yet another picture in what’s now a three-week series revolving around flowers. I promise this wasn’t planned, and yet I like how things have turned out with these pictures. This picture most certainly was not planned, and it has not been altered in Photoshop (though I did perform my usual basic Lightroom adjustments like white/dark levels, clarity, etc.) but I’m super happy with how it turned out. I was literally just walking from the car to my building at work when I happened to pass in front of Murray Hall on the OSU campus. I saw a tree filled with purple leaves that was also sprouting some new buds which were, strangely, the opposite color.

 

Since I had my camera with me, as I often do, I paused for a little bit to see if I could get a photo. I’ve tried taking a picture of trees like this one before but they usually ended up kind of messy and incoherent because it’s hard to make out a clear subject or focal point if you just have a bunch of purple leaves. All you get is a sea of color with nothing interesting, even though it might seem like a good photo opportunity at first. Well, that’s been my experience anyway. This time was different though, all thanks to (what else?) my close-up filters. Whee!

I started by using my +4 filter and focusing on a small yellow leaf, but the result wasn’t quite what I was hoping for.

In this image you can clearly see the leaf but there’s too much else going on to distract you. There’s a sea of purple behind the leaf and with the other ones poking out below and to its right, it’s easy to get distracted and lose a sense of clarity. That’s when I decided to bust out the Big Guns and switched to my +10 filter, while also stopping down to f/8 to get a usable depth of field, which resulted in the photo you see at the top of the post. Perhaps it’s a bit overexposed, which I guess I could fix in Lightroom, and I do wish the white splotches in the background weren’t quite as prominent as they are, but nonetheless I really like the final result and it was fun to see all the elements of this shot come together in the way they did. One of the keys was the early morning light which added a nice soft glow to the scene which would not be present at all during midday, and I think it’s kind of cool to see two completely contrasting colors so closely linked like this. I’d like to revisit the tree soon and see how it has changed, and maybe even take another photo or two to document things.