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

There’s nothing about this picture that isn’t artificial, and yet, I kind of like it in a weird way. To wit, the various elements include:

• Plastic USB-powered Christmas tree which was given to me by one of my students when I taught at a K-12 school in Minnesota about ten years ago. (Thanks Rachel!)
• Fake Christmas tree in the background
• Artificial lights on the tree in the background
• Even the ornament itself isn’t really what it seems. It’s designed to sit passively on a desk, but my buddy Stacy is literally holding it up in midair so I could take this shot. I cropped his hand out of the photo

So basically this image, which likely conjures up some very real thoughts and feelings about Christmas, is entirely concocted and created by me, the photographer. It’s manipulative in a way, and almost makes me a bit uncomfortable to even post it here, but I am a sucker for bokehlicious backgrounds, so there you go.

I don’t know what any of this says in grander terms, and probably nothing at all, but it did make me think about the ways in which we surround ourselves with man-made materialism at this most holy time of year when our thoughts often shift to the birth of Christ and His sacrifice on the cross. The simple act of taking this picture (f/1.8, 1/180 second, ISO 140 in case you’re interested) gave me pause because it felt like I was trying too hard to create a specific scene that should be a lot more organic and natural. If I were really trying to capture a picture that embodied the spirit of Christmas perhaps I should have looked for a crèche, or a star, or even a cross. Or maybe a picture that encapsulates innocence, self-sacrifice, or even just love.

I didn’t do any of that though, and instead chose to take a plastic tree, put it in front of another plastic tree with man-made lights stuck to it, and call it Christmas. I think the reason was because I wasn’t really trying to do anything with this picture other than to make an image that looked cool. It could have been a ham sandwich in front of a Lite Brite and it would have had the same effect, but lacking either of those I went with some more readily available implements.

Perhaps the point here is that there isn’t really a point, and if this picture makes you think of Christmas then that’s just as valid as if this picture makes you think of nothing at all. Either way I enjoyed taking this (and thanks to Stacy for helping me out!) and I like that it did make me think a little bit about things I hadn’t really intended at the time.

And with that, here’s to a good 2017 with hopes for a fantastic 2018. For me and my family this year certainly had its share of ups and downs, challenges and rewards, and good times and bad times, but through it all I’m thankful to have had the experience and optimistic for whatever the new year brings. Thanks to all of you who continue to read Weekly Fifty, and I hope your year is ending on a good note with a lot of fantastic things yet to come.

This one took some work.

I don’t mean in the physical sense, as in it was difficult to get the shot (though it was a bit tricky) but in the sense that when I sat down to edit the image I was totally lost. I had a vision in my mind of what I wanted the shot to look like, but it just wan’t quite coming together for me. A bit more on that after a while though.

For starters, I wanted to mention a bit about how I got the shot itself. I was heading to work one morning in mid October when I saw a particularly beautiful sunrise and stopped to get a photo of it from the vacant lot just south of my house. I’ve used that spot before to take sunrise pictures and while it might seem like a good place, my pictures never quite turns out exactly how I want them to. No worries though, because it’s always fun to try. A few minutes later I had turned westward and after biking a little way I looked behind me to see if it was safe to cross the street…and that’s when the sunrise went into overdrive. As soon as I got across the street I grabbed my D750 with the 50mm lens attached and waited for the traffic to clear. What I had in mind was a shot with a totally empty road with the sky glowing like the world’s largest fireworks display behind it. And I only had a few seconds to work with because sunrise scenes are exceedingly fleeting and then, as if arriving with the wave of a cosmic hand, day breaks and the magic is gone.

I waited for traffic to clear and then ran out into the middle of the road to take a couple of shots from eye level, which actually worked out fairly well. I set my aperture to f/4 with auto-ISO and a minimum shutter speed of 1/180 second. I believe I was using highlight-weighted metering too, just to make sure the sky wasn’t all blown out and knowing I could recover plenty of shadow detail in post. After a few seconds some cars showed up on the horizon so I ran back to the curb and was about to get on my bike when I noticed another potential clearing in traffic. This time I grabbed my camera, ran into the road, clicked over to Live View, flipped up the rear LCD screen so I could see the shot I was composing, set my camera on the street, and took one single picture.

I didn’t even look at the image afterwards on my camera, and figured if nothing else I at least tried to get a picture which is really all you can ask for somedays.

Later on when I loaded it into Lightroom I wasn’t even sure where to begin with my editing:

Right off the bat the first thing I saw was those two glaring headlights just below the horizon. I was specifically trying to avoid any cars in the shot, and there they were: unmistakable and unavoidable and ruining my shot. Or so I thought. But back to the editing…

I tried a number of different edits to the image but was never really happy with how it turned out. Highlight/shadow adjustments, white balance, graduated filters, brushes…I just wasn’t having any luck. I knew what I saw in person, and I knew what I wanted the image to look like in my mind, but I just couldn’t get it there in Lightroom. After a while I sent the RAW file to my friend Ryan, curious to see what he could do with the same file I had, and oh my goodness did that help. A lot.

Behold, the Ryan Edit:

Good gravy! Suddenly I finally had an image of what I was trying to achieve since the start, and looking at his edits gave me a whole new direction to take in Lightroom. My final version, which you see at the top of this post, isn’t quite as bright as his and there are some other choices I made to suit my own personal taste but I was floored when I saw what he was able to do and I can’t overstate how useful it was to have a second pair of creative eyes take a look at this photo.

And finally, about those headlights.

The more I looked at this image the more I appreciated that car in the distance, and now I think it’s actually the one element that ties the whole picture together. Without the car this would be just another sunrise photograph, but with it the picture tells a story and shows a sense of time and place. It’s now a picture about someone’s drive, most likely to work, in the early morning hours. His (her?) headlights are on, which helps instill a sense of time–a few minutes later and the headlights wouldn’t be needed. It’s juuuuuust below the horizon too, which maintains the clean horizontal line above the vehicle, but not yet low enough that the headlight reflections on the road no longer show up. Contrary to what I initially envisioned for the image, having this one single vehicle makes all the difference in the world.

I must confess that no matter how I tried, I just couldn’t quite capture this scene how I envisioned it in my mind. A few years ago the Hastings in our town closed down, most likely due to mounting competition from online retailers and the Best Buy that opened up a few miles down the road, and ever since the building at the corner of Hall of Fame and Main Street has remained vacant despite being what I would assume is a fairly nice piece of commercial real estate. Not much has happened there in the time since, but this fall a pop-up flower-and-pumpkin outfit just sort of showed up one day and whenever I bike past it on my way to or from work it’s nice to see all the colors of the season that bring so much life to what’s really nothing more than an old parking lot. On my way home recently I saw that a pumpkin-man had been constructed at the edge of the property and I knew right away that it would be a really cool photo opportunity.

A few days later I returned to the scene on my way to work as the sun was just starting to peek out on the horizon, and armed with my D750 and 50mm lens I was determined to get a picture that would capture the essence of the scene. Unfortunately nothing I did really sealed the deal for me, and no matter what angle of view I shot from I just couldn’t find a compelling way to show the pumpkin creature set against the backdrop of flowers and tables beneath the yellow canopy. This is the best I was able to come up with and believe me I tried, having shot the scene while sitting, standing, and crouching low from various different vantage points in the general area. If I got much closer you couldn’t see enough of the background, but much farther and the subject wasn’t clear. I shot from straight on but it just wan’t all that interesting, and on and on. In the end I kind of resigned myself to the shot I was able to get and I might revisit the scene (I mean, I go past it every day) in the coming days to see if I’m missing something. As it stands I’m using this image here on Weekly Fifty despite its shortcomings as a reminder that sometimes things just don’t work out, but the point is to keep trying and continue learning so you have a greater chance of getting the shot next time :)

It seems like no matter how often I’m convinced that I know and understand a given principle of photography, a situation comes around that shows me I really don’t know what I’m talking about at all. Case in point: this week’s picture, which I shot with my D7100, 50mm lens, and +4 close-up filter. (A set of gear that by now many of you are probably starting to recognize quite often!) I shot this when my friend Stacy and I were walking around Theta Pond one afternoon right before OSU’s annual homecoming celebration, and I had my camera with me even though I didn’t really plan on taking any actual photos. We were just out on a short walk to get the blood flowing after being in the office all day, and as we rounded the north side of the pond we saw these tiny little orange lights wrapped around the guard rail of one of the footbridges. I stopped, looked at the scene, and decided I would try and have a go at photographing it.

My first attempt was without the close-up filter, and you can see the results below. It’s not that the shot was all that bad, but there’s not a clear subject on which to focus and overall the composition is just too busy to be pleasing to the eye.

I mean, I guess you could say this one works but the focal point–the orange bulb two-thirds of the way down from the top–is not easy to distinguish next to the rest of the bulbs even though it is much sharper. The background blur is more distracting than pleasing, and though I suppose I could have cropped in to kind of get closer to the bulb I thought I would have much better luck if I just shot with a close-up filter. So I screwed on the +4 and, like a rank amateur, took a couple shots at f/1.8.

Yikes. This one’s just a giant blurry mess, and while the bulb is clear there is no sense of context whatsoever which makes the scene basically pointless. I don’t know why I keep thinking that shooting close-up images with wide-open apertures is a good idea, but one of these days I’ll learn. And if not I’ll at least have fun trying :) The final image was shot at f/8 which still results in a razor-thin depth of field (though not quite as thin as the f/1.8 image!) but shows a much greater sense of time and place. I had to rest my camera on the railing and use live view to compose the shot, which would have been no problem at all on my D750 with its flip-out screen, but alas I had to make do with the D7100 since that’s what I had with me. And I think it worked out just fine, which is really all that matters in the end.

Sometimes the most interesting images can present themselves in the most unusual or unexpected ways. One morning a few weeks ago I was outside with my two boys after school while waiting for my wife to get off work, and they were getting a little stir crazy inside thanks to the dreary conditions outside. It was one of those overcast, slightly rainy days that doesn’t lend itself immediately to anything particularly fun except for curling up on the sofa with a blanket and a good book. My boys were more interested in running around and jumping off of things, so I figured we might as well go outside and see what we could come up with. My oldest, who is six, grabbed a tennis racket and started whacking the soccer ball while his little brother asked if we could get down the bubble machine we bought earlier this year. I didn’t see the harm in it so I dusted it off, set it on top of my ladder so the bubbles would float around a bit, turned it on, and let the kids go to town. And boy, did they ever :)

As they were running around swatting bubbles with anything they could find, I snatched my D7100 + 50mm lens to see about documenting the occasion. Sadly that particular gear combination is not well suited to taking pictures of two kids running around because the angle of view is so narrow, but I did get some good shots of each of the boys individually as well as one of their friends who saw the commotion and walked over to join in the fun. Because the grass was already somewhat damp from the rain I noticed that the bubbles were settling on it instead of popping right away, which gave me a great opportunity to take a few shots that I don’t normally get the chance to do.

Things were a bit tricky because I had in mind the type of picture I wanted to get, which is very much like what you see here, and doing it involved some maneuvering and contorting on my part thanks to the lack of a tilting screen on the D7100. I found a bubble that was sticking up a bit, put myself in a prone position, and got a couple of decent photos at f/4 and f/2.8. Then because I was satisfied with the results I pushed the throttle all the way to f/1.8 and got some more, and to my surprise ended up with one that was sharp, focused, and almost exactly what I was picturing in my mind. At this point my kids were calling to me and wanting me to put the camera down so I could get back to playing with them, a request with which I happily obliged. Because let’s face it, as fun as it is to take artsy-fartsy photos of bubbles, it’s much better to jump up and down with your two kids who are behind you and actually playing in the bubbles :)