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

This is another look at a very cold lake in Oklahoma. In other words, this is something you just don’t see very often down here. As with last week’s photo, this is Lake Carl Blackwell completely frozen, a few days after one of the longest stretches of cold weather in recent memory. When my wife and I took our kids out to the lake just to walk around and look at the strange sights, we didn’t really know what to expect other than that the surface of the water would be smooth. Which it was. And covered in snow. Which it also was. But this thing? No, I can safely say I had no idea I would see this.

So what is it? Good question. I think, though I’m not entirely certain, that this is some kind of plant or shrub that was covered in a layer, or many layers, of ice. And I mean that ice was thick. We tried whacking it with a pretty large stick, and it didn’t budge. I don’t know what weather conditions would cause a bush (albeit having lost its foliage to the winter season) to freeze such that it looks like this, but it wasn’t at all what I expected. I also have a hunch that winds from the lake battered this plant, and the rocks against which it is nestled, with a freezing mist for several days as well which led to such a thick covering of ice.

The trick was to find a way to photograph it, and I think I did OK except for one thing: I should have used a smaller aperture. I shot this at f/4 but f/8 would have been a little better, mostly because the background would be a lot sharper. Normally I’m a big fan of blurry backgrounds, but not in this case. I think the shallower depth of field belies just how smooth the surface of the lake really was. I have to give myself a bit of grace though, since I had never taken a picture like this and wasn’t really sure what exposure settings would be ideal. In fact we so rarely get any significant snowfall down here that any photo of snow is somewhat of a challenge I think I did OK though, and hopefully next time (if there is a next time, which, Lord willing, won’t be for many years!) I’ll have a better sense of just what to do to get a good shot of a scene like this.

During the extreme cold snap of mid February I didn’t actually take many photos. It was just too cold! Even though I often thought about going out with my camera while we were stuck inside huddled under blankets trying to conserve power, I mostly just erred on the side of comfort at the expense of photographic creativity. That changed a bit as the weather warmed, and when temperatures rose into the 40’s my wife and I took our boys out to Lake Carl Blackwell west of town just to let them see what a frozen lake looked like. Living in Oklahoma you just don’t see things like this too often, so we wanted to take the opportunity while it was available.

And nature did not disappoint!

Ok so first things first: we did not go on the ice. Even though it seemed plenty thick for walking around, and it certainly withstood being pounded with pretty large rocks, there’s no telling when you could come across a weak spot or a crack or other such unforeseen issue, the results of which would be cold at best and tragic at worst.

What we did do, however, was spend a while just walking around and admiring the scenery while letting the boys whack the ice with long pieces of wood we brought with. I also kept my eyes open for photographic opportunities, the first of which you see here. I really liked the contrasting elements, particularly the deep shadows along the left side. The lake itself is smooth as glass, and the undulating ice-covered mounds are so starkly different they almost seem photoshopped in. I was using my D7100 which does not have a flip-out screen, which was a big miss on my part. I really should have brought my D500 or D750! I had to get down low to get this shot, which was nearly impossible on the outcropping I was standing on, which meant I had to use Live View. And since the glare was so bad I literally could not see what I was photographing. I also didn’t know what aperture to use. I stopped down to f/8, focused on the closest ice mound, lowered the camera, and took a few shots. This one actually worked! How, I’m not exactly sure. But it was neat to see this scene and capture it to show people someday who might not believe that back in 2021 Lake Carl Blackwell really did freeze over.

I shot this in mid February when Oklahoma was in the middle of one of the longest and harshest cold snaps in recent memory. We had a near-record number of days below freezing, some with a high hovering around Zero. (If you live in the midwest United States you know what I’m talking about–we had it easy compared to states farther north!) My wife and I didn’t leave the house for a few days, and neither did our kids, but I really wanted to find a way to document the cold and snow and generally really bad weather conditions. I wasn’t about to spend more than two minutes outside in order to do it though! Then one evening I noticed this thing in the backyard and realized it might have the answer.

What you’re looking at here is a simple weather vane my youngest son did as a school project back in October. The idea was that with a pencil, a pin, a straw, and some cardstock he could create a basic weather vane to show wind direction. It was one of those simple school projects that I would never have thought of on my own, but ended up being a pretty cool demonstration of some basic science principles. He stuck this thing in the ground, recorded a few measurements, and then just sort of left it sit.

And sit it most certainly has. This weird little school project has survived rain, wind, ice storms, snow, and record freezing temperatures and (as my dad would say) by golly it still works. And I’ll be darned (another dad-ism) if that straw doesn’t keep on rotating to show wind direction even after all this time. For whatever reason this thing is like a Timex watch (have I shown my age yet?) and I’m curious just how long it will hang in there. So it made sense to me to use it as a way of showing a bit about the strange winter we have been having.

To get this shot I grabbed my D750 and 50mm lens, ran outside with the sun at my back, angled myself so my own shadow wouldn’t be in the picture, flipped down the rear screen, turned on Live View, and started shooting before my fingers froze into little pink popsicles. I didn’t really think too much about creating a compelling composition–mostly I just wanted to get back inside. I did wait just a few seconds for the wind to aim the arrow sideways because the other shots where it was facing towards or away from the camera just didn’t seem all that interesting. I shot at f/2.8 to balance sharpness and depth of field, and used continuous high-speed shooting in the hope that something would turn out. And I’ll be a monkey’s uncle (I’m now officially my dad) if this photo wasn’t almost exactly what I hoped it would be.

Something kind of interesting happened as I was out shooting with my 10-stop ND filter on a chilly February morning. I didn’t have anything specific in mind other than to shoot a picture of this particular fountain on campus, but once I got there and set up my tripod I wondered if there might be a way to incorporate geese into the shot. I took a few shots and liked how the swimming geese added some interesting streaks across the image, but something about the end result just seemed cheap and boring. I thought I could do better. Trouble is, geese aren’t really known for cooperating or doing what you want them to do at all. They mostly just kind of ignore you, hiss at you, or run away. Still, I did think I could get something if I worked at it for a bit.

As I reviewed my images briefly on the back of my camera I thought it would be kind of neat if I could get a shot where one goose was frozen (not literally, but you know what I mean) but everything else was smooth and showed motion. I didn’t know what I could really do to make that kind of a shot happen though, but after some experimenting I realized I would need to strike a balance with my shutter speed: too long and there’s no way a goose would be still in the image. Too short and the picture wouldn’t show movement the way I was hoping. And then there’s the matter of the animals, and trying to work around their obtuse agenda in order to get a shot.

Finally one goose did swim by and, as luck would have it, actually held still for a bit. I quickly dialed in a shutter speed of four seconds and an aperture of f/4.8, and hoped for the best. I pretty much just sat there and held my breath while the shutter was open, hoping against all odds that the goose would remain still. And I’m telling you, not one second after the shutter clicked and the exposure ended that goose in the foreground turned and swam away. It was almost like it was staring at me as I stared back, or maybe it was even posing for the shot. Whatever the case may have been, it resulted in a shot that that, while not perfect, does fill me with a sense of pride and gives me some new techniques to try as I explore the concept of long exposures.

Also on an unrelated note, this post marks the completion of eight years of doing this blog. Eight years, gone in a flash. I’ve learned an awful lot and I appreciate all the comments and questions from you, my readers, and look forward to many many more years of doing Weekly Fifty.

So after last week’s grandiose pontifications about a years-long photography improvement project involving fountains and filters, this image is pretty much the opposite end of the spectrum. I mean, it’s a pumpkin covered with snow. That’s pretty much it folks. Nothing to see here, move along.

Actually that’s not entirely accurate. This picture isn’t anything to write home about, but it does have a bit of a story behind it. Over the past several months many of my Weekly Fifty pictures have been taken along the route that my wife and I walk every day with our kids, who either ride their bikes or putt along on scooters. At some point we noticed this pumpkin sitting in a field all by itself, and it was a little…strange, I guess. It clearly did not grow there, but who put it there? And why? And were they going to come back for it? It was fully intact so it didn’t appear to have been tossed from a car or ejected off a truck. It seemed like someone walked out to the middle of a field, carefully set down a pumpkin, and walked away.

We didn’t really pay much attention other than to remark every day or so as we walked past. “Hmm. Looks like that pumpkin’s still there.” Every now and then I thought about bringing my camera on our walk so I could take a picture, but didn’t really have much in mind for what that picture would look like or why I would even want to take it. Then in late December we had a couple inches of snow, and because we don’t stop our daily walk even in bad weather I thought I would bring my D7100 and 50mm lens to finally get a picture of our little pumpkin friend. I ran out, shot this at f/2.8 with my camera basically sitting on the snow, and ran back to my wife and kids to continue the walk.

There wasn’t much to this photo, really, but I still kind of get a kick out of it. We don’t normally see pumpkins sitting in a field all by their lonesome, and we don’t get a lot of snow here in Oklahoma, so I guess you could say this was a confluence of a couple of odd events. It’s not the kind of picture I’ll be printing to hang on a wall or anything, but it does bring back a fun memory of an interesting time in our lives. One of those artifacts, so to speak, that I’ll probably look back on one day and remember this strange time of living through a global pandemic.

hen I did my 2020 In Review video one of the things I mentioned as a goal for 2021 is to do more long exposures, especially with ND filters. Soon afterwards I decided to bite the bullet and get a nice 10-stop ND filter (or, as my wife calls it, a very dark circle) for my 50mm lens and the first thing I wanted to do was go down to the OSU campus and take a picture of the rainbow at Theta Pond.

In the winter when the sun is low on the horizon there’s a good chance of seeing a rainbow in the fountains, but you have to catch it at the right time of day when looking at the fountains from just the right angle. It’s a really cool sight, and not difficult to capture with a camera, but usually you end up with a picture that looks like this:

It’s not bad, but it looks kind of messy with the droplets frozen in midair while the pockmarked surface of the water gives a sense of messiness to the overall composition. When I shot this picture (the one you see directly above) I wanted to create motion trails, but all I could do was lower the ISO to 100 and close the aperture to f/16, but even then the shutter speed was 1/15 second which is nowhere close to long enough if you want to show motion trails in a fountain.

Enter the 10-stop ND Filter!

After getting the filter I raced down to campus with my kids and let them run around while I fiddled with my camera for a while. The result is what you see at the top: a much smoother pond surface, silky-smooth motion trails from the fountain, and a sense of peace and calm that doesn’t exist in the other image. The key difference between the two images is shutter speed: 15 seconds vs 1/15 second. Letting the shutter stay open for so long during a bright afternoon day lets you capture images like this, and I’m thrilled to find out what else I can do with this ND filter in the coming months.

If anyone ever asks me to define the word serendipity I’m just going to point them in the direction of this image. Nothing was planned about this in anyway, and I’m so happy with the results for so many reasons. Before we moved to Oklahoma years ago I had never seen an armadillo in the wild. At a zoo, perhaps, but never just running around like a squirrel or possum or other such creature. While you don’t see these things every single day in urban areas, they really are quite a common fixture out in the country–so much so that they have earned the unfortunate nickname of Texas Speedbumps. We live in Stillwater which isn’t a huge city but not exactly a small town either, and as such it’s not out of the ordinary to see these wandering across someone’s yard or hear them rustling around in the bushes when out walking around Boomer Lake. Or out at Lake Carl Blackwell, where we found this guy.

During the pandemic we have been going on walks out on the equestrian trails at Lake Carl, as it’s known around here, and it’s a really fun way to spend the afternoon with our boys exploring new territory and just getting out in nature a bit. We headed out there on a warm afternoon in late December and I made sure to bring the closest setup I have that resembles any type of wildlife photography gear: My Nikon D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens. For actual wildlife photography you would want a much longer lens, but the 70-200 will suffice in a pinch especially when paired with a crop-sensor camera like the D500 to get a little extra reach out of the glass. I didn’t really expect to shoot any particular photos that day, but wanted to be ready in case an opportunity presented itself.

We actually ran across several armadillos during our hike that afternoon, either scampering across the muddy path or off in the distance, but I wasn’t able to get any great photos. Our kids sure enjoyed seeing them, and excitedly pointing out their features like the long snouts and hard shells. As we were nearing the end of the hike, only about a quarter mile from the trailhead, we saw this one armadillo scrounging for grubs in a patch of short grass and I had the thought that this could turn out to be a decent photo opportunity.

I carefully walked towards it, circling wide and making sure the sun was at my back in order to get a nicely-lit image. I crouched down, fired off several shots, stood up, crept forward, and repeated the same pattern. I had my camera on continuous high-speed shooting which fired off 10 frames each second, which was certainly overkill but didn’t exactly hurt either. I set my aperture to f/4 instead of f/2.8 to avoid temping the depth-of-field fates, and a minimum shutter speed of 1/500 second. Mostly this armadillo just ignored me but every now and again would pop his head up, check things out, and then go back to rooting and munching.

And then he stopped. He lifted himself up on his hind legs, and looked right at me for a split second. I jammed the shutter button and held it down until he turned away and scampered off. I took about 150 shots in those few minutes and there was one, exactly one, that turned out how I was hoping which is the one you see here. And the key to this image? The tiny white glint of sunlight reflected in his eye. That one little dot makes the whole photo, and it only happened because I was in the right spot and his head was tilted at just the right angle. I didn’t set out to get this photo when we went on our walk, but I’m so glad everything worked out to make this shot happen.

And that, my friends, is yet another example of why I enjoy photography so much.

This is a photo I have thought about taking for a long time, but never really made happen until a chilly evening in mid December of last year. I shot this while I was out walking around on campus with a friend, mostly to just shoot the breeze and catch up on things, but also with our cameras in tow so we could take some long-exposure photos of campus. If you’re the kind of person who likes to have a sense of place and geography, you might notice that the Low Library from last week’s shot is in this image too, albeit much smaller. This was taken southwest, as the crow flies, from where I stood to get the picture of the library; just behind me is University Avenue. I knew I wanted to get a picture of the fountains, but I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted the photo to look like until I got to this spot. I tried one or two long exposures on the west side of Theta Pond but this scene was the one that really caught my eye.

I used my Fuji X100F on a very short tripod to get it low to the ground, set the aperture to f/13 and ISO to 200, activated the three-stop ND filter, and calculated an exposure time of four minutes to get the shot*. I activated the shutter with my cable release so as to minimize any shake from me pressing on the camera. And also because it was really cold out, and I didn’t want my fingers to get frostbite while holding down the shutter button for several minutes at a time! Getting pictures like this is an exercise in patience because you have to wait so long to know if you got a good shot, and my Fuji takes about as long to process a picture like this as it does to take it. So basically, this picture took almost ten minutes of work, which meant I couldn’t just go around snapping a dozens of frames willy-nilly. I had to be careful about planning things out and framing the shot to get it just how I wanted.

And oh man, it turned out great. I’m super happy with the smooth glass-like surface of the water, the fine mist from the fountains, the starbursts of light punctuating the midsection of the photo, and the library in the background. The trees have a cool snowy accent to them which was gone by the following afternoon, and you can also see snow on the ground along the middle of the photo too. I’m honestly not sure what I would even do differently if I went back to take this photo now, other than to maybe tilt my camera upwards a bit more to get the treetops and some more sky, perhaps? I dunno.

I think the best thing about this image isn’t the picture, but the experience. I rarely go out at night to take long-exposure photos, and it was so cool to do that with my friend on a chilly winter night. I hope we get to do more of this, and really see what nature has to offer when you slow down. Way, way down.

*My camera’s meter indicated that a 30-second shot would be about three stops underexposed, which meant a proper exposure would be about four minutes.

Photos of the Low Library are so common it’s practically a cliché. Not that any picture of this particular building is more or less valuable than any other (and I have certainly taken my fair share of similar images over the years) but a view of this library from the formal gardens isn’t going to win any awards for originality. However, there is something about this scene that you won’t find too often: snow. And not just snow, but enough to make snowmen–many of which can be see scattered about the lawn. Here in Stillwater we just don’t get snow very often, and when we do it’s usually not enough to use for fashioning any sort of humanoid likeness. The snow that we might get once or twice each winter is generally one or two inches of white powder, most of which disappears within a day.

Not this time.

When my kids woke up on the morning of December 14, the ground was already covered with a few inches of snow which meant they were practically bouncing off the walls (and certainly the furniture!) with excitement. A few hours later and we had about five inches of snow–the really thick kind that’s not great for sledding but awesome for rolling into snowballs and snowmen, which my wife and I did several times with our kids that afternoon. The next day most of the snow was still on the ground, which is also quite atypical for central Oklahoma, and this was also the day my buddy Ryan and I went out to campus to take photos as the sun went down.

He had his Mamiya Medium Format camera and a Nikon F1 film camera, and I brought my D750 and Fuji X100F. We spent about two hours walking around campus looking for photo opportunities and just shooting the breeze while struggling to keep warm in the rapidly-lowering temperatures. About a half hour into our photo walk around campus we got to the center of the Formal Gardens and shot the scene you see here: First Ryan on film, and then me on digital.

I used my D750 and my 50mm lens, sans ND filter because I didn’t have one when I took this, and wanted to get a shot with some cloud streaks in the barely-lit sky. I also wanted to remove people from the frame as much as possible. The best way to accomplish both? Use a long exposure! I stopped down to f/16 which let me use a 10-second exposure that did a great job of creating a silky smooth sky, but didn’t quite remove the people: you can see a few blurry spots right in the center, which are some college students milling about. A longer exposure would have almost certainly made them disappear entirely.

I like pretty much everything about this: the snow on the ground, the texture of the grass and bushes thanks to the off-camera lighting on the right side, the starbursts on the lights in the right and left side, the orange glow of the library lights, the smooth sky…all the elements come together to make a photo that you just don’t see very often. The only thing I’m not happy with is a subtle orange smudge on above the library on the right: I forgot to clean my lens before taking this shot. Arg! It’s not a deal-breaker though, and now I have something to try differently next time :)

You’ve heard me say many times that you don’t need to go very far to get good photos, and that includes just stepping out into your own back yard. Even so, it’s been a while since I posted a picture here on Weekly Fifty that I shot literally in my own back yard. Most of the time I’m out with my family and my camera is used for snapshots of people, and not the kind that I share here on the blog. But on a mild afternoon late last year I had my D750 and 50mm lens outside, as opposed to the Fuji X100F I normally use when taking snots of my wife and kids, and realized I could use it to get a really cool picture of this leaf by the fence.

I did have to alter the scene just a bit to get this shot, which I don’t normally do but in this case I thought would be OK. This one leaf was initially part of a triad with two others sticking up near the top of the frame, so I gently picked them off to get just the single leaf in the shot. I’m actually looking straight down here, not up towards a tree, which is one reason this image caught my eye. Normally you would have to contend with the bright sky for a shot of a single leaf, but in this case the dirt and brown branches gave a rich visual contrast to the image that I don’t often see. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I see it, but don’t take the time to stop and really notice.)

Choosing the right settings for this photo was a bit tricky, since the leaf was so large and my camera so close that a wide aperture would mean too much of it would be out of focus. I knew any larger than f/2.8 wouldn’t work, both for depth of field as well as overall sharpness, but I did try a few shots at f/4 and f/5.6 just for fun. In the end I preferred this one, shot at f/2.8, the most because of the way it obliterated the background even though the right edge of the leaf isn’t quite in focus. It was worth the tradeoff, and it’s not something I notice easily anyway.

I didn’t spend too long outside taking nature shots while my kids were climbing the ropes and swinging in the swingset, but it was fun to try something different but also quite the same. I think I need to take my own advice and look for photo opportunities right in my own backyard a little more often :)