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

On the morning I shot this photo I was going through somewhat of a photographic slump. I think it was mostly due to the oppressive heat that was bearing down on Oklahoma through much of Summer 2017, and it was difficult to find the inspiration to get outside and shoot photos. I mean it, I barely even went outside at work which was a big contrast to other times of the year when I will often take a stroll around Theta Pond or head to the Student Union and back just to clear my mind. But boy howdy, after weeks of upper 90’s and low 100’s the thought of going on a walk was just not that appealing anymore. I was determined to find a way out of the picture-taking rut though, and even prayed about it on the morning I took this picture. Sure enough, as often happens when I submit things to the Lord, I found a couple of picture opportunities while biking to work that very morning.

The first was about a half mile from my house when I came across some flowers in a very small field right behind the strip mall I ride past each morning. I initially biked right on by and then stopped, turned around, and got down on my hands and knees with my D7100 to get a few shots of yellow petals poking up in the early morning. The shots were OK though nothing special, but I was glad I took the time to stop and at least try something. A few minutes later as I approached Boone Pickens Stadium on Hall of Fame avenue I decided to take a fairly innocuous detour and instead of taking my usual counterclockwise route around the perimeter of the colosseum I turned south at Gallagher-Iba Arena just because it would be different. And sure enough, it worked.

As I was riding south past the home of Cowboy Basketball I saw a row of cypress trees whose leaves were a mix of glowing green and deep brown, and the rich mix of colors in the morning light really was something special. At almost an other time of day the sunlight would have been too harsh to get a picture like this, but the sun just peeking over the horizon it bathed the whole scene in a warm glow that I don’t often associate with cypress trees. I debated for a little while about whether to use a close-up filter but decided not to in order to get a broader sense of context for the green leaves, and shot at f/2.8 instead of f/1.8 in order to get the subject a bit sharper with a wider depth of field.

Strangely, one of the trickiest parts of this shot was actually getting my camera to focus on the green leaves. Apparently it was small enough that my lens kept focusing on background elements instead of the green leaves in front, but eventually I got a shot that worked out fairly well. It was a good reminder that if I ever do get a little lost when it comes to photography ideas, a solution can present itself even if it lies just a hundred yards off the beaten path.

When I was a kid my dad was really into model trains, perhaps because he worked as a carman at Burlington Northern (now Burlington Northern Santa Fe) railroad, and I fondly remember the rather impressive H-O gauge set he built in the basement of our house in central Minnesota. When we moved to Nebraska in the early part of 1986 my parents bought a house that they still live in today, and its relatively modest size suited our rather large family quite well except when it came to having a model train set. There was simply no place to build one, given that every room in the house was occupied–that sort of thing tends to happen when you are raising five children under one room :)

My dad’s solution? Construct a 12′ x 12′ train set attached to cables and a winch so it can be raised into the ceiling. To this day I’m not sure how he actually did it, but if you go to my parents’ basement and look upwards you’ll see the underside of none other than the very same train set he built back when we were kids, just waiting to be lowered down and played with. It’s not much to look at compared to my uncle Ray and aunt Renee’s Nostalgia Trip set, but it’s still pretty neat.

My wife and I were back in Nebraska visiting my parents and other family members over Memorial Day this year and he had the set down on near the floor so some of the younger grandchildren could watch trains make their circuit around the tracks, and I grabbed my D7100 + 50mm lens to take a few shots of the models for posterity. This particular engine, which I clearly remember playing with when I was a kid, was still running and dutifully transporting H-O gauge cars around but I was able to catch it at a moment of rest when the operator on the other side of the set was momentarily distracted.

The light was dim so I needed to shoot somewhat wide open and use a shutter speed fast enough to eliminate the motion blur from hand-holding the camera, and even at f/2.8 I was only able to get a 1/60 second shutter. (And that was with the ISO clear up to 3200, which is a lot on that old D7100.) The result is a picture that does a decent job of capturing the fact that there’s a model train engine on some track, but I wish the depth of field was a bit wider to provide some context. It all happened in a matter of seconds though, and I didn’t want to tell the kids to stop having fun just so I could snap a few shots for my blog but it did make me want to revisit the scene (hopefully with a wider lens!) to capture a bit more of what makes this particular train set so unique.

Every year my family goes to Milford Lake in Kansas for a few days of playing on the beach, going on boat rides, and really just spending time with each other. As I was preparing for this year’s trip I had to decide what gear to bring, which is always a bit of a tricky proposition because I don’t want to get stuck in the trap of focusing more on my camera stuff than I am on my family, but I also didn’t want to leave anything at home that could be used to get some fun photos. In the end I might have actually gone a bit overboard with gear (isn’t that always the case?) but made sure that I wasn’t getting too distracted with picture-taking during the days we were at the lake. Sometimes I intentionally left my camera at the cabin so I wouldn’t be caught up in taking dozens of photos, and at other times I used my camera only for specific purposes and then put it away when I was done. I also brought out good old-fashioned pocket camera we’ve had for years, because sometimes all you need is something small and portable to capture the memories you want.

I’ve discovered over the years that while 50mm is a fantastic focal length in many situations, it’s not my preferred lens when I know I’m mostly going to be with and around family. For that I turn to something wider like my 35mm, and if I know I’m going to be away from the action I also bring along my 70-200. I did bring my 50mm lens on the trip specifically so I could take some photos for my Weekly Fifty blog, and it stayed on a shelf the entire time except for when I specifically went out with my brother Andy to capture some shots of lightning as a storm rolled through the area. At first I ran down to the beach near our cabins but soon realized that the surrounding trees and camping areas were obscuring most of the incoming clouds. When that wasn’t working out I went back to the cabin, found my big brother, and asked if he wanted to drive down to the boat launch and set up shop there to catch some lightning shots. He grabbed his camera gear and off we went, hoping to do the best with what we had.

Andy was better prepared than I, having a nice tripod and a remote shutter release whereas I had to borrow my dad’s tripod and use a 30-second timer. This gave Andy the ability to shoot in Bulb mode (basically opening the shutter for as long as he wanted to, and then clicking his remote shutter release again to close it) whereas my 30-second exposures had to be done over and over manually. It wasn’t a big problem though, and every time my 30 seconds was up I just clicked the shutter button again and sat there waiting.

In fact, it was the waiting and uncertainty which were the most difficult parts of getting this shot. We had no idea where the lightning would come from, where it would strike, or how much time we even had to work with before the rain started falling. Because of this a wider lens would have been good since it would have allowed more room for error, but I stuck with my Nifty Fifty just because I wanted to see what would happen. Turns out I got a shot that I really like, and I can honestly say it’s the best lightning picture I’ve ever taken. It did require some postprocessing (yay for shooting in RAW!) but after I brought out some of the colors in the clouds and in the background I was even more pleased with how the image turned out.

The one thing I don’t quite understand is why the trees on the lower-left corner have a bit of a white halo around them. It’s not anything I did in Photoshop, and if you look closely the trees on the lower-right have a similar type of glow. I did raise the shadows quite a bit in order to bring out some color in the sky, but I don’t think that was causing the halo effect. Rather I’m guessing it was the flash of light from the lightning bolt that provided some backlighting to the trees. Whatever caused it, I don’t really mind it except that it tends to look like a poor job of photoshopping which, I can fairly confidently say, is not the case.

If you like this shot I would encourage you to try this sort of thing on your own, and the next time you see a storm rolling in put your camera on a tripod and see what you can come up with :)

This shot surprised me.

I was headed back to my office after running an errand on campus and, as is often the case, I was carting my camera and close-up filters on the off-chance that something caught my eye and caused me to stop for a picture. And boy howdy, something sure did. This was taken on the magnolia tree mere inches from my office building, and as I stopped to look at the flowers I though of taking a top-down picture which was, frankly, unlike any other magnolia photo I had taken before. I thought it would merely be a fun experiment and very little would come of it, but as I was looking at the photos in Lightroom this one really stood out to me. It required very little in terms of editing and all I did to crop it was bring in the sides to make it a square image (which I rarely do, especially for my Weekly Fifty pics) and juuuuuust a tad bit on the top as well.

The result was an image that I was not at all expecting, and one that, if nothing else, is certainly unique as I scan through my Flickr page. I don’t normally shoot my subjects from directly above, and when I use my +4 close-up filter I don’t normally shoot at f/2.8…and yet here’s both of those. I also generally use more colors than this, but here you see very little in terms of variation and the entire image is really just white and yellow. Add to that the fact that it’s cropped to be square and…well, you see what I mean.

I’m honestly not sure what to make of this picture; I think I like it but I’m not really sure. So in the end I’m just going to say that it’s different, at least for me, and leave it at that.

Taking the photo only took about a minute and I had to hold my camera in my right hand while steadying the flower (which was just a few feet off the ground) with my left hand. I used the center focus point and shot about 12 pictures hoping one would be in focus, and used a couple different aperture settings in order to get a good combination of depth of field as well as overall sharpness. In the end it was this image, with mere millimeters of wiggle room in terms of DOF, that stood out to me the most. Most of the others from this series were either out of focus, off-center in terms of composition, or had bright sunlight poking through the white flower petals–all things that I was trying to avoid. It was fun to try something new and it gives me a few ideas to think about for future photos as well.

Ah, tis the season once again when flowers are in full bloom, the weather is mild, and the Lord watches as photographers everywhere set out to enjoy and document the intricate wonders of His world. Each summer one of my favorite subjects to photograph is none other than the magnolia flower, as visitors to this blog no doubt know by now, and 2017 has been no exception. Of course I enjoy taking pictures of other flowers as well, but it’s the size, features, and explosions of color that often accompany the magnolia flower that make it such a joy to photograph. Add in a little daylight and a close-up filter and you’ve got the recipe for some pretty cool pictures.

This one, like most of the magnolia photos I’ve taken, was on the OSU campus within spitting distance of Theta Pond. I was walking past the tree when I saw several flowers relatively close to the ground, and this particular one a bit above my head which meant that I immediately dismissed it as a potential photo subject. I did take a bit of a detour over to it just in case it turned out to have something of value, photographically speaking, and snapped a picture of it (because why not?) before deciding to move on.

If you’re a regular reader you might also know by now that I’m not generally in the habit of chimping, or looking at the screen on the back of my camera, after taking photos. I like to trust my instincts and look at my pictures on a big computer screen, and when I’m looking at the LCD on my camera it’s usually just to check to see if I nailed focus. This time though, I checked specifically to see how the picture turned out and I was honestly kind of surprised. I quite liked what I saw, so I stopped and went back to take a few more.

There were a couple of elements in this image that I tried to use intentionally as a way of creating a complete composition rather than simply snapping a shot of this flower. First I used the orange and green leaves in the foreground to frame the subject, which required me to scoot around and shift my viewpoint quite a bit. I know there’s some empty space on the right-hand side but I’m OK with that since it felt just a little too claustrophobic to have the leaves looming large and blocking out absolutely everything on the sides. The second compositional element, which I assure you was quite intentional, was the light spots in the background behind the flower. I wanted them to surround the flower and not intersect with its boundary, and to get this to work properly I actually had to chimp quite a bit while continually adjusting my viewpoint. It might be kind of a subtle effect but I do think it add an altogether not insignificant amount of flair to the picture.

There was also the issue of exposure settings: I wanted the flower to be sharp but also wanted a shallow depth of field. F/4 blew out the background a bit too much and f/8 was not enough, so I found a sweet spot at f/6.7 which really did the job nicely. I think the shot turned out very close to what I was going for, and if I compare it to a similar picture I took last summer I actually prefer the newer one because it feels like more of a complete, considered composition.