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

I thought this image of a red yucca flower might be a fun way to ring in the new year here on Weekly Fifty. It’s not a lily despite its similar appearance, because what you’re looking at is a very big image of a very small flower. I shot this using my D750, 50mm lens, and +10 close-up filter (f/8, 1/250, ISO 1400) which means the actual object is only about the size of a dime. What I found somewhat fascinating about this particular plant, other than all the beauty and detail contained in such a small entity, was that it was literally right outside my building at work. I took this picture on an unremarkable day outside an unremarkable brick office on the campus at Oklahoma State University. Before shooting the picture you see here I had walked around for about 10 minutes looking at trees, flowers, leaves, people, bicycles, and other subjects that I thought would make for interesting pictures but came back without any noteworthy images. Not that I took zero photos, but just that none of them were all that compelling to me.

When I walked past this yucca plant (which has been the subject of a few other Weekly Fifty images over the years) I was struck not just by the flowers but by the rest of the colors in the scene. I think that’s probably what made me want to share this image here instead of letting it gather digital dust in my Lightroom library, and it’s something I want to keep in mind with other images too. There are basically three swaths of color in the frame: green on the left, crimson in the middle, and dull brown or purple on the right. Initially my idea was to photograph the flower in such a way that the deep red color would stand out against the red brick of the building behind it, but those resulted in images that seemed too plain and uninteresting. Then I re-framed the shot so the flower was in front of a sea of green (which are other bushes and the leaves of a golden rain tree) but that didn’t work either since the flower kind of appeared to be hovering awkwardly in the middle of the frame. This one works the best, in my opinion, because the green and burnt umber tones show that the flower is part of a much richer context than just a field or just a building. As an example, here’s the same flower (image is mostly unedited, with just a few basic color tweaks) with my building showing much more prominently in the background:

It just doesn’t look as interesting, and the flower punches through the middle of the frame without much else to help weave it into the larger tapestry of the image as a whole. The cross-hatches of brick and mortar in the background create an awkward sense of angular geometry which contrasts severely with the rich texture and curves of the flower. In short, this image just doesn’t work–at least not in the same way that the top one does.

So anyway, with all that being said..happy new year to you! I hope your 2017 is off to a bright start and things are only looking better. Cheers, God bless you, and here’s to another turn around the sun :)

And here we are, the final photo of Weekly Fifty for the 2016 year. I’m posting this one in particular for a couple of reasons, and it’s designed to be somewhat of a companion piece to last week’s image. First off, you might note that its composition bears a striking resemblance to last week’s image in that the photo is horizontally composed with the subject along the right-hand third. In both images I am standing below and looking up, and there is a vast expanse of sky on the left side. Both pictures involve the sun as a key element even though in last week’s you see the effects of its light and not the solar object itself. And both pictures, I hope, present a sense of awe, wonder, and possibly even inspiration. They did for me, anyway, and I dare to think they just might do the same for you the viewer.

Last week’s image was titled “Rise” and this one is “Set” not just because the sun is on its way down but because the year is coming to a close. I shot this in the middle of October but have saved it until now because it represents, to me, a sense of closure while also a sense of hope and even anticipation for the year ahead. Now, it’s also important to remember that this is just a simple picture I snapped one day while walking around Theta Pond and I’m not trying to change the world or anything like that. The image is not fancy and did not require special effort, and I’m not trying to make a big statement or anything. I just thought it would be nice to use as an end-of-year photo and I hope it serves that purpose decently enough.

Keen readers might see echoes of similar sunburst-style images that I have posted in the past and while this is not meant to be a retread of familiar territory, I do think it is worth revisiting a certain style, subject, or type of photography in order to practice and get better at it. Ever since I learned how to take pictures with starburst patterns it is something I have enjoyed repeating and this is yet another example. I tried a couple different ways of composing the image and moving around so the sun was placed at different spots, but I kept coming back to this one where it was peeking out from where the branch extends from the main trunk. I can’t exactly say why other than it just seems to fit nicely, and I like that the sky is somewhat clear in the area surrounding the sun and darker on the left side with the overhanging cypress branches. I shot this at f/11 to get several rays to appear without being overwhelming, and just like last week the only major adjusting I did (which turned out to be quite minor) was to adjust black levels and saturation.

And with that I big a fond farewell to 2016 and raise a glass of Mt. Dew, my drink of choice, to a happy, healthy, and productive 2017. It’s going to be a fun ride, folks. I can’t wait to see you there :)

For this picture we’re going to go back to the basics with a fairly simple composition and some tried-and-true photographic techniques. No close-up filters, no long exposures, no full-frame-vs-crop tangents…just a horizontal photo with a single subject on the right-hand third dividing line. And like many other images I post here on Weekly Fifty, this one almost didn’t happen and would not exist at all if I had not brought my camera to work with me on a crisp Tuesday morning. There was even a moment before I left the house that I had my D7100 in hand and was about to put it on the shelf because I knew I had a busy day ahead of me, but decided I might as well bring it anyway just in case I happened to come across a photographic opportunity. Little did I know that such an opportunity would present itself before I even got to work :)

As I rounded the west side of Boone Pickens Stadium and turned south onto Monroe avenue I saw, about a block away to the east, this cross rising from the top of the University Parish of Saint John the Baptist. (You can see, using Google Maps Street View, the spot where I was standing to get the photo.) The sun was just starting to peek over the horizon which cast a nice orange glow on the clouds, and served to create a fantastic backdrop for this backlit monolith. I knew I had just a few minutes in which to take a picture, partly because I did not want to be late for work but also because I knew that the sunrise would soon be over and the deep oranges would be entirely washed out.

I parked my bike in the empty Gallagher-Iba lot and ran over to Hester street to take the picture. I shot it at f/4 along with my usual auto-ISO setting which resulted in a shutter speed of 1/180 and ISO 220. I know photos like this are best when taken at the lowest possible ISO and if my camera was going to go past 400 I would have shot in manual or just disabled Auto ISO, but as things turned out I was quite happy with the exposure my camera gave me. This is also one of those instances in which shooting with a 50mm lens on a crop sensor camera turned out to be a benefit since I didn’t really want the rest of the church, or the powerlines in front of it, in the shot at all and they would have been unavoidable if I was using my full-frame D750.

This didn’t require much postprocessing either, and what you see here is pretty much exactly what things looked like on the morning I made the image. I dialed down the black level to get a monochromatic silhouette, and adjusted the saturation just a bit, but otherwise this image hasn’t been changed much at all. Not that Lightroom adjustments are a bad thing, but in general I like to use a style of editing that gets the final image as close as possible to what I saw in my mind’s eye when I took the shot, rather than creating some kind of hyper-real HDR-style image that couldn’t actually exist in real life.

Finally, it is no coincidence that I am posting this image a few days before Christmas. In a few days we will celebrate the birth of our savior Jesus Christ, and while the image of a newborn baby wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger is certainly worth treasuring and pondering, as Mary did many years ago, it’s also important to remember the reason He was born in the first place. It was so He could take the punishment for our sins all the way to the cross, where he would die not for anything He did but for everything we have done. You can’t have Christmas without the cross; the two are forever intertwined and the one leads directly to the other. So in a sense, this image of Jesus’ instrument of crucifixion could be said to be the best Christmas greeting I could offer to you, my readers. Merry Christmas to all of you, and may you reflect on both the manger and the cross now and throughout the new year.

This picture has been a long time in coming, and though I didn’t exactly enjoy the process of taking it I am glad to have had the experience. It serves as a companion piece, or rather a counterpoint, to a picture I posted in May of this year where a man was doing his best to spread the gospel and save souls but using a much different and, I would argue, more effective technique.

Every now and again this man, whom the students have nicknamed Preacher Bob, shows up on campus with a cohort of bible-thumpers and sign-wavers to rile up the student body from the lawn in front of Low Library. You can usually tell when they are around because of the large crowd gathers (and as Dave Piner said, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd) and things can, and often do, get quite hostile. The pattern is similar every time: Bob waves his bible, yells at the students, and generally condemns the student body to the pits of hades for their sinful ways. Usually someone will confront him, as you can see here, and attempt to debate or discuss theological points while quoting scripture, but Bob remains resolute and will hear none of it. Some students yell and jeer, others start chants to overpower the sound of his voice, and at the end of the day I very much doubt that any progress is made by anyone involved.

All this activity makes for a very uncomfortable situation, but that’s exactly why I was glad to have had the experience of taking this photograph. I stood at a distance observing the scene for a few minutes and then realized that this would be a good picture-taking opportunity if only I could work up the gumption to walk out there and start snapping photos. So I did just that. I put my D7100 in 3D tracking mode because my usual focus-and-recompose method wouldn’t work with how much Bob was walking around, and walked over to the knoll from which he was casting aspersions on the students surrounding him.

There are rules when Preacher Bob or his counterparts come to campus, the most important one being that you are not allowed to get physically close to any of them. I believe this has to do with prior incidents involving physical violence, but in any case I knew that I wanted to separate Bob from the rest of the people visually so I shot wide open at f/1.8 in order to get a shallow depth of field–or as shallow as I could, given the circumstances. I initially tried standing in front of him to get his face in the shot, but wasn’t happy with the composition so I moved behind him and tried to capture his emotion through body language. I specifically waited until he was waving his hand in an accusatory manner at the student he was talking to. (Whose shirt, incidentally, reads “Brothers Under Christ, 2016 Dad’s Day, Oklahoma State University. I honestly think this student was just seeking clarification and not out to egg on the Preacher.) I did this so I could give the viewer a sense of Bob’s body language as well as the student’s emotional response since you can see his face and half-outstretched hand. Since I couldn’t show the face of Bob and the face of this student at the same time I erred on the side of the student and tried to let Bob’s body language and boldface t-shirt convey a message to the viewer instead about the type of interpersonal interaction that was taking place here.

I was only here for a few minutes but I left feeling slightly uncomfortable, and also glad to have had a few years of practice using my camera so I wasn’t trying to figure out buttons or controls in the middle of what could have been a very volatile situation. I do believe that deep down Bob does believe in what he is doing, and a part of me admires and respects him for having the courage to face off against hundreds of angry and flustered students…but only a very small part. These students are angry because Bob and his kind intentionally stir controversy and discontent, instead of sowing seeds of the Gospel that will take root in fertile soil. I have seen Bob and many others like him over the years and rarely are they interested in having sincere, honest dialog with students in order to help them wade through what is often a spiritually challenging time in their lives. I’d much rather they took the route of the Gideons and I am fairly certain they would be far more effective as a result.

This photo was directly inspired by my cousin Beth who recently (well, as of the time I write this) uploaded her 2000th image to Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BLcFFARAh0p/

I begin almost every day with the same routine: get up long before my wife and kids, shower, spend about 5-10 minutes in quiet prayer, eat breakfast, and then play a video game or read a book until the rest of the family wakes up. On a quiet morning in mid-October I found myself looking out the glass door on the south side of our house as I prayed, and in what was kind of a strange moment for me I asked the Lord for inspiration. I had been feeling a bit down, photographically speaking, and was having trouble finding motivation to get out and take pictures. It was only an hour later that I saw Beth’s post on Instagram and it was just the spark for which I was looking. I thought to myself “That image is so beautiful, I want to go take one like it.” So I set out later that day with my D750, 50mm lens, +10 and +4 close-up filters, and went to take a picture like the one I had seen earlier.

The result of my brief photographic excursion is this image of a Black Cotton flower which, ironically, has very little in common with Beth’s picture. It was hers that sent me on the journey though, and that’s what matters. I have tried, mostly in vain, for years to get a close-up picture of an insect like a bee or butterfly resting atop a flower and you will note that I still have yet to succeed. But going out with that goal in mind, sort of like my recent picture of a couple of bikes, helped focus my mind and give me a clear idea of what to aim for with my camera. Before I shot this picture I took a few others of a small pepper bush and a diamond delight plant at the Price Family Garden and was not extraordinarily pleased with the results I was getting. I was about to leave the garden altogether when I saw this pink flower cradled between deep purple leaves and knew that it was going to make for a good picture.

I knew my +10 filter would put me too close and remove any sense of context, so I used my +4 and shot at f/5.6 to get the flower in focus but leave the foreground and background nice and blurry. My goal here was to get a sense that this flower is nestled, almost hidden, among the rest of the plant and that the purple fringes surrounding the crimson petals would look like the fingers of a hand delicately holding it in place. I was very pleased with how sharp the final image looked and didn’t use much post-processing on it either, preferring instead to let the image stand on its own.

Beth, if you’re reading this thanks for the ideas you constantly send my way. And to everyone who might be reading this and looking for ideas and inspiration, I hope you find it one way or another and that right soon :)