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

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.

Here we have yet another in the long line of pictures I’ve taken which was directly inspired by my cousin Beth, who often posts close-up photos of flowers to her Instagram feed. Go ahead and follow her–you’ll be glad you did, and I’m sure you will see where I’ve gotten some ideas for my own pictures over the years :) I forget exactly which picture she posted that led to me taking this one, but sometimes it’s the idea of going out and taking pictures more than an individual photo that really gets to me. Occasionally I need a little mental nudge to get my camera out of my bag and go out and shoot some pictures, which is what I really like about using software like Instagram, Flickr, and even Facebook. Seeing what other people post helps give me ideas for my own photography, which can be a really col thing.

This picture is, as I have learned over the years, a class Simon Flower Photo: subject is off-center, viewing angle is slightly off to one side, the center is sharp, and there is a bit of context in both the foreground and background to give the subject a sense of depth and perspective. These particular compositional choices have come to define my particular style when it comes to taking pictures like this, and I like the idea of iterating, and improving, on these traits. I of course also used my close-up filters to get this shot starting with a +4 and then a +10. I didn’t like the results I was getting from the latter so I went with an image taken with the former, and even though I thought shooting at f/8 would result in an image that had too wide of a depth of field, it turned out to be not the case at all. In fact the shots I took at f/4 and f/2.8 had a depth of field that was so shallow it was a muddy purple mess, hence the f/8 shot you see here.

Something about the colors in this photo is a little off to me, and I’m not quite sure what’s causing it or what to do about it. The whole image seems to have somewhat of a yellow tint to it, but adjusting the white balance and overall tint (in the Basic panel of the Lightroom Develop module) didn’t really help. Maybe it had something to do with the time of day at which this was taken, or maybe even the close-up filter causing some type of aberration with the incoming light. It almost looks like this picture was sent through some kind of Instagram filter but I can assure you that’s not the case :) I almost didn’t post this picture because of the weirdness with the colors, but then figured I’d take the same as Spike from Cowboy Bebop: whatever happens, happens. This is how the picture turned out, so I might as well use it. And you know what? I kind of like it.

So this is a different sort of take on the traditional picture of a flower, and it’s an idea that came to me while I was eating breakfast with my kids one morning in March. My son brought home a carnation from school about a week prior to this picture as some sort of fund raiser where students could support the PTA (or other such organization) by buying a flower and having it delivered to a friend. He was thrilled with the flower and my wife found a nice simple vase to hold it, and it had been sitting on the window sill for several days afterwards. My wife called it “The Little Carnation that Could” because it just kept hanging in there long after we would have predicted its demise, and I thought it would make an interesting photo opportunity.

The trick, though, was in figuring out how to photograph a flower against a window and make the resulting image look interesting while also not being too over- or under-exposed. I thought about a couple different compositions before settling on what you see here, which was taken just as the sun was peeking over the horizon. I don’t often take pictures that exclusively feature shadows, and the idea of taking a bright pink carnation and reducing it to nothing more than a black-and-white silhouette seemed anathema to me and yet I quite like the result. It’s a different sort of way of looking at something familiar.

If the image appears somber, sad, introspective, or even depressing I promise you that’s not my intention at all. Take from it what you will, but before and after I shot this photo I was helping my two boys (ages 5 and 3) pour cereal and get dressed for school, and much of that involved the typical sorts of goofing around and odd noises one might expect on any given morning with kids that age :) The resulting image is a bit unique in my collection of photographs and I am happy with how it turned out, even though it takes a rather bright and cheerful flower-by-the-window scene and turns it into something else entirely. I guess that could be a statement about the power of photography, but for me it was really just about experimentation and trying something new. And I think it worked :)