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

Well here you have it folks, the final in my long-running series of pictures of the magnolia tree. It’s almost a compulsion at this point since their flowers and seed pods are so…well, I guess they kind of run the gamut from beautiful to curious to downright frightening. But wherever you stand on that spectrum it’s hard to deny they make for fascinating photo subjects! These trees are scattered all over campus, and indeed all over town, and it’s hard to not take pictures of their flowers and seeds over the course of a year. Since this was the first season that I had my close-up filters to go on my 50mm lens I just couldn’t resist documenting the transition from bud to flower to seed, with this being the final image in the series. I hope you like it :)

These seed pods usually start falling to the ground in late October and as I went out with my camera to capture a picture of one I had a couple goals in mind. I knew I wanted to find a  pod with several bright red seeds sticking out, and I knew I wanted it to be already on the ground as opposed to still attached to a tree. I was hoping to get a bit of dimension to the picture in terms of foreground and background, and I purposely took my +4 filter so I could get close without getting too close. It took a few days but I finally was able to capture the image you see here and I am quite pleased with how it turned out. I took a different photo a few days prior to this one that was OK but not quite what I envisioned, so I went back out and was able to get this one which was much closer to what I was picturing in my mind.

One nice thing about my D750 is the flip-out screen which doesn’t come in handy all that often, but when you need it it sure is useful. I set my camera on the ground and used Live View with 100% magnification to make positively sure the shot was in focus how I wanted, and got a shot that would have been very difficult if not impossible with the optical viewfinder alone. I think it also helped to have  a clear vision for exactly what I was going for when I went to take this shot as it made the process more streamlined and…well, focused, if you excuse the pun :)

I shot this at f/5.6 and a few others at f/2.8 but really liked the wider depth of field and sharpness of the former vs. the latter. In my view it has just the right amount of foreground and background blur, and it illustrates the less-is-more lesson that I have been learning for years when it comes to things like shooting with larger apertures. Anyway, if you are tired of the magnolia seed photos rest assured you won’t see any for a good long while but come next Spring we’ll have to see what happens…

This picture was a bit of a departure for me in that I normally take close-up pictures of things in nature (flowers, plants, bugs, etc.) but when I was out walking around Theta Pond on campus one day I came across the rather innocuous scene of a young tree held in place by a few stakes and some rope. It’s quite common and, honestly, quite unremarkable and yet I thought I would see what I could do with my D7100, 50mm lens, and +4 close-up filter of which I have become quite fond. That particular filter, I have discovered, strikes a nice balance between allowing me to focus much more closely than normal without getting too close and thus obscuring far too much of the background or the rest of the subject.

One of the most important things I a continue to learn about photography is the power of restraint: You don’t always need to shoot at f/1.8. You don’t always need to shoot at ISO 100 or 6400. You don’t always need ultra-close macro-style magnification. You don’t need to take 100 shots when 10 or even 1 will suffice. You don’t need to share every single photo online. The list goes on, and because this lesson is something I am rather slow to learn this picture is not one that I would have ever gotten six months ago. I would have used my +10 filter (to get super close!) and shot at f/2.8 (to get super shallow depth of field!) and the result would have been a blurry disaster. Instead after learning to hold back and taking a more considered approach, I shot this image using my +4 filter at f/8 and got a much better picture.

I like the simplicity of this picture, with just two elements (the post and the rope) and a clear point on which the viewer should focus, that of the knot itself. I like the telltale signs of age: a fraying rope, rust on the edges of the post, and thin strands of a spider’s web. I also like how there’s a clear sense that something is happening here, or at least I hope it’s clear. The rope isn’t just dangling from the post, but being stretched tight as outside forces are clearly acting on it. It is serving a purpose, whatever that may be, and despite its ragged nature it continues to dutifully hold on. To hang in there, if you will, regardless of what else happens around it. I don’t know that there is any grand metaphor or larger story to tell here, but I am quite pleased with how the final image turned out.

I also tried a few things in the editing process in order to get just the right look I was going for. This is the original unprocessed RAW file:

It’s OK but not great, so I made a couple key edits in Lightroom:

• Adjust White Balance to 6300K
• Added just a bit of vignette
• Lowered highlights and black levels, raised shadows and whites just a bit
• Adjusted the tone curve from a straight line to more of an S-shape to add some contrast
• Adjusted the tint of the green
• Lowered the overall saturation of the image

And a few other things too. None of these were all that dramatic but the resulting picture is much more impactful because of it. In fact even learning to properly edit a picture has been an ongoing exercise in restraint, and I have had to learn the hard way that a few subtle edits are generally much more impactful than upping Clarity, Saturation, and Contrast. Basically if you were to assign a theme to this whole blog post it would be that less is more, both in photography and in editing, and it’s a lesson I will likely have to continue learning for many years to come :)

Keen readers of this blog might have noticed that each year around this time I post a picture or two of a spider, and if you have been wondering when the 2016 edition of such a photo might show up…well, here you go :) The ones I just linked to were all taken right in my own back yard, and this week’s picture was shot only a few feet away from where I made the backlit image of a spider at night. I guess it just goes to show you how rich and vibrant nature can be even without leaving your own property. Though in this case I must give credit to my wife who actually spotted this year’s spider, and had she not said something I might have knocked its web into oblivion by accident while we were clearing away some shrubs in the yard.

As you might have guessed, one thing that makes this particular spider different from any of the others I have posted is that this time I had my set of close-up filters to play with. I knew a +10 filter would be way too much, and the spider’s body would fill the frame and leave no room for the legs or anything else. A +1 or +2 would probably not do a whole lot, so I set out with my D750, 50mm lens, and +4 filter. The results were fantastic, if you don’t mind me saying so. This is the type of picture I wish I could have gotten for the past three years, and to finally be able to take it was a huge personal victory for me. Looking back on the other images I can clearly see a progression in terms of composition, framing, and lighting and I think one could draw a pretty direct line from those earlier images to this one in terms of an overall learning curve. Not that it’s the end result, mind you, but just another step on what I guess you could call my own photographic journey. Certainly I have a ton left to learn (especially since I don’t even have a true macro lens for shots like this) but this image was nice validation that I am learning more along the way, bit by bit.

This picture was taken on a Sunday morning as we were all getting ready to go to church but we had just a few minutes to spare before loading the kids up in the car. The boys and I went outside to check on the spider, which we had seen and photographed the night before after we fed it a cricket:

Overnight the spider had evidently finished off the cricket and, as this kind of arachnid usually does, kicked the carcass out of the web and subsequently rebuilt any damaged threads. When we went to view it in the morning it was hanging out, literally, on its newly-refreshed web enjoying the sunrise and waiting for an unsuspecting moth or other insect to wander into its silky trap. With the sun peeking over the horizon there was a window of just a few minutes where I knew the spider would be nicely backlit so I took a few dozen shots, some at f/4 and some about two stops smaller, and was quite pleased with the majority of them. In fact the only real problem I had with the photo was choosing which one I liked, and enlisted the help of my wife with her keen eye for color and detail who also helped me decide to crop the picture so the spider is just a bit on the left side.

I tried hard to compose the picture in such a way that the glowing sunlight poking through the trees would serve to frame the spider itself, and I think the end result works out quite well. A few minutes later the sun had risen past the treetops and this particular photographic moment had vanished, but I was glad I could catch it for posterity. In the days after this picture was taken my boys and I continued to keep our garden spider well-fed thanks to a steady diet of crickets and grasshoppers we found in the yard and while it did hang around for a while it eventually went wherever spiders go in the winter. Who knows…maybe it will show up next year for another round of spider pics :)

This week’s picture isn’t so much about capturing beauty, making art, or anything like that. Rather, it’s mostly just an illustration of a photographic principle I have been working on for as long as I have been interested in the medium. Framing and composition are two of the fundamental elements of picture-taking, and I shot this picture of two bicycles specifically as a personal exercise in order to work on these concepts. But first, as I sometimes do here on the blog, a bit of background…

A while ago I ran across this image on Instagram:

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A post shared by Eric Buller Photography (@ericbullerphotography)

I found it when I was looking through the portfolio of a photographer named Eric Buller who had left a comment on one of the Weekly Fifty pics I posted to my own Instagram account. Turns out Mr. Buller started shooting with a 50mm lens because of this Weekly Fifty blog (I’m so glad you found this blog to be helpful, Eric!) and when I saw his picture of some bicycle wheels I was struck by the richness of the image, the colors of the bike forks and spokes, and the untold stories behind each of the two-wheeled transporters. I don’t know if go so far as to say I was inspired by it, but I certainly did want to use it as the basis for a few pictures of my own. There’s bikes all over the OSU campus and so one overcast Friday morning I went for a short walk around the school to see if I could get a similar picture.

Turns out I was way wrong, and no matter what I tried I just couldn’t capture an image with the richness of Eric’s photograph. Most of the bikes on campus are newer, shinier, and less colorful than the ones in the original which served to make most of the images I was taking look rather boring. When I saw the bike in this week’s picture above I realized that I could use that as the basis for practicing both framing and composition. It’s a far cry from creating an image like the one Eric posted, but it was a fun and useful photographic moment for me so I considered it a win :)

I knew I wanted to shoot the bike from the front and at a lot angle, but the tricky part was how to use the other elements in the composition to properly frame the bike. There were three main things in play: the blue bike in the foreground, the purple bike on the left side, and the vertical bike rack between them. I wanted to get an image that used the two latter elements to accentuate the former, but doing so proved to be a bit tricky because of one other, rather obvious, problem: students. They were everywhere, as you might expect, and I had to basically lie in wait until the shot I was looking for presented itself:

While this wasn’t bad I realized I wanted to add a dynamic element to the image by way of filling the gap between the blue bike and the vertical rack with a student. I waited for one to pass by and snapped another image:

Bingo! This was the shot I was hoping to get…except for one problem. As I reviewed my images I realized I had cut off the purple bike’s rear wheel, which made the overall composition feel somewhat amateurish. I was looking at the bike frame, not the tires, and thus failed to see the complete picture. I liked almost everything else about this, especially the smooth background thanks to using my lens wide open at f/1.8 in the first shot, but I needed to correct the compositional error. So I scooted over and waited for one of two conditions: one student passing through or none at all, both of which were a little tricky given the hustle and bustle of a college campus. I did get a shot where no students were in the frame, which I ultimately used as this week’s image, but before I could get any more someone rode on over and locked his bike up to the empty rack in the picture. Ah well, such is life, eh? :)

The whole exercise was a fun way to practice composition, and though I wish I would have been able to get a shot wide open with one student in the background and the two other bikes perfectly framed with the bike rack between them…it was, as Wayne Campbell said, “never meant to be.” It does give me ideas for future pictures, and many thanks to Eric Campbell for providing the impetus for me to get out and shoot some pics of bicycles. Keep up the good work man!

One night in September after the kids went to bed my wife came into the kitchen where I was doing some dishes, and with an excited look on her face she said “I’ve got a photo opportunity for you!” The last time she said this sort of thing it resulted in this picture, so I quickly grabbed my camera and followed her into the garage where she had been putting away some of the kids’ toys. We carefully crept around to the back of our vehicle where she pointed at a small praying mantis perched at the top of the wheel well, and I immediately realized why she was so pleased with her find. I don’t think I have ever seen a mantis up close and personal except for a nature conservatory, and was thrilled to find one just sort of hanging out and relaxing right in our garage. I smiled like a kid on Christmas morning and she said “I’ll leave you to it” so I spent the next 20 minutes trying to get a good picture of the little insect.

The first thing I did was put on a +4 filter as I knew I would want to get closer to the mantis, but not so close as to obscure all its features. A +10 filter would have been overkill while a +2 wouldn’t have done much at all, and sure enough the +4 worked admirably. The light in our garage was fairly dim and I didn’t want to open the door because the creature might see that as an opportunity to exit the premises, so I grabbed a flashlight and set it on the floor about a meter away from the mantis with the head angled up so as to provide a bit of light. My 50mm lens was on my D7100 so I took a few shots with that but soon switched over to my D750 because I was shooting at such high ISO values in the dim light, and I also wanted to take advantage of its highlight-weighted metering system to help get the right exposure. More on that in a bit.

The situation presented a compositional challenge right from the get-go because it was more than a little awkward to position myself in a way that would allow me to even get a decent picture. I wanted to get the eyes and face of the mantis in focus which meant I had to shoot from below, but with my 50mm lens and filter I had to be somewhat close to the bug as well. I ended up lying on my back and propping myself up with one elbow while holding my camera against my eye with the other hand and scooting around until I had at least somewhat of a decent composition. It wasn’t the most comfortable way of shooting, but it did give me a composition that was at least decently close to what I was going for.

As for the metering system, I knew that with my flashlight providing most of the light for the mantis it was going to be tricky for my camera to figure out the exposure values to use since some parts of the scene (like the bug’s face) were so bright and others were so dark. The D750’s highlight-weighted mode basically looks at the entire scene and figures out which parts are the brightest, and then adjusts the exposure accordingly so those bright spots look normal. It’s a mode that I don’t use very often, but is super handy when I need it such as a situation in which there is a praying mantis hanging out above my car tire :) I could have also just shot the picture normally and then used exposure compensation to dial things down a bit so the mantis wasn’t so blown out, but the other method worked fine so I went with that.

When I was finally satisfied that I got the shot I was looking for I called my wife back in the garage where we opened the door and coaxed the mantis outside. He had done a fantastic job of letting me get close enough to take his picture, and we wanted to make sure to let him go free before the sun went down completely so he could go find some buddies and chill out after such an intense modeling session.