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

This is a picture I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and it’s the kind of shot that I just can’t go out and get any time I feel like it. Whenever we take Highway 77 north of town to get to the turnpike we pass this house, and every time we drive by I wonder about this house and what it’s doing there. When was it built? Does anyone still live in it? If so, why is it so run-down? If not, who farms the land around it? I don’t know if I will ever find the answers to these questions and in some ways I kind of like not knowing since it lets me make up my own stories about what’s really going on in inside those walls.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that I don’t know anything about this house I always think it would be a compelling picture to take but since my wife and I are either at the beginning or end of a multi-hour drive to Nebraska when we go past this location I’ve never stopped to take a picture. Never, that is, until I found myself driving solo after dropping off my two nieces who stayed with us for a week this past summer. Eager to get home to my family, I spent less than a minute actually taking pictures and honestly there weren’t a whole lot of options for composing the photo since I did not want to trespass on private property. I had my D200 and 50mm lens with me at the time, which was a bit fortuitous since it meant I was shooting with roughly a 75mm equivalent lens when you take the crop factor into consideration, and that allowed me to get a closer view of the house than I would have on my D750. (Though I suppose I could have just cropped in on a D750 photo to get the same result. But still.)

I was pleasantly surprised at how the overcast sky and brown grass complemented the run-down appearance of the house, as this image would have taken on an entirely different connotation if shot in springtime, or in the early morning, or on a clear day with bright blue sky. It’s not a creepy photo despite the abandoned appearance of the house, and to me it’s more of a curiosity than anything. I shot at f/4, 1/1500 second, ISO 400 to get the exposure I was aiming for and I think it all worked out quite nicely. I’m curious what you, my readers, think of the house. Not the image per se, but the house itself. What stories come to your mind when you see this house or others like it that seem to have been long since forgotten by the passing of time?

After several years of taking photos, many of which end up here on Weekly Fifty, I’m still not sure what I would say if you were to ask me what my favorite subject is to photograph. I like taking all sorts of pictures whether people, animals, flowers, landscapes, etc. Some I’d say show up more often than others and some types of pictures are better suited to a 50mm lens than others, but I think it would be safe to say that one of my favorite themes to illustrate with photography is that of transition. Obviously a picture is just a visual representation of a single moment in time, but there’s something special about taking a picture that somehow captures the ebb and flow of time as a concept that I find fascinating. I think that’s what drew me to this particular photo opportunity in the first place and it’s one reason the more I look at it the more I like it.

As per usual I don’t know what type of plant this is but I’m fairly certain it’s not a four-leaf clover. It’s just one cluster of leaves on a large bush that is on the east side of Willard Hall on the OSU campus, and even though it looks at first glance like it could have some kind of leprechaun-infused magical properties I highly doubt that is in fact the case. What drew me to this particular leaf (or leaves? I dunno) was the way it showed a subject in transition from a state of life and vibrance to wilt and decay. Not an altogether pleasant idea, but one that is compelling nonetheless.

As you might be able to guess I shot this with my close-up filters (I think it was my trusty +4 on this image) and with my creaky-but-gotta-love-it D200. The seals on that camera are all worn out so I had to be careful about not getting too much rain on it, but it only took a few seconds to get this shot so I don’t think I was in too much danger of damaging anything. I like how the rain made the leaves shine and sparkle even in the overcast light, and the tiny drop rolling down the bottom-right edge of the lower leaf adds a nice bit of motion to the image also.

Sometimes I’ll take pictures like this and then return to the same spot a day later and it always amazes me how much things can change in just a short amount of time. It’s good motivation for me to take pictures and not let my camera sit on the shelf, because I sometimes just don’t realize or have an appreciation for just how quickly time does indeed fly, how little of it we have, and how precious even simple moments like this really are.

This was a photo that came about entirely because of limitations including, but not limited to, the following:

• I was shooting with my super old D200, which meant I had to keep the ISO low on this rainy, overcast day.
• D200 has no Live View and certainly no flip-out screen. I had to hold the camera low to the ground and literally could not see what I was shooting when I took this picture.
• My particular D200 has some kind of glitch which causes the camera to not close down the aperture about 1 out of every 4 shots. So if you shoot at f/4 you’ll get a lot of shots that are way, way overexposed because the lens was open to f/1.8
• Because of the limitations of my gear I shot this and other pictures at f/1.8 knowing I couldn’t rely on the camera to reliably stop the aperture down
• It was rainy and my D200 has cracks in the rubber grips and seals all over the place. I had to be extra careful with it or I’d need a whole new camera in a hurry.

I haven’t shot with my D200 in a long time and it was fun to dust it off and go out to take some pictures, and even though I prefer my much newer full-frame D750 there’s just something special about using old gear and working within the limitations it has to offer. I like the feel of this particular camera, and the chunkiness and sense of durability I get from using its controls. Not having access to things like Live View forces a photographer to come up with interesting solutions to photographic challenges, and something about the whole process of taking this and other photos made me slow down and really consider the basics of photography a bit more.

As to the shot you see here, just out of the frame on the right side is Theta Pond and far in the distance you might even be able to see the red brick of my building on campus which is just a way of saying that there’s nothing inherently special about the location of this picture. If the sun were out the middle portion of the shot would have been severely overexposed, but the clouds, rain, and leaves on the ground all came together to form kind of a somber, contemplative scene that I found quite pleasant. Since I couldn’t use Live View and didn’t want to get my work clothes all muddy I basically held the camera to my eye from a crouching position, locked focus, and then put the camera down on a brick outcropping and just shot several pictures not knowing at all how they would turn out. It was a weird way of going about taking photos and nothing I would actually recommend, but I like how things turned out.

The hum and rhythm of cicadas is a noise that used to bother me when I was a kid, but now is such a part of autumn life that I kind of miss it if it’s not there in the evenings. However, while the sound of these aural insects is not hard to miss it’s the bugs themselves which can sometimes be a bit more elusive. It’s not uncommon to find evidence of their presence on trees, bushes, and the sides of buildings but for some reason I don’t actually see the cicadas themselves very often if ever. It was because of this that I didn’t really think much of the subject of this photo when I walked past a bush across the street from my building at OSU, and almost missed a good photo opportunity in the process.

When I saw this little guy hanging out in the late afternoon sunshine I thought it was just another outer shell but, because it was so large, I thought I might as well take a picture of it anyway. When I got back to my office I grabbed my D200, 50mm lens, and set of close-up filters and walked back across the street (along with two friends from my office who just happened to be going in the same direction) to snap a photo or two. As soon as we got to the cicada shell one of them pointed out that it was, in fact, not a shell at all but a living cicada still very much ensconced in his existing exoskeleton.

Thankfully this cicada wasn’t too interested in moving around, and didn’t seem to mind that I was shoving a giant camera in his face, so I was able to spend a few minutes moving around and changing close-up filters to get just the shot I was looking for. I initially shot with my +10 filter at f/8 (and ISO 200, all the while being thankful for good light since the D200 is pretty bad at ISO 800 or higher) and got some shots that, while kind of neat, were honestly just a bit too close to be interesting. Soon I switched to my +4 filter at f/4 and took several shots like the one you see here, but from different angles and knowing I would likely need to crop in a bit.

While I was photographing I started to get a little frustrated with one of the limitations of this old camera, in that there are only 11 autofocus points. I really wanted to nail focus on the eye, but focus-and-recompose is out of the question when working at such close distances because the depth of field is so shallow. If I was using my D7100 or D750 I could have just selected an AF point that was right on top of the eye but on my D200 when I did that same thing it invariably resulted in a poor overall composition which was why the ending shot needed to be cropped a bit more than I would have liked.

In the end I was thrilled to get to see a cicada up close and get a decent shot of it too. As my wife said, “that bug has one ugly mug!” and I certainly agree with that assessment. If one landed on me I’d probably freak out and shoo it away as quickly as possible, but it was fun to spend a few minutes getting a close look at such a fascinatingly-designed insect.

When I was a kid I clearly remember my mom saying “Good morning sunshine!” to me and my siblings, particularly on school mornings when we would wander upstairs bleary-eyed and wishing we could go back to bed for just a few more minutes of sleep. That phrase has always stuck with me over the years and, come to think of it, I need to start saying it to my own two boys. Who knows…maybe they will remember it when they’re older too :)

On my bike ride home from work near the end of July I passed a couple sunflowers at the base of a hill near a retirement home, and made a mental note to return to the same spot the following morning in order to get a couple shots of the flowers as the sun was rising. It was kind of the same idea as last week’s photo, but this time it was entirely intentional and I clearly knew in advance where I wanted to go, what I wanted to photograph, and how I wanted the composition to look. Sort of. And I’ll get to that in a second.

First, for a bit of context, here’s the scene:

Not much to look at, right? I think that’s why I biked past this little grove so many times without really noticing anything. But if photography is taught me anything over the years, it’s that I really do need to slow down, look harder, and really see the picture opportunities right before my eyes. So that’s what I tried to do, and when I came back this way the very next morning I had a clear idea of what I wanted to capture, where the light would be coming from, what elements I wanted to use in the composition, etc.

I spent a few minutes wading through the tall grass taking pictures of the flower on the far right from a variety of angles, and I was specifically trying to get a picture with the flower on the left and the sky poking out through the trees in the background. Here’s my favorites from the shoot, as seen in my Lightroom library.

I eventually settled on #6 (you can see dim gray numbers behind the thumbnails) because I liked how the discrete elements of the composition came together to form a cohesive whole: the sky in the top-right corner, the bright yellow flower in the middle, and the green leaves behind it which created a nice sense of contrast as well. Originally I thought #5 was my image of choice but the more I looked at it the more I realized that the streak of blue sky blended in a bit too much with the yellow petals, whereas #6 created a much stronger composition and the green background really served to highlight the subject.

It was a fun exercise in finding a picture opportunity that was dulled just a bit when I got back on my bike and found my shorts and legs covered in hundreds of small little burs from the grass. I spent the rest of the day picking them off but it was a small price to pay for a picture I really liked :)