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

This photo honestly took me by surprise just a little bit. On a warm Sunday afternoon in July my wife and I were at the local botanic gardens with our two boys and as they played with one of the exhibits (some kind of hand-operated water pump connected to a trough and an underground storage tank) and we wandered around talking while looking at the local flora. It was one of those lazy, relaxing kind of days where there is no real agenda other than to get out and enjoy nature and we wanted to take advantage before it got too sunny. Soon our boys migrated to a spot within a grove of trees containing a few interactive art pieces to play with, so we went with and played along while snapping a couple pictures just for the fun of it.

As we were getting ready to head back to the car I spotted this tiny winged woodland lady frolicking among the branches, and crept in close to get a better look. She was kind enough to hover silently while I drew near with my D750 + 50mm lens, and turned a few pirouettes while I snapped some pictures. I didn’t want to disturb her lest she cry out for Oberon or Puck to come to her rescue but I did linger long enough get about a dozen photos before retreating to the outside world. Her slow twirling made it somewhat difficult to get the images I was looking for, and what I ended up with is actually not at all what I intended at the outset. I thought it would be fun to get a picture of her on the left side of the frame while also angled slightly so as to possibly show a bit of movement, and while I did in fact get that picture I did not really like it much:

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Looking at the photos in Lightroom I realized that her slightly skewed composure made her look strangely distorted, and the extrusion of this two-dimensional shape in order to add depth only served to make such a picture look strange and even a bit disconcerting. I had about a dozen images just like this one but fortunately I also managed to capture one–and only one–of this little lady directly from the side which is what I ended up using as this week’s featured photo. I shot it at f/4 which, thanks to my full-frame camera, gave me the equivalent depth of field as if I had shot this at f/2.8 on a crop sensor camera and resulted in a very pleasing composition overall.

I thought it was cool to see this little scene in the gardens on that day, and it made me think of how we often decorate Christmas trees with similar trinkets and tchotchkes but put them away once the season passes. Why do we do that? Why not add a bit of life and inspire a sense of wonder in the world around us by adding special charms like this to our yards during the rest of the year? It seems like a fun activity to do, and I think I’m going to try to get on this with my own kiddos and find ways of adding a little extra spark of life to the natural world outside our house and the world around us.

Ah, the classic sunstar-from-behind-a-building photo. It’s one I’ve done many times before and yet it continues to be the type of picture I really enjoy revisiting. When I took this I had no special intention of making the particular picture you see here but I’m quite happy with how it all turned out. At the time I shot this I was running an errand at work and, as I often do, I brought my camera with me. On this occasion it was my D750 + 50mm combo which I knew would give me a little wider field of view than my D7100, so when I saw the sun poking out from behind the stairwell on a parking garage I thought it might make for a slightly more interesting photo than I would normally get with my crop sensor D7100. For me the biggest consideration here was of a compositional nature: there were three elements at play, and I had to decide how I wanted them to all interact within the frame. The parking garage, the sky, and the sun all come together to form a cohesive whole, and I had to figure out where I would stand and point my camera in order to get the shot I was looking for. (FYI, nothing here was cropped. What you see is what I got.)

Ironically the first thing I decided was the aperture of my lens; when shooting a starburst like this you need to stop your lens down quite a bit to get the light to make that cool star pattern which usually requires something around f/11 to f/16. I set my camera to f/13 and moved around until I could just barely see the sun poking out from behind the roof of the stairwell, which is key for a shot like this. If you point your camera straight at the sun you will just get a giant overexposed blob, so you have to get just a bit of the sun peeking out from behind something else like a tree or building.

After deciding my aperture I tried a couple different places to stand that would still show a bit of the sun and took a grand total of five images from slightly different angles. The sky was actually quite overcast which meant I was able to pull out a great deal of blue color detail in Lightroom that would have normally been way, way too overexposed to salvage and I also used the Healing brush to take out about a half dozen little brown spots on the concrete side of the structure.

To me this picture is somewhat of an exercise in how to convey a sense of size or create a particular mood, as well as a reminder of how much I have grown as a photographer in the last several years. If I had made this image in 2012 I would have taken 50 shots from all sorts of angles and tried all kinds of different settings, but here I only took five and it was over in less than a minute. These days I have a much better idea of how to control my camera to get the shot I want, and I try to avoid taking dozens and dozens of photos of the same scene to get that one perfect shot. There is no such thing as the perfect image, and instead I try to get photos that I like and with which I am well pleased, and then go back to my life. That’s what happened here and I hope you like this shot too :)

When I was a kid my family used to spend a week each summer at a lake near Brainerd, Minnesota, playing at the beach, catching turtles with paddleboats and fishing nets, going tubing behind my uncle Paul’s boat, and staying up talking with relatives around the campfire. For some reason I distinctly remember the sight of dragonflies on those vacations, and when I was a kid I was absolutely fascinated at these strange anachronistic creatures that looked like they were ripped right from prehistoric eras and placed squarely in our modern-day world. I remember seeing them buzzing around us when were out on the boat or sitting in tubes near the beach and being at once amazed and horrified by their strange design.

Nearly 30 years later when my family was on vacation in Kansas a few weeks ago my brother Phil asked if I wanted to go bug hunting with him, armed with our cameras and close-up lenses. I gladly agreed and we set off near the beach at Milford Lake to go see what we could find among the foliage. He had a big advantage since he was using a 55-200mm lens with a +2 filter attached (I think. Or it might have been a +4.) that let him stay farther away from various bugs and insects but still take good shots. Far more, in fact, than I was able to get with my 50mm lens :) We were surrounded by not only dragonflies but bees, flies, beetles, and myriad other bugs but the problem, I soon realized, was that whenever I would get close enough to one of these little creatures it would scamper away by the time I could get things in focus and fire off a few shots. We were only bug hunting for maybe 20 minutes but I spent much more of that time chasing away insects than taking their pictures, and it was quite a learning experience for me in that regard!

After a little while Phil pointed out the dragonfly you see in this week’s image, and after taking some pictures he stepped aside and I eagerly moved in to see what I could get. I was using my +10 filter which meant I had to be about three inches away, but this gold-colored dragonfly didn’t really seem to mind too much. In fact I don’t think he minded anything at all, judging by the look on his face :) I shot this at f/8, ISO 160, 1/180 second which was more than fast enough given that the insect wasn’t moving at all, and much smaller than f/8 would have given me a depth of field that was simply too shallow. As you can probably tell by the slate of recent pics here on Weekly Fifty I’m really enjoying these close-up filters, and if you don’t have some yet I’d highly recommend getting a set. They’re very cheap and can introduce you to a whole new world of photographic possibilities!

This photo came about somewhat by accident, and not really how I intended, but led to a series of images of which I am rather fond nonetheless. I have posted some pictures over the years involving magnolia trees, which are quite prevalent here in this part of Oklahoma, and the beauty of their flowers never stops being amazing to me. I hope, then, that you won’t mind yet another photo (or two or three) of the same subject :)

When I shot this picture I was on a short walk and wasn’t really looking for an image quite like what you see, but I did know I wanted to capture a magnolia flower somehow using my D7100 and a close-up filter. (I think might have been either a +4 or a +10 but can’t remember which.) Not 30 seconds into the walk I came across this flower which was just starting to emerge, and as I took a few shots I specifically framed the subject so it was being blocked a bit on the left-hand side by one of its own massive petals. I wanted to create a scene almost as if the viewer is peeking in on the beginning of something fascinating not unlike when a baby raptor emerges from its egg in the original Jurassic Park. Though hopefully this flower is much more benign.

I thought the image was decent but kept on looking around for something…different. On another tree I spotted this flower which was much farther along in its progression:

For this image I removed the filter so I could get a little more context for the flower. I wanted to see some of the petals and surrounding scenery which wasn’t really possible with a close-up filter attached. I shot from a low angle because I thought it would be more appropriate to see this flower reaching, stretching, lifting high into the sky like Andy Dufresne at the end of Shawshank. (Though ironically, that scene was shot from above in kind of the opposite fashion. Hmm. Perhaps I need to re-think my technique.) It made no sense to use a filter on the second image because it would have severely restricted my field of view and given the viewer no sense of context at all, and I liked the idea of showing the petals opening wide as the ball of pistils raised the anthers high almost like a chorus of worshippers praising God on a Sunday morning. In his gospel Luke recounts a scene in which Jesus tells the religious leaders of the day that if his disciples are not allowed to speak, the rocks and stones around them will cry out with praises to the Lord. I don’t know if they had magnolia trees in Israel back then, but it sure looks to me like that’s what is happening here in this picture :)

As I rounded the tree I came upon one final scene that shows the progression of a magnolia flower, and even though the beauty and glory has faded there is still much to be seen.

The anthers are withered, the pistils are faltering, and yet despite the impending sense of loss and decay there is hope to be found here as the flower has served its purpose, and in its death there lives hope: inside the ball of pistils are dozens of bright red seeds only beginning to take form, and in a few months what was once a flower will be transformed into a thick green shell which will house them until they are fully mature. After that the shell itself will wither and die, exposing the seeds which may take root and turn into majestic trees of their own someday.

I wasn’t expecting to capture all this on a single 10-minute walk one warm May afternoon, but that’s the nice thing about photography. You never know what you’re gonna get.

Alright, here you have it. This photo right here…this is the reason I bought a set of close-up filters. Every time I have seen a shot like this over the past several years I have wanted to get one of my own, but never had the proper equipment to make it happen. Certainly any one of my cameras could get this shot, even my old D200, but there’s no way to get a picture like this without using some type of macro equipment. The subject is just too small, and taking a picture with a normal lens and cropping it in post does not at all yield the same results as simply getting very close to the subject. However after getting my close-up filters and trying a few experiments I knew a shot like this was possible, which then meant I had to find a way to make it actually happen.

What you are seeing here are the anthers at the end of the filaments on a flower. (It’s some kind of lily, I think, though I’m not certain.) I found this, as I do so many of my Weekly Fifty pictures, on the campus of Oklahoma State University as I was out running an errand one day in late May. I figured we must have had some flowers on campus that would allow for this type of image but for a few weeks I had been mostly unsuccessful in locating any, until I cam across this one near the south side of our student union. There was a bit of a breeze so it made focusing a little tricky, and I ended up mostly just moving myself forward and backward as I snapped the shutter in order to get the picture I was hoping for. Even at f/8 I knew the depth of field would be so shallow as to be almost uncontrollable, and autofocus wasn’t helping much because of the way close-up filters degrade its accuracy along with the light wind causing its own set of problems.

I kept at it though, and after shooting the flower from one side I scooted over and tried a different angle while finally resulted in the image you see here. I hope I’m not being conceited when I say how pleased I am with the picture and the way it turned out–it’s not often that an image comes across exactly how I picture it in my mind, but that’s precisely what happened in this particular instance. I like the clear, distinct color palette and the sharpness of the foremost anther, and I like how you can clearly see a context for the subject too. Going much wider on the aperture would have resulted in a depth of field that would have likely obscured too many background elements and made it well-nigh impossible to get the one single anther in focus anyway.

I’m excited to keep using these filters and maybe one day get my hands on a true macro lens to play with too. It sure would be fun :)