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

I must confess that no matter how I tried, I just couldn’t quite capture this scene how I envisioned it in my mind. A few years ago the Hastings in our town closed down, most likely due to mounting competition from online retailers and the Best Buy that opened up a few miles down the road, and ever since the building at the corner of Hall of Fame and Main Street has remained vacant despite being what I would assume is a fairly nice piece of commercial real estate. Not much has happened there in the time since, but this fall a pop-up flower-and-pumpkin outfit just sort of showed up one day and whenever I bike past it on my way to or from work it’s nice to see all the colors of the season that bring so much life to what’s really nothing more than an old parking lot. On my way home recently I saw that a pumpkin-man had been constructed at the edge of the property and I knew right away that it would be a really cool photo opportunity.

A few days later I returned to the scene on my way to work as the sun was just starting to peek out on the horizon, and armed with my D750 and 50mm lens I was determined to get a picture that would capture the essence of the scene. Unfortunately nothing I did really sealed the deal for me, and no matter what angle of view I shot from I just couldn’t find a compelling way to show the pumpkin creature set against the backdrop of flowers and tables beneath the yellow canopy. This is the best I was able to come up with and believe me I tried, having shot the scene while sitting, standing, and crouching low from various different vantage points in the general area. If I got much closer you couldn’t see enough of the background, but much farther and the subject wasn’t clear. I shot from straight on but it just wan’t all that interesting, and on and on. In the end I kind of resigned myself to the shot I was able to get and I might revisit the scene (I mean, I go past it every day) in the coming days to see if I’m missing something. As it stands I’m using this image here on Weekly Fifty despite its shortcomings as a reminder that sometimes things just don’t work out, but the point is to keep trying and continue learning so you have a greater chance of getting the shot next time :)

It seems like no matter how often I’m convinced that I know and understand a given principle of photography, a situation comes around that shows me I really don’t know what I’m talking about at all. Case in point: this week’s picture, which I shot with my D7100, 50mm lens, and +4 close-up filter. (A set of gear that by now many of you are probably starting to recognize quite often!) I shot this when my friend Stacy and I were walking around Theta Pond one afternoon right before OSU’s annual homecoming celebration, and I had my camera with me even though I didn’t really plan on taking any actual photos. We were just out on a short walk to get the blood flowing after being in the office all day, and as we rounded the north side of the pond we saw these tiny little orange lights wrapped around the guard rail of one of the footbridges. I stopped, looked at the scene, and decided I would try and have a go at photographing it.

My first attempt was without the close-up filter, and you can see the results below. It’s not that the shot was all that bad, but there’s not a clear subject on which to focus and overall the composition is just too busy to be pleasing to the eye.

I mean, I guess you could say this one works but the focal point–the orange bulb two-thirds of the way down from the top–is not easy to distinguish next to the rest of the bulbs even though it is much sharper. The background blur is more distracting than pleasing, and though I suppose I could have cropped in to kind of get closer to the bulb I thought I would have much better luck if I just shot with a close-up filter. So I screwed on the +4 and, like a rank amateur, took a couple shots at f/1.8.

Yikes. This one’s just a giant blurry mess, and while the bulb is clear there is no sense of context whatsoever which makes the scene basically pointless. I don’t know why I keep thinking that shooting close-up images with wide-open apertures is a good idea, but one of these days I’ll learn. And if not I’ll at least have fun trying :) The final image was shot at f/8 which still results in a razor-thin depth of field (though not quite as thin as the f/1.8 image!) but shows a much greater sense of time and place. I had to rest my camera on the railing and use live view to compose the shot, which would have been no problem at all on my D750 with its flip-out screen, but alas I had to make do with the D7100 since that’s what I had with me. And I think it worked out just fine, which is really all that matters in the end.

Sometimes the most interesting images can present themselves in the most unusual or unexpected ways. One morning a few weeks ago I was outside with my two boys after school while waiting for my wife to get off work, and they were getting a little stir crazy inside thanks to the dreary conditions outside. It was one of those overcast, slightly rainy days that doesn’t lend itself immediately to anything particularly fun except for curling up on the sofa with a blanket and a good book. My boys were more interested in running around and jumping off of things, so I figured we might as well go outside and see what we could come up with. My oldest, who is six, grabbed a tennis racket and started whacking the soccer ball while his little brother asked if we could get down the bubble machine we bought earlier this year. I didn’t see the harm in it so I dusted it off, set it on top of my ladder so the bubbles would float around a bit, turned it on, and let the kids go to town. And boy, did they ever :)

As they were running around swatting bubbles with anything they could find, I snatched my D7100 + 50mm lens to see about documenting the occasion. Sadly that particular gear combination is not well suited to taking pictures of two kids running around because the angle of view is so narrow, but I did get some good shots of each of the boys individually as well as one of their friends who saw the commotion and walked over to join in the fun. Because the grass was already somewhat damp from the rain I noticed that the bubbles were settling on it instead of popping right away, which gave me a great opportunity to take a few shots that I don’t normally get the chance to do.

Things were a bit tricky because I had in mind the type of picture I wanted to get, which is very much like what you see here, and doing it involved some maneuvering and contorting on my part thanks to the lack of a tilting screen on the D7100. I found a bubble that was sticking up a bit, put myself in a prone position, and got a couple of decent photos at f/4 and f/2.8. Then because I was satisfied with the results I pushed the throttle all the way to f/1.8 and got some more, and to my surprise ended up with one that was sharp, focused, and almost exactly what I was picturing in my mind. At this point my kids were calling to me and wanting me to put the camera down so I could get back to playing with them, a request with which I happily obliged. Because let’s face it, as fun as it is to take artsy-fartsy photos of bubbles, it’s much better to jump up and down with your two kids who are behind you and actually playing in the bubbles :)

It’s kind of become an annual tradition here on Weekly Fifty for me to post a picture of a garden spider in the fall, but as autumn marched onward and the leaves started to fall I must admit I had to wonder if I was going to get a picture of one of these black and yellow friends this year. Almost without fail one of these shoes up in our yard sometime around Labor Day, spins a big old web, and hangs out for a few days until it moves on to greener pastures.* The fall of 2017 was turning out to be a big of a bust though, and as the weather got a little chillier and the days grew shorter I kind of gave up on the idea of seeing one appear. And then, in an amazing display of arachnid consistency, my kids found this one hanging off the side of our house just like his (her?) forebears in years past.

And just like we always do, my boys and I spent a couple days feeding the spider with crickets and grasshoppers and watching the fascinating intricate display of dexterity as, with each insect we dropped into the web, the spider nimbly bound its prey in a whirlwind of webbing before closing in for the kill. It’s like watching a nature documentary without the television, and it’s a fun way to share a rather singular experience with my two boys who, like most kids their age, are endlessly curious about, and fascinated by, the world around them. After watching this spider capture the grasshopper my oldest, who turned six this summer, turned to me and said “It’s the food chain, daddy.” He went on to explain that the grasshopper had no doubt eaten other things, and now it was food for something else. I was both proud and relieved, since it has never been my intention to put bugs into spider webs in order to be cruel but to demonstrate to my kids that this is how our eight-legged friends survive. And to hear my son explain this back to me was a nice affirmation that something has stuck with him along the way.

Whenever these situations present themselves I always try to find a way to get photographs, and that is often a little tricker than it might seem. After using my close-up filters for so long I had a good idea of what gear I needed to get the shot I was going for here, so after this spider wrapped up the grasshopper I ran inside and grabbed my D750, 50mm lens, and +4 filter. Even though it was near sunset there was still enough light to get a good exposure at f/8, which I knew I would need in order to get a sharp image with a wide depth of field. Shooting at a smaller aperture would have left too much of the image out of focus, and shooting with a +10 filter would be far too close to see what’s really happening.

The shot you see here was taken at f/8, 1/180 second, ISO 5600 and I think it does a good job of showing what is really happening here. I tried a few different angles and also made sure to take the background elements into consideration–by showing the web the viewer is able to get a better sense of context, and by moving myself to position the spider in front of the gray eaves I was able to make the subjects stand out from the background.

Looking back on previous spider pictures I have posted it’s fun to see a progression in my photography, and also get a sense of just how much I still don’t know and have left to learn. And I’m confident that about a year from now I’ll have another opportunity to practice this type of shot.

*or wherever spiders go when they stop showing up. I have no idea :)

When our son turned six earlier this year we decided to buy him a camera, but instead of getting a kid-friendly camera we got him what he calls a real professional camera. You know, the kind for adults like daddy has. He has shown a great interest in taking pictures in the past year or so and we wanted to encourage that by giving him a real camera with real controls that could take real pictures, but at the same time we didn’t want to break the bank in case he broke the camera. Our solution was a Canon Powershot SD450, which was small and light enough to be pocketable but had all the options and controls of an actual camera. Because it is an actual camera, even though it’s not exactly the most current high-tech touchscreen model. And the beauty of the whole situation was that we only paid $25 for it on eBay, and even though it arrived with a couple of scratches and dings he has used it extensively ever since and jumps at the chance to use his “real professional” camera to take pictures of anything and everything he comes across.

He has also figured out how to change settings, turn the flash on and off, record movies, and set a timer for using it on daddy’s tripod. So yeah, you might say that the birthday gift was $25 well spent :)

A few weeks into the school year I asked my kids if they wanted to go on a photo walk with our cameras–me with my D750 + 50mm lens, my older son with his PowerShot, and my youngest with an old film camera (devoid of any actual film but with a flash that still works). They didn’t quite understand the point at first, but as we walked around the neighborhood taking a closer look at the everyday objects all around us the kids got more and more excited about taking pictures of the most boring, mundane things. We went the same way that the kids go when they walk to school so the route was well-traveled, but even so it took us about 45 minutes to walk roughly one mile because of how often they stopped. It was really cool :)

As we neared the end of our Photo Walk I saw this pinecone basically hovering in midair, suspended by only a thin branch which you can’t really see in the picture. I thought it would make for a fun picture, and a nice opportunity to get a super blurry background too. As usual it took a couple of tries for me to get it right, and of course both my kids wanted to get in on the photo action too, and in the end not only do I have a photo I like but a fun story to go along with it.

I’m not sure what all this says about the power of photography and the ability to use it as a connect with others, but there’s probably some kind of nugget buried here that maybe I’ll suss out someday :)