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

I shot this photo after work in November 2016 while walking to my car (not my bike. it was chilly that day!) and happened to see a patch of colorful leaves on the ground which looked like it could make for a halfway decent photo opportunity. And really, that’s about all this is. It’s a picture I would consider not especially good, but halfway decent. I like it but wouldn’t frame it, and I think it’s OK but could be better. So why am I posting it here on Weekly Fifty? Because this picture represents what my blog is all about: growth, progress, and forcing me to keep taking pictures even if I don’t think they will be all that noteworthy.

However…

The more I look at this image the more I actually do think it bears a little closer examination especially due to the shallow depth of field which resulted from shooting a close subject (the curled leaf in the center) at a wide aperture of f/1.8. As I have said repeatedly here on this blog I generally don’t like shooting wide open especially with close subjects because the depth of field goes from an interesting compositional choice to a blurry distraction, but I actually think it works quite well here for one reason: it creates a sense of motion. Even though there was virtually no wind when I took the picture, the blurred foreground and background combined with the bent and twisted nature of the various leaves and grasses imparts a sense of kinetic energy into the picture which I kind of like. Then again, perhaps this is all just in my mind and I’m imagining something where nothing actually exists, but when I look at the picture now it’s hard for me to not envision leaves actually swirling around like you might see on a crisp autumn day.

I’ve noticed a theme developing with some of the pictures I take when out walking around, often on campus during a short break, which is less about the types of images I’m recording with my camera and more about the way in which I find them. This picture is the most recent example but I’ve seen it plenty of other times too, and the idea is that I often find photographic opportunities on the latter part of a walk. And I’m not talking some kind of milti-mile hike here, but just a short 5-minute walk around Theta Pond on the OSU campus. During the first few minutes I often look for picture opportunities but, and it’s weird how often this happens, I don’t usually find any. I end up just walking around looking at the trees, flowers, ducks, squirrels, and taking it all in for a little while. (Which, I might add, is one of the nice parts about working on a college campus.) I often snap some pictures here and there but rarely does anything strike me as interesting, creative, or…good.

However near the end of one of these walks as I get close to my building I have often found myself noticing more than I did at the outset, and this is when I get the shots I’m most happy with. This week’s picture, for instance, was taken just across the street from my building after I had walked around the pond and was headed back to my office. I saw a cluster of short, thick grass by the edge of a sidewalk and realized it would make an interesting picture. I crouched down low with my D7100 and a +4 filter attached to the 50mm lens and took a few photos with the grass severely backlit by the overhead sun, and was super happy with the result.

I think what’s happening here is that during the first part of one of these 5-minute walks my brain is just starting to clear itself from the tasks on which I have been concentrating and I find myself less open to artistic or creative forms of expression. After a little while of ambling around and just being a part of nature I think my mind starts to reset itself and by the end I am much more likely to see subjects, colors, and details that I had entirely missed at the outset. Of course all this is anecdotal and a conclusion cannot be drawn from just one person’s experience, but it does make me wonder about whether this is a legitimate phenomenon.

So my advice to you, readers of this blog, is the next time you feel yourself eagerly searching for a photo opportunity but coming up empty-handed, put your camera away and just exist for a little while–outdoors in nature if at all possible. Let your mind relax, wander, and soak in the sights around you and then pick up your camera and see what you can find. I can’t say it will work for sure, but I do think it might and I’d be eager to hear your thoughts about all this in the comments below :)

This image is quite a departure from the close-up shots I was posting during the final months of 2016, and it’s been kind of fun to take those filters out of my bag and force myself to sue my 50mm lens as just a plain ol’ lens once again without any additional modifications. I shot this with my D7100 when I spotted the vehicle while biking through campus on the way to work a little while ago and really liked how the morning sun was casting such a nice glow on the car while keeping the whole scene overall somewhat subdued. I tried to keep in mind a few things I learned when taking this shot of a Tesla Model S but ran into a couple of issues that made this a little different.

1. Lighting…or the fact that there simply wasn’t much. It meant I had to shoot at f/1.8 which I normally don’t do, but it worked out fine here since I needed a shallow depth of field for the type of shot I was going for.

2. Crop vs. Full Frame. I shot the Tesla with my D750 which meant that I could get much closer to the vehicle and, as a result, get a shallower depth of field. I shot this off road racer with my D7100 so I had to stand back a bit farther in order to fit the whole thing in the frame so my DOF was a little wider.

3. Shooting position. I tried using the viewfinder to get this shot but ended up literally laying down on the ground and shooting in Live View. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

4. Camera shake. Since the lighting was so dim I had to use a slow shutter speed which meant the image was most likely going to be blurry. I wanted to keep the ISO low (I used 200) because I knew I would be doing a lot of editing in Lightroom, and I also dialed in -2EV for exposure compensation so the overall scene would be a bit dark but the highlights would be properly exposed. This allowed me to raise the exposure and bring out details in the shadows while maintaining the integrity of the bright spots on the car.

I used a 2-second timer and set my camera to take 3 shots with half-second intervals because I figured that would increase my chances of getting a blur-free image. And for the most part it worked, though if you zoom in super close you’ll notice that the lettering on the car is just a bit blurry. Oops :) I ended up with an exposure of 50mm, f/1.8, 1/6 second, ISO 200 and it really was just dumb luck that the shot turned out as clear as it did.

My editing on this image was a bit more heavy-handed than usual, and you can see the original here:

I purposely kept the door in the frame because I liked the sense of context it added, and went so far as to remove the two signs behind the car (albeit in Lightroom, not Photoshop, because I didn’t really care enough to do a pixel-perfect job on the Reserved Parking sign) which I normally avoid altogether. All in all this was a fun image to take and edit, and who knows…maybe one day I’ll get to see this car actually driving around instead of just sitting there :)

I thought this image of a red yucca flower might be a fun way to ring in the new year here on Weekly Fifty. It’s not a lily despite its similar appearance, because what you’re looking at is a very big image of a very small flower. I shot this using my D750, 50mm lens, and +10 close-up filter (f/8, 1/250, ISO 1400) which means the actual object is only about the size of a dime. What I found somewhat fascinating about this particular plant, other than all the beauty and detail contained in such a small entity, was that it was literally right outside my building at work. I took this picture on an unremarkable day outside an unremarkable brick office on the campus at Oklahoma State University. Before shooting the picture you see here I had walked around for about 10 minutes looking at trees, flowers, leaves, people, bicycles, and other subjects that I thought would make for interesting pictures but came back without any noteworthy images. Not that I took zero photos, but just that none of them were all that compelling to me.

When I walked past this yucca plant (which has been the subject of a few other Weekly Fifty images over the years) I was struck not just by the flowers but by the rest of the colors in the scene. I think that’s probably what made me want to share this image here instead of letting it gather digital dust in my Lightroom library, and it’s something I want to keep in mind with other images too. There are basically three swaths of color in the frame: green on the left, crimson in the middle, and dull brown or purple on the right. Initially my idea was to photograph the flower in such a way that the deep red color would stand out against the red brick of the building behind it, but those resulted in images that seemed too plain and uninteresting. Then I re-framed the shot so the flower was in front of a sea of green (which are other bushes and the leaves of a golden rain tree) but that didn’t work either since the flower kind of appeared to be hovering awkwardly in the middle of the frame. This one works the best, in my opinion, because the green and burnt umber tones show that the flower is part of a much richer context than just a field or just a building. As an example, here’s the same flower (image is mostly unedited, with just a few basic color tweaks) with my building showing much more prominently in the background:

It just doesn’t look as interesting, and the flower punches through the middle of the frame without much else to help weave it into the larger tapestry of the image as a whole. The cross-hatches of brick and mortar in the background create an awkward sense of angular geometry which contrasts severely with the rich texture and curves of the flower. In short, this image just doesn’t work–at least not in the same way that the top one does.

So anyway, with all that being said..happy new year to you! I hope your 2017 is off to a bright start and things are only looking better. Cheers, God bless you, and here’s to another turn around the sun :)

And here we are, the final photo of Weekly Fifty for the 2016 year. I’m posting this one in particular for a couple of reasons, and it’s designed to be somewhat of a companion piece to last week’s image. First off, you might note that its composition bears a striking resemblance to last week’s image in that the photo is horizontally composed with the subject along the right-hand third. In both images I am standing below and looking up, and there is a vast expanse of sky on the left side. Both pictures involve the sun as a key element even though in last week’s you see the effects of its light and not the solar object itself. And both pictures, I hope, present a sense of awe, wonder, and possibly even inspiration. They did for me, anyway, and I dare to think they just might do the same for you the viewer.

Last week’s image was titled “Rise” and this one is “Set” not just because the sun is on its way down but because the year is coming to a close. I shot this in the middle of October but have saved it until now because it represents, to me, a sense of closure while also a sense of hope and even anticipation for the year ahead. Now, it’s also important to remember that this is just a simple picture I snapped one day while walking around Theta Pond and I’m not trying to change the world or anything like that. The image is not fancy and did not require special effort, and I’m not trying to make a big statement or anything. I just thought it would be nice to use as an end-of-year photo and I hope it serves that purpose decently enough.

Keen readers might see echoes of similar sunburst-style images that I have posted in the past and while this is not meant to be a retread of familiar territory, I do think it is worth revisiting a certain style, subject, or type of photography in order to practice and get better at it. Ever since I learned how to take pictures with starburst patterns it is something I have enjoyed repeating and this is yet another example. I tried a couple different ways of composing the image and moving around so the sun was placed at different spots, but I kept coming back to this one where it was peeking out from where the branch extends from the main trunk. I can’t exactly say why other than it just seems to fit nicely, and I like that the sky is somewhat clear in the area surrounding the sun and darker on the left side with the overhanging cypress branches. I shot this at f/11 to get several rays to appear without being overwhelming, and just like last week the only major adjusting I did (which turned out to be quite minor) was to adjust black levels and saturation.

And with that I big a fond farewell to 2016 and raise a glass of Mt. Dew, my drink of choice, to a happy, healthy, and productive 2017. It’s going to be a fun ride, folks. I can’t wait to see you there :)