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

For this picture we’re going to go back to the basics with a fairly simple composition and some tried-and-true photographic techniques. No close-up filters, no long exposures, no full-frame-vs-crop tangents…just a horizontal photo with a single subject on the right-hand third dividing line. And like many other images I post here on Weekly Fifty, this one almost didn’t happen and would not exist at all if I had not brought my camera to work with me on a crisp Tuesday morning. There was even a moment before I left the house that I had my D7100 in hand and was about to put it on the shelf because I knew I had a busy day ahead of me, but decided I might as well bring it anyway just in case I happened to come across a photographic opportunity. Little did I know that such an opportunity would present itself before I even got to work :)

As I rounded the west side of Boone Pickens Stadium and turned south onto Monroe avenue I saw, about a block away to the east, this cross rising from the top of the University Parish of Saint John the Baptist. (You can see, using Google Maps Street View, the spot where I was standing to get the photo.) The sun was just starting to peek over the horizon which cast a nice orange glow on the clouds, and served to create a fantastic backdrop for this backlit monolith. I knew I had just a few minutes in which to take a picture, partly because I did not want to be late for work but also because I knew that the sunrise would soon be over and the deep oranges would be entirely washed out.

I parked my bike in the empty Gallagher-Iba lot and ran over to Hester street to take the picture. I shot it at f/4 along with my usual auto-ISO setting which resulted in a shutter speed of 1/180 and ISO 220. I know photos like this are best when taken at the lowest possible ISO and if my camera was going to go past 400 I would have shot in manual or just disabled Auto ISO, but as things turned out I was quite happy with the exposure my camera gave me. This is also one of those instances in which shooting with a 50mm lens on a crop sensor camera turned out to be a benefit since I didn’t really want the rest of the church, or the powerlines in front of it, in the shot at all and they would have been unavoidable if I was using my full-frame D750.

This didn’t require much postprocessing either, and what you see here is pretty much exactly what things looked like on the morning I made the image. I dialed down the black level to get a monochromatic silhouette, and adjusted the saturation just a bit, but otherwise this image hasn’t been changed much at all. Not that Lightroom adjustments are a bad thing, but in general I like to use a style of editing that gets the final image as close as possible to what I saw in my mind’s eye when I took the shot, rather than creating some kind of hyper-real HDR-style image that couldn’t actually exist in real life.

Finally, it is no coincidence that I am posting this image a few days before Christmas. In a few days we will celebrate the birth of our savior Jesus Christ, and while the image of a newborn baby wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger is certainly worth treasuring and pondering, as Mary did many years ago, it’s also important to remember the reason He was born in the first place. It was so He could take the punishment for our sins all the way to the cross, where he would die not for anything He did but for everything we have done. You can’t have Christmas without the cross; the two are forever intertwined and the one leads directly to the other. So in a sense, this image of Jesus’ instrument of crucifixion could be said to be the best Christmas greeting I could offer to you, my readers. Merry Christmas to all of you, and may you reflect on both the manger and the cross now and throughout the new year.

This picture has been a long time in coming, and though I didn’t exactly enjoy the process of taking it I am glad to have had the experience. It serves as a companion piece, or rather a counterpoint, to a picture I posted in May of this year where a man was doing his best to spread the gospel and save souls but using a much different and, I would argue, more effective technique.

Every now and again this man, whom the students have nicknamed Preacher Bob, shows up on campus with a cohort of bible-thumpers and sign-wavers to rile up the student body from the lawn in front of Low Library. You can usually tell when they are around because of the large crowd gathers (and as Dave Piner said, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd) and things can, and often do, get quite hostile. The pattern is similar every time: Bob waves his bible, yells at the students, and generally condemns the student body to the pits of hades for their sinful ways. Usually someone will confront him, as you can see here, and attempt to debate or discuss theological points while quoting scripture, but Bob remains resolute and will hear none of it. Some students yell and jeer, others start chants to overpower the sound of his voice, and at the end of the day I very much doubt that any progress is made by anyone involved.

All this activity makes for a very uncomfortable situation, but that’s exactly why I was glad to have had the experience of taking this photograph. I stood at a distance observing the scene for a few minutes and then realized that this would be a good picture-taking opportunity if only I could work up the gumption to walk out there and start snapping photos. So I did just that. I put my D7100 in 3D tracking mode because my usual focus-and-recompose method wouldn’t work with how much Bob was walking around, and walked over to the knoll from which he was casting aspersions on the students surrounding him.

There are rules when Preacher Bob or his counterparts come to campus, the most important one being that you are not allowed to get physically close to any of them. I believe this has to do with prior incidents involving physical violence, but in any case I knew that I wanted to separate Bob from the rest of the people visually so I shot wide open at f/1.8 in order to get a shallow depth of field–or as shallow as I could, given the circumstances. I initially tried standing in front of him to get his face in the shot, but wasn’t happy with the composition so I moved behind him and tried to capture his emotion through body language. I specifically waited until he was waving his hand in an accusatory manner at the student he was talking to. (Whose shirt, incidentally, reads “Brothers Under Christ, 2016 Dad’s Day, Oklahoma State University. I honestly think this student was just seeking clarification and not out to egg on the Preacher.) I did this so I could give the viewer a sense of Bob’s body language as well as the student’s emotional response since you can see his face and half-outstretched hand. Since I couldn’t show the face of Bob and the face of this student at the same time I erred on the side of the student and tried to let Bob’s body language and boldface t-shirt convey a message to the viewer instead about the type of interpersonal interaction that was taking place here.

I was only here for a few minutes but I left feeling slightly uncomfortable, and also glad to have had a few years of practice using my camera so I wasn’t trying to figure out buttons or controls in the middle of what could have been a very volatile situation. I do believe that deep down Bob does believe in what he is doing, and a part of me admires and respects him for having the courage to face off against hundreds of angry and flustered students…but only a very small part. These students are angry because Bob and his kind intentionally stir controversy and discontent, instead of sowing seeds of the Gospel that will take root in fertile soil. I have seen Bob and many others like him over the years and rarely are they interested in having sincere, honest dialog with students in order to help them wade through what is often a spiritually challenging time in their lives. I’d much rather they took the route of the Gideons and I am fairly certain they would be far more effective as a result.

This photo was directly inspired by my cousin Beth who recently (well, as of the time I write this) uploaded her 2000th image to Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BLcFFARAh0p/

I begin almost every day with the same routine: get up long before my wife and kids, shower, spend about 5-10 minutes in quiet prayer, eat breakfast, and then play a video game or read a book until the rest of the family wakes up. On a quiet morning in mid-October I found myself looking out the glass door on the south side of our house as I prayed, and in what was kind of a strange moment for me I asked the Lord for inspiration. I had been feeling a bit down, photographically speaking, and was having trouble finding motivation to get out and take pictures. It was only an hour later that I saw Beth’s post on Instagram and it was just the spark for which I was looking. I thought to myself “That image is so beautiful, I want to go take one like it.” So I set out later that day with my D750, 50mm lens, +10 and +4 close-up filters, and went to take a picture like the one I had seen earlier.

The result of my brief photographic excursion is this image of a Black Cotton flower which, ironically, has very little in common with Beth’s picture. It was hers that sent me on the journey though, and that’s what matters. I have tried, mostly in vain, for years to get a close-up picture of an insect like a bee or butterfly resting atop a flower and you will note that I still have yet to succeed. But going out with that goal in mind, sort of like my recent picture of a couple of bikes, helped focus my mind and give me a clear idea of what to aim for with my camera. Before I shot this picture I took a few others of a small pepper bush and a diamond delight plant at the Price Family Garden and was not extraordinarily pleased with the results I was getting. I was about to leave the garden altogether when I saw this pink flower cradled between deep purple leaves and knew that it was going to make for a good picture.

I knew my +10 filter would put me too close and remove any sense of context, so I used my +4 and shot at f/5.6 to get the flower in focus but leave the foreground and background nice and blurry. My goal here was to get a sense that this flower is nestled, almost hidden, among the rest of the plant and that the purple fringes surrounding the crimson petals would look like the fingers of a hand delicately holding it in place. I was very pleased with how sharp the final image looked and didn’t use much post-processing on it either, preferring instead to let the image stand on its own.

Beth, if you’re reading this thanks for the ideas you constantly send my way. And to everyone who might be reading this and looking for ideas and inspiration, I hope you find it one way or another and that right soon :)

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 :)