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

Keen readers of this blog might have noticed that each year around this time I post a picture or two of a spider, and if you have been wondering when the 2016 edition of such a photo might show up…well, here you go :) The ones I just linked to were all taken right in my own back yard, and this week’s picture was shot only a few feet away from where I made the backlit image of a spider at night. I guess it just goes to show you how rich and vibrant nature can be even without leaving your own property. Though in this case I must give credit to my wife who actually spotted this year’s spider, and had she not said something I might have knocked its web into oblivion by accident while we were clearing away some shrubs in the yard.

As you might have guessed, one thing that makes this particular spider different from any of the others I have posted is that this time I had my set of close-up filters to play with. I knew a +10 filter would be way too much, and the spider’s body would fill the frame and leave no room for the legs or anything else. A +1 or +2 would probably not do a whole lot, so I set out with my D750, 50mm lens, and +4 filter. The results were fantastic, if you don’t mind me saying so. This is the type of picture I wish I could have gotten for the past three years, and to finally be able to take it was a huge personal victory for me. Looking back on the other images I can clearly see a progression in terms of composition, framing, and lighting and I think one could draw a pretty direct line from those earlier images to this one in terms of an overall learning curve. Not that it’s the end result, mind you, but just another step on what I guess you could call my own photographic journey. Certainly I have a ton left to learn (especially since I don’t even have a true macro lens for shots like this) but this image was nice validation that I am learning more along the way, bit by bit.

This picture was taken on a Sunday morning as we were all getting ready to go to church but we had just a few minutes to spare before loading the kids up in the car. The boys and I went outside to check on the spider, which we had seen and photographed the night before after we fed it a cricket:

Overnight the spider had evidently finished off the cricket and, as this kind of arachnid usually does, kicked the carcass out of the web and subsequently rebuilt any damaged threads. When we went to view it in the morning it was hanging out, literally, on its newly-refreshed web enjoying the sunrise and waiting for an unsuspecting moth or other insect to wander into its silky trap. With the sun peeking over the horizon there was a window of just a few minutes where I knew the spider would be nicely backlit so I took a few dozen shots, some at f/4 and some about two stops smaller, and was quite pleased with the majority of them. In fact the only real problem I had with the photo was choosing which one I liked, and enlisted the help of my wife with her keen eye for color and detail who also helped me decide to crop the picture so the spider is just a bit on the left side.

I tried hard to compose the picture in such a way that the glowing sunlight poking through the trees would serve to frame the spider itself, and I think the end result works out quite well. A few minutes later the sun had risen past the treetops and this particular photographic moment had vanished, but I was glad I could catch it for posterity. In the days after this picture was taken my boys and I continued to keep our garden spider well-fed thanks to a steady diet of crickets and grasshoppers we found in the yard and while it did hang around for a while it eventually went wherever spiders go in the winter. Who knows…maybe it will show up next year for another round of spider pics :)

This week’s picture isn’t so much about capturing beauty, making art, or anything like that. Rather, it’s mostly just an illustration of a photographic principle I have been working on for as long as I have been interested in the medium. Framing and composition are two of the fundamental elements of picture-taking, and I shot this picture of two bicycles specifically as a personal exercise in order to work on these concepts. But first, as I sometimes do here on the blog, a bit of background…

A while ago I ran across this image on Instagram:

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A post shared by Eric Buller Photography (@ericbullerphotography)

I found it when I was looking through the portfolio of a photographer named Eric Buller who had left a comment on one of the Weekly Fifty pics I posted to my own Instagram account. Turns out Mr. Buller started shooting with a 50mm lens because of this Weekly Fifty blog (I’m so glad you found this blog to be helpful, Eric!) and when I saw his picture of some bicycle wheels I was struck by the richness of the image, the colors of the bike forks and spokes, and the untold stories behind each of the two-wheeled transporters. I don’t know if go so far as to say I was inspired by it, but I certainly did want to use it as the basis for a few pictures of my own. There’s bikes all over the OSU campus and so one overcast Friday morning I went for a short walk around the school to see if I could get a similar picture.

Turns out I was way wrong, and no matter what I tried I just couldn’t capture an image with the richness of Eric’s photograph. Most of the bikes on campus are newer, shinier, and less colorful than the ones in the original which served to make most of the images I was taking look rather boring. When I saw the bike in this week’s picture above I realized that I could use that as the basis for practicing both framing and composition. It’s a far cry from creating an image like the one Eric posted, but it was a fun and useful photographic moment for me so I considered it a win :)

I knew I wanted to shoot the bike from the front and at a lot angle, but the tricky part was how to use the other elements in the composition to properly frame the bike. There were three main things in play: the blue bike in the foreground, the purple bike on the left side, and the vertical bike rack between them. I wanted to get an image that used the two latter elements to accentuate the former, but doing so proved to be a bit tricky because of one other, rather obvious, problem: students. They were everywhere, as you might expect, and I had to basically lie in wait until the shot I was looking for presented itself:

While this wasn’t bad I realized I wanted to add a dynamic element to the image by way of filling the gap between the blue bike and the vertical rack with a student. I waited for one to pass by and snapped another image:

Bingo! This was the shot I was hoping to get…except for one problem. As I reviewed my images I realized I had cut off the purple bike’s rear wheel, which made the overall composition feel somewhat amateurish. I was looking at the bike frame, not the tires, and thus failed to see the complete picture. I liked almost everything else about this, especially the smooth background thanks to using my lens wide open at f/1.8 in the first shot, but I needed to correct the compositional error. So I scooted over and waited for one of two conditions: one student passing through or none at all, both of which were a little tricky given the hustle and bustle of a college campus. I did get a shot where no students were in the frame, which I ultimately used as this week’s image, but before I could get any more someone rode on over and locked his bike up to the empty rack in the picture. Ah well, such is life, eh? :)

The whole exercise was a fun way to practice composition, and though I wish I would have been able to get a shot wide open with one student in the background and the two other bikes perfectly framed with the bike rack between them…it was, as Wayne Campbell said, “never meant to be.” It does give me ideas for future pictures, and many thanks to Eric Campbell for providing the impetus for me to get out and shoot some pics of bicycles. Keep up the good work man!

One night in September after the kids went to bed my wife came into the kitchen where I was doing some dishes, and with an excited look on her face she said “I’ve got a photo opportunity for you!” The last time she said this sort of thing it resulted in this picture, so I quickly grabbed my camera and followed her into the garage where she had been putting away some of the kids’ toys. We carefully crept around to the back of our vehicle where she pointed at a small praying mantis perched at the top of the wheel well, and I immediately realized why she was so pleased with her find. I don’t think I have ever seen a mantis up close and personal except for a nature conservatory, and was thrilled to find one just sort of hanging out and relaxing right in our garage. I smiled like a kid on Christmas morning and she said “I’ll leave you to it” so I spent the next 20 minutes trying to get a good picture of the little insect.

The first thing I did was put on a +4 filter as I knew I would want to get closer to the mantis, but not so close as to obscure all its features. A +10 filter would have been overkill while a +2 wouldn’t have done much at all, and sure enough the +4 worked admirably. The light in our garage was fairly dim and I didn’t want to open the door because the creature might see that as an opportunity to exit the premises, so I grabbed a flashlight and set it on the floor about a meter away from the mantis with the head angled up so as to provide a bit of light. My 50mm lens was on my D7100 so I took a few shots with that but soon switched over to my D750 because I was shooting at such high ISO values in the dim light, and I also wanted to take advantage of its highlight-weighted metering system to help get the right exposure. More on that in a bit.

The situation presented a compositional challenge right from the get-go because it was more than a little awkward to position myself in a way that would allow me to even get a decent picture. I wanted to get the eyes and face of the mantis in focus which meant I had to shoot from below, but with my 50mm lens and filter I had to be somewhat close to the bug as well. I ended up lying on my back and propping myself up with one elbow while holding my camera against my eye with the other hand and scooting around until I had at least somewhat of a decent composition. It wasn’t the most comfortable way of shooting, but it did give me a composition that was at least decently close to what I was going for.

As for the metering system, I knew that with my flashlight providing most of the light for the mantis it was going to be tricky for my camera to figure out the exposure values to use since some parts of the scene (like the bug’s face) were so bright and others were so dark. The D750’s highlight-weighted mode basically looks at the entire scene and figures out which parts are the brightest, and then adjusts the exposure accordingly so those bright spots look normal. It’s a mode that I don’t use very often, but is super handy when I need it such as a situation in which there is a praying mantis hanging out above my car tire :) I could have also just shot the picture normally and then used exposure compensation to dial things down a bit so the mantis wasn’t so blown out, but the other method worked fine so I went with that.

When I was finally satisfied that I got the shot I was looking for I called my wife back in the garage where we opened the door and coaxed the mantis outside. He had done a fantastic job of letting me get close enough to take his picture, and we wanted to make sure to let him go free before the sun went down completely so he could go find some buddies and chill out after such an intense modeling session.

I got this picture quite by accident, as I certainly had no intention of waking up in the morning just to take a photo of a mushroom. Though come to think of it, that might actually be kind of a fun thing to try. Hmm. This image, however, was almost an afterthought and was only possible because of one of my cardinal rules of photography: bring your camera with you. I take my camera to work with me almost every day because I never know when I might come across some type of photographic opportunity, and as often happens I tend to find them more often than not. The day before I took this picture we had one of those rainy, overcast days that is just ideal for taking pictures and I saw a little mushroom poking through the ground cover just outside my office.

It was an interesting picture, or so I thought at the time, because of the way the relatively diffuse lighting cast a nice soft glow over the whole scene. I had to put my D7100 on the ground and use Live View to get this shot (a case in which my D750’s flip-up screen would have been much more useful if only I had that camera with me) and deliberately framed it with the tree in the background in order to give the subject a much greater sense of contrast. I liked this original just fine, and was honestly thinking about putting it up as a Weekly Fifty picture until the next morning.

As I rode my bike up to the office the following day I saw that my little mushroom friend was still there but had opened up a little more, as mushrooms are wont to do, and I figured I would use the opportunity to revisit the picture from the previous day. Just as I was adjusting my camera on the ground and trying to keep everything as similar as possible (same general composition, same aperture of f/4, etc.) a bit of sunlight started to peek out from behind a building on campus and gave the mushroom a fantastic yellow glow around the edges. I took three shots, reviewed them for focus, packed up, and went about my day. Later as I was editing the image I was struck by how much that touch of daylight added to the image, and how it turned what was originally a pretty decent (in my opinion) shot of a mushroom into something kind of special. The morning glow permeated the background and gave everything a nice warm touch that was sadly lacking in the original.

I’ll probably pass by this little bit of fungus on my way home and, if past experience has taught me anything, it will probably be wilting away. That’s how these things go though, and I’m glad I got the chance to capture it in its prime. Sure it’s just a boring simple mushroom, but I thought it made for a cool picture anyway.

Longtime readers of Weekly Fifty might see echoes of an earlier picture in this one, but there’s a bit of a twist: the first one was taken with my regular 50mm lens, while this one was shot with my 10x close-up filter. I hope it’s not too derivative to just take the same type of picture I have taken before, but you know…it doesn’t really matter, I suppose. I have found, since getting these close-up filters, that I quite enjoy taking images of nature accented by droplets of water, and it’s fun to do this sort of thing even if it is treading trodden ground. (Photographically speaking, of course.) When I shot this image I wasn’t even thinking of the picture I took over two years ago, but as I edited this I couldn’t help but reminded of its predecessor and I do wonder if, on some level, my composition here was informed by the image from the summer of 2014. And even if it was, well, that’s kind of the point of doing something repeatedly isn’t it? If you want to get better at a skill you have to practice it over and over, and since I would like to get better at taking pictures of leaves and flowers with water drops on them, I should probably keep doing exactly that :)

Shooting this with a close-up filter did present its own unique set of challenges, and also dramatically altered some key elements of the image when you compare it to the first one. For one, the subject appears dramatically larger simply because I was able to get so much closer to it. The depth of field is markedly shallower as a result, and the image takes on a more intimate feel whereas the first one seems like the droplet is part of a much larger scene. The leaves of this bush that you see here are much smaller than the leaves of the tree in the original image, and while none of these characteristics makes the picture inherently better it is interesting to see how the close-up filter has such a dramatic effect on things. In fact, when I compare the two side-by-side I almost prefer the original because it feels like a more complete composition and also has the benefit of showing a few streaks of rain, whereas in today’s picture the focus is clearly the droplet and almost everything else is secondary. There isn’t much in the way of a rest of the scene, as it were. It’s not good or bad, it’s just different.

I think this speaks to one issue with which I continually struggle when it comes to photography: the desire to always try something new and different. I mentioned several weeks ago in pictures of a squirrel and a duck that I felt like these types of images were almost cheap because they are not all that difficult, given that I work about a block away from the pond on campus where these animals congregate daily. In a similar fashion today’s picture requires nothing special at all other than a bit of rain, and even that could be faked with a spray bottle and some tap water. And so after taking a picture of a rainy leaf, a duck, or a squirrel I often think of it as an item on a checklist that has been completed, never to be revisited. However, this type of thinking is entirely incorrect! If you like taking pictures of something, keep doing it! No one says you can’t, and just because you got a shot of a beautiful sunrise, your kids playing in the sprinkler, a bolt of lightning, or anything else you were aiming for, doesn’t mean you should stop there. Do it again, and again, and again and see what you can learn from the experience. Far from being the stopping point, these pictures should be the starting point of a photographic journey.

And so with that I’ll just close by saying this probably won’t be the last time you see a picture here on Weekly Fifty of a leaf with some water dripping off it :)