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

One thing I really like about using my close-up filters is that it’s helping me to see the world around me in a whole new light, especially the types of things I have photographed before. For instance, each year around February or early March I see all sorts of signs of life after a chilly winter, and one of my favorites to watch out for is rose bushes that are just starting to spring forth from their crispy brown cocoons. I’ve tried photographing this phenomenon before, but the results have been mixed as you can see here:

That was taken in my back yard with my 50mm lens on a Nikon D200 and focusing as close as I could get it. The bud itself is the same physical size as the one in this week’s post, and yet because I simply couldn’t get very close to it without my lens being able to focus on it, the entire picture feels different. You see a giant chunky thorny green branch from a rose bush…and wait a minute, there’s a little red thing peeking out. Indeed some viewers might not even notice the bud, and this is addition to the relatively poor composition of the picture in general. Oh well, you live and learn right? :)

Contrast that image, taken in March of 2014, to this week’s picture which I took nearly three years later. Not only have I learned a lot more about creating a well-composed photograph but I was, thanks to my +10 close-up filter, able to get much closer to the little red bud. So much that it nearly fills the frame and is obviously the clear subject of the image. The second picture is so much better (in my opinion) that it’s not even close, and I’m constantly amazed at how using a close-up filter is able to bring out so many rich details that are all around us but often go unnoticed.

Focusing this image was tricky as all get out, since shooting an object a few inches away results in a depth of field that is downright unwieldy. I initially took some shots at f/4 but then stopped down to f/8 to not only get a sharper image but to get a slightly wider area in focus too. The f/4 shots also lacked a sense of context, as the background was just a blurry cloudy mess whereas in the f/8 iteration you can (sort of) see a thorn extending from the branch which hopefully sends a signal that this is on a rose bush and also gives a sense of scale for the bud.

So yeah…maybe I’ll make a whole series out of this. “Re-taking shots I couldn’t get before I had close-up filters.” Hmm :)

Before you ask…yes, the title of this picture was taken from an Ed Sheeran song :) The song itself didn’t inspire the photo though, and in fact this was a picture that, contrary to many of the pictures I put here on the blog, was deliberately planned in advance. On a chilly weekend in January my wife and I loaded up the kids in our car to take a little drive so our youngest would hopefully fall asleep and take a nap…which actually worked. Woohoo! As we headed south out of town we drove past this dilapidated, um, barn? Shed? Workshop? I’m not even sure. But whatever it once was, it had clearly fallen on hard times and as we drove past I had the distinct though that it would make for a good picture. So a few days later I returned to the scene on my way to work in an attempt to make good on my vision.

Going in to the shoot I knew I would need a couple of specific pieces of gear. Based on the proximity of the building to the main road, and the fact that right in front of where I stood to take this image there was a barbed-wire fence to keep out any trespassers, I knew I would need to use my D750 if I shot this with my 50mm lens. I could get no closer and no farther from the building than what you see here and I knew that if I shot this with my crop-sensor D7100 it would be much too tight and I wouldn’t be able to capture a sense that this building was part of a much larger landscape. I also knew I would need a tripod since I was going to shoot this early in the morning, and finally I understood that I would have to shoot in manual without Auto-ISO in order to get precisely the end result I was hoping for.

That advance mental preparation paid off quite well and on the morning I took this shot the sky was quite overcast which provided a nice even, and rather somber, light to the scene. I hopped out of the car, grabbed my D750 and tripod, and walked right up to the fence to take a few pictures. I shot this at f/8, ISO 100 to get everything nice and sharp and this particular image required 0.3 seconds to get a properly-exposed photo. (Bonus tip: if you’re doing shots like this with a tripod, use a delay timer so your picture isn’t affected by your finger wobbling the camera when you press the shutter button.) There was not much room to move around laterally either, which was fine because the spot I was standing gave me pretty much the exact view I was hoping for. I also composed the shot specifically with the pine tree on the right and the other two trees, sans leaves, on the left. I tried shifting my view a bit to the north but other trees soon entered the frame in the foreground which wasn’t what I wanted at all.

In the end I’m happy with how this turned out and part of me wonders what the history of this place is like. Since I don’t know, I like to make up my own stories which can be a lot more interesting than finding out what really happened. I’m also reminded of how, even though I’m a big proponent of spontaneous photography, it’s also a good thing to plan your shots and create a deliberate composition from time to time.

When my wife and I moved to Oklahoma several years ago we were told a couple things about the weather that we were cautioned to keep in mind. The first, regarding tornados, was obvious and we soon followed through on getting an underground storm shelter installed on our property. The second was something we didn’t expect, which was that Oklahoma, apparently, doesn’t get a lot of snow in the winter but can get a lot of ice. I don’t know if we objectively get more or less ice than, say, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Kansas, but I certainly can confirm we get far less snow. Nonetheless, when we do get ice storms here they tend to be pretty bad and such was the case, or so we thought, on a chilly weekend in January when Winter Storm Jupiter made its way slowly across the midwestern plains.

Though the weather conditions didn’t quite materialize how meteorologists were predicting, we did get a fair amount of ice here in town and when my kids and I woke up on Saturday morning (I like to let my wife sleep in on the weekends) we saw that the whole world outside was covered in a thin sheet of frozen water that glistened in the morning sunlight. I quickly grabbed my camera and walked around the yard for about five minutes attempting to take a few shots before things started to melt, and came back with a few dozen pictures of branches, leaves, icicles dangling from fences, and crepe myrtle buds like what you see in this week’s picture above. I shot most of the pictures with my +4 filter at f/4 or smaller in order to get things as sharp as they could be, and this one was my favorite of the bunch.

This picture could also be seen as some kind of tangible evidence of my own progression as a photographer. The last time I remember having the opportunity to take pictures on the morning after an ice storm I made an image called Winter Berries that I posted to Weekly Fifty. I like the colors of that photo but looking back on it I think it’s far too cluttered, with a depth of field that is way too shallow given the foreground elements, and generally leaves the viewer with a sense of relative confusion. This week’s image, by comparison, is much more focused with a cleaner overall composition, and the viewer’s eye is specifically directed to just one or two elements. Now of course all this is a matter of personal taste and some might prefer the original over this one, but in my opinion this week’s image shows how my approach to photography has changed over the years and is, to be honest, much better than it used to be. And I’m sure a couple years from now I’ll look back at this picture and shake my head, wondering just what in the world I was thinking. But that’s good! And if it weren’t for the early steps we would never have the later ones.

Incidentally, this post comes almost exactly four years after I started Weekly Fifty. It sure has been a fun ride, and I want all of you to know how much I appreciate you taking time out of your days to read these posts, listen to the commentary, and even leave feedback. You are all part of why this blog is so special to me, and I hope it has helped you learn and grow as photographers too. Thank you, and I’m excited for what the next four years (and many more) have in store.

Here’s to the journey, folks :)

The winter here in Oklahoma has been a little strange, with some days in the 60’s and 70’s and other days bitterly cold with freezing rain and even a little snow. This up-and-down pattern (or lack thereof) is still a bit of a surprise for a Northerner like me who still thinks of winters as perpetually snow-covered and well below 32 degrees on the thermometer. Not that I don’t enjoy it, mind you, and in the nearly eight years since my wife and I have moved down here I have grown quite accustomed to making it through the colder months with jackets instead of wool overcoats. In fact I quite like it and I don’t know if I’d ever want to go back :)

This picture was taken on January 17, the start of the Spring 2017 semester at OSU, at the edge of good old Theta Pond–the location of a disproportionally large number of Weekly Fifty photos. It was the first time in a while that we had such pleasant weather, and with temps in the mid-50’s it made for ideal photography conditions especially with all the student activity that was sorely lacking in the preceding months. I just couldn’t help myself and, because I had my D7100 + 50mm lens with me, went for a short walk to enjoy a few minutes of nature through the lens of my camera.

Even though I have taken what might be considered far too many pictures of Theta Pond I never really get tired of walking around it. At one point way back in the early days of OSU it was used as a watering hole for cattle, and in the years since it is has morphed into basically a man-made heavily-curated artifice and yet it feels so nice to just go and chill out on one of the benches, watch the geese and ducks, or stroll around on the sidewalks which is precisely what I was doing when I took this picture. I deliberately framed the fountain between the two trees on the right and shot with a 1/10 shutter in order to get a little bit of motion trails in the fountain. The only way to get a still image without a tripod was to shoot a burst of images and hope for the best, and out of a half dozen images this was the one that turned out the clearest. I actually overexposed the original by about a full stop in order to use a 1/10 shutter in bright daylight without an ND filter but thanks to the magic of RAW I was able to recover plenty of data in Lightroom.

It’s probably a bit cliché at this point to continue posting pictures of Theta Pond but what can I say…I like it and if you ever get the chance to visit OSU I’m sure you will too :)

This post is sort of a follow-up to a previous one from the fall of 2015 title Aftermath, which dealt with the fallout from a tragic event at the annual OSU Homecoming Parade in which a woman drove her car into a crowd of onlookers and killed four people including a young boy and a woman named Bonnie who worked in the my building on campus. My family and I were at the parade a few blocks away from the car crash and almost everyone I talked to in the following days had some kind of connection to the event. That’s life in a small town, really. Friends were at the same intersection and narrowly avoided getting hit. Coworkers had just seen Bonnie and her husband a few minutes prior to their passing. Church members were near the scene, and even a student of mine who was in the military was so close he was one of the first responders at the scene offering help to those who were hurt. It was a rough time for pretty much everyone in Stillwater and the intersection of Hall of Fame and Main Street (seriously…Main Street. How much more Americana can you get?) is, to this day, memorialized with flowers and signs like what you see here.

The morning I took this picture I was biking to work on an uncharacteristically warm day in January which also happened to be the day that the woman who was responsible for the tragedy was finally brought to justice. About two hours after I took this picture she accepted a plea deal and will spend the rest of her life in prison–a result about which I feel strangely ambivalent. Putting this woman in jail will not bring the four people killed back to life, and yet the punishment at the same time feels almost a bit light. No one really knows why she did what she did, and even the woman has indicated she feels remorse for her actions. But at the same time I wouldn’t really want her to go scot-free either (not that such an outcome was ever an option.) To be honest I’m not really sure what justice would even look like in this case, but at least now the town has what might be called a sense of closure from the ordeal almost a year and a half ago.

In the days following the accident there were signs of shared pain throughout the whole town, and the message on that small little handmade sign rings true: nothing brings people together quite like a shared experience, and even moreso when the experience is one of profound pain, grief, sadness, or tragedy. The inevitable hashtag, in this case #StillwaterStrong, started showing up on social media almost immediately afterwards, but even today that simple compound word can be seen on signs, shirts, and vehicles all over the city. I bike past that same intersection almost every day and looking at the photos of the four people, especially little Nash Lucas, who were killed still makes me tear up a little. While hearing the news that the perpetrator will no longer be a danger to anyone else in society certainly brings a sigh of relief, many people here in Stillwater remain as frustrated, angry, and confused as ever simply because there doesn’t seem to be any reason behind what she did. And I think it’s that vacuum of logic that makes this whole incident strike a little deeper as a result.

So to Nash, Nikita, Marvin and Bonnie…you are missed and you will continue to be missed. And every time I walk past Bonnie’s office on the way to mine I still think about her smile, her charm, and her relentless positive attitude with which she approached every aspect of her job. I do hope their families can sleep a little easier, and if nothing else all this serves as yet another reminder to me to give my wife and two little boys just one more hug before heading out the door in the morning.