Leafy Business
Over all the years I have been actively and intentionally photographing the world around me, as opposed to casual snapshots without much thought behind them (which should not be misconstrued as an implication that such pictures are inherently devoid of meaning and purpose) there are two things I keep coming back to that need to be in place for me to take a good picture: I need to have my camera with me. Preferably one of my DSLRs, but any camera will do. I need to actively seek out photo opportunities. Other things help, for sure, but without those two things in place it’s not likely I’ll get much in the way of a good photograph. Or any photograph at all, if I don’t have a camera. That, then, offers a bit of background, or perhaps context, for today’s photo. When I left for work on the morning I saw…
Hover Bee
Well folks, here it is. This is, and I mean this without any exaggeration and with all possible sincerity, the best shot of a bee I have ever taken. It’s the kind of picture I have been trying to get for years. This quest, you might say, say back in June of 2024 I got a picture of a bee going in for some nectar from a magnolia flower near my office on the OSU campus. I since snagged others like this one but never quite got what I was hoping for, which is a profile shot of a bee hovering near a flower. Not a butterfly, not a hummingbird…a bee, bumble or otherwise, about to have itself a snack while simultaneously picking up some pollen. The thing about this kind of shot is you can’t really plan it or create it. You just have to be in the right…
Hanging Helicopters
When I was a kid my friends and I would spend entire recess periods in elementary school throwing these things, which we, and probably many others, affectionately termed helicopter seeds, up in the air and chase them down as they spun to the ground or even, if we were lucky, into our outstretched hands. It was super fun, especially on windy days, but something I just don’t see a lot of kids doing these days. Though that’s probably because where I live in Oklahoma we don’t really have many trees around that produce these kinds of seeds :) Every now and then you can find one though, like this one on the OSU campus near Theta Pond, and I was fortunate enough to come across this group of seeds on a cloudy, overcast day when the light was really good for this kind of picture. Almost too good, I might…
Beauty in the Passing
For as long as I have owned DSLR cameras, all the way back to the good ol’ Nikon D200, I have enjoyed taking pictures of a few specific subjects around the same time each year. Crocus and magnolia flowers in spring, butterflies in the fall, squirrels and geese near Theta Pond…anyone who has been following Weekly Fifty for any length of time has no doubt seen pictures of such things and, hopefully, enjoyed looking at them as much as I enjoyed taking them. Add to the list the seed pods of the Golden Raintree that you see here, which are fascinating on a normal day but particularly mesmerizing after a good soaking from above with cloudy, overcast skies casting even, diffused lighting as far as the eye can see. Such was the case way back in Summer 2013 with this picture, and these little balloonlike structures continue to be one…
Leaflight
Most of the pictures I take, and then share here on Weekly Fifty, are pretty straightforward: what you see is, as the saying goes, what you get. I don’t much dabble in abstract artwork and my images generally don’t present much in the way of deeper meaning, nor are they designed to promote introspection, contemplation, or much else aside from a passing “Hey, that’s kind of neat.” I do this to learn and grow as a photographer, and help me keep my camera in my hands and off the shelf where it might otherwise sit collecting dust. But every now and then something shows up in front of me, and then, susbequently, in front of my camera lens, that does prompt me, and now you, the viewer, to think just a bit deeper or perhaps use your imagination. That’s what we’ve got going on here :) This is, on one…
Leaflet
This picture is somewhat of a return to form, you might say, albeit not exactly intentionally. It’s not like I threw away my full-frame camera and macro lens, in order to recapture my roots with my original 50mm lens and Nikon D200 body, but the idea here isn’t too far (literally as well as geographically) from some of the pictures I took years and years ago. Like many of my earlier images I shot this right in my own back yard, and there wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy that went into the planning of this photo. It wasn’t planned at all, really. But the end result is an image that I like quite a bit, and more than that, really enjoyed taking. One recent evening after a few hours of rain had quenched the parched ground, I found myself with a bit of time while my kids were playing video games…
Sunrise Spider
I had no time to prepare for this photo. It came about with no planning, no thought process other than “Grab the camera!” and no control over almost anything including my own point of view. A few minutes before this shot was taken the sun had not yet crested the horizon, and a few seconds after I clicked the shutter the spider had skittered down and started to disassemble its web altogether. It was an incredibly fortunate moment of serendipity, and one that I’m thrilled to have been able to capture with my camera. Shortly before I had to leave for work my son and I noticed this large spider web in the back yard, which we happened to see while looking out the window just kind of at random. One of us, I’m not sure who, remarked at how the web was lit up in the morning sunlight, creating…
Cottonwood Falls
Not long ago we met up with some friends for a weekend in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, roughly halfway between our respective home bases in Nebraska and Oklahoma. We got a big Airbnb with plenty of room to spread out, make meals, play games, and just catch up on life while the kids hung out together. The town was small, the weather was warm, the entire experience was one that, in some ways, felt like something out of a postcard. Not long after dinner we all walked down the cobblestone-paved Main Street over to the eponymous Falls, and then continued on for a bit of geocaching. (We found one!) Before heading back to the Airbnb we all just kind of hung out on the bridge near the falls, which had long ago been transformed from a road into a pedestrian area, and after getting some shots of my family and our…
Badlands Sunset Starburst
The phenomenon you see illustrated here, with points of light radiating out from a bright center, is one of my favorite photography tricks to pull off. Though it’s not actually a trick at all, just a matter of understanding some fundamentals of how pictures are captured by cameras and the importance of exercising control over exposure. Also, you can’t get this kind of shot with a phone so it’s kind of a fun, if perhaps slightly vain, flex for anyone who shoots with a dedicated camera and knows what they are doing. But more than all that, this picture is among my favorites from our entire trip to the Black Hills and Badlands over the summer, which is why it most certainly deserves a spot here on Weekly Fifty. I shot this with my Fuji X100F at f/16, 1/80 second, ISO 1250, and while that ISO is a bit higher…
Dusk in the Badlands
https://youtu.be/S3cTfcTwWSE Note: This sunset time-lapse was taken at the same time I shot the photo above, but with a different camera and from a slightly different location. I used my GoPro Hero 12 Black for the time-lapse, and positioned it just down the boardwalk from where I shot this week’s featured image. I figured the two photos were close enough that it counts :) One conclusion I kept coming back to during our trip to to the Black Hills and Badlands was that no picture seemed to adequately capture the vastness of the scenes we were witnessing. It didn’t seem to matter what focal length I used, what angle I shot from, what I included in the foreground or background…few things ever really captured the sheer scale of the western wilderness stretched out before us. It’s not that such a thing isn’t possible, just that I found myself continually outside…