Popped Corn
This is one of my favorite kinds of pictures to take–the kind that comes out of nowhere, grabs you by surprise, and turns into something unique, fun, and unexpected. This is exactly what you probably think: a single piece of popcorn. Nothing special, and yet, it is kind of special. My wife and I are huge fans of Star Trek and popcorn*, and it’s not uncommon for me to whip up a batch of the latter while watching the former on any given evening after the kids are in bed and our normal obligations are wrapped up for the day. (Or just postponed until tomorrow, which does tend to happen maybe a bit more often than I care to admit.) I don’t usually see popped kernels with this level of roundness and uniformity, so instead of eating this one I decided to save it until after the show was over…
All Aglow
This picture right here is one of the reasons I bought a macro lens. I have always enjoyed taking pictures of flowers with a set of close-up filters on my 50mm lens (longtime Weekly Fifty readers probably know this already) but to be able to get shots of flowers with an actual macro lens is a whole other experience entirely. Some of the first pictures I took with my close-up filters looked similar to this one, but they were much more difficult to shoot due to the fussy nature of filters compared to a true macro lens. Now I’m able to frame my shot and focus on whatever I want, without trying to move my camera back and forth with a +10 or +4 filter attached to the front and hope that the thing I want to be in focus actually resides within the narrow plane of focus allowed by…
Goosed
It might not seem like there’s a whole lot to this picture, but in a lot of ways it represents the culmination of many years of practice, patience, and education. But it’s a goose, right? I mean, how complicated could this picture possibly be? The answer is, a lot more than you might think. Theta Pond, on the OSU campus, is inhabited by geese pretty much year-round. Only in the coldest months of winter will you not find geese swimming or otherwise milling about, but despite their ubiquity they do tend to keep a safe distance when it comes to pedestrians and passers-by. Despite seeing geese almost every time I go for a walk around the pond, I have only a handful of good pictures of them–even when I use my 70-200 f/2.8 zoom lens. And none of my geese pictures are up close and personal like the one you…
Caretaker
In case you’re keeping track of these sorts of things (and if not, I don’t blame you since I barely am) this is the first 50mm photo I’ve had on Weekly Fifty all year. My 2013 self would likely respond with righteous incredulity, but my goal for this blog from day one was to be a tool that I could use to learn and grow as a photographer—with or without a 50mm lens. And it just so happens that after getting a true macro lens, after shooting with close-up filters for so many years, almost immediately opens your eyes to a boat-load of new photographic opportunities suddenly available. Hence the last four months of Weekly Fifty pictures :) However, that doesn’t mean the old tried-and-true Nifty Fifty is suddenly irrelevant. Far from it! I don’t think I will ever stop using my 50mm lens, but I certainly do enjoy venturing…
Light Touch
Earlier this year I posted a photo of some water droplets suspended in midair that I shot near the southeastern corner of the Oklahoma State University campus. Even though that image didn’t turn out exactly how I had hoped, I treated it as a learning experience and wanted to find ways to improve on the overall concept, since what good is it, I ask you, if we learn nothing from our mistakes? (A rhetorical question, obviously, but one that is always worth asking no matter how often it is repeated.) More than anything, I wanted to solve the issue of the water droplets in the original being just slightly blurry—the result, so I thought, of Vibration Reduction accidentally being enabled on my lens while shooting with a tripod. So I returned to the same spot weeks later with the same gear (105mm f/2.8 Macro lens and my Nikon D500) to…
Concept
It’s interesting where you can find inspiration for photography sometimes. My brother Phil and his wife came down for a visit recently and over the course of a few days he and I spent a lot of time talking about photography techniques, experiments, and of course, gear. We played around with my 105mm f/2.8 macro lens a lot, finding interesting ways to shoot everyday subjects and looking for creative photographic possibilities out in the yard or just around the house. One such opportunity cropped up when the four of us (me, him, and our wives) were played a board game called Concept late into the evening after all the kids were asleep. The game itself was really fun, but what captured our interest even more was the colorful translucent pieces that you place on the board throughout your turn. The more we looked at the rich greens, blues, reds, and…
Translucency
There are some types of images that I have realized I just enjoy taking. And, conversely, there are some styles of photography that don’t interest me whatsoever. Street photography definitely falls into the latter category for me, as does most animal and wildlife photography: I don’t really have the patience for either one, and when it comes to taking pictures of random pedestrians and passers-by, I just feel icky. (I know some people are great at street photography, but it’s just not my thing.) This image, however–the one you see at the top of this post–is one that I find great joy in capturing. It’s simple, straightforward, and in my opinion, interesting to look at. It invites no deep interpretation and offers no life lessons to the viewer, but it makes me happy to take pictures like this and that’s all I need. I shot this not by my traditional…
Early Morning Light
This is one of those photos that started as something very different than how it turned out, and is significantly better as a result. I was pulling out of my driveway on a very cold morning in February, and noticed that the ground was covered with a light layer of frost. That doesn’t happen too often here in Oklahoma, and I think it came about because of a bit of rain followed by sub-freezing temps overnight, but this being a photo blog and not a weather blog, I suppose the cause isn’t nearly as important as the result. And the result, if I do say so myself, is pretty cool. I saw this leaf sticking up and thought it would make for a neat picture, but what I had in mind in that moment was pretty different from how it actually turned out. Originally I was just going to take…
Tucked Away
I got my macro lens right when everything was turning brown and gray for the winter, which meant that I had to wait months until shots like this would be possible. I don’t know if I would say without qualification that it was worth the wait, but I will say that as things green up a bit and colors start showing up, I’m having a lot of fun taking pictures of it all with this lens. I’ve taken shots like this before with close-up filters, but the rendering of the out-of-focus elements (i.e. the foreground and the background) has always been rather subpar. Close-up filters are also much trickier to work with in general, and offer much less latitude in terms of focusing and depth of field, whereas an actual macro lens gives you a ton of freedom for experimentation and creativity. (Though to be fair, the latter is also…
Pockmark
This is more of an experiment than a photo, but given that the result turned out fairly well I’m happy to use it as this week’s image here on Weekly Fifty. Near the edge of Theta Pond on the OSU campus are a couple of odd, orange spheres about a foot in diameter sitting atop a low stone wall. They must be some kind of decoration because I don’t know what functional purpose they serve, but as purely aesthetic objects they have always seemed a bit out of place to me. Not that I’m a good judge of art or architecture; I just don’t know if I get these things on an existential level. I suppose I don’t have to though. Such accoutrements are often subjective in their interpretation, and it just so happens that I think I found an interesting way of photographing them. As I was walking past…