Keystone
This isn’t really about the picture, but the story behind it. The picture isn’t all that great, but making it was a bit more interesting than the image itself. Every now and then I make the drive to Tulsa and about 40 minutes into the trip is a causeway across Keystone Lake. Immediately afterwards there is a gentle incline and at the top of the hill, a small road that turns south. If you look upwards as you cross the lake you can see a few houses on the bluffs overlooking the waterfront, and I have often thought about pulling over to take a picture. As with many photography situations there are always a thousand reasons to say no to that little voice in your head, but this time I decided to answer the call. Photographically speaking, that is. I came prepared for the occasion too, with my X100F and…
Slant
Sometimes it’s fun to just go out and shoot normal things at super wide apertures. That simple concept helped foster my love of photography several years ago, and to this day it remains a fun way to use my camera while seeing the world around me in a bit of a different light. When I shot this picture I had my D7100 and 50mm lens, and noticed a bush with yellow dried up leaves scattered all around its edge. It was the type of conventional, unassuming scene I would normally just stroll past but I saw that the leaves were slightly backlit and it made me wonder if it would be an interesting picture as a result. So out comes my camera, and a few shots later I ended up with this. But what exactly is this? I’m not entirely sure. Most of my photos have a clearly-understood subject, and…
Haze
This is the one that almost got away. As I left for work on a mild January morning a few months ago I noticed as soon as I opened the garage door that something wasn’t quite right. The whole neighborhood was shrouded in a thick fog, the kind that we only get a few times a year. I ran inside and told my two boys to come here, quick, and don’t worry about your shoes! They raced outside and immediately saw and felt what I was talking about. There’s a certain stillness unique to foggy mornings, where you can literally feel the air like a thin wet blanket as you move around beneath the trees. I had to get going so we didn’t spend too much time dwelling on it, but I was glad I got to share that quick moment with my kids before I left for the day.…
Gumball
This photo is similar in many ways to one that I shared on January 15. So similar, in fact, that it almost seems like a cop-out to put it here because it would seem there just isn’t much variation between the two. So why post it? Because it’s not about the subject, it’s about the lighting. The first image was shot on a sunny afternoon in mid November which lit the whole scene in a warm glow while the bushes behind the magnolia seed pod had pockets of light shining through. It was lively and dynamic, despite the subject being most certainly deceased. This week’s photo is similar but the conditions in which it was shot were much different, which adds some subtle but important alterations to the image as a whole. First and most importantly, I shot this on a cloudy day after a morning of light rain. That…
Best Foot Forward
I know what you’re probably thinking right now: what’s up with yet another picture of a goose? In truth I’m not exactly sure why I’ve had so many shots of birds this year, but for some reason I’m enjoying taking pictures like this. And in looking back at my Flickr library I don’t yet have a picture of a goose or duck standing one-footed on a rock…so there you go :) When I left for work the morning I took this photo I grabbed my D500 which happened to have my 85mm f/1.8 lens attached, so I went with that just in case I came across any photographic situations. As often happens, at one point during the day I went out for a walk near Theta Pond and brought my camera with me only to find a small gaggle of geese hanging out on the west side of the water.…
Illusion
Almost exactly one year ago I shared a photo of something called the Magic Tree. It’s in Columbia, Missouri, and we like to go see it (there’s actually two of them) every year when we visit my wife’s family over Christmas. The photo I shared last year was shot with my Fuji X100F, and it’s actually the same tree as this year’s image, but the two pictures could be seen as two extreme ends of the same spectrum. One one end you have last year’s photo which was a close-up of a single green light with a thousand other bulbs scattered throughout the background. When we revisited the same location over Christmas a few months ago I wanted to go way to the other end of the continuum and capture an image of the entire tree. But in a different way than you might expect. As we were walking around…
Caught in the Act
I wasn’t actually going to use this photo for anything, much less a Weekly Fifty post, when I shot it outside Willard Hall in mid December at Oklahoma State University. It was really just me getting out for a few minutes with my new camera and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and and taking a few pictures just for fun. But as I was looking through my image library in Lightroom something caught my eye about this particular photo. It’s different from other squirrel pictures I have taken, and a little more compelling and interesting than a squirrel just sitting on the ground or climbing a tree. I realized after a while that what really made this one stand out was the lighting, much moreso than just about any other image of an animal I have shared here on the blog. I got this shot after a walk around Theta Pond with…
Swimming
Like last week’s photo, I shot this when I was out for a walk at Theta Pond on a warm day in December. And like last week’s photo this one is also a duck, though in a slightly different context. I shot this with the same camera/lens combination (Nikon D500, 50mm f/1.8) and, as with last week’s photo, I have the camera’s Live View to thank for it. But before I get to that, look at the water in the foreground. In order to get this shot I held my camera about an inch off the surface of the water which wasn’t super risky since there wasn’t much in the way of wind or waves, but it still was just a little nerve-wracking. Let’s just say I made sure to use both hands and a sturdy wrist strap. One thing about Nikon DSLRs and Live View is that they’re just…
Contemplative
Over Black Friday weekend I made a purchase that I had been saving for since the beginning of the year: a Nikon D500. I bought it specifically to get shots of my kids as they play sports, and in a way this camera choice is a tangible artifacts reminding me of how far my two boys have come in the past eight years. My wife and I bought our first DSLR because our little Panasonic pocket camera didn’t take great photos of our newborn son, and that Nikon D200 and 50mm f/1.8 lens immediately sent our photo quality into the stratosphere. Since then we have made other gear purchases because of the needs they met–not simply because they looked cool or we had money burning a hole in our pocket. That’s actually the number one question I ask people when they seek my advice on a camera: what problem do…
Tension
My brother Phil came for a visit with his family a few months ago and while they were here I got kind of fascinated at his use of close-up filters. Any longtime reader of Weekly fifty knows that I’ve taken my fair share of macro shots using close-up filters, but that kind of photography sort of ebbs and flows with me. I’ll be super into it for a while and then move on to something else, but when Phil was here it was kind of inspiring watching him find ideas for shots where I would have never considered to look. Even just out in my front yard he was pointing his camera at leaves, bricks, mailboxes…almost like he was seeing it anew with fresh eyes, and even though all those things are part of my daily life I never really thought about them as potential photo subjects. Watching him was…