Flower Pillar
A week ago as my wife and I were walking past my neighbor’s house with our boys, we stopped to chat with him while he was tending to his impressive flower bed in the front yard. He said he would cut a few for us to take home, and we gladly accepted his offer—who would turn down a vase of flowers from a neighbor? Of course my photographer’s eye thought the flowers would be a good opportunity to take some pictures, so a few days later on Sunday morning after church that’s exactly what I did. My wife went out to play with the kids while I set up shop on the kitchen table: Tripod, D750, 105mm macro lens, and a giant translucent reflector. (I have owned this thing for years but rarely use it, so I was excited at the opportunity to bust it out and harness its light-altering…
Georgetown Loop Bridge
One of the most difficult, but most essential, components of landscape photography is establishing a sense of scale. When you see a grand scene or sweeping vista in person you can tell how vast it is by comparing it to other things in your immediate surroundings: trees, buildings, animals, people, roads receding into the distance, even the clouds in the sky can help establish a sense of scale. But how do you convey that to an audience who might be viewing your picture of the landscape on a tiny little phone screen? It’s not easy, but it’s essential for your photos to be impactful and meaningful. I’m not sure if this picture accurately conveys a sense of scale or not, but I certainly tried to and I hope it comes across even in some small way. What you’re looking at here is a view of some huge mountains near Denver.…
Winding Rocky River
This is a picture that seemed a lot more interesting in my mind, and while the final result doesn’t stand up when too well when compared against some of my other images, it’s not bad and at the very least it does remind me of a fun family trip. And if that’s all it does, then it has accomplished its mission. I shot this after a day of driving and hiking near Denver with my wife, our kids, my cousin, and her husband and despite our general sense of exhaustion near the tail end of a busy but enjoyable day, I wanted to take one last opportunity to get a picture of the scenery. This small river was near the road we took down a mountain and after catching a few glimpses of it over the course of 10 or 15 minutes I asked if anyone would mind stopping for…
Tundra Elk
As we hiked on various paths and trails on our visit to the Rocky Mountains, one thing quickly became abundantly clear to me: I had to balance my desire to take camera gear with my desire to have food and water. Usually the latter won out, which meant that I limited myself to my Fuji X100F and my iPhone, and my big heavy cameras and lenses usually stayed back at the cabin. Maybe in the future I can find a way around that compromise, but since this was our first real visit to the Rockies we were still trying to figure all this out and see how things would work. I shot this picture when we went for a drive on Trail Ridge Road, a winding route that takes visitors above the treeline and offers amazing views of the surrounding mountains and even some hidden surprises like a small patch…
Emerald Lake
And now, as Monty Python might say, for something completely different. I have only seen the mountains a few times in my life: once on a trip out to Seattle with my wife in 2016 and…well, maybe one or two other times but I guess it sort of depends on your definition. I have flown over mountain ranges on the way from A to B, and have also had layovers in Denver, but I don’t think I have ever really spent time in the mountains, so to speak. That all changed this summer when we took our kids out west to spend a week in the Rockies with some friends of ours from way back in the day. (After all, friends from back in the day are some of the best you’ll ever have.) We stayed at YMCA of the Rockies which was surrounded on all sides by breathtaking views…
Class of 2023
This is the kind of picture you almost never see here on Weekly Fifty because, as you probably know by now, I like to keep things mostly people-free and stick to nature and objects and other things of that nature. When I do post pictures of people, especially my kids, I don’t use faces. This one is an exception though, not because of the person specifically but because of all the elements that went into taking this shot. I have a side project taking portraits (not really a business, since I only do a couple photo sessions a year) that allows me to flex my creative muscles in a bit of a different way compared to photos of flowers and animals and this is an example of the type of portraits I really enjoy doing. A few weeks before our annual extended family trip to Kansas my sister-in-law asked me…
Calm Waters at Sunset
Every year my family goes to Milford Lake, Kansas, to spend a few days catching up on things, fishing, swimming, boating, tubing…all the normal kinds of things you might do while vacationing at the lake with siblings, nieces, nephews, and parents. And the occasional four-legged family member too :) Normally I return from those trips with a handful of shots to put up here on Weekly Fifty, but this one was a little different. I found that, contrary to most of our trips over the years, I did not take as many shots of the world around me and instead most of my pictures were the people around me. Not that vacation-based photography has to be one or the other, but I didn’t find that I had my usual inspiration or creative spark for taking photos of nature, even with my macro lens that I specifically brought with on the…
Shrouded
I was looking through my gallery of macro shots recently and discovered something a little surprising: I had no close-ups of mushrooms! The last time I got low on the ground to take a macro picture of fungi it was this shot from May 2021, and that was with my 50mm lens and close-up filters. (And also my first real experimentation with focus stacking, something I have not done since. Mostly because it’s more work than I’m used to doing, not because it’s particularly difficult to get the hang of the basics.) So when the sun was rising on a warm June morning, after a couple of rainy days to really get the ground nice and soaked, I ran outside and took this photo of a mushroom that had recently popped up in my back yard. Only this time I did it with my 105mm macro lens, which made a…
Morning Dewdrops
Alright, enough with the Wichita Mountains pictures of sunsets and bison and lizards…here’s a classic Weekly Fifty shot like you might expect when you come to the blog, check my YouTube channel, or open up the email that shows up in your Inbox every Wednesday morning. The composition here is simple, classic, and highly effective: a clear subject, something in the foreground, a rich and layered background, and some cool bokeh to boot. This won’t win awards for creativity, but I’d be lying if I said that pictures like this aren’t a ton of fun to take. Every spring we see an emergence of Indian Paintbrush flowers all over the state, but despite being quite commonplace their simple beauty is always pleasing to look at. I have taken lots of pictures of these flowers over the years and shared many of them here on Weekly Fifty, but never with a…
Sunset Haze from Mount Scott
If you have been following Weekly Fifty for any length of time you know that I’ve never posted an image like this. At all. Nearly every picture I take is fairly simple and, to be perfectly honest, kind of similar. There’s usually a clearly-understood subject, some foreground and background elements, and often some additional things that add a bit of context. I don’t like to go for abstract art and I’m not one for over-complicating the image-making process. Normally, and especially since I got my macro lens, I just take simple pictures of things I see in my daily life. Not this time. I took this picture at the top of Mount Scott right as the sun was setting on the evening of our final day in the Wichita Mountains. I actually have a few shots that include the sun, but decided to specifically compose this image (as well as…