2025 Lunar Eclipse Timelapse
https://youtu.be/8qhZ1oIIqc4 One common refrain you might notice here on Weekly Fifty is that many of the shots I take involve a degree of serendipity: I encounter a photo opportunity while out walking around on campus or other such relatively benign activity. I rarely have something specific in mind, and I’m often just as surprised by the results as you, the reader, might be. This picture, though, is kind of the opposite. It required careful planning as well as timing (though one could argue that’s just two ways of saying the same thing) and also something entirely beyond my control: clear skies. Thankfully, everything came together just fine and the result is the shot you see here, along with a video of the three-hour time lapse condensed down to 11 seconds. The setup here is surprisingly simple: I captured this scene very early in the morning on March 14, 2025, with…
Orchid In Bloom
About a year and a half ago, my wife was gifted a very nice orchid that she has been happily caring for ever since. Neither one of us are what you might call plant people, but when we do come into possession of a pothos, potted cactus, or other such green growing thing we try to keep it around for as long as we can, as best we can. Sometimes it works, every now and then it doesn’t, but these plants are a fun to have around and a lot less work than a pet and that’s a good thing :) This orchid, which I have photographed before, has always presented a bit of a challenge: how to adequately take a picture of a flower that is mostly white, with the only color tucked away in the middle surrounded by petals on all sides? My previous images have been fine,…
Leafy Background
This is one of those images for which I really had trouble coming up with a title. I usually don’t dwell on the title for more than a few seconds since it doesn’t really matter that much to me, and in the end just went for function over form. It happens :) Every now and then I take a picture that fills me with an odd sense of deja vu. I can’t help but shake the feeling that I’ve seen it somewhere before, and that definitely happened here. I couldn’t quite place it though, and then after a while it hit me: It was strikingly similar to this shot I took way back on May 10, 2013, with my Nikon D200 and the same 50mm lens I use to this day. (Though perhaps not as much as back then, when it was the only lens I owned.) I liked the…
Ochre Cypress
You know how anglers will sometimes tell the tale of the one that got away? How even though they might head home with an impressive haul, there’s till the story of the fish that they almost reeled in but managed to wriggle free at the last second? That’s this week’s image, in a manner of speaking. It bears some similarities to other photos I have posted recently, most notably this shot of a green cypress sprig lifting itself high in the early morning sun. when I came upon the scene you see here in early March I thought it would present an interesting opportunity to build on the original, as I am often wont to do, and even perhaps improve it in a couple of ways. I liked how the rich yellow and gold color palette were distinctly different from the greens and browns one might expect in a shot…
Lunar Cradle
One evening recently, when my wife and I were walking up our street as the sun was setting and the world was calming down for the night, she pointed up to the sky and remarked at how beautiful the thin crescent moon looked with one lone star hovering next to it. It was a singular scene that doesn’t come along very often, and we both discussed it as we continued the few blocks left in our walk before turning up our driveway. Conditions have to be just right to see something like this in the sky–not just the waxing crescent moon, but the brilliance of a small secondary star (in this case, the planet Venus) right nearby as if stopping by to say goodnight as well as the diminishing daylight that leaves just enough of the surrounding scenery visible to put everything into context. As soon as we got home…
Temba, his arms wide
This is one of those photos that’s part experiment, part education, part abstract, and part just messing around. It was also a good reminder of how effective it is to just focus on the fundamentals of photography, practice the basics of exposure, and do just a tiny bit of editing in order to produce an interesting image. I didn’t have any grand designs on this one or a bigger picture in mind, and even though the title might suggest some kind of deeper meaning or implication, it’s really just a Star Trek TNG reference. I mean, if you squint real hard and hold your phone in just such a way, you could maybe mistake this for…um…a stick-dude holding his arms out? I dunno. Look, sometimes I just need a title :) Anyway, the basic idea here was pretty simple. I wanted to get a shot of these tiny branches sticking…
Seoul Street Food
This is a bit of a companion to last week’s photo of some skyscrapers in downtown Seoul, South Korea, but kind of the opposite. Another side of the same coin, if you will. Whereas the skyscraper were tall, monolithic, imposing, sterile, and fundamentally corporate, here we have someone who is selling food on the street at a winter festival with none of the trappings of corporate Korea to be found. This person was one of many selling all manner of food to passers-by, and while this photo isn’t the greatest street shot ever taken it is a representation of an amazing trip we were fortunate to take with our kids–an experience we are not likely to repeat anytime soon. Like last week’s shot, I didn’t want to spend much time taking this photo since I was more interested in walking and talking with my family but at the same time…
Miracle on the Han
So this one’s a bit different. Very different, really, from the images I usually share. In fact I’d go so far as to say I can’t think of another photo here on Weekly Fifty that looks anything like this. A running theme here on the blog, especially in recent months, is that of building on what I have learned so that I can improve over time, but for this image there simply is no precedent. And that’s partly why I like it so much. In late 2024 my wife and I took our kids on a trip we had been planning for months, which was well beyond any family travel we had ever done up to that point. After months of planning and preparation, we boarded an airplane and flew 14 hours to South Korea, in order to spend five days in Seoul with her brother and his girlfriend. It…
Crimson and Amber
Every now and then, and perhaps a bit more as of late, I will share a photo here on the blog that was directly inspired by a picture I took months, or even years, prior. Part of the learning and growing process, after all, involves building on what came before: learning from mistakes, improving on what worked well, weeding out the good ideas from the not-so-good, and so on. But in that same vein, every now and again I find myself taking a picture that I don’t realize is a continuation of, or a building on, a thread that began long ago. And those times can be really cool :) Nine years ago I took this photo of some read and yellow leaves in the formal garden just west of the Student Union on the OSU campus. It was shortly after a day of cold rain, and I liked how…
Squirrel Snack
Not that long ago I shared an image of a squirrel here on Weekly Fifty while also waxing at length about how I’m not really a wildlife photographer: I lack the gear, the patience, and to be honest, the fortitude. And yet, since then I ended up sharing a couple more pictures of squirrels almost as though the universe had set out to prove me wrong regarding my own self-assessment. I still stand by my original, and somewhat longstanding, claim that I’m just not that into wildlife photography but I think that makes it all the more interesting and exciting when I am able to take a picture like the one you see here. This little rodent was snacking on some acorns at the edge of Theta Pond on the OSU campus and I just happened to be walking past with my D750 and 105mm macro lens on a mild…