Backlight Breeze
This is one of those shots that’s so simple, so basic, and so easy to capture that it almost feels like cheating. This is not complicated in the least, and no special gear or equipment is required other than a camera, some vegetation, and the setting sun. But when done right, a picture like this can just knock it out of the park and do exactly what you might hope it would do: create some kind of feeling, emotion, or mood for the person who views it. The basic idea here is super easy: find some kind of plant with a bit of color to it (I like wide blades midsummer of grass or tree leaves in the fall as they are changing colors) and position yourself such that the sun is behind it. Then get out your camera, open up the lens aperture, and start taking pictures. that all…
Velvet Lakeshore
Almost every year when my family gets together at Milford Lake, Kansas, I like to go out at least one evening and take a picture of the sunset. Views like this aren’t something I see in my normal daily life in Oklahoma, so it’s fun to be able to try different kids of shots compared to my normal repertoire of bugs, insects, and scenes from Theta Pond on the OSU campus. While most of my family was up at the campfire I stole away for a few minutes to run down to the beach, set up my camera, and see if I could get something maybe a tad different from the similar compositions I had created in previous years. Not that there’s anything wrong with repeating a photo year after year, and I have certainly done just that more than a few times in the past decade or so, but…
Frozen in Motion
Last week I wrote (and spoke) about how the shot of a dragonfly, when compared to a similar picture from seven years prior, was evidence of just how much I have learned in the time between the two. This image, while similar to one that I took a few months ago, isn’t so much an example of what I have learned but how earlier shots can inform later shots. This hummingbird moth is closing in on a white ball of…something? (I’m still not sure what in the world these flower-ish things are, but they must taste good to bees, moths, and other insects.) When I saw the animal flitting from one bulbous protrusion to the next on the shores of Milford Lake, Kansas, I immediately thought of this picture of a similar situation that I took in my very own back yard in April. I knew I didn’t want to…
Cautiously Curious
One of my favorite things to do as a photographer is look back on earlier images and compare them to similar shots that I have taken years down the line. While sometimes embarrassing, particularly when I think about the portraits I used to take in days gone by, it’s also refreshingly illustrative, and even a bit instructive, and if nothing else it’s just fun to see how far I’ve come. (I recommend this to other photographers too: try going through your earlier shots and see what you have learned and how you have improved over the years. It’s really cool.) Such is absolutely the case here. Back in 2016, not too long after I got a set of close-up filters for my 50mm lens, I took this shot of a dragonfly near the shore of Milford Lake, Kansas: At the time I was kind of blown away, having never taken…
Bumblebee Bulb
One of my white whales, as it were, in macro photography is a picture of a bee hovering just next to a flower or other such source of nectar. It’s a shot that I have been chasing for years but never quite achieved, though I have come close on a couple of occasions. This shot, clearly, is not me reaching my goal but it isn’t bad and a good example of a kind of picture that I do enjoy being able to create while also serving as a reminder that if I just keep at it I’m sure I will get it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but hopefully soon. And in the meantime, there’s still so much to learn and so many new things to try. It’s a magical world, after all :) Anyway, at the risk of waxing introspectively poetic, let’s talk about this image of a…
Precipice
Every year since 2012 my family has spent a few days each summer in cabins at the shore of Milford Lake, Kansas, just enjoying each other’s company. We talk, play games, go swimming, ride the pontoon, sit by the campfire, and stay up way, way too late knowing full well we really should be getting to bed. But we don’t, and it’s great :) And every year I bring my full suite of cameras to take some photos that I can’t get any other time–nothing groundbreaking, mind you, but pictures that exist just outside the boundaries of my normal daily life. This bug (beetle?) you see here is one such image, and even though nothing about it screams lake vacation it’s a shot that I don’t really have the opportunity to take at home or walking around the Oklahoma State University campus. Not that there aren’t plenty of bugs and…
Close to Home
The more I use my macro lens, the more I learn about what to do as well as what not to do in order to get a good close-up shot. I also seem to gain a greater respect for true macro shooters with almost every picture I take, as is the case in point here. For a while now I have thought about trying to get a picture of a single key on my keyboard, kind of like what you might see on a stock photo site. How hard could it be, I thought to myself every time I came across a PowerPoint presentation with some kind of call to action enhanced with a keyboard closeup. Turns out that, while not extremely difficult, it does involve a bit more challenge than I was prepared for. First of all, I wanted to use (what else?) my Nanlite Pavotubes to light the…
Shy Guy Adventure
This is one of those shots that I had in mind, or at least had a clear vision in my mind of what I wanted to do, and while the end result is pretty good I’m not entirely certain I accomplished what I was going for. It’s not bad, not by a long shot, but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s more I could have done here. No worries though! It just means I get to experiment more and continue to learn about photography and lighting :) So the idea for this shot came to me when I saw the little yellow Shy Guy that my son brought home from school a while ago. The expression on his face, and the position of his arms (the figuring, that is. Not my son) made me think that he was about to embark on some grand adventure, or perhaps more like…
Selenite
This was an interesting experiment in trying to make what I saw in my mind match what my camera was able to capture. I don’t think I quite pulled it off, but it was a fun exercise in light, color, and crystals :) What you see here is a selenite crystal, one of many hundreds that my family and I dug out of the ground at Oklahoma’s Salt Plains State Park one warm May afternoon. My wife and I had been talking about visiting this natural landmark for years but it was always one of those items sitting near the top of our to-do list, never quite reaching high enough to actually make happen. That all changed when some friends of ours asked if we would want to join them on a trip out there, which was all the motivation we needed. We soon packed up two vehicles with shovels,…
Dashing
This is one of my favorite kinds of pictures, partly because of the basics like composition, subject, lighting, and depth of field but also because it’s a single shot that tells a much larger story. And while I certainly enjoy the creativity afforded by the off-camera colored lights with which I have been experimenting lately, at the end of the day images that tell a narrative are a lot more meaningful to me. When I look at this image I don’t see a dog running with a frisbee in his mouth. I see Dashwood, my cousin’s Fox Red Labarador who spent Easter weekend with us (along with my cousins, of course) in an Airbnb in central Iowa. I see my kids throwing the frisbee for Dash in the early morning while the grownups chat after a warm breakfast including bacon made on a barely-working electric griddle. I see two days…