Cabin Six Sunset
Each year in June or July you’re likely to see a picture like this here on Weekly Fifty. It’s usually some kind of sunset or nature photo, and it’s always taken at Acorn’s Resort in Milford, Kansas where my family has gone for vacation for the past ten years. Every year I try to find either a new type of picture to take, or a new way of taking a familiar type of image, and the latter was certainly the case this time. I brought a slew of camera gear with me but since most of our time was spent visiting with family, most of my pictures are relatives: siblings, parents, nieces, and nephews. There was one evening when my brother’s wife tipped me off about the sunset, so I decided it was worth a quick break from talking around a bowl of chips and queso. And she was right:…
The View from Mount Scott
Would you believe me if I told you this picture was taken in Oklahoma? I don’t think I would believe you if you told me, and yet, that’s exactly where I shot this. I stood near the southwestern edge of Mount Scott, situated at the east end of the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, Oklahoma, and took this picture with my Fuji X100F while my wife and kids climbed around on some nearby rocks behind me. This was the third of four visits to Mount Scott during our recent trip and I was glad I could capture a small sliver of what the magnificent view looks like from this spot high above the plains. The previous evening my wife and I both noted that as the sun was setting, the hills surrounding the mountain came alive with brilliant contrast, as the western side was bathed in light while the…
Purple Prairie Dog
One of the first posts I ever put up on Weekly Fifty was a shot (well, two shots) of a prairie dog from the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, OK. Those images were pretty neat for the time, especially considering how little I understood about photography as well as my gear: a humble Nikon D200 and a 50mm f/1.8 lens. I still have that lens and use it regularly, but have since replaced the D200 with other much more capable cameras, and have learned way more about photography as well. As such, it was fun to revisit that scene eight years later for the shot you see above. I took this picture of a prairie dog poking up between two rows of purple flowers at the same location as the original shots from 2013, but this time I was thinking about more than just the subject. I considered the…
Jed Johnson Tower
Way back in 2013 my wife and I took a weekend trip to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, Oklahoma, and it seemed like we stepped into some kind of warp in the fabric of spacetime. Oklahoma isn’t exactly known for its soaring peaks and grand scenic vistas, and yet, just two hours from our home is this beautiful, expansive, majestic spot tucked away behind an army base just waiting to be discovered. We visited again a few years later and this spring as we were eager to get out with our kids after a rather…different…school year we once again turned our attention to the Wichita Mountains. The first spot we went was Jed Johnson Tower, an old fire watch tower that sits near a lake which bears the same name. We spent a few hours just hiking around, looking at scenery, and of course taking lots of photos.…
Nestled
‘Tis the season for magnolia flowers! I always like taking my camera out in May and June when these giant flowers are in full bloom around campus, especially at Theta pond. I’ve taken many shots of magnolias over the years but there’s always something special about seeing these gigantic bursts of color often tucked away beneath brilliant layers of unfolding white petals. I don’t recall seeing magnolia flowers before moving to Oklahoma but now that we live here, and have lived here for well over ten years, I still never grow tired of looking at them or taking their photograph. Every year I try to see these flowers a little differently or look for a bit more creative way to showcase them in a picture, and for this shot I used a lesson I have been learning (albeit slowly) over the last several months. It helps to get closer, but…
Stacking
This photo can’t exist. What you’re seeing isn’t a real picture, but a combination of two images that I stitched together in Photoshop. Or, rather, overlayed on top of one another and then edited with a mask so one part of one picture was superimposed on top of the rest of the other picture. So now the question: Do you know what part was Photoshopped? I’ll give you a hint: it has to do with depth of field. When you take pictures at very close range, like I did here, you have to deal with a very unwieldy depth of field. That is, the in-focus part is so narrow that even with smaller apertures you can only get a fraction of the photo in focus. I shot this picture with my Nikon D750, 50mm lens, and either a +4 or +10 close-up filter. (I can’t remember exactly, but I think…
Showcase
I talk a lot about learning from my past experiences as a photographer, and this picture is a good example of how I have tried to apply this principle in my daily life. Or at least my daily photography. Not long ago I shared a picture that I shot in my own back yard, with some purple flowers and an interesting style of background blur involving vertical slits of light from a fence. Today’s photo takes everything I learned when photographing the original and applies it to get what is, in my opinion, a much better picture. These are flowers from a saliva plant, which is pretty common where I live in Oklahoma. Every spring the one we have in our backyard produces these brilliant purple flowers which attract bumblebees, honeybees, hummingbirds, and of course a certain photographer as well :) After taking a picture of purple flowers with the…
Cat King
For years we have seen this particular cat roaming around the neighborhood, often minding its own business and generally keeping to itself on a daily basis. My buddy next door has kind of adopted it, feeding him scraps of food and giving him shelter in his back yard, but we’re not sure who actually owns the cat or where it came from. Sometimes it hangs out on our front porch, and our doorbell camera is filled with videos of this cat lounging at night or tussling with other felines at all hours of the day. I don’t know his name and haven’t ever gotten close enough to pet it, but it’s nice to have this cat adding a bit of flair to the neighborhood. So on a nice overcast day this spring I was glad I had the chance to take its photo in a way that I haven’t really…
Floral Flame
This photo was an exercise in condensing years of photographic experience down to about a five-minute time span. In order to get this shot I had to think about lighting, aperture, depth of field, sharpness, background objects, foreground objects (which I finally had to just nudge aside) and even small breaths of wind. It seems like a pretty basic image, but a lot of thought and careful consideration went in to what you see here. I was out for a walk around Theta Pond in late April, looking for natural colors amidst a sea of browns and greens, when I saw a small patch of purple flowers near the southeastern edge of the pond right by University avenue. Most of the flowers were open and drooping, but some, such as this one, had yet to spring forth which made them ideal photography subjects. I basically tried a series of techniques…
Flora Fireworks
I didn’t crop this photo. Not one bit, not even a single pixel. And that’s something I can almost never say. Nearly every one of the shots I share on Weekly Fifty is cropped, even if only just a little bit, and it almost felt like cheating to post this image without any cropping at all. I tried a few different times, but no matter what I did I always ended up preferring the original, and that really surprised me. I don’t know what kind of flower this is but it was super small, and I was only able to get this picture thanks to my +10 Close-Up Filter on my D750 + 50mm lens. I was walking through one of the gardens on campus when I saw this small purple plant hanging its head low in the afternoon shade, and thought that a picture would be difficult but at…