Sunset at 2500 Feet
If this picture brings you a bit of déjà vu, you might be on to something. The view from the top of Mount Scott in the Wichita Mountains is one of the most incredible sights in Oklahoma, and is part of what makes this location one of my family’s favorite places to spend a weekend. It’s not always easy to get a specific picture that you have in mind though, and over the years I’ve realized that the way for me to get the most fulfilling (even if they’re not the most technically impressive) photos is to just kind of go with the flow. We’ve gone to Mount Scott in all sorts of weather conditions, and things rarely line up with the photos I want to capture or the gear I happen to have with me. So, the most recent time we visited the area the only camera I brought…
Staredown
I’m not sure I have the patience to be a wildlife photographer. I certainly don’t have the gear for it, and I don’t really know if I have the compositional eye for this kind of image-making pursuit either. That being said, it is fun to take pictures of our animal counterparts with whom we share the planet every now and again. Most of the time when I end up taking photos of animals, like the squirrel you see here, it’s basically an accident, or perhaps seen from a more positive angle, serendipity. In this case I was walking around Theta Pond on the OSU campus with my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens (hardly a good combination for wildlife photos, though an outstanding setup for lots of other kinds of pictures) and just kind of paused in my tracks when I came face-to-face with this fleet-footed furry friend. Unlike some…
Medicine Park Star Trails
Time-lapse video of this star trails photo: youtu.be/HRg8OHnSY1c One of my favorite features of my GoPro camera is its ability to take star trails shots, like the one you see here, with relative ease. Despite its minuscule image sensor, especially compared to a full-frame DSLR or Mirrorless camera, it has a bevy of software features to help photographers get incredible images that are difficult, impractical, or even impossible to capture with a larger, more expensive, digital camera. I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself though; let’s back up a bit and talk about this week’s picture a bit, shall we? I shot this on the outskirts of Medicine Park, Oklahoma, which sits nestled in a valley just outside one of our family’s favorite spots in the state: The Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. We rented a cabin (or house, I guess, depending on your definition) with some friends and spent a…
Mini Majesty
So, do you remember how last week I went on and on about patience, planning, and forethought? Yeah, this image had none of that. Not that it’s a bad shot–far from it, I would say. I quite like it, and am really glad to have been able to take it. It’s just a bit, oh, ironic I suppose, that after all my rambling about taking time to consider so many photographic elements in advance last week that I would take a picture like this that employed none of that whatsoever. And yet, it still turned out great. Is there a lesson to be learned? I dunno. Maybe, maybe not, but at the end of the day it’s the results that count and if this photo is any indication, sometimes you it takes a lot of preparation to get a good image but sometimes all you need is a little energon,…
Sea of Red
One of my favorite times to take photos is during, or perhaps slightly after, a warm rain. Another one of the best times to go out and capture the world with a camera is in the morning. And still yet one more fantastic time for photos is in the fall when the leaves are changing colors. So when these conditions come together, the results can be almost magical. Not actually magical, but pretty cool nonetheless. I was walking around Theta Pond at OSU on a recent rainy afternoon when I saw a tree that was lit up like an Independence Day firework–just an explosion of red amidst all the greens and yellows surrounding it, and the first thing I thought of was what it would look like in a picture. But not just any picture, mind you: a blob of red leaves doesn’t make for a very interesting image. What…
Bent, bowed, backlit
One of the most interesting things about photography is how the act of reflecting on, and analyzing, an image can make it stick in your mind in a way that otherwise might not happen. Two years ago I took this image of some backlit river oats seeds while out on a hike with my family, and subsequently used it as the subject of a Weekly Fifty post. In the process of doing so, the image kind of lodged itself in the back of my mind–I don’t think about it every day, but when I happened upon a similar scene (which you can see at the top of this post) the earlier shot from early 2023 immediately resurfaced. I remembered the glowing serrated edges of the leaves, the drooping bows, the blurry brown background, and most of all, the excitement I felt at being able to capture the shot. So when…
Transition
One of my longstanding conventions here on Weekly Fifty is that I don’t really create my posts to coincide with any particular point in time. I take pictures often and then schedule them weeks, sometimes even months, in advance so as to give me plenty of buffer in case I just don’t have the time, patience, opportunity, or let’s face it, mental energy to get my camera out and take a new photo every single week. As such, I often don’t even know when a given image will get published until I write the entire post and then click the “Schedule” button in WordPress. Where I’m going with this is, here we are on the cusp of a brand new year and the picture I have to go along with it is…a couple of leaves. It’s a fine photo, but there’s not much in terms of symbolism or meaning–not that…
Tree Climber
You probably know by now that my go-to gear setup for taking Weekly Fifty photos is a Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens. After acquiring, and then extensively using, a small but not-too-shabby collection of camera gear over the years it is this combination that I keep returning to because it just does such a phenomenal job in almost every photographic situation in which I find myself. I haven’t done an official inventory, but I would guess that about 90% of the photos I have shared on Weekly Fifty this year (and probably last year) were taken with this camera/lens combination. However, and you probably could tell that this was coming, there are some situations where it just isn’t all that great. The most obvious is, of course, any time that a true telephoto lens would just get better results–particularly when it comes to nature and wildlife. Even simple shots…
Year in Review 2024
https://youtu.be/6lmUokxxEhs Welcome to another Year in Review! Join me as I look back on the past year, share my top three photos, talk a bit about AI, show a few of the pieces of gear I have used, and look ahead to 2025 and beyond. It’s been another great year here at Weekly Fifty, and I couldn’t do it without all of you :) Check out the podcast my brother Phil and I are doing, which is all about parenting and photography: Camera Dads
Ducks in a Row
This is a photo I have been thinking about taking for months, but until recently I simply did not have the opportunity to do so. One of my friends at work has several dozen tiny colored glass ducks lining the top of her cubicle walls, and it’s the kind of scene that’s just ideal for a close-up shot with a macro lens. The problem is, our cubicle walls are about seven feet high so taking a shot like this requires a tripod and a bit of time to set it up. As a result, there aren’t many opportunities to get a picture of these little ducks. However, one morning recently I decided to finally make the shot happen and I’m so glad I did. I got to work early before anyone else was in my department, set up my tripod with each leg resting on a chair, stood on a…