Lookout
Longtime Weekly Fifty readers know I rarely post pictures of my kids, and when I do you can’t see their faces. That’s because this blog isn’t for me to show off my family, but to share my love of photography and my journey to continually learn more about it. However, every now and then a picture comes along that happens to have my kids in it that I feel justified in sharing here. So that’s one fairly unique thing about this photo. The other singular characteristic of this picture is how it was shot. I took it with my iPhone, and I can count on one hand the number of times I have posted a mobile phone photo here. Not that mobile phone cameras are any less worthy of being counted among their large-sensor brethren; I just find my particular photographic learning path to involve more DSLRs and fewer iPhones.…
Takeoff
When we were gathering up the kids to take them out to Lake Carl Blackwell, I had to make a choice: what camera/lens combination to bring. Maybe the X100F since it would give me more candid-style shots? Or the D750 and 50mm lens for that classic not-too-wide, not-too-narrow look? What about the 70-200 for wildlife? I really didn’t know what to do, so I ended up toting my D7100 and 50mm lens mostly for the sake of simplicity and also because if I accidentally dropped it on the ice (a very real possibility, given how slick everything was) I wouldn’t be out thousands of dollars. That combination was great for the entire time we were out at the lake…right until about five minutes before we left. My youngest son wanted to walk out on a peninsula that jutted out into the lake, and as we got near the end my…
Frostbitten
This is another look at a very cold lake in Oklahoma. In other words, this is something you just don’t see very often down here. As with last week’s photo, this is Lake Carl Blackwell completely frozen, a few days after one of the longest stretches of cold weather in recent memory. When my wife and I took our kids out to the lake just to walk around and look at the strange sights, we didn’t really know what to expect other than that the surface of the water would be smooth. Which it was. And covered in snow. Which it also was. But this thing? No, I can safely say I had no idea I would see this. So what is it? Good question. I think, though I’m not entirely certain, that this is some kind of plant or shrub that was covered in a layer, or many layers,…
Deep Freeze
During the extreme cold snap of mid February I didn’t actually take many photos. It was just too cold! Even though I often thought about going out with my camera while we were stuck inside huddled under blankets trying to conserve power, I mostly just erred on the side of comfort at the expense of photographic creativity. That changed a bit as the weather warmed, and when temperatures rose into the 40’s my wife and I took our boys out to Lake Carl Blackwell west of town just to let them see what a frozen lake looked like. Living in Oklahoma you just don’t see things like this too often, so we wanted to take the opportunity while it was available. And nature did not disappoint! Ok so first things first: we did not go on the ice. Even though it seemed plenty thick for walking around, and it certainly…
Weather Vane
I shot this in mid February when Oklahoma was in the middle of one of the longest and harshest cold snaps in recent memory. We had a near-record number of days below freezing, some with a high hovering around Zero. (If you live in the midwest United States you know what I’m talking about–we had it easy compared to states farther north!) My wife and I didn’t leave the house for a few days, and neither did our kids, but I really wanted to find a way to document the cold and snow and generally really bad weather conditions. I wasn’t about to spend more than two minutes outside in order to do it though! Then one evening I noticed this thing in the backyard and realized it might have the answer. What you’re looking at here is a simple weather vane my youngest son did as a school project…
Holding
Something kind of interesting happened as I was out shooting with my 10-stop ND filter on a chilly February morning. I didn’t have anything specific in mind other than to shoot a picture of this particular fountain on campus, but once I got there and set up my tripod I wondered if there might be a way to incorporate geese into the shot. I took a few shots and liked how the swimming geese added some interesting streaks across the image, but something about the end result just seemed cheap and boring. I thought I could do better. Trouble is, geese aren’t really known for cooperating or doing what you want them to do at all. They mostly just kind of ignore you, hiss at you, or run away. Still, I did think I could get something if I worked at it for a bit. As I reviewed my images…
Pumpkin on the Prairie
So after last week’s grandiose pontifications about a years-long photography improvement project involving fountains and filters, this image is pretty much the opposite end of the spectrum. I mean, it’s a pumpkin covered with snow. That’s pretty much it folks. Nothing to see here, move along. Actually that’s not entirely accurate. This picture isn’t anything to write home about, but it does have a bit of a story behind it. Over the past several months many of my Weekly Fifty pictures have been taken along the route that my wife and I walk every day with our kids, who either ride their bikes or putt along on scooters. At some point we noticed this pumpkin sitting in a field all by itself, and it was a little…strange, I guess. It clearly did not grow there, but who put it there? And why? And were they going to come back for…
Theta Pond Rainbow
hen I did my 2020 In Review video one of the things I mentioned as a goal for 2021 is to do more long exposures, especially with ND filters. Soon afterwards I decided to bite the bullet and get a nice 10-stop ND filter (or, as my wife calls it, a very dark circle) for my 50mm lens and the first thing I wanted to do was go down to the OSU campus and take a picture of the rainbow at Theta Pond. In the winter when the sun is low on the horizon there’s a good chance of seeing a rainbow in the fountains, but you have to catch it at the right time of day when looking at the fountains from just the right angle. It’s a really cool sight, and not difficult to capture with a camera, but usually you end up with a picture that looks…
Nine Bands
If anyone ever asks me to define the word serendipity I’m just going to point them in the direction of this image. Nothing was planned about this in anyway, and I’m so happy with the results for so many reasons. Before we moved to Oklahoma years ago I had never seen an armadillo in the wild. At a zoo, perhaps, but never just running around like a squirrel or possum or other such creature. While you don’t see these things every single day in urban areas, they really are quite a common fixture out in the country–so much so that they have earned the unfortunate nickname of Texas Speedbumps. We live in Stillwater which isn’t a huge city but not exactly a small town either, and as such it’s not out of the ordinary to see these wandering across someone’s yard or hear them rustling around in the bushes when…
Reflections
This is a photo I have thought about taking for a long time, but never really made happen until a chilly evening in mid December of last year. I shot this while I was out walking around on campus with a friend, mostly to just shoot the breeze and catch up on things, but also with our cameras in tow so we could take some long-exposure photos of campus. If you’re the kind of person who likes to have a sense of place and geography, you might notice that the Low Library from last week’s shot is in this image too, albeit much smaller. This was taken southwest, as the crow flies, from where I stood to get the picture of the library; just behind me is University Avenue. I knew I wanted to get a picture of the fountains, but I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted the photo…