October 15, 2022 - Unmemorable apparent firsts

 I picked a very old gallery to look at for today and am coming up completely empty on any specific reason or goal I may have had in mind for this walk. It wouldn't be terribly unusual at this time to have had no specific goal, except to spend time outside and try to take pictures of "fall" or something. I do think there were a few things that I found on this walk that have become repeated goals in autumnal trots, though.

This photo is the first mild-wide shot of anenome flowers in front of blue sky that I think I may have taken. Through a 21mm lens (APS-C), the added context of the other flowers in and out of focus give this image a lot of depth and do a pretty good job actually conveying to the viewer what a thicket of anenome actually looks like.

While not at all my first recording of a butterfly on verbena, this was an early example of getting one in good critical focus with a non-macro wide lens (the 21 again). I have found that butterflies can be surprisingly tolerant of a photographer as long as you move smoothly and tend to stay near the animal but not too close. How I managed to do that with a wide-angle lens, I don't know, but successes like this one kept me trying at it.

Every time I go to Brookside Gardens now, I look for green tree frogs under the sidewalk illumination lamps near the visitor center. These frogs tend to wander up underneath, presumably to take advantage of warmth and of shade during the day, with the bonus of these lights likely attracting bugs once they light up in the evening. That's an observationally-supported guess, based on how much spider web I've found under all of the lamps this fall. If the spiders are able to support themselves there, the frogs surely also knew it was a safe place to hide and eat. This photo is through a 14mm lens, so as little as the cabbagewhite in the previous photo cared about my proximity, this frog cared even less... or it believed it was camouflaged adequately, I guess.

Finally, this wasn't a first, but it was pretty and it demonstrates a relative rarity in the wild: non-purple echinacea flowers. I believe there's only one species that blooms yellow naturally, though there are domestic cultivars that come in several colors (including a kind of gross-looking greenish petal color). These red flowers are well represented in garden collections around here, but rare in large, wild planters and don't seem to do much to escape cultivation and establish themselves.

2025 Bulbs, Part 2 - or - oops, all macro lens shots

There's no unifying theme for these images. This walk is actually the week before the last bulb post, and while it's obvious the light was still pretty flat, you can tell there's more color present in these shots. Rosid trees were in bloom, though no significant representation from cherries. As tends to be the case, though, the bulb flowers received more of my attention. These little narcissus flowers (via 100mm macro) are showing the little bit of moisture that remained from perhaps watering that morning.

This narcissus was in a much earlier-blooming stand of flowers, from what I remember. My memory is a little hazy on them, but near this photo, I have one of a blossom that was quite thoroughly slug-eaten, and in my experience with my day-lilies at home, the slugs take a little while to find a bed in bloom. This flower escaped the attention of the slugs, but not the ants.

These two tulips were about to open. I was taken with the fact that it looked like they were doing so together, as a pair. It made for a nice scene, though if I ever print this one, it'll be 8x10 - I only just now saw I failed to frame without the garden sign in the background.

I felt like this was the star of the day, though. I don't often get a chance to make interesting images where the subject is centered in the frame, but every once in a while works for me.

Interestingly enough, all four of the images I selected to represent this walk are from my 100 macro. I am not sure what lenses I actually took on the walk, but only three are represented in the 54 images i uploaded for the day - I shot one image through my 14mm, five images through the 20-40 zoom which I adore, and the entire remainder are the macro. Pentax's 100mm AW macro has become a really common carry for me on both APS-C and 135. My travel kit, if I get three lenses, is 16-85, 55-300, and the macro. If I'm doing a walkaround, I'll select a kit that makes sense for the weather, but the one overlap, regardless of if I'm doing ultrawide+standard zoom or array-o'-primes will be the 100. It's small, light, and does two things really well: 1:1 macro and middle-distance portraiture for flowers, like on this post. Traditionally, my go-to for the latter has been the 77mm f1.8 Limited lens, which I still absolutely adore... but that lens carries the penalty of lack of weather sealing, and would usually leave me without close-focus capability.

September 24, 2022 - Mono means one, pod means pod - and, u l t r a w i d e

contextualized

Most of the work I do is documenting what I have called fiddly little things, which involves a lot of flowers and insects. One would think this would be work that leads itself to a lot of macro lens time, and you wouldn't be wrong if you found yourself in that camp thinking about me... but I also spend quite a bit of time doing this with wide angle glass. When I first started using 'real' cameras in 2003, I had exactly two lenses: an smc-Pentax M 135mm and an smc-Pentax K 24mm. Lens designs contemporary to the 1970s appear to have assumed nobody would ever try to take close-up photos with a lens that was not specified for the purpose, so the 135 does not get terribly close to anything. That's great for things like rabbits, but for flowers, a theoretical 1:9 maximum reproduction ratio isn't very inspiring. The 24mm focusing at a quarter meter does a couple of things: first, a nominally tighter 1:7-ish ratio does actually make objects larger on film, and second, the photographer being actually closer to the object makes it feel... well, closer. I spent a lot of time 'misusing' that ultrawide lens, and so I developed a fondness for my own accidental style, one of context surrounding an object. The lead image on this post is such an example... it's not going to light the world on fire as an artistic accomplishment, but we get detail on the flower and we get a lot of background showing where it grows.

This specific example is on a point of land into Pine Lake in Wheaton Regional Park in Maryland that often gets used as a fishing point. These little asteraceae blooms were waiting to greet anyone that bothered to wander off into the woods to watch the small group of ducks and geese on the water. I used my 14mm (APS-C) to do this capture, a lens I absolutely adore using, and one that I wish would get a reissue with more aperture blades and weather sealing.

This photo is through the 21mm (APS-C). While not an ultrawide field of view, it's still very much in the genre of "look at the wonderful world around the thing you're photographing." With these anenome flowers being so delicate and pale, exposing for them tends to produce a beatiful vibrant blue sky on clear days like this one. 

I think this is the star image of these three, though. Milkweed bugs patrolling a seed pod made for a great foreground with the structure of the plant visible in the back. The only thing I wish I had been able to frame up a little better would be fully-open flowers, as none of the buds on the foreground sprig had gotten to the point the flowerhead just beginning at bottom center at that point. One of the things you have to accept doing this kind of photography, though, is that it is nature and therefore subject to the sense of order of things that respond on a seasonal timescale. I can't make a flower bloom, and don't want to try.

That said, I never will just go out with a set of ultrawides. I do have to carry a macro lens with me, and this walk was one of my first with a monopod.

Using a 100mm macro and on-camera flash, I was able to stabilize enough to catch this moth napping on what looks to me to be goldenrod. This photo also managed to do something that's relatively hard to do by accident with flash-macro work and shows background detail, not just a dark rectangle. Macro with context is really difficult to do like that unless you're kind of intentional about making sure the background exposure is going to be within the same couple of stops as the subject.

Or you can just shoot bugs in a flower. This species of hibiscus is almost always good for finding something lunching inside, and this day it was a little bumblebee and a honeybee. This image also did something I always love finding out in processing when I get home though...

It contained bonus bugs! I do think this might be a parasitic fly that was tending to the honeybee, but regardless, there's a whole world of little things going on even beyond the little things I can see and decide to act on. I also love the fact that the added detail of the pollen stuck to the bee really shows how pollination works.

2025 Bulbs, Part 1 - or - color in gray

 I'm doing flower posts out of order here, as April 19 was the last day I went out specifically to do spring bloom work this year. Unfortunately for the drama of the photos, none of the days I had time to do sessions at the gardens featured anything other than uniform overcast. Fortunately, fast glass and bright colors can do a lot of heavy lifting on their own, and I've also gotten to be much handier with managing curves and color balance to add a little extra pop if the image calls for it.

I used full-frame this walk, and few kits on a nice day are more rewarding to do flower work with than the FA Limited lenses. The three frames I selected for this post are all through the 77. When I shoot flower portraiture like this, the 77 has always done a fantastic job painting the scene. I had concerns when I got a full-frame digital camera that the wider field of view would create a problem for me, as I had only ever shot the lens on APS-C where it's about equivalent to 115mm, but practice in this field and a little experience doing portraiture sessions have made me more comfortable with the native field of view of this lens.

These tulips were planted at the Brookside Gardens fragrance garden area this year. All of the hexagonal beds featured these three colors, with maybe a less uniform distribution than I remember them doing from years past. There were fewer people enjoying them this year, too, but I think that's because it was gray, and my experience is that only the die hard gardenfan will spend time outside peeping on days that aren't full-sun and warm. One can make an argument that 80 might be too warm for a mid-April day, but it certainly wasn't an obstacle for me.

A new favorite thing from this year was magnolia flowers that were bloomed in such a way - usually via missing a petal - that you can see the stamens and carpels through a window in the petals. This saucer magnolia was doing a great job of that, and with the distance I had between the flower and where I could stand outside the bed beneath it, I was able to throw another flower out of focus in front of it. I remember reading someone once say that under no circumstances should you ever have anything out of focus in front of your subject... I can't imagine leaving an entire set of layers out of your compositional toolkit just because you think your viewers are too dumb to handle it, though.

Magnolias, at least saucer, star, and sweetbay, represent an interesting challenge generally thanks to their tendencies to flower too high to effectively photograph like this. In a way, that's one of the nice things about the distance created by a flowerbed you're not allowed to walk in. I have my limits, since the most reach I have native full-frame is 135mm, but I suppose if I know I want to do this in advance, I just take APS-C gear instead.

Another "huh" about this selection of shots is that all of them are subject-right. I will do that a lot with picking candidates for share. I suppose this is because I get biased to one side of the screen or another by my first few good shots, but who knows for sure. Maybe it's because I'm right-handed?

This narcissus bed was closer to the conservatories. As you can see in the lower left, it was pretty late for some of these, but the open flowers from that morning or the day before were striking. If I had this shot to do over again, I'd stand up a little bit and try to get the clump in the background more in line between the foreground and secondary flowers - or it's possible this ended up like this because there was a fencepost or sign to the left. I do try to shoot around the obstacles in the gardens, and sometimes it forces slightly weird views.

One thing missing from this frame that I know I've seen in other shots of narcissus flowers is an ant. It's a pretty common experience to come home from a garden session and find at least a couple of shots like this will contain ants on the flowers. I don't usually think of ants as pollinators, but they're there, dutifully shuffling probably nectar around. 

The final observation I'll provide here is that I do need to be a bit better about my editing practice from days like this. Most days, I will use shadow and highlight controls to expand my images' histograms to fill the full range of brightnesses. Doing that will give your images a lot of pop, but they become in a sense dishonest, featuring shadows that weren't there on the day. I'm not against extreme editing practices categorically, but for my own work, a subtle pushing of the boundaries is what I generally want to aim for. I might have to do an A/B demonstration at some point, but leaving the darkest pixels of the image off the 0 floor is a big benefit when processing this type of image.

Relocating effort

 

Surely, in late 2025, more than enough keypresses have been actuated in pursuit of the philosophy of how normal people have ceased to have a positive experience on social media. I had originally intended to start a long, rambling post about how my experiences seeing things people I like or know, or at least follow, have been replaced with Zucksites attempting to find exactly what fetish content I want to see.

It's funny to think of how much negative attention Facebook specifically has gotten off using personal information to build scary-accurate profiles of everyone to market things and to increase negative emotion to keep eyes on its pages. It seems to me that all they actually know about me, despite having been on the site for 19 years, is that that I'm a cishet male. They don't even seem to have an age range down, and they seem to have concluded the single most important thing about me is the 'het' part of their profile for me. I suppose it's possible their users are paying to boost their content? I don't know how reels work, but I do know the algorithm as a whole clearly doesn't get me, and it seems clearer to me that nobody is actually creating anything to post on that site anymore anyway.

At least it's not universally like that. On Instagram, I have accumulated a small group of people, both photographers and appreciators of photography, who see and note my work, and I've managed to curate a group of people who have no interest in algorithmic content generation or short-form video content who do at least see my work, and that makes me happy. This is so clearly contrary to Mark's wishes... I recently "got what I asked for" in the form of an iPad-native version of the IG app, which dumps directly into a video-first, autoplaying-with-sound-on-by-default experience that shows nothing but content from accounts I don't follow. Personally, I don't go to social networks to discover new people, but whatever... I have my sharing workflow figured out, and I can do that song and dance for the foreseeable.

So anyway, the plan: I've written this post probably seven or eight times over the history of this site. I intend to come back, then I forget about it after a month. That's why it's called the content vortex. What I'd like to start doing is just writing about my photography outings. I want to stick with something I'll be good at, and I like talking about my experiences out and about. I have, to date, primarily done photography with the old adage in mind, using my photographs to tell a story about where I go. I have no idea if the tens (or sometimes hundreds!) of thousands of words from each outing have actually made any impact, but I also know I've not done any discourse on my process or thinking, and I don't tend to talk about my actual experience being out and about... and hopefully that changes going forward.

In the short term, I will probably go back to a few select outings from the last few years and get at them. In the long term, the focus will stay more on more recent work, though I have about two decades of activity I can go back over, and most of that is a relatively unexamined body of work and experience.

Hopefully I keep some inertia behind this go!

Adventures with the wrong lens

When I first started on digital photography, that was really the first time I had to care about "gear" in the sense that I had learned how to use my mom's Pentax MX and the two lenses I had - 24mm and 135mm - and had only made it as far as getting a gift from my dad of a Tamron two-lens kit, a 28-80 zoom and 80-210 zoom. I was able to find a new-old-stock ZX-L at the Ritz camera at the mall in 2005, got that, and used the living daylights out of it, enjoying access to autofocus and aperture priority metering.

[edit: skip to the second half of this paragraph if you read my post "reengaging with photography" from last year, as I didn't realize I basically already told it. sorry.] That all changed when I got my *ist DL, and the company was in the midst of introducing a bunch of new lenses to deal with APS-C image sensors. I actually skipped the 18-55 kit and went with the 16-45 zoom they introduced, as 16 got me out to the 84 degrees I was used to with the M 24mm lens, and then the standard DA 50-200 lens. That kit served me very well for a year and a half, when I got my first limited lenses, the 43mm and the 77mm. At some point in this stretch, my dad got me the 14mm from Pentax, which is still one of my absolute favorites. Through this stretch, though, I of course always wanted the star lenses. The 16-50 would have been nice, but I didn't feel let down in any way by the 16-45 (and indeed, if they were to reintroduce the latter lens, screw drive and all, but with weather sealing, I would be in line tomorrow). The 50-135, on the other hand... the 50-200 served me well but the softness and lack of speed at 200 left me wanting something faster. The pricing was never going to work well for my budget, though.

Until this year, when I decided to take a look at them again. I learned all about SDM motor failure and screw-drive conversions, and decided it was worth a shot. The copy I got for less than a third of what they cost new 15 years ago came out of the shipping box without wanting to autofocus at all. Eventually it got itself to the point where it would begrudgingly swing through the focus range over the course of ten seconds, and I was resigned to returning it. The next morning, I read someone suggesting that this lens could suffer from sleepy SDM, and that one way they were able to get around it was to point the lens at the ground, run the AF, then point the lens at the sky and run the AF again, and that would be enough to wake it up. Lo and behold, the focus is working correctly. At least for a use session, then if I leave it sit for a while, it will slow up again. I figured I could live with that if the lens performed well in the field, and then resolved to take it on a walk before deciding for sure.

Today, I took that walk. The lens performs superbly... at 135mm, which is the only place in the zoom range I wanted to use it. This actually just now has reminded me of my experience with the Tamron 80-210, a lens that I basically only used as a 200mm stand-in because the minimum focus distance meant it wasn't great at shooting pictures of small things really anywhere short of that length. I guess these are traditionally intended to be used for portraiture or general walkabout stuff, and nobody ever thought they'd be on someone's camera that was into little things. The 50-135 worked great for a couple of birds today, even, but it's a lot to keep in the bag for what is effectively something I can effectively do with a 100mm f2.8 macro, or if I were to dig up an FA 135 f2.8, I'd have the same field of view at a fraction of the size. It probably would not do bokeh as well and may not be quite as sharp, but those are trades I can live with in that world.

Anyway, a younger version of myself would not have admitted this. He would have kept this lens and basically let it fall into disuse, believing it had a place in the hoard despite the limitations inherent to a zoom lens. I'm proud of myself for being mature enough to know it's best to let this go to a new home, maybe where someone can convert it to screw drive (since that's not even something you can do on the latest bodies, it turns out).

Incidentally, on zooms: I do have one zoom lens I absolutely adore - the 20-40mm limited. Not only does it feel fantastic in use and produce beautiful images, because the zoom range is so small, the focal distance doesn't create problems with trying to use it at 20mm. I think if they ended up doing a similar lens design that was maybe APS-C only, 40-80mm f2.8-4, same limited construction and feel, I'd again be in line tomorrow for one. I see they made an M zoom in that spec that I may go with just for fun for a while, but I really would like something a little longer that's weather sealed for flowers and bugs. Yes, I do recognize that means I need to stop futzing with it and get the 100 AW macro.

A couple more highlights from the star lens:

Here's the rest of the shoot.

A Whole Decade of Difficulty

Fresh off my leg trying to kill me just before I turned 30, I showed up for a neck ultrasound because my doctor felt like my thyroid may have been a little weird. A couple months later, I was in for biopsies twice in the same month. Reeling from the comically high cost of coinsurance payments from these experiences, I was set for a right thyroid lobectomy. That was April 5. My first surgery. I wasn’t in a great place mentally at the time, and when I woke up after the procedure, it turned out I had right-side vocal cord paralysis. In the flurry of professional concern about my voice being so far gone it could have been considered miraculous if I made it through five hoarse, low-volume but high-airflow syllables without needing to take a breath, I got a phone call from the surgeon to cover two things: first, he was going to cancel the unpaid amount of my bill from coinsurance because he felt terrible for me, and second, he wanted to schedule a meeting with me.

Oh, also relevant: we didn’t know at the time, but I would go on to discover that I had severe difficulty coming out from under the effects of anesthesia and pain medications; that problem was five and a half years away from identification and treatment. So this whole stretch of time, I was in a prolonged brain fog. I basically only remember taking this phone call in a parking lot at the Laurel MARC station. I think it was sometime in the afternoon. I was not back at work, but able to be out and about.

The days the surgeon was in person at my doctor’s office are lost to the sands of time. I assume he called me to schedule on Tuesday, so maybe Thursday or Friday he would have been able to see me. Either six or seven days after the surgery. I only remember that it was in the first week.

That meeting, of course, was to tell me the lab results were back.

The last ten years have been Something. One, two, or more of them are lost for everyone. For me, I count most of 2013, especially the July to September/October range, as a complete bust. I had backed out of volunteering at the zoo, I was dealing with being incredibly physically drained from six weeks of my ability to restrain any meaningful amount of air in my chest while speaking or exercising, and just generally having a tough time with the diagnosis and treatment. I’m four total surgeries and one radiation therapy down the road and I think things are better, but a lot of this has shaped how I look at the world and I hope I turned out better because of it. Time will tell, I guess.