Hello all!
Welcome to another week, and the end of another weekend (sad face)
I wonder how you all went and what you shot over the weekend, anything interesting, different or difficult?
Myself, I took a visit to Sydney's Taronga Zoo, A life long favourite of mine and an absolute special for great photos of subjects you don't get to see every day.
However as I mentioned I have been to this Zoo a couple of times already, and the inclination to just grab my 70-200 throw it on my 5D and get shootin' is almost an involuntary action. Once you have shot at the zoo a couple of times with a tele lens, good shots are almost present themselves, and this can be very VERY satisfying, especially when you get so close as to fool others into thinking you have captured the images on Safari on an African continent! However I wanted something different this day, I Wanted to create an opportunity to force myself to try new things, so, I left the 70-200 at home, slapped on a 50mm 1.8 and left.
Thats right, going to a shoot subjects that are quite happy to stay at the very back of their enclosures and make it extremely difficult for you to get a good picture of them, I chose to take a lens that would get me no closer then most of my friends could get with their compact digital cameras, much to their confusion when they made the assumption and asked "that looks like an expensive camera!, you must be able to get really close with that!?..." upon arrival of course you notice the abundance of other photographers, all with as expensive or more expensive cameras then mine and ALL with big, long, very impressive looking telephoto lenses attached to said expensive cameras, this can be off putting but I insisted that having to create interesting pictures in camera for myself would be far more rewarding then getting a nice image, simply because I used a long lens to get nice and close to my stationary subjects.
So I went about my day, having to think each time about how I would approach this shot, compose it and execute it. Knowing that if I could make a few good images today, they would be good because of my ability and knowledge and not because I had the expensive gear allowing me to get up and close and simply snap away.
Its because of this that I found these results a lot more pleasing.
let me know what you think, and also when have you gone about a shoot in a "non traditional" way as to give you a different set of results?
unitll next week!
GE
