Gear
“Oh no here we go again. He’s finally lost it. Three shots already uploaded from that infernal ridge walk and yet he still manages to find another one to rattle on about!” is what you might be thinking. I’m starting to have the same thoughts myself. It doesn’t help that I’ve done so little photography since that adventure. Ok so there’s a van related wild camp caper on Dartmoor the week before last to report tales of yet to come, but I’m still to work those raw files into shape. The thing is, that afternoon on the high ground of the Brecon Beacons in South Wales brought one composition after another as the landscape gradually revealed new secrets with each phase of the trek. All of them taken with a lens that really deserves a bit more love in return for its efforts. This one brought the peaks of Fan y Big, Cribyn, Pen y Fan and Corn Du into a single frame, with an illuminated bonus foreground designed by the icy architects of this landscape to offset the four dark shrouds behind.
Like so many of us I started out with a modest assembly of tools for my induction into this world that we share. A midrange camera, a couple of reasonably price lenses sourced from your favourite auction site, a cheap tripod, an even cheaper bag and some very inexpensive filters that would be better suited as coasters for tea cups. And then I got carried away – a sorry tale of obsession, a descent of the senses so steep as to be matched only by the plummeting bank balance as a full frame camera and professional lenses were added to the bag, itself replaced by a new model of course. The cheap filters gave way to the same set that Nigel Danson swears by, and then of course a carbon fibre tripod was a must wasn’t it? Not long ago I looked at the collection, did some mental arithmetic, and decided it was best not to mention the final score to my better half, who has far more modest tastes. A new pair of knitting needles is as racy as she gets when it comes to freeing up budget for luxuries. When people take her to task on her innate sense of thrift, with metronomic consistency she replies with “how do you think I managed to retire in my fifties on what I was earning?” She has a point. You become so much wealthier by desiring less in life.
But in that bagful of precious things lies the lens that so often gets overlooked – only really brought into use at moments when lugging the others around is going to prove challenging. I think of it as my adventuring lens. After all I’d have needed a team of sherpas to roll my 100-400mm lens up the first slope of Fan y Big on a series of felled tree trunks if I’d wanted to take it with me. So for long arduous treks, the lightweight lens with the huge focal length gets its day in the sun; and the rain too for that matter. I used it a lot that day as you may already be aware from a surfeit of previous posts. When I uploaded the raw files from the hike onto my computer at home my first reaction was one of enormous disappointment – so many of them were fuzzy and grainy and I found myself heading down the familiarly dangerous route of eBay as I blamed the lens once more for its inadequacies, while stubbornly ignoring my own shortcomings. Misplaced vainglory is such an unattractive web in which to entangle oneself.
Eventually, after much soul searching and further experimenting at 300mm on the tripod in my living room I concluded that the maligned lens was entirely free of blame – it was me who was at fault. I resolved to learn to use it properly and stop poring over alternatives on the internet each time I fail. In fact it went to Dartmoor with me so you’ll be able to judge for yourself which one of us has performance issues to come to terms with in due course. I think we both know already it’s me and not the lens.
I’m sitting at my laptop in the aforementioned van, where the strains of the annual music festival that take place on the estate across the road from us are drifting across the trees towards me on the gentlest of summer evening breaths. It might be Razorlight; it might be Goldie Looking Chain I can hear, but this year the neighbours don’t appear to have been invited to the party in atonement for the interruption to our weekend peace so I’ve really no idea. I’ve moved on from indignation to indifference now. We didn’t really want to go anyway. At least it’s nearly over and it’s Bank Holiday Monday tomorrow with its stay of execution from the real world for one more day.
This might be the last image I post from that ridge walk, but the trouble is there’s at least one more of them jumping up and down in the shadows waving its arms about if I can drag another tale out of the adventure. For now I’ll work harder at familiarising myself with that lens.
Gear
“Oh no here we go again. He’s finally lost it. Three shots already uploaded from that infernal ridge walk and yet he still manages to find another one to rattle on about!” is what you might be thinking. I’m starting to have the same thoughts myself. It doesn’t help that I’ve done so little photography since that adventure. Ok so there’s a van related wild camp caper on Dartmoor the week before last to report tales of yet to come, but I’m still to work those raw files into shape. The thing is, that afternoon on the high ground of the Brecon Beacons in South Wales brought one composition after another as the landscape gradually revealed new secrets with each phase of the trek. All of them taken with a lens that really deserves a bit more love in return for its efforts. This one brought the peaks of Fan y Big, Cribyn, Pen y Fan and Corn Du into a single frame, with an illuminated bonus foreground designed by the icy architects of this landscape to offset the four dark shrouds behind.
Like so many of us I started out with a modest assembly of tools for my induction into this world that we share. A midrange camera, a couple of reasonably price lenses sourced from your favourite auction site, a cheap tripod, an even cheaper bag and some very inexpensive filters that would be better suited as coasters for tea cups. And then I got carried away – a sorry tale of obsession, a descent of the senses so steep as to be matched only by the plummeting bank balance as a full frame camera and professional lenses were added to the bag, itself replaced by a new model of course. The cheap filters gave way to the same set that Nigel Danson swears by, and then of course a carbon fibre tripod was a must wasn’t it? Not long ago I looked at the collection, did some mental arithmetic, and decided it was best not to mention the final score to my better half, who has far more modest tastes. A new pair of knitting needles is as racy as she gets when it comes to freeing up budget for luxuries. When people take her to task on her innate sense of thrift, with metronomic consistency she replies with “how do you think I managed to retire in my fifties on what I was earning?” She has a point. You become so much wealthier by desiring less in life.
But in that bagful of precious things lies the lens that so often gets overlooked – only really brought into use at moments when lugging the others around is going to prove challenging. I think of it as my adventuring lens. After all I’d have needed a team of sherpas to roll my 100-400mm lens up the first slope of Fan y Big on a series of felled tree trunks if I’d wanted to take it with me. So for long arduous treks, the lightweight lens with the huge focal length gets its day in the sun; and the rain too for that matter. I used it a lot that day as you may already be aware from a surfeit of previous posts. When I uploaded the raw files from the hike onto my computer at home my first reaction was one of enormous disappointment – so many of them were fuzzy and grainy and I found myself heading down the familiarly dangerous route of eBay as I blamed the lens once more for its inadequacies, while stubbornly ignoring my own shortcomings. Misplaced vainglory is such an unattractive web in which to entangle oneself.
Eventually, after much soul searching and further experimenting at 300mm on the tripod in my living room I concluded that the maligned lens was entirely free of blame – it was me who was at fault. I resolved to learn to use it properly and stop poring over alternatives on the internet each time I fail. In fact it went to Dartmoor with me so you’ll be able to judge for yourself which one of us has performance issues to come to terms with in due course. I think we both know already it’s me and not the lens.
I’m sitting at my laptop in the aforementioned van, where the strains of the annual music festival that take place on the estate across the road from us are drifting across the trees towards me on the gentlest of summer evening breaths. It might be Razorlight; it might be Goldie Looking Chain I can hear, but this year the neighbours don’t appear to have been invited to the party in atonement for the interruption to our weekend peace so I’ve really no idea. I’ve moved on from indignation to indifference now. We didn’t really want to go anyway. At least it’s nearly over and it’s Bank Holiday Monday tomorrow with its stay of execution from the real world for one more day.
This might be the last image I post from that ridge walk, but the trouble is there’s at least one more of them jumping up and down in the shadows waving its arms about if I can drag another tale out of the adventure. For now I’ll work harder at familiarising myself with that lens.