One of the drawbacks of being a landscape photographer with lots of free time, but a severely limited budget, is the lack of an endless source of new places to explore. I have a 1/2 dozen or so places within driving distance, but some of them are far enough away that I don't visit them very often. And what that means is that I tend to see the same thing, over and over again. Changing seasons, changing weather, and changing light makes those “same things” look a bit different from time to time, and give me more photographing options. Nonetheless, the limits are still there, and sometimes frustrating.
When I'm feeling frustrated about my lack of photo opportunities, I have to remind myself that the most important part of the process is getting out in nature and enjoying the fresh air and sunshine. Occasionally I will stumble upon something that makes those limited opportunities a bit more interesting. That's what happened when I rented a lens for the primary purpose of trying to capture birds in flight, something my existing lenses were not quite long enough to accomplish well.
My photography had been less than satisfying for a while. January tends to offer few interesting compositions. The trees are bare; the wildlife is scarce. I really wanted, I really needed something to spice up those hikes in the local parks.
On a cold winter morning, when the water in what’s left of Lake Conestee is icy cold, and the morning sun strikes the water’s surface, the result is often a rising misty fog, lit up by the very sun that created the fog. It was January 2016, and I was sporting a rented Nikon 200 to 500 mm lens that seemed almost magical, once I’ve figured out how to use it properly, and once I realized it had more uses than the one for which I had rented it.
That lens could bring in something far away and make it look close, all the while, squeezing the elements of the scene closer together, a compression effect that is quite pleasing to my eye. There’s nothing particularly interesting about the view I saw on that morning, but when that lens squeezed it all together, with lake water in the foreground, and the strip of bank with a great tangle of trees in the middle ground, backed up by that rising fog lit by the sun … something about that scene, that cold and frosty scene, attracted my attention in ways my naked eyes could not imagine.
The water on the other side of those trees was getting direct sun, while the water on my side of the trees was still shaded by the trees themselves. That’s what caused the backdrop of rising fog behind those trees. I was just fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time. That let me capture the resulting difference between icy water in shadow and icy water being warmed by direct sunlight.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I feel compelled to say it again: I really want to own that lens. It’s heavy to carry. It’s too expensive for me. But if I had one, I would probably carry it often. Of course, there are a lot of pieces of photography gear that I lust after, with no means to make them mine.
My Nikon D610 is what they call an entry-level full frame camera. It has 24 megapixels and is several years old now. The camera I have lusted after for a long time is the Nikon D850, which has a larger sensor, better lowlight performance, a much larger buffer, and is just an all-around professional quality camera.
Nowadays, most folks are interested in mirrorless cameras. They have some advantages that a DSLR camera like mine and the D850 do not possess. And I suppose, if I had enough money to start all over again with camera gear, I might be tempted in that direction also. But right now, the D850 is still the dream camera for me. That camera and a 200 to 500 mm lens would be an extraordinary combination for landscape and wildlife photography. Those two items would cost between $4000 and $5000 together, pretty steep into fantasy territory for me.
That doesn’t mean it can’t happen. It just means I have no idea how to make it happen. But I’m quite pleased to admit that my current gear will do everything I want it to do. And I can always rent that lens again for a few days, on occasion. Nonetheless, I have to remember that when I was six years old I lived in a three room shack on a sharecropper’s farm. And that simple life was all I knew.
Things change. And sometimes you get what you want, if you want it badly enough. But like the old Rolling Stones song goes: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.” It’s amazing how often the wisdom of that lyric, written by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, has held true in my life. Those guys must be geniuses.