Limiting your lenses – exploring with a just a 50mm lens

When travelling I often seem to carry a lot of camera equipment around, a DSLR with a few lenses, plus the Fujifilm X10. This time when I went away I decided to leave the Fujifilm at home to focus more on using the DSLR which had become somewhat neglected in recent months. One day I decided to go further than this and just take the Canon 450 with the 50mm f/1.8 lens. The intention of this was to make me think more about the images I could take rather than switching back and forth between lenses for shots I think I should take. The day’s travels took us for a wander around the edge of the Castle of Santa Maria da Feira. These were the results from using just a 50mm lens.

Initially I was frustrated as I couldn’t get all of the castle into the frame that I wanted – the shot below is an example, it doesn’t include enough of the castle for a nice shot. But I’ve been to this castle before and I have those typical wide angle shots, and so I realised I needed to shift my way of thinking a little. I needed to look for shots that would work with this lens.

A trip to Narnia anyone….

I took quite a lot of shots of the castle walls, trying to pick up on details, or in this case the shadows created by the trees.

After a little while of shooting some of the large features of the area I began to look for details.

These are not your typical shots from a wander around castle grounds, but it I learnt a lot from this exercise. Knowing I had a fixed frame lens meant I spent longer looking at the environment around me, and looking for details – rather than spending the whole time switching between lenses. The other benefit, of course, was that my bag was a lot lighter!

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