I always encourage folks in my Lightbending Workshops to push their creativity by creating specific exercises and personal goals when they go out shooting. An exercise I like doing a lot is selecting one camera and one lens to carry on an entire outing. Rather than having my whole kit with all the different options easily available at fingertips, this forces me to really think outside the box and create unique image that I might not have “seen” otherwise.

Last week I went for a photo walk in Dungannon Plantation Wildlife Management Area. Normally for a hike in the forest you’d take a wide angle lens, right? I decided to go to the oposite extreme, carrying ONLY my long Nikkor 200-400mm f4. With the late afternoon light fading, I was pushing the envelope on hand-holding that beast. But it was a fun excercise, and I NEVER would have “seen the forest for the trees” if I hadn’t truly focused my creativity to that one lens.

The first image is actually a panoramic composit of 5 images, shot vertically, then stitched together. Each image was shot at 1/30th of a second, hand-held, at 300mm!!! In case you’ve been doubting, YES, vr technology works. 🙂
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