“Owning more than one lens assures that you will always have the wrong lens on the camera for any given picture”
-T. Orland’s Compendium of Photographic Truths
This seems to be one of the great truths that I’m experiencing these days. It’s getting harder to get out the full SLR kit with lenses, save for specific activities. Most days I’m running around with the LX3, it seems – and on full wide-angle mode. Despite the zoom, I’m using it as if no zoom existed.
Some of this is mindset, I suppose. When I have too many choices, I get option lock. With fewer choices, I tend to just make ‘em work.
This is likely a good lead-in to my next project: going back to film. I’ve decided to do a short trial run similar to TOP’s Leica for a year challenge. The purpose isn’t really to follow what Mike Johnson is recommending – although I hope to get some of the same benefits. Rather, in my case: having always used labs to do processing, followed by jumping into digital, I never had the chance to develop my own negatives. Or to make my own prints. Or to get back to the original ways of how this was done.
Overall, my goal is to gain the skills it would take to be an old-time war photographer. Take a fully manual camera and a wad of film into the field, use it over the course of several days, and return for developing. Or even create a make-shift development kit on premises & process there.
We’ll see where this takes us.
