My wife, Linda, has been wanting to really put her new 135mm lens to the test.
Even though the 135mm focal length is normally used for portraitures, she wanted to give it a roadside work out and suggested we take a short drive.
We decided on a morning drive along the meandering South Thompson River ending in Salmon Arm, just short of an hour away, for coffee and some photographs.
The British Columbia city of Salmon Arm with it’s unique, picturesque downtown and what residents claim to be the longest, curved wooden wharf in North America is located on the Shuswap Lake, midway between Calgary and Vancouver on the Trans-Canada Highway.
The lakeside city also became infamous in August of 1982 when then Canadian Premier Pierre Trudeau raised his middle finger at protesters from his seat inside a private rail car.
When I’m not making portraits I prefer zoom lenses. Using a multi-focal length lens when photographing buildings and other features that one finds along a busy city street makes photography easy to do because it’s simple to crop out people, cars and other unwanted elements.
Nevertheless, Linda wanted to use her 135mm and I decided to follow suit and brought my 105mm.
We wandered the downtown photographing anything that caught our attention. It was Sunday and most shops were closed and the streets, other than a couple of people walking to the grocery store or, like us, driving to Tim Horton’s for coffee, were almost empty.
It was a perfect day to walk around, and there was plenty of room to step backwards on to the street or move around in front of shops with our prime lenses.
We spent a leisurely hour or so just taking pictures in town before driving to the lakeside park to sit in the shade, take in the view, and talk about our pictures.
My preference would have been to use my 24-86mm, and although Linda really liked the 135mm, she wished I had brought along her 70-300mm.
However, we both thought using the long prime lenses was a good exercise.
Placing a subject and composing the final image took longer than just zooming the lens length forwards or back. Our fixed focal length lenses required that we had to physically move about to get the image we desired. There was also a change in perspective because of the mid-range of our lenses.
I have been trying to think of some words that would sum up our experience. Maybe American documentary photographer and author, Elliott Erwitt, got the closest to what I was experiencing when he wrote, “To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
Perhaps our exercise wasn’t so much, “an art of observation” as it was an “act of observation”.
These are my thoughts for this week. Contact me at emcam@telus.net. Stop by Enman’s Camera at 423 Tranquille Road in Kamloops. Or call (250) 371-3069.
I sell an interesting selection of used photographic equipment.