Lens

The Dunedin railway station is ridiculously pretty. It was built when cash from the gold rushes flowed freely through the city and the council wanted to make a statement about what a grand and important little town we were. So, no expense was spared to cover it in little towers and fill it up with mosaics and carved wood. It's years since it was an actual transport hub. Freight trains pass it, and tourists use it to board the Taieri Gorge railway, but other than that it's mostly just something to look at.

This morning, early, before the tourists arrived, I went to look at it. I took my camera and one lens: a wide angle. I have a half dozen lenses that I have gathered up over the years to fit on the front of my Nikon camera. They cover a range of focal lengths from 16mm (extreme wide angle) to 600mm (extreme telephoto) and I pick one or two of them to take with me depending on what I think I might be taking pictures of. A wide angle lens is all about inclusion: lots of different things are going to be in the picture and the issue for me is, "how do I make all those things relate into a single, coherent image?" A telephoto lens is about exclusion. It focuses on one object only, and the issue becomes, "what object is that going to be, and how do I make sense of that object once it is removed from its context?"

These questions aren't decided at the time I take the picture. They are decided, to some extent, back home in my study, when I am putting the lenses into the camera bag. The lens I walk out the door with is going to decide what I'm looking at for the next couple of hours. The lens decides what I will see. Which is true of our normal, non - photographic perceptions as well.

"to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail," as the old saying goes. It's our (usually unconsciously) chosen mindset that determines how the world looks to us. The camera won't work unless it has a lens, and I guess we can't live in the world long without a set of preconceptions with which to make sense of what's going on around us. Just as long as we remember that there are other lenses on the shelf, which might change our picture of he world, entirely

Top picture: Nikon d750, Nikkor 16-35 f4 @ f8, iso 100. This is an HDR photo. I took 5 shots, just before sunrise, with exposure values varying by 0.7 stops and combined them in Adobe Lightroom. The shutter speed of the pictures varied from 1/2 a second to about 3 seconds. The camera was, of course, on a tripod.

Bottom picture: Nikon D750, Micro Nikkor 105 f2.8 @f8, 1/2000, iso 640. I was taking flower pictures with a specialised macro lens. This is a mild telephoto lens, specifically designed for things very close to the camera. The bee appeared and hovered cooperatively over a camelia. I fired off a burst of about 8 shots, of which 5 were OK.

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