I Brought The Bare Minimum of Gear on a Hike
One of the constant issues plaguing many photographers, myself included, is the FOMTS: Fear of Missing The Shot. As such, myself, and many other photographers, take their cameras with them everywhere they go. Some take heavy bags full of different lenses, with tripods strapped to the side of their bag in case they want to do a long exposure, and filters in every pocket to try to manipulate the scene to their liking. Personally I prefer to travel light, so on most outings I will pick one or two lenses to take with me, and just have a single camera body, no filters or tripods to speak of.
This means that sometimes I am in situations where I see an amazing composition or the light falls perfectly on a scene and I just can’t possibly capture it quite how I want. I have had to come to grips with the fact that sometimes that is okay. On a long hike such as the eight mile one I took on this day at the Briones Reservoir, I felt the weight of the singular lens and camera body, it was an extra burden I would have preferred to have left at home. But when the sun began to get lower in the sky there were images I just had to capture, and while a different lens may have been better suited to some of the compositions I saw I had to make do with the 85mm I had packed.
Sometimes when the light falls across the path you can just imagine what the photo could look like, and luckily I had a willing subject with me on my outing. The 85mm shows how versatile it can be, creating sharp close-up portraits with creamy bokeh, and beautiful environmental portraits with plenty of background separation.
