Playing Favorites

Do you find yourself playing favorites with your camera gear or locations?  Do you keep going back to a piece of gear, just for the sheer joy of using it?  Or, return again and again to a location because you feel some symbiosis or energy from the spot? I recently processed an image from my recent workshop along the Oregon coast which started me thinking about playing favorites and what that might do for my photography.

Here is the image that sparked this train of thought.  It’s a simple image with not much to it other than texture and color and a bit of shape/flow in the way the rope winds around.

When I viewed the image in my catalog, the textures, tonality and sharpness of the image really struck me as being better than average (for me) and so I started examining it closer, appreciating the fine details, the way the color is rendered and the depth/dimensionality I saw in the image.  I glanced at the EXIF data and saw that I shot this with my Fujinon 50-140mm lens, a lens I don’t use as much as I probably should.  This started me down the path of looking at other images shot with this lens and I realized that many of my favorite images were shot with this lens!  I was a bit surprised by this initially because I don’t view this lens as my “go to” or “favorite” lens.  I most often have my 16-55mm lens on the camera which serves as my wide angle and somewhat medium telephoto lens and then my 100-400mm is my second most used lens.  My 50-140 ranks third in my catalog for the number of images I’ve shot with it, however, the percentage of keepers I have far surpasses the other more used lenses.  Below are a few of my favorites shot with the 50-140mm lens.

When I think about “playing favorites”, the Fujinon 50-140 doesn’t immediately come to mind and that is puzzling to me.  When I was a Canon shooter on a full frame body, my 70-200mm was my “go to” lens for most things.  But when I transitioned to Fujifilm, my preference for this mid-length zoom didn’t transition with me.  However, I’m finding more and more that I pull the 50-140mm out of the bag for many of my shots because of the amazing clarity, color and resolving characteristics in the lens. There is something non-quanitifiable, non-definable and hard to describe about using this lens and the results it produces.  When I do get it out of my bag, it is an absolute joy to use in the field and the image results often turn out quite pleasing.

Which all leads me back to the start of playing favorites with gear or locations.  Do I have favorites?  Yes!!!!  Is that a bad thing?  NO!!!!  One of the joys of this hobby is enjoying the act of the hobby and perhaps enjoying the results we produce from it. Anything that helps us raise our enjoyment level is a good thing.  More often than not, I find that photography is about the experience of being on location and the experience of crafting a composition, then appreciating it more when you get back home to develop it.  Anything that might make the experience more pleasing is a good thing in my book.  If you know me, you know I’m not really a “trophy hunter” searching for the best images of the most iconic locations.  I’m more about the experience, connecting to the location and the subject, being more “in the moment” while on location.  This is where I find my joy in photography, not the trophy image.  So anything and everything I can do to make me feel more in the moment and connected to the photographic experience is something I support and encourage.

Using gear that “feels good” when you use it may seem like the antithesis of what is often preached in photography, which is more focused on image quality and pixel peeping and such.  Those things are important yet, but I also believe that enjoying your gear is also important to maximize the experience.  And, this is a big and, I believe that if you enjoy using your equipment, you are more likely to produce better quality work!   When our gear “feels right”, it can give us more creative energy, or at the very least, get out of the way so we can focus on the art and not the mechanics of photography. When I use my 50-140mm, the weight, size and function of the zoom ring just “feel” right to me.  The same holds true with my Fujifilm GFX50s, there is something about it that just feels right, from it’s size, dial and switch positions, etc., that just meshes well with me as I’m working.   I feel that by playing favorites with these two pieces of gear raises my enjoyment of photography along with potentially helping me to be more creative and produce better work than I do with some of my other lenses or camera bodies.

The same concept holds true with locations.  Some locations we respond to better than others and that may help us produce better work.  Maybe it’s the subject matter, the “energy” of the location, or something subconscious like the curve of a shoreline or the angle of a mountain slope that just “feels” better to us.  I always recommend to return to familiar locations in order to peel back the layers of subjects and stories that can be told that you can’t capture in one brief visit.  Playing favorites with a location helps us build a familiarity and comfort, which in turn may unlock untapped creativity in you allowing you to experiment, create more insightful or connective images, or simply be a restorative exercise for you being in a place that “feels” good to you.  For me, the Oregon Coast is such a place that I return to month after month, both for the creative potential as well as the comforting/restorative properties.  I find that returning to the same locations over and over again, under different conditions, times of day, etc allows me to peel back layers of the onion and dive deeply in to the subject matter.

Playing favorites is a good thing!  Routines and patterns are essential parts of being human, and that carries in to our photography.  Whether you use a lens more often is due to convenience of not wanting to change your lens, or it is in fact because it is a favorite that brings you joy, that’s what I encourage you to examine a bit more closely.  Playing favorites, using our favorite gear or going to our favorite locations is something that can definitely increase our enjoyment of this wonderful hobby, and perhaps, help us to produce better images in the end.   I’m curious, do you play favorites and if so, with what?