Honestly, recently I have been in a bit of a photography rut. I don't know exactly what caused it, possibly a combination of a run of mess-ups on my part. These mess ups include; getting to various location and screwing up the shot. Getting to locations and forgetting important pieces of equipment, managing to erase a years worth of Lightroom edits after a windows update messed up my documents and losing my Lightroom catalogue and, just generally not feeling very inspired.
I guess one other thing, that I will fully admit to being guilty of, is spending far to much time on 500px, instagram and Flickr, and becoming increasingly disheartened by viewing some of the truly outstanding work out there, and feeling a little..... inadequate.
Well anyway, I watched a very interesting video the other day, and it really got me thinking:
If you don't subscribe to this guy's channel already, you should as his work is incredible and his content is top notch.
So taking his advice I set out to try and deal with this little itch.
So step 1 came about a little bit by chance. I am going on a big 6 week long trip in about a months time, where I will be living, travelling and shooting out of a backpack, and therefore will need to keep the photography kit down to an absolute minimum. I purchased this little beauty last week:
The Sigma 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM, and it is going to need to be my go-to lens for all things wide-angle and telephoto. The thing is, I weirdly have never owned a lens yet with a focal length over 70mm equiv. 99% of what I do is landscapes, meaning I rarely, if ever, go over 50mm in my photos. So having my new toy was a real joy as suddenly I had this wonderful new zoom range to play with.
So taking Nick's advice, I set out with my new toy to a lake near my house to snap away and came away with one of my new favourite pictures of this year:
I don't know if you can call it "zen" or "minimalist", but I really love the simplicity of this shot. We have also been really lucky recently in Perth, I don't know if it is the time of the year, the weather or whatever. But we have been getting the gorgeous light pink soft light sunsets recently which, in the picture above, give some gorgeous pastel-y colours.
Step 2, was a bit of an "if you cant beat em, join em" moment. I haven't for quite a while gone out with the sole intention of taking a landscape with a big ol'e long exposure sunset sky, but it turn's out its actually quite fun, and very rewarding. So I went down to one of my favourite spots in Perth, the South Perth foreshore and set up the tripod with a 10stop ND filter just as the sun was going down and casting a gorgeous winter-y pink glow over the city.
Anyway, I feel like this last week, I have taken more shots that I am super happy about, than almost this whole year so far!!!!
Here is to the next 6 months and finger's crossed some more good shots. In the next two months I will be visiting New Zealand, Peru, New York and Iceland and should be a chance to shoot some of my all time bucket list locations, I expect that will be quite a fun blog post to write at the end of it all.
All the best till next time.
David