Valhalla Island

Last weekend I was stupid enough to place my new digital SLR camera on the roof of our rental car. You can guess what happened. Miraculously only the lens was smashed to pieces, the body walked away with just a single, small scratch and still works perfectly.

I had no idea whether the camera was still able to take photographs because I had no other lens to test with. This week I took it to the camera store, confirmed it works and bought a new lens, the cheapest Nikon lens immediately available.

The smashed lens was the kit 18-55mm. It was light, provided a pretty wide angle with a little zoom if I needed it and my camera could power the auto focus. My new lens is a Nikkor 50mm prime, it has no wide angle, no zoom and while it’s an AF lens, the D40 can’t make it auto-focus. It was $170.

It has advantages, it’s fast — f1.8, it’s compact and it will force me into better habits. When I get it right, it takes beautiful photographs, better than those with the kit lens. I took 250 photos on this weekend’s Rocky Mountain trip, I got the focus wrong on around 50 where the auto focus would have gotten it right. Here’s a few I got right:

Despite getting it wrong one out of every five shots, manual focus was less of a chore than I expected it to be. It creates a feeling of being part of the image making process. How well a photo might turn out is completely on my shoulders and I’m responsible for the bad ones.

Being without a camera made me realise how much I enjoy taking photographs and enjoy being able to take good photographs.