The weeks where I don't have an official shoot make this photo challenge, well, more of a challenge. I decided to do something I haven't done since the first few weeks of the year: wander with some music and my camera. Today's soundtrack was the new Punch Brothers EP, Ahoy. I went down to the beach for the first time since the hurricane to see what was left of the boardwalk. Large chunks of it have been destroyed and washed away, yet nature is coming back.
I planned on finding some water fowl to photograph when I happened upon these deer on the marsh. I only brought one lens with me, my 35-350mm. I call this lens The Beast: it weighs pretty close to a ton. Instead of the normal twist to zoom, this lens slides. While it is my largest telephoto, it's my least favorite lens. It's actually been out of my camera bag for at least 6 years. The problem with it used to be the focus. I remember bringing it to a daytime football game and I seriously considered smashing it because it couldn't find focus. When fully zoomed out, it would slowly move through all its focus points and fail to lock on to anything, so you would have to zoom back out and try again. I attached it to my new 5D Mark III and it performs better than I could have hoped for. It didn't miss a single shot. Now I'm not going to start bringing The Beast around with me on most of my shoots. It's still miserable in low light settings and quite frankly, I don't want to carry around all that extra weight, but for bright sun nature kinda stuff, I'm going to turn to this.
Interested in seeing what The Beast looks like?
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