Mother Nature the great leveller

Shooting weather is a great leveller for photographers. It’s one area in which you don’t need accreditation and authority to get in, it doesn’t involve expensive travel to get you there, nor does it demand the latest and greatest in cutting-edge equipment for you to have the opportunity to make pictures that are as good as any.

Unlike many other photographic pursuits, you can produce awe-inspiring weather pictures pretty much regardless of your resources. It’s far more a test of your individual vision and skill than your hardware.

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Learning from where we least expect it

Some creative disciplines might be so far apart it would seem a stretch that they could possibly offer much to one another at all. But if you take the time to break it down, the work of a fashion designer in London could actually have something to offer to a photographer in Sydney, or indeed to creatives anywhere. You just have to be able to recognise it when it presents itself.

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For when nothing less will do

Here’s one from the rare equipment file. It’s the biggest* fully autofocus SLR lens ever built and probably the most expensive. I had the opportunity to give it a run a while back and I thought some of you might be interested in hearing about it.

First introduced in a manual focus variant for the 1984 LA Olympics and later updated to an EF model in 1993, Canon’s 1200mm f5.6L USM lens is a $120,000, 16.5kg technological masterpiece. It reportedly takes a year to grow fluorite crystals of a scale necessary to build its grand elements, and it’s completely hand-built, resulting in lead-times of about eighteen months on orders.

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