WOODS & WATERS
Seeing things from a
HOW THE PANDEMIC TURNED ME INTO AN OUTDOORS PHOTOGRAPHER BY BOB DUCHESNE
MY LIFE FEELS LIKE a chronic Zoom meeting, and that’s not the only change brought on by an unfortunate pandemic. I’m becoming a photographer. No, I mean a real one, not just someone with a point-and-shoot fetish, skilled only at taking photos of puppies and children’s birthdays. A year of semi-isolation seems to have transformed many lives. Since we couldn’t socially-gather indoors, many of us socially-distanced outdoors. There has been a surge in hunting, fishing, camping, canoeing and wildlife-watching. My transformation into a photographer followed the same pattern. It happened completely by accident, when a used Canon EOS 80d came into my possession. It was just the camera body, no lens. I didn’t even own a lens. The following week I bought my first, a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 STM Lens. Those numbers didn’t mean anything to me. It just seemed like a relatively inexpensive way to try out my new toy. Up until this point, I had been the proud owner of a Fujifilm Finepix S1 — a point-and-shoot superzoom that could manage 50x magnification. Such cameras are also called bridge cameras, because they bridge the gap between basic traditional cameras and the advanced DSLR cameras, one of which I now possessed. DSLR stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex. It bounces the target image off a mirror into the viewfinder, giving the photographer a precise look at the subject and its focus. The mirror snaps out of the way when the shutter is pressed. The advantage of DSLR cameras is that you can interchange a variety of lenses on one body. I still use the Finepix. It can do many of the things a DSLR can do. But not everything. My reaction to the new camera was like that
A YEAR OF SEMI-ISOLATION SEEMS TO HAVE TRANSFORMED MANY LIVES. SINCE WE COULDN’T SOCIALLYGATHER INDOORS, MANY OF US SOCIALLYDISTANCED OUTDOORS.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF BOB DUCHESNE
DIFFERENT ANGLE
