The Hardware Excuse

I didn’t grow up in a family of photographers. For years, we shot on Kodak film, through a telephoto lens that came with the camera — a Best Buy deal, if I recall correctly. On family vacations, we’d just buy a few disposable waterproof cameras because we thought the “good” camera was too heavy and prone to splash zone incidents.

We did eventually buy a DSLR, a Canon 50D, but we kept the cheap lens. It lasted us ten years, shooting all of my elementary and middle school memories. Finally, the thumbwheels stopped working properly, and we got an upgrade.

It was a Canon 80D this time, but we still had the cheap lens. After all, we shot to remember, not to capture art. So, when I started photography as a hobby, I had plenty of excuses for bad pictures. No matter how focused I got the image, the lens just couldn’t capture sharp lines — the glass wasn’t ground finely enough. There was image stabilization, but it was jumpy. Sometimes, it jittered so much that I had to turn it off.

I’d always marvel at the parents with their rapid-fire cameras and their long white lenses. If only I had those, maybe I could shoot better.

Eventually, our cheap lens failed. The focusing motors stopped working, and the manual focusing ring was prohibitively hard to turn. So, we got a 50mm prime lens on an Amazon Prime day deal. There was no image stabilization, but the focusing was top-notch, and the image was very, very sharp. And yet, I still felt constrained. Birds taunted me. With 50mm, I had no chance of capturing them in flight. The closest I got was peeping between the branches of our Blue Spruce tree and taking a few shots of baby Robins.

This tech envy followed me for a long time. It was now the fall quarter of my freshman year at Stanford, and I got placed last-minute into a Photographing Nature course. At first, I was hesitant. Could I even get anything interesting with a 50mm prime lens?

COVID-19 had kept Stanford from hosting in-person classes, so all I had at my photographic disposal was a patch of semi-developed land owned by my high school. Half of it had been turned into athletic facilities, while the other half remained as it was found — a small forest. The groundskeepers often drove their massive lawnmowers into the forest, carving out a trail for the cross country team and the occasional dog walker.

During the early pandemic shutdowns, I had walked these trails frequently out of boredom, so I knew every twist and turn. And yet, with a camera in my hand, I saw a completely different world. The “weeds” that bordered the path were not “weeds” at all, but a variety of flowering plants. Goldenrods and Asters filled the forest floor while Staghorns towered above them. I started snapping pictures of the flowers, the insect-ridden leaves, and even the bark textures without even thinking.

When I emerged from the trail, I had over a hundred pictures of plants, all shot with a 50mm prime lens. At this moment, I realized something: hardware can make a good picture, but it can also make a good excuse. For years, I had shied away from going out into the field, fearing that my camera and my lens wasn’t good enough. I did find my place with photographing the artificial — electric arcs on a tesla coil, fireworks, copper sulfate crystals — but I was holding myself back from my true photographic potential. Photographing nature isn’t just about catching the elusive cheetah or the ultra-rare bird in mid-flight. It’s also about finding exciting patterns of lichen on bark, shooting reflections in a still pond, and getting close-ups of an attractive berry. And that can be done with a cheap prime lens — and maybe even my old telephoto if it weren’t broken.

Hardware can indeed be physically limiting at times. Seeking to improve our family photo experiences, we very recently invested in a really good lens: a 70–200 mm telephoto. I remember walking outside with the massive lens for the first time and snapping a picture of a bird’s nest. It was at least 30 feet off the ground, but I easily captured each leaf and twig. This would have been physically impossible with the 50mm prime.

But hardware doesn’t limit a photographer. When I strolled the trail with the camera for the first time, I didn’t have that large telephoto lens at my disposal. That’s why I started looking around at the flowers and the stationary marvels of nature.

A blind man develops a keen sense of hearing. A double arm amputee becomes deft with their feet. The same goes for camera hardware. We might be hobbled by lens availability and camera technology, but that allows us to look elsewhere. In my case, it allowed me to embrace the mundane trail vegetation and single out every single plant. And when I finally got that powerful telephoto, I didn’t feel a wave of relief. It wasn’t my photographic savior — it was just another tool. A tool that quite literally expanded my horizons, but still, just a tool.