I’ve been going through my library of old photos and thinking.

Before 2006, I’ve been using standard zoom lenses by default, and when you ask people why those lenses are good, they will tell you it’s because they are universal, and allow you to take all kinds of pictures – from landscapes to portraits and details and so on. However, when I look at my photos taken with Olympus E-1 and the ZD 14-54mm standard zoom, over 90% of them conform to the pattern of “extend to 54mm, aperture wide open”. I was not a “diverse” photographer at all, and in fact I could have used the ZD 50mm f/2 macro instead of the standard zoom, without any adverse effects. Even then, I was very specialised for isolation-based closeups, and from what I can tell, I produced very “mature” work in that area. I knew what I was doing and the results turned out the way I wanted them:

However, there was a reason why I used the lens almost exclusively at 54mm: I didn’t know anything about shooting landscapes, or wide angle anything in general. It’s not that I didn’t try, but the results were crap, in a sense that I couldn’t control the scene in such a way that would capture the feeling of calm stillness that I learned to capture with closeups. When I think of it, I tried to follow a formulaic approach for shooting landscapes, and the images sucked. Also, when I would use wide angle, the scene felt cluttered and full of distractions that created something that was the exact opposite of what I did with closeups. Also, the 5MP camera lacked the level of detail that would be required for a wide angle landscape shot in which everything is supposed to be sharp.

And then I decided I’m going to learn landscape. It certainly was a learning curve; my early attempts were crap, until the point I was reviewing the Olympus ultra-wideangle, the ZD 7-14mm f/4, and at some point it clicked: I stopped trying to remove things from the scene in order to simplify it. I embraced the chaos in the scene and just arranged it into a flow. When I think about it now, it’s not that I learned to use wide angle; rather, I changed my attitude towards Chaos as a principle, by no longer trying to eliminate everything chaotic and thus create order, and instead felt the wild spin of the Chaos in a scene and freeze a moment that feels right.

It took me years to get comfortable with the concept of infinite depth of field, chaos, suggested motion, people in the frame, random things in the frame, non-obvious composition, and, sometimes, intentional motion blur. But, how else do you take a portrait with a fisheye lens in dense woods? 🙂

I must admit that the technique required me to pretty much abandon my usual style and methodology, and initially the equipment more-less dictated what I did; essentially, the camera took the pictures it wanted to take. It took me a while to first control the process, then get comfortable with it, and eventually extend my style through it. At some point, wide angle shots I took started looking as just my normal stuff, and that’s when I became happy with it. Even if it’s not nature, and if it’s black and white.