You Don’t Need Fancy Gear.

So after a week on the road, shooting landscapes, I headed back down the road on Friday evening. As I was driving down the A9, I was increasingly distracted by a beautiful sky. It had been one of those mixed days, where there was heavy showers, and beautiful sunny spells. Black clouds, with sun peeking through, casting rays across the hills, as the sun went down in the sky. I don’t know how many times I slowed down to pull over, but decided it would be too late by the time I got somewhere decent to capture it. Eventually, as I crossed the Dornoch bridge towards Tain, I had to stop. It was worth taking a shot, even from the roadside. I pulled into a layby, got out the car, opened the boot….no camera bag! WTF!? I had left it up the road. What a total idiot. It was after 8pm, so there’s no way I could summon up the energy to drive back up that night, so I had to resign myself to driving back up at the weekend to collect it, ahead of a fairly busy week.

I woke up on Saturday morning and had an idea. I had just been reading people online wetting their pants about the new Nikon mirrorless camera. Camera geeks getting their knickers in a twist about ‘dual memory card slots’ and various other features or lack of them. I had facepalmed several times over the last day or two, and made a few comments about people getting so excited about cameras, when they already had a very good camera. Somehow thinking that buying the latest gadget would suddenly make them better, when in actual fact, I still aspire to be half as good as many people who worked on technology from half a century ago.

So after digging through some old camera bags, I came up with the following kit.

1 Canon 5D mk2 body, battered and beaten, 10 years old, and not worth even putting on EBay. (And only one card slot – how did we ever cope in the film days)

1 Hardly used Canon 24mm f2.8 lens.

1 512MB Compact Flash Card.

1 Very old chinese battery, which luckily seemed to have a wee bit of charge left in it.

That was it. No tripod – the quick release plate was in my back, which was still on holiday.  Didn’t have my compact camera or gorillapod either – yes, in the camera bag, for making videos on my travels. So basic, 10+year old technology, a fairly ‘average’ day, and I set myself a challenge of heading out no more than 5 minutes from home, and just see what I could get. Oh, and I had an hour to spare.

The point is, you don’t need fancy kit. Yes it helps. Of course it is nice to have the best, expensive gear, but I have never been able to justify that. I know plenty people who have every bit of kit going, and still don’t have a clue. Equally I know people shooting Fellowship standard images on a phone. The big thing is, photography is about what you see, not what technology can do. Having an eye for an image is much more important, as well as just enjoying it.

So I got a few images I was happy with. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t amazing, just ‘ok’, but I liked the challenge of just taking the eyes for a bit of exercise.

I went to the ‘Clootie Well’, a pretty weird place to be honest, but steeped in all sorts of history, and just along the road a wee bit, overlooking Munlochy Bay.