I live in a small village and have walked the streets many times, and it would be easy for me to conclude that I’ve seen everything, but I know I haven’t. One way I continue to discover new things is to change the lenses that I use when I take photos, which forces me to see the same neighborhood from different perspectives.
For example, today I put a lens on my camera that I don’t often use — a 127mm fixed macro lens. A fixed lens is a lens that doesn’t zoom in or out. If you choose a subject and want to zoom in or out, you have to do it with your feet, physically moving towards or away from it — if you can. This may sound inconvenient, but I find the limitation is actually beneficial. It forces me to see things that can be captured best within that len’s particular focal length, and teaches me to see my familiar surroundings in new ways. With the lens I used today, which you could think of as permanently zoomed in, I tend to see greater detail in ordinary things.
It also forces me to compose photos from unusual perspectives.
There is a downside, which is that there were a lot of photos I wanted to take today that weren’t possible with the lens I’d chosen. I could have avoided that — by using a zoom lens with a wide range, or by carrying another fixed lens with a different focal length and switching to that, or by bringing along a second camera with a different lens — but imposing the limitation on myself was the whole point of today’s exercise. With other lenses I could have taken other photos, but I would have missed the ones I did take. You can’t see everything from every angle all at once.
The Stoic philosophers of Ancient Greece and Rome understood that there are always limits in life, and that freedom comes from embracing those limits and making them work. Amor fati — love your fate. At a micro level, tonight I chose my photographic fate by carrying only a single, fixed lens. At a macro level, I’ve chosen (among other things) to live in the Japanese countryside, with all its limitations — many of which I could not have anticipated. Because of them — not in spite of them — I’m free.