The Art of Photography

Jasper | 2021

Just kidding. We are not the people to give you any advice on how to take the perfect picture. Sure, we now have a beautiful camera – a Sony a7iii with an FE 24-105 F4 G OSS lens – if you understand what that all means, you are further ahead than I am. We took a lot of photography classes – a lot! We learned quite a bit, but we have absolutely forgotten way more than we retained. I remember a real life photographer telling us once, “Just because you have an amazing, state of the art kitchen, does not mean you are a chef.” Got it, we are not photographers.

We kind of fell into this camera, being gifted an earlier version when our children were born and we fell in love with it. Over the years we upgraded and then bought different lenses to do different jobs and we even carried everything around all nicely organized in a proper camera backpack. We quickly discovered that we are, well,  lazy. Carrying around all that equipment and taking the time to change lenses got old in record time. Eventually, (and by that I mean within a day or two of each trip) we started leaving the backpack behind and carrying only the camera with the smallest lens we had – a wide angle lens that was really light. This meant we had very little range in the type of pictures we could take and we could never zoom in with any degree of usefulness. But, we made it work for as long as we could. Lazy, remember?

Vancouver | 2008

As we started to travel more often and discovered the world of photobooks, it became obvious that we were going to have to up our photography game. We did a lot of research and asking around to eventually discover our one-stop-shop, last-one-we-will-ever-buy, decent ‘all around’ lens. We can now zoom in to our hearts content and get nice close ups. But it is heavy. Really heavy. Nor does not fit into our pocket. <sigh>

Barcelona | 2011

So you may be asking, why do we choose to carry around 5 pounds of camera? Especially now that phone cameras are so much more powerful. Well, hmmm. We have asked ourselves that same question, usually within 5 hours of carrying this weight around our necks. Habit? Definitely. Realistically though, we find capturing the moment with the camera quicker and the actual pictures are usually of better quality than with the phone. Hanging from our neck, the camera is always at our fingertips so we rarely miss a moment. The moment may sometimes (okay, oftentimes) come out blurry, or badly framed or with horrible lighting, but we have it.

Carcassonne, France | 2017

On the flipside, there is occasion when we want to take some time to set up a shot, play with the lighting, the aperture, the ISO, the shutter speed and our camera gives us this opportunity as well. We may not have an artistic bone in our body, but we do understand some of the technical aspects of how the camera works and it is fun to play around.

Besides, carrying around all this extra weight while touring counts as a workout, right? If you’re lazy, you bet your arse it does.