Since I haven’t been taking many pictures lately, I have been using my time to try to decide what I’d like to do when it warms up next spring.  I am thinking about what I would like to photograph and what camera I would prefer to use.  I thought that one element of this process should be to look back through some of my older pictures and pick out what I liked and so I did.  The above are one set of results.  I liked their simplicity and color and that they all had black in them.

I deliberately didn’t look at what camera I used or any other details about the pictures until I was done.  Looking back later I noted that a different camera was used for all four of the above, but that they were all taken with a long focal length lens.  Probably the only thing significant about the different cameras is that I have used many different ones; but another possible factor is that it indicates that the particular camera didn’t matter.

The long focal length is more troubling for me.  I have liked long focal lengths since they enabled me to extract details from around me while blurring out the backgrounds.  The troubling aspect is that I have had more problems with heavy camera-lens combinations.  As a result of that, I have been carrying around and shooting primarily my Ricoh GR with a fixed effective 28 mm lens.

The problem that I need to resolve is that I prefer small light-weight cameras with prime lenses like the GR or a Leica X2 or the Fujifilm X100T while at the same time I preferred images made with long focal length lenses.  This presents a real dilemma for me.  Should I use a camera I like to hold and carry and seek out new compositions that I might like, or choose a camera with a long lens and shoot images like above?  If I use a long lens, I might need to use a light-weight camera lens combination with a smaller sensor and lower image quality to keep the weight lower.