I’m considering changing most, if not all, of my photography to using prime lenses rather than zoom lenses.  If I do that, a potential downside is it could have a major impact on what I photograph as well as how I photograph.

I get frustrated taking pictures of events in poor lighting.  It seems that I can’t keep my shutter speeds high enough to stop subject motion, and at the same time keep my ISO settings low enough to keep the digital noise down and the image quality up.

In the past month I have been trying various zoom lenses of higher quality but if I get lenses with a maximum aperture of F2.8, which I need, the lenses are too big, too heavy, and expensive.  With heavy lenses, my back complains even more than normally and that means that I can only carry them and use them for short periods of time … much shorter than I desire.

I have always preferred small cameras and lenses, but most of my photographic opportunities ay Honewood have been photographing wildlife and events which required the ability to quickly change focal lengths, and thus I was forced into using zoom lenses.

In the coming weeks I am going to try just using prime lenses.  I can make that work as long as I can get close enough and don’t need to be changing lenses a lot in the field.  For some activities I know ahead of time what focal length is required and I can pick the most suitable lens.  That should work for indoor photography.  Outdoors, it is a different story.

I photographed some frog legs (I think that is what they are) with my 45mm lens this morning (image above), but while I was walking I spotted a heron flying away over the pond.  I definitely didn’t have a long enough lens but I captured what I could (below) with the same 45mm lens by cropping and upsizing.

If I had my preferences, I would most like to utilize one small prime lens on my OM-5 camera for my photography … maybe just a 20mm lens which is an effective 40mm focal length.  That would be a more practical system for an old man with arthritis in his hands, a lot of hardware in his back, and continual back pain.

If I can make it work with a few prime lenses, I might then get back to trying to concentrate on environmental landscape details.