Not all photographs have to have award-winning potential. Some pictures we take for ourselves. For a long time, I’ve wanted to visit Aldborough, look around the town, and see The Scallop sculpture on the beach. If you search Google, you’ll find hundreds of entries and pages of pictures taken from every conceivable angle.
They all look pretty much the same to me. So I took another one. It’s a solid photograph, but nothing exciting!
I could have left my camera at home and not been bothered!
I could go online day or night after I got home and look at pictures of The Scallop whenever I wanted. But having your photograph to look at is different. You made it. It’s yours. It makes the memory of being there stronger.
Think more Full Metal Jacket, “This is my rifle. There are many like it but this one is mine…”
So don’t feel uncomfortable adding to the pile. Take your camera and photograph all those things that have already been photographed a trillion times before.
The one you take is the special one.
Exposure: 1/200 | f8 | 100 ISO
The Canon 17-40 f4
The second reason I went there was to test the Canon 17-40 f4 lens.
I had already owned one in 2012 and used it professionally. There was a photograph I took (I did take many more, just to be clear) that I’ve always liked. When I decided to go back to using Canon, it was this picture and this lens that my memory went to:
The Canon 17-40 f4 is considered an old lens in 2025, but I find it works well on the Canon 5Ds, and I’ll be using it for quite some time.
Happy snapping!