Leave the Camera Bag at Home

Next time you’re out taking photos try bringing just one camera and one lens. You’ll be surprised with the results.

Before continuing, I’ll say that the only caveat to this one lens approach is that I would only recommend doing it on your own time, not on a client’s time. It’s best to have access to your whole kit when working for someone else.

Anyways, a couple of years ago I had the opportunity to travel to Ireland. For the sake of traveling light, I made the tough decision to only bring one lens with me on the trip. From my collection of photo gear I chose to bring my 35mm f/1.4.

Bringing just one lens at first felt like a potentially disastrous choice. I didn’t know if I was going to regret the decision once I arrived in Ireland. It’s not every day you get to take a trip like this and not having the ability to capture every angle seemed like a big concession.

It turned out it wasn’t.

Since bringing just one lens to Ireland, I’ve started to bring one lens everywhere I go. The limitation opened a lot of creativity.

Less decisions

When you’re in the field with a single lens you can focus on building up your scene. If you have multiple lenses, you spend more time thinking about how to choose the right lens instead of framing your scene. From there you can try multiple lenses on the same scene just to have none of them work out the way you hoped.

Constraints Meant More Creativity

I noticed that I started to think more about things like motion, light and depth of field when I had one lens. Since I was limited to one lens, I had to push myself to get the most out of every shot. When you have one lens, you already know what the shot is going to look like before you even look through the viewfinder. The composition is already made up, you just have to capture the moment. When you’re constantly switching between lenses you don’t give yourself the time to appreciate this. When I’m shooting with my telephoto lens, I’m looking for entirely different things than when I’m shooting with a 35mm lens. When you have access to everything and no limitation, you lose creativity.

More Immersion

Without having all of my lenses, I was living in the moment and not behind the camera. I knew that I couldn’t capture every angle so if it was out my lens’s wheelhouse I wouldn’t even bother lifting up my camera. I could stay connected to the moment instead of popping in and out of the photo mindset.

Lightweight

No matter how ergonomic, photo backpacks aren’t ideal. The gear is heavy and it’s another thing to carry. Changing lenses requires you to step-aside for a few moments. You have to take apart your backpack, rifle through lens caps and then attach the new lens, all while making sure your not getting dust on your camera sensor. At least a good minute is lost and at that point you could probably be a block away finding something else to photograph if you had just one lens.

New Approaches

I didn’t have the opportunity to do this with the trip to Ireland but in other scenarios I have. It’s a fun challenge to try photographing an area with a single lens and then revisit at another date with a different lens. The lens change-up will create two completely different versions of the same location. Every lens has their own strengths and weaknesses and giving each lens a true opportunity to shine will result in an impressive portfolio of that location.

While it’s great to have an extensive lens collection to photograph anything, we shouldn’t necessarily be thinking about photographing every detail at once. It becomes an overwhelming task and potentially can wind up with you having less images that you’re satisfied with. We should instead enforce constraints to push creativity. When headed out to a location, do your research on the area and decide what lens is going to satisfy your goals for the day, the results will be rewarding.

All photos in this post were taken by me in Ireland with a 35mm lens.

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