The title of this article is a quote attributed to Aristotle. It has been ingrained into my value system all through my life that in order to be best, i.e. achieve perfection in your work, you need to have as many (specialized) skills as you can possibly acquire and learning is continuous and don’t stop learning (acquiring new skills).
I have applied the same outlook in pursuing my passion for photography. If you check the section on My Gear, you will see quite a few specialized lenses for different purposes. There is my CZ135f1.8, one of the best lenses ever made for portrait photography bar none, then there is Minolta 100f2.8 Macro for close up shots, and of course my bazooka of a lens, Sony 70-400 for birds in flight and celestial objects like Moon.
Let me indulge in a vernacular acrobatics here. In language, macro and micro mean two opposite things. Macro implies a large scale and micro means extremely small.
In photography parlance, a macro lens does the same same thing as a micro(scope) lens, i.e. magnify the image. The difference lay in how much of a magnification a lens achieves (>=1 means micro, 1 = life size), and typically macro lenses achieve <=1 magnification. I do not (yet) have a lens with >1 magnification though I have managed such magnification with reverse mounting a lens. Now that I made that as clear as mud, I want to share some of my recent realizations.
The above images were taken with a dedicated macro lens. A lens used to take images up close and fill the screen.
As I said in the beginning, I treated life as a battlefield. The more armor and weapons I have, the better the chance I have of winning. As time progressed, and as I started understanding my tools better, became more self-aware of my capabilities and limitations, my needs and wants, my aspirations and expectations, I have come to realize that in reality the armor and weapons are not there to protect me. They held the real me in.
The above three images are taken with an ultra wide angle lens, which is an anti-thesis to close up shots. The notion that more armor I wear and more tools I have would help me win the battles in life is certainly true to some extent, but when I became a slave to that notion, it completely restricted my creative process and bound it within the scope of those tools. The cliche that if one has a hammer, everything looks like a nail is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as some discretion is exercised.
I fully acknowledge the fact I DO need right tools in most circumstances, a Phillip head screwdriver will not do when I have a Torx screw head, worse yet when I have a flat head screw. The aha moment for me is that don’t be a slave to your tools, and become co-dependent on your armor, and think that without those accoutrements you will not succeed. I do not regret the decisions I made in my life, but I wonder what other wonderful meanderings I would have taken if I did not stick to my armor and weapons. After all, I remember reading the following quote (a signature of some one in a photography forum), life is too short to take a short cut. Stay safe and stay healthy. Hoping your meanderings help you discover the rainbows that you would miss otherwise.
