Gear: Canon 35mm f/1.4
Location: Brookings, OR
Before I write anything else, I'll say this: everyone must drive up to Northern (the technical northern) California at one point in their lifetime. Bay Area dwellers have no excuse! This past weekend was the first time that I ventured northwest past the wine valleys and into endless miles of the wild. The drought-stricken valleys of Mendocino rolled into lush glens of redwood rainforest and unbridled Pacific coastline. Driving through fog banks and hillsides carpeted in ferns made our current water crisis seem like a bad dream; instead, this Eden was our reality.
I brought Canon's 35mm f/1.4 to test it with landscapes and casual photos of friends. I'll admit that it took me a minute to adjust to its wide angle. While I have shot on wider lenses, Canon's 24mm f/2.8 for example, the 35mm isn't quite wide enough to strictly be a landscape lens, nor does it possess a focal length that makes it exceptional for portraits. Don't get me wrong, this is a fast lens that has the ability to shoot razor sharp images (just be sure to give it proper stability), but it's also wide enough that there is a ton of negative space around your subject. Personally, I don't enjoy getting uncomfortably close to my subjects or applying a significant crop in post, so I would rather start out with an 85mm. While I enjoyed how this lens photographed landscapes, I would prefer to work with an even wider lens. In the end, it was a nice, clean lens to shoot with, but ultimately not one that I would have as a regular in my kit.
“The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time”
Happy 4th of July!