My Relationship with a Camera Lens

I used to lug around a wonderfully large but versatile lens with my Canon 20D DSLR, back in the early 2000s. I traveled all around the world with it. I got some amazing photos. I improved my photography skills and collected the proof. I captured incredible scenes of rural East Asia, the Himalayas, even Afghanistan.

Sure, it was a pain in the ass to carry around, and in some places, downright dangerous because of its obvious value. But I loved it. It gave me purpose and was an opportunity to capture the beauty and wonder I saw around me.

Eventually, however, I developed a weird relationship with that lens. It made me more of a target in places where its price tag could feed a whole family for probably months. It was heavy, a burden to carry around. I was always hiding it when I wasn’t using it. I was often fiddling with the camera it was attached to, while a scene unfolded or a brief connection passed by. This is not the lens’s fault. It served its purpose extremely well.

Maybe I was struggling with my identity at the time. Maybe I was tired of being an explorer, a wanderer, a documenter. Maybe I wanted to be ‘of’ a place, instead of passing through it as a tourist.

This was around the same time I began to really understand that my travels had been significantly fueled by my need to run: from an emptiness inside, from a sense of placeless-ness, from who I feared I might be.

I loved that lens. Again, it gave me a sense of identity and purpose as its owner and user.

At some point, though, and I don’t remember where I was or what the scene was, but I remember lowering my camera and just looking at something – a beautiful bird, an animal, a scene in the afternoon sunlight…. and I decided not to snap a photo. To take it in with my own eyeballs, to feel the full experience with as little distraction as possible.

It was exhilarating.

(Insert photo here…. oh right. There is no photo.)

And in the true fashion of at least the first half of my life, (here’s hoping for a long life), the rest is a blur. I sold that lens. I packed it up and shipped it off because it was easy and I was offered a decent price. I don’t remember where I was or how much I got for it. I just remember that I decided to part ways with that lens, and my art-making has never been the same since.

Sure, I have other lenses, but they’re kinda crap. Basic, lower-end, nothing like the sharpness and quality of that other lens. So taking photos with my now-outdated Canon 20D just isn’t as satisfying. It takes better photos than any of my various smartphones, and I’m thankful for the images I’ve been able to capture of my child as they’ve grown.

But more than a decade later, I still think about that lens. About what it represented as a testament to believing in myself, to investing in my creativity. And how I sold it off during what I suppose was a revision of my sense of self.

Will I ever own another lens like that? I hope so.

Will I ever approach the world that way again? Yes. I do it all the time, without any camera at all. Sometimes I stand with my watercolors and study an early morning bird, slowly, carefully, calmly. I also know how to bask in the cool breeze that lifts my hair on my afternoon walks. I know how to stretch my arms and feel the ground beneath my feet as my dog and I wander down rural streets in Central America. Nobody is there to record it, but I experience it and I remember it.

I’m okay.

And I hope someone else has had as much fun with that lens as I did. Wherever you are, lens, I hope you’re a part of a joyful life.

Here’s to used equipment and the stories they hold.