Muscle Memory

I was hungry when I made this photo and wondered if I had been a hunter-gatherer in prehistory would this grasshopper be a subject of observation or a snack? Sustenance or study?

Or would I have eaten the not-yet-ripe crabapples or threshed the wild amaranth or continued to look for black raspberries, black walnuts, ramps, persimmons, elderberries, and wild mushrooms while studying the grasshopper?

That was just too much thinking and it was destroying the moment when this grasshopper landed on my hand while it embraced a large telephoto lens.

I made a series of photos one-handed with my other camera, short zoom, autofocus, aperture priority autoexposure, 1/3rd stop underexposed, all with one hand, my right hand using a camera with a short zoom lens slung over my left shoulder.

Manipulation and muscle memory made it happen. Not that I’d ever made a photo of a grasshopper on my hand while holding a long telephoto lens before.

I knew by feel how far to twist the short zoom to get the required focal length. I knew spinning the aperture ring to the far right gave me the widest aperture. I knew pressing the autofocus point return to center was a double strike and moving it to just below the bottom of the frame was three clicks on the wheel.

Camera to eye and I’m making photos without having to think about what I’m going to do to make the photo happen. I’d already done it.

PhotoCamp Daily is always free! But you can pledge support at any time.

This is an Amazon link where I make a few pennies to help pay for my life. Today’s book is The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey. Great book about photography, sorta. At least the type of photography I teach.

Almost everything I shoot goes through Luminar Neo. Even after I’ve made the first edit of my raw file in Adobe Camera Raw. I’ve built my own set of Luminar presets for the places and things I normally shoot and for different lighting conditions at those places. Then it’s easy to adjust the results for fine-tuning each photo. This is an affiliate link so I might make a little something from sale. Download it for the trial period.