The past few days we’ve been on the west side of the state, staying at the family farmhouse of a friend, not far from Benton Harbor. The first evening there, I went for a walk along the lane, looking for photographs. I was happily working on scenes from a small pond and I switched from my more normal-length lens to the telephoto I had used for most of my recent photos in Portland and afterwards. Everything seemed to be going fine, and I wandered around the pond to check out another view, decided it could work and went back to get my camera. It was still switched on and on the tripod. I carried it round, about 10 yards, put it down and had a look through the viewfinder-complete blur. Experimenting, I found that whereas infinity focus had been about 20 yards, all of a sudden it was only about 2 yards. I though I must have knocked a setting on the camera, but no, it was definitely the lens.

The photo at the top is the last with the normal lens, and this is the last with the telephoto. I had decided to travel light, and had brought just 3 lenses with me, even left the walk-about zoom at home, and now all I had with me working were a normal and a slightly wide lens, whereas I am typically using a short or medium telephoto. I do tend to put a lens on the camera and just stay with the one for long periods, and this became an ‘opportunity’ to work more with my normal lens.