Alex Strohl

Alex Strohl

alexstrohl

Day 14. Final thoughts on the 35mm— How could I not close this lens series with my first love? This is the glass I bought after purchasing my first full frame camera (a Canon 5D) some 15 years ago — a very used specimen of a 35mm f1.4 L. If you used the Central American grading system for used parts, you’d call it “semi nuevo” which is an elegant way of saying “beaten to death”. The young romantic in me wanted a proper lens. And what’s more proper than a prime 35mm? You’re right, nothing. So after shelling my modest savings into this kit I went out to travel the world with it on Microsoft’s dime , who had licensed the first photo of this post from me. I thought I’d never need another lens since it did everything : landscapes, portraits, details, interiors… obviously I didn’t know any better but what I take away from that year long experience is the following: The best gear is the one you already own. When it comes to this stuff, less is more, specially if you’re trying to train your eye. Having too many lenses bogs us down. It’s nice to wake up without having to think which lens you’re going to screw on your camera. A 35mm allows you to get on with it, and that continued momentum, day after day, is what will build your work. Thanks for reading, liking and commenting on the Lens field notes! What should this week be about ? Edited on #AS1Pack & #AS2Wild

04.15 03:42

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🏔️THE DOLOMITES RETREAT PHOTO CONTEST📸 I’m giving away the final spot in my Dolomites Photo Retreat through a photo contest! Join me for a week of hands-on training in the Dolomites. You’ll get real mentorship, daily photography projects, mountain air, meaningful conversations, and the kind of guidance that shapes careers. (Trip is worth $6k). The winner will also receive a kit from @lexarmemory to include their new 1TB Lexar Professional CFexpress 4.0 Cards, 4TB Pro Workflow SSD, and Pro Workflow Reader. To enter: 1. Follow @alexstrohl @lexarmemory 2. Post your favorite landscape photo or carousel to your feed. It can be horizontal, vertical, no rules! 3. Tell us in the caption why you really need to win this spot. 4. Use the hashtag #StrohlLexarDolomites 🗓️ Winner announced June 12th (contacted directly) Remember, we’re not looking for perfection : we’re looking for vision, intention, and heart. Retreat dates June 23-28, 2025. You are entering to win a spot at the Dolomites Retreat: includes food, accommodation. Doesn’t include flights- you have to get you and your camera to Italy , then we’ll do the rest 🤝
IDay 17. LESSONS in Commercial Photography — The Huayhuash range in the Peruvian Andes has been on my mind ever since I saw it on a magazine years ago. Canon had reached out about shooting a new camera release so I immediately thought of going to this place for it. I always think back of this trip as my biggest lesson in commercial photography, here’s why: Back then, there wasn’t a lof of information about this through hike. There were reports of people getting mugged, a hiker even got shot and killed there. Instead of listening to all the horrible news, I tried to approach it logically. If we have the right guides with the best local knowledge, we may be able to pull it off. It seemed that only a few limited spots were problematic. So I found Damian on an official guide site, spoke to him on the phone, and he was confident we could pull it off. He even offered to assemble a crew for us so we didn’t have to worry about any logistics. It seemed over the top but OK. Damian and his crew picked @isaacsjohnston and I at the Lima airport and drove us all the way to the mountains for our hike. All in all we had our our guide, driver, Justino the cook, and Justo, the donkey handler. Initially I had reservations about having the logistics taken away from me… it felt like I was losing control over the trip but in end, I’m so happy I did. When reflecting on that experience, everything went perfectly. Although a guy in a balaclava did try to steal my watch at the top of some mountain pass. After respectfully declining to give him my watch, he disappeared. I’ll never know if he was armed or not but it was a moment for sure.. That was one of my first camera assignments and I’m so happy I hired the full crew. All we had to worry about was making the best images possible while the crew took care of everything else. Without that logical approach, and the team, we would have never pulled it off. Now I always look for the right people to take care of the things that get in the way of image making so I can focus on what I do best…
Day 15. LESSONS on… Failure Let’s talk about the times when a concept bombed. This image represents one of those moments where vision met reality and things fell short. Rather than hiding these failures, I’m sharing what went wrong and the valuable lessons learned. Failure isn’t the opposite of success in photography.. It’s part of the journey toward it. The initial @salomon brief was to create an image that mixed the idea of earth and skiing. Trees instantly come to mind when I think of the earth so that was my anchor. Next came the logistics… We had to find a striking tree, enough snow to ski it, and assemble a team who could make the shot happen. Quickly and within budget. Despite our planning, several crucial elements didn’t come together as envisioned. Here’s what I learned: 1. Scout more: We had scouted two potential spots for the concept. The first one resulted in a 6 mile ski approach with no real way to tow the skier in… We landed on this second location, here pictured, next to the highway which ticked a lot of the boxes — the problem was the background— too busy. I should have gone back to the drawing board to look for another location. 2. Do more testing: The tree was so big that we needed another 2 or 3 drones with lights on to really make the canopy pop. 3. Spend more time on the build: Our ramp was fine but we could have built a smoother, higher one, with one more day of prep. 4. Bring More lights: I brought all the lights I had at the studio but I should have rented another 2 to really make the scene pop at night. Failures like this one are invaluable teaching moments. While the shoot didn’t deliver the vision we had in mind, it gave us clear direction for next time: more thorough location scouting beyond just accessibility, expanded equipment testing before the big day, additional prep time for builds, and always bringing more lighting than you think you’ll need. 🙏🏻
Day 13. A tribute to the 15-35mm (continued) — This is the hardest lens to pick images from. So many photos, so many I still enjoy looking at from time to time.. After all, You’re only seeing 14 shots out of more than 140k! Perhaps my favorite feature of ultra wides is that they tend to exaggerate the relationship between foreground and background. That always makes for a dramatic effect, specially if you love to look for layers in your compositions. The biggest party trick of this lens is that it can show the foreground in great detail and that makes it very immersive to the viewer. This is a piece of gear that helps create work that people can stare at for quite some time. And if the foreground is uninteresting, you can always zoom in a bit to 28mm or 35mm and boom, you have a lens that can do portraits. Its common wisdom that there is no perfect Swiss Army knife but this lens is as close as it gets for me 🫡
Day 12. A tribute to the 16-35mm ultra wide 1/2 — Out of all the lenses in this series, this is my most used, by a country mile with more than 143k photos shot with it (!). I absolutely adore ultra wide lenses because they represent with the most accuracy how nature feels to me. Anytime I am outdoors it feel like I finally have room to breathe and the 16-35mm does just that to my photos — it leaves room for air, interpretation, and context. Context is what I always strive for. Showing you what’s behind the edges of a scene or landscape is one of the most satisfying things I can in life and this is the only lens that empowers me to do that. The 16-35 is a lens that’s not stingy; its generous, and that’s a beautiful quality in gear and life. Of course, you can’t overuse it because it loses its effect. Although, I feel like I’ve built my career on the back of this lens.. It’s the only one that has never left my camera bag, been with me on every fools errand. And that’s not going to change anytime soon.. See you tomorrow for Part II 🤙 Edited on #AS1pack and #as2wild
Day 11. An Exploration of the 100-500mm lens — If the 70-200mm is the “make it happen” lens, this is the nuclear weapon. It sees everything but sees nothing at the same time. Point it at the wrong thing and it becomes useless — It really is a tool for separating subjects from their environment. I’ve shot 17,000+ photos with it which doesn’t sounds like a lot but really is if you consider its narrow use cases . This is what I pull out when I’m in front of a massive landscape, too big to capture with anything else. I take a big breath (waiting for the stabilization to kick in) and patiently start zooming and panning at the max zoom. That’s when small compositions within the far away landscape start to appear. Almost like hazy miracles. She isn’t a looker on your camera, its protruding barrel doesn’t help, but Its a lens that rewards you incredibly for your time and efforts. You could argue that a lot of my best blue hour work was done on this puppy and you’d be right. Thank you for all these years 100-500. Captions: 1-2. South Greenland 3. Bryce, Utah 4. Whitefish, Montana 5. Pyrenees, France 6. North Shore O’ahu, Hawai’i 7. Montana 8. Glacier NP wildfires, Montana 9. Chamonix, France 10. South Coast, Iceland 11. O’ahu, Hawai’i 12. Biarritz, France
Day 10. Field notes with the 70-200mm focal length — Well, looking at Lightroom I can see I’ve shot about 31,400 frames with this focal range. If I had to give it name it would be the “Make it happen”. This glass doesn’t care about my excuses, it’s here with solutions, and it packs a punch. I often pull out this lens when I can’t see a shot, or I’ve shot enough with the wider lens. But, this seemingly transactional relationship doesn’t say it all. A lot of my favorite shots ever were made on this lens. As someone who likes cleaner, more “minimal” compositions, this is the ultimate isolator, often to a fault where you could blame it for creating simplistic images. But it’s this very thing that makes me love the 70-200mm. It’s always in my camera bag when I travel because the times I didn’t pack it, I ended up needing it. Photo captions: 1. Capitol Reef, Utah @iflyheli 2. Carbondale, Colorado @sienavalleyclub 3. Cathedral Range, Wyoming 4. Ardeche, France, dad 5. Homer, AK @mathieulelay 6. Polson, MT @altbloom 7. Polebridge, MT @isaacsjohnston 8. Landmanalaugar, Iceland 9. Mammoth Lakes, CA @andreadabene 10. Idaho Sand Dunes, ID 11. Carbondale, CO 12. O’ahu, HI @andreadabene
Day 9. 24mm, A Study — If you go by focal length this is my second most used focal length. According to Lightroom, I’ve shot north of 71,000 frames at 24mm over the last 15 years. But focal length doesn’t tell the full story. You see, there are 24-70mm zooms and 24mm primes. The one I’m most interested in today is the all mighty EF 24mm f1.4. The reason Ive used. it so much is simple: the aperture. As someone who likes to shoot in low light, sometimes before sunrise and often after sunset, the ultra low aperture makes a lot of sense. Besides the logical reason though, there is love and affinity for the object. I love how heavy it is. I love how it sits on the camera. And, most of all, I love the way that it limits my field of view (vs a 15mm) while still allowing me to make sense of the chaos within a scene. Most of these shots were shot in Norway’s Lofoten islands with a few exceptions. Cowboys : Colorado, surfers: O’ahu, farmer: Switzerland, alpine lake: Switzerland. All re-edited on #AS1Pack & #AS2Pack
Day 8. My love letter to 50mm. Kicking off a new focus this week— I will be going through my favorite focal lenses and sharing unseen work shot with them. According to Lightroom, I’ve shot 8161 photos with the old EF 50mm 1.2 , and 8694 with the new RF 50mm 1.2. That’s not counting the film shots. So all in all, the 50mm is my fourth most shot focal length, and It took me a while to love it. It was too tight for the work I like to do but I realized that if used widely, it produces larger than life images. Akin to a medium format camera, specially if paired to the right camera body. 1. Eastfjords of Iceland @1924us 2. La Manche, France 3. Lofoten islands, Norway 4. Glacier NP, Montana @andreadabene 5. Kamnik Alps, Slovenia 6. Baldface, BC, Canada @meg_haywoodsullivan 7. Polson, Montana @isaacsjohnston 8. Carbondale, CO @sienavalleyclub 9. Glacier NP, Montana 10. Carbondale, CO 11. North Shore, HI @andreadabene 12. South Coast, Iceland 13. Santorini, Greece, Andrea Merakis
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