When you find yourself getting bored of shooting in the sample place, a great way to get out of a rut is to force yourself to use just one lens all day. This forced perspective gives you no choice but to think differently about the location. This is what I did one changeable afternoon this summer. I stuck on my 55-200mm telephoto, and forced myself to use nothing else for the day. Being out in the beautiful Cavan countryside I would normally be shooting wide angle landscape shots. But, being confined to the telephoto I had to think smaller. That was when I noticed the water drops from a recent shower pooling on a cabbage leaf, and grabbed this shot.

I use this shot as one of the 20 or so that I have automatically rotating every 30 minutes as my desktop wallpaper. Each time it comes round in the rotation it brings a smile to my face. Normally I don’t share images bigger than 1000 pixels, but in this case I’m also sharing two larger versions designed to be used as desktop wallpapers.

on Flickr – Full-Size – Wallpaper (4:3) – Wallpaper (16:10)

• Camera: Nikon D40
• Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
• Exposure: 1/500 sec
• Focal Length: 200mm
• Focal Ratio: f/5.6
• ISO: 800
• Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
• Processing: Apart from the basics edits in Aperture (exposure, white balance, detail & vibrancy), the shot was also tweaked a little using Aperture’s Dodge & Burn plugin to give it more of a sense of depth to draw the eye in better.