I've worked hard over the years to build up what I consider to be a great photography kit, I have some excellent lenses to cover almost all eventualities. That said, sometimes travelling about with a full complement of lenses and bodies can actually be a little restrictive from a creative point of view. It's easy to lose a bit of discipline at times when you have a choice of focal lengths, changing lenses rather than working that little bit harder to create an image.

This morning we had bright blue skies here and I decided it would be great to keep things simple, I wanted to produce a couple of nice black and white shots and i wanted to go out with one camera and lens. I am lucky enough to have a few really superb lenses in my collection, one of those is the Nikkor 200f2, a completely fantastic lens and probably the best portrait lens I have ever used. I grabbed the D800 and the 200 f2 and out I went.

The 200 is fantastic mainly due to its lightning fast AF and incredible bokeh, the out of focus areas in a photograph. It's easy to see in this shot how lovely and smooth the background is, it really helps to make what is in focus pop! Whilst the 200 is a legendary portrait lens, it doesn't mean it can't be used for all sorts of photography, I like using it for these miniature landscapes, especially when there's nice light.

Using a really narrow depth of field and a relatively strong black and white conversion can help turn something a little boring into something a little more intriguing. Backlit branches are so much more interesting when they look slightly abstract.

So, there's my exercise in keeping it simple, one body and lens, one idea for grabbing a couple black and white shots and seeing what I get out of it, it's a great way to shoot.