Evolving Photographer: 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington

On the actual anniversary of the March on Washington, quite the event was planned - speeches, tributes; the whole nine yards. Seeing as how special this occasion was, and the fact that three Presidents would be there, I decided to rent a nice big zoom lens: Nikon's 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6 ED VR lens. (released in 2000)

I rented the lens from Lens Giant, which was a perfectly fine experience. Everything arrived intact and with no defects. Best of all, it was perfectly set up to pop the lens right back into the box and ship back to them. All in all, a super easy experience.

Using such a large telephoto zoom lens was a challenge. Every motion that you make is amplified when you're pressed all the way out to the limit of the lens. Fortunately, the lens' VR worked great. Of course, just to make things a little more challenging, it was a cloudy and rainy day, but with thin enough clouds to let some decent sunlight through. Since I was cropping down (despite the 400mm reach, I wasn't close enough to the Lincoln Memorial to be satisfied with straight out of the camera images), I put my ISO at 250. Silly me! Shooting at f/5.6 and 1/800 (to freeze motion at that distance and ensure sharpness), I really should have been up higher with my ISO settings. The pro-sumer D7100 is optimized for ISO 200 - I wasn't even making the camera work at 250!

This was my favorite moment of the day. President Obama had just begun to speak, and this little girl was taking it all in from her father's shoulders. Then she started to use a camera to capture the moment. It was heart warming.