XF400mF4.5 x Benjamin Charles Trickey / FUJIFILM

Hi, my name is Benjamin Charles Tricky. I'm from Melbourne, Australia. I'm an adventure and travel photographer. I focus on anything really with the natural world, so oceanscapes, rainforests, just anything wildlife, anything nature orientated, yeah. For this project, I'm shooting on the brand new Fujinon XF400mm Prime. It's been really good to use and it really has allowed me to find new perspectives, things that I wouldn't traditionally shoot, maybe, and really open new possibilities with being able to take it on much longer hikes and, you know, situations where I usually wouldn't bring this kind of lens along. Super telephoto lenses like this are really good for capturing grand, vast landscapes where there's lots going on. There's lots of things far into the distance and really capturing the scale of places because with pictures how grand or large certain aspects of our landscape is. So lenses like this really help capture the world in a way where compression is king and it creates really dramatic images with layering. We're looking at abstract details of the landscape here. I'm currently focusing on the veins through all the dunes and we currently have the wind sweeping the sand over the top, which is creating a really interesting effect. So when I'm walking through the dunes, I'm looking for shapes that complement each other. I'm looking for how the light interacts with the landscape, so how the light's hitting particular dunes, where the shadows are forming and trying to find a frame that is aesthetic and where there's a nice leading line, for example. And I was also looking at the whole surrounding scene and seeing the distant ocean waves crashing and seeing how I can incorporate that with the scene in front of us to create a more dynamic image. Yeah, I'm loving this frame that I got with this nice dune leading your eye through to a large wave crashing in the background with nice golden light hitting the dunes and the ocean in the background. It's created really dynamic contrast. It allows you to create really unique perspectives because most people shoot these kind of scenes much wider. I mean, some people still use teles, but they're 100, 200 millimeters. So this is much more zoomed than that. So it really allows you to use your creative vision and come up with unique perspectives, perhaps from really popular locations. We went out over the beach and we found these islands in the distance, which are a really good subject for this lens as it's really zoomed 600 mil equivalent full frame. I was trying to use waves in the foreground to frame up with the islands in the background and really watching how the light was interacting with the water and the different islands and trying to create nice frames from there. I was really focusing on the finer details of our landscape. For example, at sunrise, I was really focused on just the surface of the ocean and looking at textures and playing around with shutter speed and just panning movements with the camera and lens to kind of use the camera as like a paintbrush, so to say, and paint over and create these really cool effects with the sunrise light hitting the surface of the ocean. And yeah, with all those different techniques with shutter speed panning, you can come up with some really cool detail shots. I think I'm just fascinated by like Earth and the natural world. This lens really helps bring out those intricate details in Earth and just really push my vision to another level and make me think outside the box, you know, from traditional frames and really try and connect to the landscape and the world in a different way. I've loved my time shooting with the lens and I'm looking forward to continue shooting with it over the next couple of weeks and really push it to its limits and see what other things I can capture.