Happy Sunday! Ann Christine is leading the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge this week with the story-based theme of Journey.

Call it remorse but for me, there’s always an internal struggle at the start of each trip. I would feel excited but I would also feel I should cancel the trip. This happens the night before of every trip.

Two weeks ago, I took a Thursday off from work, simply because I’ve reached the limit on my paid-time-off and it won’t accumulate again until I took time off. I struggled to figure out what there’s to do. After all, it’s February, it’s cold and most of the roads I love to drive on are closed. At the same time, I had errands to run, had to get supplies to build some better trellises for the garden. At the same time, I really wanted to try out my new camera lens.

That internal struggle went on and on…

I woke up at my usual time that morning at, went out to the garden and picked some spinach for breakfast. After breakfast, at almost 8 AM, I sat at the kitchen counter thinking, wondering whether I should just do the errand and stay home or I should pack my camera gear, do the errands, and head to the place I wanted to go. I wanted to stay home but another voice said, “It’s now or never.”

It was like the voice was the kick in the ass to get me moving. Feeling resolute, I went up to my room and packed the camera along with my go-to 17-70 mm lens, the new 150-600 mm lens, and tripod into my day-tripping backpack. Then I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and put on sunscreen before I returned downstairs. I took a deep breath, “It’s now or never.”

At the hardware store that morning, I completed half of my errand. I figure I would return later so I wouldn’t have pipes rattling in my backseat each I went over a bump. “It’s now or never,” the voice said as I reached the T-intersection – left to go home, right to the location of the trip. I turned right, got on the highway and took a deep breath, “I’m doing it.”

About 45 minutes later, I reached my destination – the auto tour route to the migratory bird wildlife refuge. The day was looking surprisingly beautiful and the water was so calm that there was reflections everywhere. Seeing there was nobody on the road but me, I got out of the car and took a few photos of the landscapes around me with my go-to lens before switching to the new lens.

The new lens was quite heavy and it was quite difficult to do handheld shots with it. I’m also very rusty at taking photos of things in motion. Most of the times, I relied on the camera’s auto-focus and luck. Auto-focus, on this day, did not work in my favor and I had to switch to manual focus. Still, I was quite impressed at the outcome.

The route was 12 miles long. I tried to take my time while I kept feeling my time is limited, so I wanted to make sure I make every minute count. I decided I would find compositions that I can snap from the car window since the lens is so heavy. I figured it would be a true test of the lens’s limit.

After a while, the route changed directions and on my side, I was greeted by what seemed like an ocean but of course, I knew it was a lake as I live in a land-lock area. Looking at Google Maps, I was looking at a fresh water reservoir of the Great Salt Lake. It’s a place where birds flock to during the winter.

It was my first time of seeing a swan. I did a photo search and this is a tundra swan and I photographed it with the new lens at 600 mm. I was amazed by how well that turned out.

Do you want to know the coolest thing I saw? Two geese take off right in front of me. They were fearless and in my mind, they looked exactly like how airplanes take off on a runway.