Photos of Uluru: shooting the 50mm challenge in Australia’s Red Centre

The Australian outback is my favourite place on earth. It feels like only a few kilometres after leaving one of the state capitals you’re engulfed by a vast expanse of ochre tones that turns a deeper red the closer into the centre of the country that you get. And then when you arrive in the aptly named Red Centre itself, even the broad expanse of earth is dwarfed by the commanding silhouette of Uluru against the otherwise empty horizon. Staring deep into its enigmatic songlines, shapes and shadows, it is fairly normal for time to stand still.

So when I took my family on the Adventure Tours 3-day Uluru Adventure through Kings Canyon, Kata Tjuta and Uluru, I was excited to show off this stunning and spiritual part of Australia. And since my camera comes with me everywhere I go, I was feeling pretty smug in anticipation of all the epic landscapes I was destined to capture.

However, my dreams of Instagram fame were rapidly quashed when I realised the lenses I usually shoot with (a few zooms and a couple of wide primes) were out on another shoot, so the only glassware available to me for this trip was my trusty 50mm prime.

In photography terms, a 50mm lens has a fairly narrow field of vision. So it definitely isn’t your go-to lens for shooting vast landscapes or epic natural features – the exact kind you might find in the Red Centre…

But I figured I would set myself a 50mm challenge (look it up, it’s a legit thing), to see if it is possible to capture the scale of Uluru, Kata Tjuta and King’s Canyon without being able to, well, show the scale.

Want to see Uluru for yourself? Check out our 3-day Uluru Adventure. 

All images c/o Lucy Piper.