An Absurd Wild Camp with Paul Messner and a Samyang 100mm f2.8 Macro Lens

I spent a good few hours in the rain this week, lying face down in the dirt, trying to pull focus on a piece of bird sh1t and a dung beetle.

A few meters away, Paul Messner was doing what Paul Messner does best: pitching a tent in the rain and enthusiastically reviewing some new useful camping gear.

I was doing something completely absurd. I decided to head up into the Shropshire Hills, in late September, right as the weather was turning, to shoot an entire wild camping film using only one camera and one incredibly frustrating, stupid lens, the Samyang 100mm f2.8 Macro Lens.

If you want to see the results before reading how much of a pain in the ass this was to shoot, you can watch the videos here.

• The Cinematic Macro Film: A Closer Look at Wild Camping | A Short Film

• The Behind-The-Scenes Vlog: An absurd wild camp with Paul Messner and a macro lens

• Paul’s Shropshire Hills Camping Video: Shropshire Hills Wild Camping

The Anti-Landscape Approach

For years, for me, wild camping has been mostly focused on looking further. It’s about climbing higher, pitching on the highest summit you can find, and showing off the biggest vistas. I often use wide-angle lenses and fly drones to capture the vastness of the environment. I look for the sunrise, the sunset, and the Milky Way arching over my tent.

But when you’re constantly looking at the horizon, you often miss everything that is immediately around your feet.

Today, I wanted to stop. I wanted to hold on a minute, look closer, and be entirely present in the immediate surroundings of my camp. So, I handicapped myself. I stripped away the drones, the action cameras, and the wide-angle glass. I packed the Sony ZV-E1 and bolted on a Samyang 100mm f2.8 Macro lens.

This isn't a lens you bring on a wild camp. It’s designed for looking very closely at things in a controlled environment. But I wanted to see what would happen if I forced myself to tell the story of a wild camp solely through the micro-details: the tension of a guyline, the zip of a tent, the boiling of a pot, and the textures of the hill.

The Samyang 100mm f2.8 Macro Lens

Let’s talk about the glass, because shooting an entire film on this lens was a nightmare.

The Samyang 100mm f2.8 is a true 1:1 macro lens. That means it projects an image onto the camera sensor at exactly the same size as the subject is in real life. If you are shooting a bug that is 20mm long at the minimum focus distance of 30cm, it takes up 20mm of physical space on your sensor.

It’s fully manual. There is no autofocus to save you. When you are shooting at true 1:1 macro distances, your focal plane—the area of the image that is actually sharp—is razor-thin. We are talking millimetres. If you breathe heavily, you lose focus. If your hands shake, you lose focus.

Now, take that lens, put it on a hill in Shropshire, and throw 30mph wind gusts at it. Not easy!

Trying to film a piece of moss or a Daddy Longlegs clinging to a blade of grass in high wind is an exercise in pure frustration. You frame the shot, you lock the tripod down, you get the focus ring perfectly dialled in, and then a gust of wind violently throws the subject entirely out of the frame. You sit there, pissed off, waiting for the wind to drop for exactly three seconds so you can grab a usable clip.

It was difficult. It was odd. But the results it produces are incredible.

When you get it right, the Samyang 100mm completely isolates the subject. It crushes the background into a smooth blur and highlights textures you would never see with the naked eye. The machined grooves of a JetBoil, the micro-strands of a braided tent guyline, the violent bubbling of the coffee-making—it turns mundane camp tasks into high-end cinematic sequences. You just have to be willing to suffer for the shot.

This lens is now tricky to find, but check here on Amazon - SAMYANG 100mm f2.8 MACRO LENS

The Camp Setup: A Tale of Two Tents

The conditions were far from ideal for a delicate camera test. The wind was whipping through the valley, bringing heavy rain showers with it.

I brought the Hilleberg Soulo. It is a bombproof, freestanding bunker of a tent. I usually run with an MSR in these parts, but knowing the forecast, I wanted the security of a shelter built for storms. Once it is pegged down, it does not move.

Paul, meanwhile, brought a Six Moon Designs Lunar Solo. It’s a single-skin, trekking-pole tent. Paul Messner is a tent enthusiast (and camping stove connoisseur), and he brought it out for nostalgia reasons to test the lightweight setup.

The contrast was brilliant. During the night, the wind picked up a fair bit. My Hilleberg barely registered it, quietly. Paul had to get out of his sleeping bag in the pitch black, walk out into the wind, and add extra guylines to stop his tent from violently vibrating like a drum. Having said that, I loved the nostalgia; it looks like a great tent.

Fueling the Deadlift

Dinner highlighted another massive divide in our approaches to the outdoors.

I am currently running a hybrid fitness program. I am chasing a sub-20 minute 5k run while simultaneously trying to maintain a 200kg deadlift. To keep the heavy strength numbers up while running miles every week, you cannot afford to go hungry. I refuse to be the bloke who gets skinny just to run slightly faster.

My camp dinner was 12 beef meatballs fired up in a pan with some high-protein smoky Mexican chili con carne. I paired that with an entire 1500-calorie sourdough loaf that I ripped into pieces and dipped straight into the pan. It’s heavy, it’s high-calorie, and it fuels the lifting.

Paul, on the other hand, brought a packet of Ching's Secret Manchurian noodles. He boiled water on his MSR PocketRocket, poured it into his bowl, and then admitted it looked pathetic compared to the massive pan of meat and bread I was eating next to him. I felt quite guilty!

The Final Cut

Despite the wind, the rain, and the sheer mechanical difficulty of manually focusing a 100mm lens on a dark hillside, the final cinematic film worked really well.

The Samyang 100mm macro lens delivered exactly what I asked of it. It forced me to ignore the horizon and look at the gritty reality of the camp. The macro shots of the coffee extraction, the sizzling meat, the rain on the tent fabric, and the extreme close-up of an eyeball tell the story of the night far better than a standard vlog ever could.

The behind-the-scenes video is a completely different beast. I cut it down to a ruthless five minutes. It’s just the reality of me complaining about bird shit and dung beetles while Paul does his professional YouTube presenting in the background.

It was an absurd trip. But stepping away from the drone shots and the wide angles, and forcing myself to fight the wind with one stupid prime lens, produced some of the best visual textures I’ve captured in a long time.

Go check out Paul’s channel for a proper gear review, and check out my videos for meatballs, dung beetles, and daddy long legs. Videos below, or check out Paul’s website - www.Messner.co.uk