The wide-angle lens is the landscape photographer’s best friend…. and for good reason. An optic with a wide focal length of 16-18mm can capture vast scenes, stretch foreground interest and produce images with front to back sharpness.
But because these lenses are so great for landscape photography, many shooters forget to take them off the body - resulting in imagery that looks all too familiar.
So, how can you break away from this common pitfall? Well, when I headed off for a recent photography trip to Austria and Germany, I set myself a challenge that I hoped would help me see views through fresh eyes and produce landscape imagery that would shake up my portfolio. The challenge was simple; keep the long lens on the camera and the wide-angle in the bag.
Long lenses allow you to be more abstract with your landscape compositions.
Now, full disclosure; to fulfill some stock commissions, I took a handful of wide shots in my downtime, but apart from that (and for the purposes of this important challenge) I stuck faithfully to one telezoom - my trusty 70-200mm f/4 L. It’s a workhorse of a lens that I’ve owned for around ten years and is one of the most affordable L-series lenses you can buy. Sure, the maximum aperture is limited to f/4, but the payback is the weight saving (the lens tips the scales at around 700g) – crucial when you are scrambling up mountain paths and gasping for air at higher altitudes.
Landscape photographers need to know that longer lenses don't have to be heavy!
SIf you give it a go, one of the first things you encounter with this challenge is the way your approach to image-taking changes. When using a wide-angle, photographers may spot useful foreground interest, but with a longer lens, this is less important. That said, you can still use elements like tree leaves to help form natural borders that frame up a main subject.
Longer lenses give a more compressed perspective, resulting in fresher views.
Also necessary is the need to watch out for camera shake, which is more prevalent at longer focal lengths. Following the ‘reciprocal rule’ gives you a much better chance of capturing sharp shots - all you have to do is use a shutter speed that matches or is faster than your focal length. For example, if I was using the longest end of my 70-200mm lens, I’d make sure my shutter speed didn’t fall below 1/200sec. Again, if I was shooting a little wider at 100mm, I’d ensure the shutter speed didn’t fall below 1/100sec. Features such as image stabilisation can improve your odds further, but this old school method works well too.
Care is needed to avoid camera shake when using longer lenses.
By searching for subjects further away in my vision, I discovered I was picking out compositions that I never would have entertained when using my wide-angle lens. When I shot a couple of images containing buildings, I didn’t need to worry about converging verticals that would need to fixed later in Photoshop or Lightroom and I also started to pick out much smaller details that would have been lost in the frame had I gone wide. Street signs, door handles, texture in a wooden panel - all these extra subjects were now just waiting to be lined up in front of my telezoom. Even better, thanks to an adaptor ring, I was able to use the circular polariser filter that fits my wide angle on the 70-200mm, giving me deeper saturated skies and removing the sheen from any water in the frame.
Long lenses help you shoot landscape views you'd otherwise ignore.
Looking back at photos from the trip confirmed how happy I was to have tried this challenge. Wide-angle imagery is great, but so too are longer lens landscapes. The more compressed perspective can give even well-known locations a much fresher feel. The challenge has reminded me that switching up my lenses can bring great rewards. If you shoot landscapes and feel it’s time to try something new, give this challenge a go when you’re next out with the camera.
. digitalrev.com2018-9-20 03:00