ФОТО: digitalrev.com

The first thing you’re told as a fresh-faced landscape photographer is ‘get yourself a wide-angle lens’. And with good reason, too. The broad view that a wide-angle lens gives, and the way it will exaggerated the scale of anything close to you immediately make sense; you can cram big views into your pictures, and make foregrounds pop with texture and detail.

But actually wide-angle lenses require very good technique. Their huge angles of view can make exposure uneven, and you also need strong subjects in the scene, otherwise you can end up with a whole lot of nothing. Or too much clutter as the view is too wide to omit annoying distractions. And not only that, wide-angles' ubiquitous landscape status means shots taken with them can have trouble standing out.

So, if you want a break from wide-angle primes and zooms, and to get some different shots into your landscape portfolio, here are some other lenses to try in the great outdoors…

This image was shot on an APS-C body at an effective 280mm focal length.

Standard focal lengths are what photographers used to cut their teeth on – standard or 'normal' lenses run from around 40mm to over 55mm, but a 50mm lens on your film SLR was commonplace, and for lots of reasons, not least their quality and affordability.

Most of all though, standard lenses give the closest thing to a ‘natural’ view; ie, like that of the human eye in that they don’t distort views like wide-angle and telephoto lenses do. What’s more they’re likely to have wide maximum apertures, like f/2, f/1. 8 or f/1. 4, and that means you can isolate subjects in the landscape using a shallow depth-of-field, and shoot scenics handheld in low-light if you need to.

Remember if you’re using a camera with a sensor smaller than ‘full frame’, you’ll need to apply a focal length conversion. So, on cameras with an APS-C sized sensor, a 35mm lens with give you an equivalent of around 50mm, while on Micro Four Thirds, a 25mm lens becomes a 50mm equivalent.

A standard or 'normal' lens will give you a natural scenic view. This was shot at 50mm.

Short telephoto lenses, which typically include focal lengths from 70mm to 135mm, are perfect if you want to start picking out subjects in the landscape, like lone trees, buildings or rock formations. And much like using such lenses for portraits, you can really add personality to a scene. Like standard lenses, they’ll likely come with fast apertures, like f/2. 8, f/1. 8 or f/1. 4, so isolating the subject is a piece of cake if that’s what you want to do. On APS-C sensors, look for 50mm or 90mm focal lengths to achieve the same effect, and on Micro Four Thirds cameras, try anything from 35mm to 70mm.

Short telephoto focal lengths are good for isolating a landscape subject.

A short to medium telephoto zoom provides a brilliant amount of framing options for scenics. A 70-200mm for example starts out wide enough for large, close subjects but selective enough to cut out the clutter. In the middle of the zoom you’ll be creating portraits of natural features, and by the long end the telephoto compression with allow simple and elegant framing of landscape details, or tight framing on big scenes. Lenses like this are particularly handy in woodland, and when shooting in mist, picking out powerful silhouettes, but make sure you mount them properly on a tripod when shooting or images can be blighted by camera shake.

A 70-200mm f/2. 8 provides great possibilities for low-light landscapes.

Get above 200mm and you’re into the territory of long telephoto lenses. These are rarely used lenses by landscapers, but they’re very effective in the right circumstances as their huge magnification will pick out interesting details that’d otherwise go unnoticed. Think simple compositions like a spot of sun on a mountain side, the twist of a river, or rock arches in the sea. Again, the extreme magnification of these lenses means proper stabilisation on a tripod is vital, especially when working in low light around dawn and dusk.

Start using very long telephoto lenses and you can pick out distant landscape details.

Tilt-shift lenses come in lots of different focal lengths, from wide-angle to telephoto, so it’s really their special functions that mark out their usefulness.

Although they don’t tend to be cheap, and take lots of skill to master, their ability to tilt the plane of focus and thereby extend depth-of-field from foreground to horizon is well worth the investment in time and money. Or of course you can reverse the tilt and shrink the plane of focus to isolate details in the landscape, which works particularly well from high vantage points.

But that’s not all. If you spot a panoramic composition, a tilt-shift lens can help with that, too. Because of the much larger image circle a tilt-shift lens creates, you can use the shift option to widen your view without moving the camera’s position. Take three images across the range of the lens’s horizontal or vertical shift and you’ll find there’s zero distortion between them, unlike what you’d get from twisting the camera through a panoramic turn (unless using a dedicated head, of course). A quick stitch and your view will be complete.

Using a tilt-shift lens's shift function it's easy to create panoramas.

2018-11-30 03:00