Wide-Angle Lenses Aren’t Always Optimal for Shooting Landscape Photos (VIDEO)
Everyone loves rounding a bend in the trail and witnessing a breathtaking, expansive vista, which is why many landscape photographers routinely reach for a wide-angle or ultra-wide lens that enables them to capture as much of the scene as possible in one shot.
According to the folks at Yorkshire Photo Walks, however, this habit may be holding you back by compromising the impact of your compositions. Tutorials from British instructor Tom Marsh often delve into the philosophical and inspirational aspects of shooting in the field, and today he demonstrates why he often shoots landscapes with focal lengths of 50mm or longer.
Here’s how Marsh introduces the seven-minute below: “I’ll teach you how to highlight the essence of a scene and encourage you to sample what you see, rather than attempting to cram everything into the frame.” And it’s all about a discerning eye and employing a longer lens in the appropriate way.
Marsh uses practical examples to illustrate how this uncommon approach enables you to craft attention-grabbing “compact compositions” by getting in tighter on key elements in the scene and concentrating on vantage point and perspective. In fact, you may even find that you can capture two or more successful images from exactly the same spot by shooting with a slightly longer lens.
In this behind-the-scenes episode you’ll watch Marsh decode 360-degrees of stunning landscape and avoid the temptation of capturing as much of the view as possible with a wide-perspective. He does this by “summarizing and compartmentalizing” the scene before him. As you’ll see, “picking out the highlight can lead to much more coherent compositions and ultimately more impactful images.”
He provides a reminder that the average field of human vision is roughly equivalent to that of a 50mm lens on a full-frame camera, which is why wide-angle lenses make objects look much smaller while increasing the appearance of greater distance between foreground and background than what appears with the naked eye.
All of this has implications for the empathy of our photos and often requires us to adjust camera settings appropriately for the specific lens in use. Be sure you check out the Yorkshire Photo Walks YouTube channel for more outside-the-box imaging techniques.
And don’t miss another helpful tutorial we featured earlier on a topic of interest to all outdoor shooters; namely whether you should set your camera’s color space to capture photographs in RGB or Adobe RGB.
