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The first thing most landscape photographers do upon arriving on location is set down their bag and pull out a trusty wide-angle lens. After all, what better way to capture an expansive vista? The problem with always following this routine is that your images will fail to stand out from the crowd because just about everyone else does the same thing.
Today’s 15-minute tutorial from the B&H Photo Video YouTube channel will inspire you to switch up your game experimenting with telephoto landscape photography by taking advantage of the uncommon perspective and versatility that it offers. Instructor Matt Zefi demonstrates how to make the most of long lenses in the field, and then he guides you through processing these photos (including a panorama) in Lightroom.
Zefi kicks off the lesson by describing several imaging characteristic that make telephoto lenses “so fantastic” for capturing unique landscape imagery. One big benefit is the capability to compress a scene, thus “everything within the frame tends to appear denser, and larger, and overall more epic.”
A perfect example is when a scene includes majestic mountains in the background that would recede into unimpressive hills when captured with a wide-angle lens. The same holds true when there’s an important element in the midrange of a scene. And the greater the focal length the more attention-grabbing this compression effect will be.
Apart from their greater magnification, long lenses also enable you to make key subjects stand from surrounding areas by minimizing depth of field and creating soft backgrounds, as you’ll see while watching Zefi do his thing during an excursion in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. He also discusses the difference between telephoto zooms and their less-versatile fixed focal length counterparts.
For this episode Zefi is shooting with both a fast 35-150mm zoom and a slower but much more powerful 50-400mm.
Zefi describes the necessary camera settings and techniques for getting the job done, and these are significantly different (but no more complicated) that those you use when capturing the great outdoors with your favorite wide-angle lens. And as you would expect, you’ll need to take a much different approach when it comes to composition, camera angles, and the like.
The video concludes with a five-minute demonstration of the Lightroom workflow Zefi recommends when processing your telephoto landscapes for maximum impact. There’s much more to learn on a wide variety of popular topics on the B&H Photo Video YouTube channel.
And speaking of lenses, don’t miss a related tutorial we featured with another accomplished landscape shooter who demonstrates how AI can automatically banish lens flare in seconds for super clean outdoor photographs without these annoying distractions.
We often discuss the importance of applying post-processing tools is a specific sequence, and why not doing so may compromise the quality of your results. This eye-opening tutorial from the PHLOG Photography YouTube channel reveals an “essential” preliminary step that many Lightroom users ignore.
Should you begin with cropping, sharpening, exposure modifications, masking, or color enhancements? According to instructor Christian Mohrle, none of these common adjustments are where you should begin. Instead, his answer is selecting the best Lightroom Profile for the specific image at hand.
Mohrle is a notable landscape photographer based in Southern Germany near beautiful Lake Constance. His image-editing tutorials are among the post popular that we post, and if you’ve been paying attention you know that his everyday workflow starts with the Color options dropdown within Lightroom’s Basic panel where the various Profiles reside.
This lesson is all about understanding the most appropriate Profile to use when, and there are several choices available. These include what Adobe refers to as Neutral, Color, Standard, Landscape, Portrait, and Vivid. Making the right choice up front helps you create the best possible starting point for all of the global and selective adjustments that follow.
Understanding the differences will be much easier if you hold off on clicking the Play button until you download Mohrle’s demonstration Raw file with a link beneath the video so you can experiment with the various settings in real time as they’re explained. The concept is pretty simple: “The image will look different depending upon which Profile we use. Some Profiles have more contrast, others are more saturated, and there are options that deliver softer, flatter results.”
Then there’s another key consideration; namely, the manner in which Profiles differ from presets when it comes to achieving a specific look. Once you get the hang of this, and it doesn’t take long, Mohrle walks you his complete workflow for editing his long exposure photograph from beginning to end, with simple global adjustments, selective masking, color grading and sharpening.
Mohrle’s final result would appear far less impressive (or more difficult to achieve) had he chosen a less appropriate Lightroom Profile at the onset of the project. Once the lesson concludes pay a visit to the instructional Phlog Photography YouTube channel where there’s much more great advice for expanding your skills.
And on a related note, don’t miss the earlier tutorial we featured with another top expert who demonstrates how to capture spectacular landscape photographs when you have no choice but to shoot in harsh, contrasty, midday light.
