Why Every Landscape Photographer Needs a Telephoto Lens (VIDEO)
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.
