*Look Below for Photo Descriptions*
When a person first begins landscape photography, I’d say almost everyone is immediately attracted to the intoxicating wide beautiful vistas of nature. We just crave huge panoramas showcasing all that one can see in every direction. We want to capture the emotion of it and fit as much as we can into a frame and stuff it all into a photo for everyone to feel what we felt at that moment. And if carefully thought out in terms of composition, wide shots should always be in a landscape photographer’s bag of tricks. But I suggest as you mature in the craft, think about adding a telephoto lens for landscapes!
What you get from a telephoto is not only getting closer and getting detail. It is also more about something called compression. The longer the focal range of the lens, the closer far away objects will seem compared to closer ones. When thinking about composition, you often want to create a feeling of depth in a scene. This means looking for images with strong foreground, mid-ground, and background elements. I like to think of these as layers. I’m constantly trying to choose scenes with a strong sense of layering to give more of a 3-D (depth) effect in a 2-D (flat) medium. And what enhances those scenes is often compression and looking for a more detailed scene.
A couple of years ago I traded in my inexpensive 75-300mm lens to a moderately priced 150-600mm one.
It is a BIG lens! And I love it.
Most people who buy these lenses do so with either wildlife or sports photography in mind, and I occasionally will use it for these things, but I bought it for landscapes. It allows me to see a slice of a wide scene in the distance and bring it in close to me. Most good landscape photographers want to have a lens in their bag that is a minimum of 200mm or longer. No matter what, having a lens that is 75mm or over will give you some wonderful compression and really make for some wonderful photographs.
So go telephoto and get out and compress some scenes!
#1 Cascade Mountain Range in Oregon. Although in winter, the peak in the background isn’t that high and was far in the distance. But because of the tree line in the foreground, lesser forested peak in the mid-ground, and rocky treeless larger peak in the background I feel it gives the scene an epic emotional quality that would never be presented with a wider lens.
#2 This photo taken from Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska demonstrates the power of layering. Unlike the previous photo, the peak in the background is huge, but compression helped to bring layers miles apart into a feeling of intimacy for the viewer of the awesomeness of nature.
#3 Looking back from a lookout over Crater Lake you can see Mt. Thielsen in the distance. This shot almost has only two layers unless you count the fog layer as the mid-ground. But the 600mm focal length brings Thielsen so much closer through compression to the foreground peak which made me like this shot a whole lot.
