Group Test: the best lenses for landscapes

The great outdoors is looking more enticing than ever. So here are the best lenses to capture it in all its glory

Best buys for DSLRs and mirrorless

After so much time indoors, the sheer scale of a sweeping landscape can take on epic proportions. From open fields and rolling hills to huge dramatic skies, there’s a lot to take in. With a standard zoom lens, you’ll often struggle to squeeze as much of the scenery into the frame as you’d like. Mounting an ultra wide-angle lens on your camera is a truly liberating experience for landscape photography, like taking the blinkers off and pulling more of the vista onto the sensor.

You can’t beat a zoom lens for versatility, but many photographers only tend to use ultra-wide zooms at or near their shortest focal length. With that in mind, there’s something to be said for buying a prime lens instead. There are some high-quality manual-focus primes that can work well for landscape photography, where the lack of autofocus isn’t really a problem. Matthew Richards