Big Test

The great outdoors has never looked so enticing. Here are the best lenses to capture it in all its glory

Get outside and tame the wilds with these landscape lenses

After so much time indoors, the sheer scale of a sweeping landscape can take on some truly astounding 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. Mount an ultra-wideangle lens on your camera and it’s a truly liberating experience for landscape photography – much like taking the blinkers off and pulling much more of the vista into the camera for your images.

When choosing an ultra-wide lens, it’s crucial to pick the right tool for the job. While an FX (full-frame compatible) telephoto lens can work equally well on DX (APS-C) cameras, an ultra-wide lens designed for FX cameras will generally lack viewing width on a DX format. Indeed, a single millimetre in focal length can make a noticeable difference to the viewing angle. For example, the Nikon 10-20mm gives a maximum viewing angle of about 109 degrees on a camera like the D5600 (measured on the diagonal of the frame), whereas the Tokina 11-20mm shrinks the angle down to 104 degrees.