Take the wide view
Choose a lens that lets you see the bigger picture
he most obvious choice for a landscape lens is an ultra-wideangle zoom. You certainly can’t beat a zoom lens for versatility, enabling you to tailor the viewing angle with just a twist of the zoom ring. Even so, 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 of a zoom. There are some high-quality manual-focus primes for both DX and FX cameras, which can work particularly well for landscape photography, where the lack of autofocus (AF) isn’t really a problem.
We often want to keep the entire scene as sharp as possible, from front to back. At medium to long focus distances, the depth
Tof field stretches about twice as far behind the point of focus as it does in front of it. A popular rule of thumb is therefore to focus on a point that’s about a third of the way into the area of the scene that’s covered by the image frame. Autofocus is generally the preferred option, but manual focusing can work equally well.
Manual-focus lenses tend to have a larger rotational travel for their focus rings, making precise adjustments easier. They generally have a focus distance scale and most add depth of field markers. This lets you use ‘zone focusing’, setting the minimum and maximum distances that’ll be rendered sharply. When shooting landscapes, you’re more likely to align the infinity point of the focus distance scale at the longer position indicated by the depth of field markers. This sets the lens to its ‘hyperfocal distance’, where everything from half the focus distance setting to infinity will be sharp.
Exposure settings can be tricky when the sky is much brighter than the land beneath. A common solution is to use an ND Grad filter to create a better balance. However, many ultra-wide-angle lenses have an integral hood and no filter attachment thread, requiring an expensive, specialist filter system. Or you can shoot in Raw, with an exposure setting that retains detail in both highlights and lowlights. You can then create light and dark versions of the image during Raw processing, and merge them, using masks in a program like Photoshop.