Super Test: Landscape lenses

Here are eight of the best wide-angle lenses to capture the great outdoors in all of its glory

Capture those big vistas with eight of the best wide-angle lenses on the market right now

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. Mount an ultra-wide-angle lens to the front of your camera and it’s a truly liberating experience for landscape photography; it’s like taking the blinkers off and pulling much more of the vista into the camera’s frame.

When choosing an ultra-wide lens, it’s crucial to pick the right tool for your camera. Whereas full-frame compatible telephoto lenses can work equally well on APS-C format cameras, an ultra-wide lens designed for full-frame cameras will generally lack viewing width on an APS-C format body. Even 1mm can make a difference – for example, a 10mm focal length gives a viewing angle of about 108 degrees on a Canon APS-C camera like the EOS 90D (measured on the diagonal of the frame), whereas an 11mm zoom setting shrinks the angle down to 104 degrees.

Many photographers only use ultra-wide zooms at their shortest focal length. With that in mind, there’s something to be said for buying a prime lens instead of a zoom. We’ve picked some manual-focus prime lenses for APS-C and full-frame EOS cameras, which can work well for landscape photography, where the lack of autofocus (AF) isn’t a problem as you focus manually in Live View and use a tripod.