Choose a lens

Give yourself more creative options with a range of focal lengths

Like bacon and eggs, wide-angle lenses and scenic photography are a classic combination. Wideangles allow you to capture a magnificent sweeping view in a single photo, with the emphasis they place on features in the foreground making for shots with bags of impact (as long as you’re standing in the right place). On a full-frame camera, wide-angle lenses are those with a focal length shorter than 50mm; they typically run from 28mm down to 14mm. With a camera that has a smaller sensor, you’ll need to go even wider to combat the cropping effect of the sensor.

Telephoto lenses – those with focal lengths longer than the standard full-frame 50mm – allow you to pick out details in the landscape, or to take advantage of compression distortion by standing farther away and zooming in, which makes elements in the scene appear to be stacked closer together.

Other lenses worth considering include a standard zoom and, if you’re feeling flush, a specialist lens such as a tilt-shift wide-angle.

20mm Wide-angle This was taken with a 20mm lens on a full-frame camera. To get the equivalent view on a camera with a smaller APS-C sensor, you’d need to use a focal length of approximately 13mm.

105mm Telephoto Lenses from 70mm through to 600mm give you progressively greater ‘reach’ and a compression effect.