NEW PERSPECTIVES
Think beyond a wide-angle and challenge yourself to try a variety of focal lengths
You won’t be presented with an incredible Narnia‑like scene every time you go out to shoot, so learning to be diverse in your lens choice is a good way to grow as a photographer and see moments at a different angle. It’s easy to get caught shooting with just the lens that you have attached to your camera, but you’re missing out on capturing some amazing images. I’ve found myself using everything from a 10.5mm fisheye to a 500mm telephoto lens out in the field, and I’m glad I had each of those lenses when I did.
I rely on my wide‑angle lens a lot, especially when capturing a large scene and have foreground in the frame. My Nikon 14‑24mm is my workhorse and the lens I primarily use for landscapes. The extremely wide focal length allows for a wide field of view, and also to shoot detailed, focus‑stacked images.
For scenes that aren’t requiring such a wide angle, my Nikon 24‑70mm is my next bet. This lens is great for capturing scenes where I want my audience to focus on a particular area of the landscape, but I still want to include some details in the foreground.
We often tend to look at all the close details in a landscape, but attaching a telephoto lens to your camera really opens up an entirely new scene in itself. I find myself using a Nikon 70‑200mm and Nikon 200‑500mm at times, and the scenes that can be captured with these focal lengths are moments I’m glad I didn’t miss.
Try using telephoto lenses to zoom in on the tops of mountain ridges and admire the scene up there, or capture extremely intricate details among the towering mountainsides that may otherwise get lost in a wide‑angle shot. Any lens larger than 200mm is a great lens to achieve dramatic compression shots. For example, this could be compressing different layers of terrain in the mountains.