LENSES FOR LANDSCAPES

Mike Harris explains how focal length affects your images, and why successful landscapes aren’t always about going wide

Having a good-quality lens is arguably more important than a good camera body. This is especially true when it comes to shooting landscapes, because features like 4K video, high burst speeds and in-body image stabilisation aren’t essential when it comes to photographing static vistas.

While landscapes are synonymous with wide-angle lenses, standard focal lengths – and even telephoto zoom lenses – can produce outstanding results. Faraway focal points that don’t dominate the scene are easily lost when you use a wider field of view, and these are the instances where telephoto lenses can really shine.

The focal length of a lens is easily explained: the lower the number, the wider the field of view, and the higher the number, the narrower the field of view. This means a 24mm wide-angle lens provides a much wider field of view than a 200mm telephoto lens. Things get trickier for crop-sensor cameras, as you need to take into account the crop factor of its smaller sensor compared to a full-frame 35mm camera, but it’s as simple as multiplying the lens’s focal length(s) by the crop factor, which for most bands is 1.5 (it’s 1.6 for Canon, and 2 for Olympus and Panasonic

Micro Four Thirds. So, for example, a 60mm lens on a Nikon DX camera is effectively a telephoto, because it has a 35mm equivalent focal length of 90mm.

Read on to find out how different 35mm equivalent focal lengths affect the scene in front of you, and how you can cover nearly all bases with just three zoom lenses – the ‘holy trinity’.