2 Essential Lenses for Landscape Photography

how many lenses do you actually really need for landscape photography now there's a common expression of the Holy Trinity the three lenses that cover the maximum focal range all the way from wide-angle right up to telephoto but I'm not so sure if that's true and I honestly believe that you can do pretty much everything that you need to do with just two lenses with a wide angle zoom and with a telephoto zoom no mid-range zoom no repeated focal lengths with with fast priors or no AF 2.8 telephoto lens and in this video I'd like to talk about why I believe that those two lenses were the two essential lenses for landscape photography and what I think it's important to travel as light as possible and take as fewer lens as possible with you when you go out into the landscape [Music] now if you've seen any of Mary the video if you'll know that it's a particular philosophy of mind to travel as light as possible because I really believe that the less we carry the more easier it is to be creative now last month I led a workshop in the Dolomites and we did a lot of hiking on one day in particular we covered about 20 kilometers with quite significant art ative game with all of our gear on our back tripods camera gear water and stuff like that I generally think that the more gear that you've got on your back the heavier it is the more you start to ache the more you start to strain then the harder it is to climb that next Ridge or to scramble over those rocks and get to those places where you're probably going to get the best shot and I really think that anything that discourages you or do you motivates you from moving from getting to places from where you can get about a shot is obviously going to be a bad idea and bad for your photography hence traveling as light as possible now I also believe that arriving to a place out of breath with your heart pounding with your back straining really affects your ability to think calmly when you're on location and I think that some of the best images some of our most creative moments come from a clear head from a calm state of mind and being out of breath being really tired thumping hard all of that kind of stuff I honestly think it restricts our capacity to really let the landscape speak to us so the less tired we are the easier it is to get to a place that much better we feel when we get there and the much easier it is to create really compelling images now before we continue I just like to say that this video is being sponsored by Squarespace which I'm really happy about because I've been using this quest space for my own website which is a cornerstone of my photography business for a couple of years now and I've been really impressed by how easy it is to build a really great looking website even for a complete technophobe like me who's got absolutely no coding skills whatsoever now Squarespace for offering a discount for views of this video ten percent on your first purchase so all you need to do is go to www.hsn Andy Munford and I'll put the link in the description below the video now just click on that start playing around with the templates and you'll be really surprised at how easy to create a really great-looking portfolio website right so back to the two essential lenses and there's a very easy way in Lightroom to see which lenses and which focal lengths you use most often in the library module you just click onto metadata and you can see here it will list all your images in the catalog by the focal length and by the lens and you can just see here that that the vast majority of memory of a tick and either with a wide-angle zoom or with a telephoto and these three lenses of the ten to 20 the 16 to 35 by the 17 to 35 other wide-angle zooms that I had when I shot with Nick honor you can see that by far the most common lens was the 17 to 35 wide-angle zoom and then when you look at the other lenses that I used in the mid-range there's nothing really that comes close to that until we get to the telephoto zoom again the 70 to 200 that I use or the 18 to 400 and then when you get to since I switched to Fuji it's even more pronounced you can see here that the the wide-angle zoom the XF 10 to 24 is by far the most commonly a user lens much more than the the 18 to 55 the mid-range the mid-range is him there and then again you see that there's a drop-off in the middle and then a huge jump again when we look at the the telephoto zoom the 55 to 200 which I use a most commonly on Fuji and it's the same story when we look over at the focal length over here you can see all the different focal lengths focal lengths that the images are shot at and again very very few and then there's a big spike here around 10 millimeter which is one end of the wide-angle zoom and then again not another big spike at the 17 which is the wide end of the 17 to 35 and then again a lot a lot more at 24 which is the lightened of the wide-angle zoom of the future zoom and then another spike again at around the 35 mark here which again was a long end of the Nick on wide-angle zoom that I used to use and then again in the mid ranges in here very little like the odd frame here and there until we get to 55 which is when it starts to use the telephoto zoom for the Fuji and again at 70 which is the beginning of the tougher to zoom that are used with Nick on so what is it about those two lenses which makes me reach for them most often now I honestly think that the answer to that is based in where I think the power of landscape photography comes from I think that when we're shooting a scene we're attempting to do is to try to capture it in such a way that engages who ever see that image as much as possible and to do that we need to really make them connect with the mood and see it with different eyes see in a way that they're not used to seeing the world so how do we do that now if we think that our eyes the way that we normally see the world it's pretty much in the equivalent of a 50 millimeter focal length on full frame that's kind of that's the way that our eyes work and we're used to seeing everything from eye level also we're in a dated with images taken with phones and friends tend to capture images at around 27 or 28 millimeter on a full-frame equivalent so the way that we're most commonly used to connecting and seeing with the world is with those kind of mid-range focal lengths with the 50 millimetres of our eyes with a 27 millimeter of a phone I honestly believe that when we can step outside of that one we can try to show the world in a different way we automatically take a first step towards engaging the viewer because we're showing them something that they haven't seen before or something that they're not used to seeing and a wide-angle lens or a telephoto lens are great for actually doing that now a wide-angle lens will give you a very different perspective on the world it includes everything from the foreground right up in the front of the camera all the way through to this huge epic sky and we're just not used to seeing the world in that kind of panoramic wide angle of view which is part of its power what makes images taken with a wide-angle lens so compelling now it is much more problematic to compose with a wide-angle lens there's a lot more to consider because you're fitting a lot more into the frame but when it's done right when it's done well the images that you create with a wide-angle lens are just so much more compelling so much more dramatic than anything that we would see shot with a midranges view and also with a mid-range zoom there are certain situations when it can be quite hard to fake everything that you would like to fit into the frame in it so for example if you're shooting in the mountains and you have very high peaks it can be quite hard to shoot a foreground to fit a foreground that connects with the pigs what to be able to fit in the reflection that you see in front of the peak into the image without crapping really close to the top of the frame and cutting out too much of the sky and another thing about wide-angle lenses is they give you the capacity to really get in close and low to the foreground now shooting low gives us another perspective on the world that we don't normally see because we're used to seeing it from from eye height which is anything from 1.2 to about 1.7 meters above the height of the ground when we get the camera really low to the ground less than a meter or a couple of feet off the ground it changes the way that we see the world and with a wide-angle lens you can still get an incredible Visser and distant mountains or distant views with the foreground that comes right up close to there to the bottom of the frame the mix of viewer feel that they can literally step into the frame step right into the image like in this image here you can see the text is in the foreground of the pier or the textures of the grass it really gives the image that much more engaging feel there's so much more going on and it really pulls the attention and pulls you into this image and into the scene that the photographer is trying to capture a telephoto lens however will give you an altogether different perspective on a scene different from a wide-angle and different from a mid-range II scene and I've made a video about why a telephoto lens shouldn't be in your bag when you're shooting landscape photography in which I'll I'll link up here but if you haven't seen that I'll just quickly go over some of the characteristics of a telephoto lens which make it one of the two essential lenses for landscape photography now a telephoto lens in complete contrast to a wide-angle lens will fit only a very small amount of the scene that you have in front of you into the frame so you're going to be removing so much of the context you're going to be removing so many elements of the stuff that you can see in front of your eyes and just by doing that you automatically give people a very different perspective of what they're used to by isolating a particular part of the scene and removing a context you can actually make the image quite confusing just make it so people are not quite sure what they're looking at so it's very easy to create an abstract image which is automatically engaging as people try to kind of get their head around what it is that they're seeing because they're showing them the world in a very different way to the way that they're used to seeing it another thing that a telephoto lens will do is compress distant things together or take distant things and pull and closer together and this is particularly effective in places like mountains and Hills because the mountains that kind of crushed together which really increases the sense of scale that you get for them or it's great when you're shooting things like a misty morning with hills because the hills are kind of compressed together with the lines of mists creating a kind of abstract feel to the image and this is the kind of thing that you just simply can't get with a mid-range zoom a mid-range is even won't give you that compression and it also won't cut off enough of the context to be able to give you a really focused composition and a really minimal frame now the reason why I prefers in this to Prime's which would actually be even lighter is because I really do appreciate the flexibility that a good zoom lens will give you if you remember when we looked in Lightroom at the different focal lengths that I tended to shoot at the most what I found is that most most of my shots were done at one end of the zoom or the other whether those wide-angle or a telephoto zoom I do like that flexibility I like being able to change a perspective and have a kind of choice at what focal lengths that I'm shooting it and another thing that I noticed is that when I was using mid-range zoom something like a 24 to 70 or 18 to 55 on a cropped frame sensor most of the shots that I was doing with that lens were done at a focal length that was also covered with either the wide angle zoom or the telephoto zoom so for example on the 24 to 70 I tended to shoot it a lot between 24 and 35 focal lengths that were also covered with the 17 to 35 wide angles in that I possessed work on a crop frame sensor I tended to be shooting a lot at kind of between 18 and 24 focal lengths that were covered on my 10 to 24 wide angle and at the other end of the mid-range zoom I tend to be shooting a lot at 70 millimeters a focal length that I could also use on my telephoto zoom on the crop frame sensor I tended to be shooting a lot at 55 which again is the focal length that I could use on my 55 to 200 telephoto zoom what I didn't tend to be shooting was doing anything at all between that kind of 35 to 70 or that 24 to 55 which again is that mid-range it's the same focal length that we see the world with our eyes with and it's the same focal length that we see a lot of fun pictures taken with so I started to realize that I just didn't need a mid-range resume so even when I did use it it was basically just laziness and I could be doing the same shot with either a telephoto zoom or a wide-angle thing now that's what works for me and that's how I shoot and how I've always shot since I started landscape photography but I do know that a lot of people are really attached to the mid-range II seems to their 24 to 70 or they're 16 to 55 and it will be really hard to leave those lenses at home so what I suggest you do is you go into Lightroom and have a look at the focal lengths you shoot most commonly with and any lens that doesn't fit into that try leaving it at home so you only take two lenses with you whether that's a wide-angle zoom works and mid ranges here but just take two lenses with you when you got if you find yourself in a situation where you need to with the lens that you don't have with you and just having to think about how you can compensate for that that might mean walking closer or walking further away it might mean framing the shot using in a panorama and from multiple different shots or it might mean doing the whole thing from a completely different composition and rethinking the way that you do things and trying to do thing in a different way it's not really a bad thing anything that encourages to think a little bit differently there's got to be good for creativity so try going out with just your lenses because really what's the worst that could possibly happen so that's it for this video I hope it's been useful and I hope it's been interesting if you've got any questions or any comment just drop a comment in the box below and I will certainly try to get back to you don't forget to check out the Squarespace link and there's a 10% discount on any purchase that you make and as ever thanks for watching and take care [Music]

Channel: Andy Mumford

Views: 212,649

Rating: 4.8617392 out of 5

Keywords: lenses, lenses for landscape photography, wide angle lenses, telephoto lenses, photography tips, landscape photography advice, gear tips, fujifilm, landscape photography videos, which lenses for landscape photography, lightweight photography kit, essential lenses

Id: QtTxkgkeuak

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 21 2018