7 ways a 70-200mm LENS will IMPROVE your PHOTOGRAPHY

in this week's video I'm going to talk all about a telephoto lens and explain why I think is the easiest way to improve your composition morning everybody fantastic to see you all again okay in last Sunday's video I had a lot of questions about long lens photography and people are saying what what do you mean by long lens photography why is it easier because I talked about my progression in photography and how I struggled with wide-angle photography and how I said it was much easier to shoot with the long lens so I thought in this week's video I'll explain a little bit more about that and why I think that a long lens and by a long lens I mean anything above 50 millimetres really but what I'm talking about is a 70 to 200 millimeter lens the 52 140 and crop sensor format and it really can make a big difference to your photography and it's also an easier way to go out and get some good photos because it's much easier to shoot with the long lens than it is with a wide-angle lens I've got loads of great tips to share so let's start with the first of those which is just how it can simplify your photography so if we look at this scene here you can see that this is a really nice lakeland scene this is Riedel water in the Lake District there's some amazing miss but there's quite a lot of complexity in it and when I was taking the scene I remember thinking actually the focus is this island in the middle and by putting a 150 millimeter focal length on the lens my 70 to 200 150 millimetres I managed to get this shot it's much simpler there wasn't as much to think about I didn't have to think about the foreground the mid-ground etc I could just focus on that island and it made it much easier to simplify the scene and quite often in landscape photography simpler does mean better this is another scene which is you know a similar idea this was in the Faroe Islands and to be honest in the Faroe Islands you can put your camera in any direction and get a pretty good photo but you know there's a lot going on and that this is on Cal so I want one of the islands there it's quite a famous location and there was we were on a workshop there was a few of us you can see on this peninsula here it's a fairly scary walk walking out this peninsula but it's quite complicated we got this lighthouse there I got this peephole we've got the the dip in the middle and then the mountains in the background and although this sort of works as a photo I think it needs a little bit more care and attention to make it work but by getting the long lens out and zooming in on this central par then I could get a much easier and quicker shot that was a game much simpler just focusing on these recession of layers in the mountains behind and luckily had mass on him to go and pose there and yeah he has a bit of scale to it as well it's quite often a good thing as well putting people in your long lens shot see it can you know really give a sense of scale and add drama to your images now I mentioned there that you can react a little bit quicker and that's one of the other reasons I really like using the 70 to 200 it's just to be able to react quicker to things and when I was in Scotland I was on the Isle of Skye now this beautiful beach called algal looking out to the cooling mountains in the background and I was trying to compose a wide-angle shot which is this scene here I did a video on it on it actually you can go and watch it here and the light was changing really quickly and I couldn't get that composition with this wide angle shot but so by having a longer lens it just meant I could concentrate on the things in the distance I didn't have to think about how to connect the foreground to the mid-ground to the distance I just thought that looks good in the distance I'm gonna take it and in this case it was 18 millimeter lens I'm not super long it still looks like a bit of a Vista shot this but it's with that longer lens and it and it really helped to simplify it but also allow me to react more quickly to it because it didn't wasn't as complicated to find that composition the third thing is is creating drama you can create drama so easily with a long lens now I'm not saying you can't do it little wide-angle lens and in fact with a wide-angle lens if the guys looking amazing then it kind of look really brilliant but with the long lens you can do it really well and you can do it when perhaps drama doesn't exist so readily well you know when you look at the whole Vista so take this shot in Yosemite this was probably about 11 o'clock in the morning and we were in Yosemite Valley here it was blue sky I took this wide Vista shot and you can see that it's okay it's not a bad shot there's no drama in the sky though so what I did was I just put a long lens on and focused on the recession of the mountains on the right hand side I had Half Dome in the background here but you could see that that recession was what was interesting so by picking that out with the long lens meant that I could add drama into the shot and then I've got another version of this not a monochrome one but one that I've just toned blue a little bit and cropped in a little bit tighter and I think that works really well as as well and this was around about 100 millimetres you know you're the way you can add drama is adding scale or by just removing things because often having that unknown within a scene can add to your imagination I've spoken about this before with this church shot but I wanted to speak about it in this particular scene here so this is the lake scene you know there's the lake there's the tree there's some Sun on the tree and there's a mountains in the background this wide shot sort of tells the whole story you know there's not there's nothing left to the imagination as soon as you put a long lens on then you start to cut out some of those things and you leave a little bit of it to the viewers imagination and often you want to do that you don't want to tell the whole story so all I've done is I've picked out this tree here it's just getting the light and then the mountain you don't really know how big the mountain is you don't really know where that tree is within the scene so it just creates a little bit more of a mystical scene and I think that's a really good thing to do with the long lens you gain in this shot here I've got this pan o here which looks amazing and that's what I intended to do but but the shot are like most out of it was two individual shops shot with a 200 millimeter lens really close in on these mountains the first ones on the end of this mountain when the when the cloud came down and you can see here this this just looks so dramatic and it's not telling that bigger story it's just going closer just looking at those shapes and getting a bit tighter you know enable me to get something that just had a little bit more drama in it and I think that's that's really a really good way of doing things yeah again in this scene here this was in San Francisco when the fog was rolling in on this beautiful morning I did another video on this you can check it out here it was really a beautiful beautiful morning lessness the fog was rolling in it was sort of in waves coming in and out like this and I took this wide shot and then there's this island and I just thought rather than have a shot that sort of shows the mist and then the land what happens if I just share that island within the clouds it leads it leaves a little bit to the imagination you think wow is that taken from a plane where is that tree is it cloud you don't straightaway just understand what this shot is and I think that just adds something quite special to it and again you can't do that without a long lens so just think about that think about how you can add drama and mystery in your scenes cuz because the long lens can really help that the other thing is it's great for abstracts this is an abstract he shot of the Golden Gate Bridge again with the fog and the light coming through just picking really close in so rather than shooting the whole bridge which is probably what everybody does when they go to the hover gate bridge just go close in I'm just using some of the shadows cast through the you know where the bridges and the Sun coming through on onto the fog and then you can also do abstracts by just using depth of field with the long lens as well so this was one way I just put my camera I just put it down on the beach like this and then I had it on it about f2 or f4 may be shot the sea stack in the background and then just had these amazing bokeh balls of the light that was reflected off the wet pebbles these black pebbles and it created this golden black which is just so beautiful so that works that works really really well and on a similar theme you can use your long lens for close-ups so a lot of people think when you're shooting insects and flowers and things like that that you need a macro lens but you don't quite often you can shoot quite close with a 70 to 200 lens but what it really enables you to do especially if you've got an F 2.8 lenses get really shallow depth of field so more all three of these shots were shot with my long lens and you can see that they've created this rule simplicity to the scene because I've got a very very shallow depth of field so it's really good and finally I just want to talk about woodland which she was talking about mid week because it's it's again woodlands difficult it's complex as lots going on if you try and shoot it with a 20 millimeter lens you're gonna have to do a really clever composition to make sure everything just works together and again I'm not saying you can't do that Neil's shots midweek Neil Bernal he's done it really well and I suspect a few of those we're doing with the wider angle lens but generally I'll be shooting you know past 50 millimetres and using a telephoto to shoot my woodland scenes and and here's some examples this one you know particularly I did a video on of this amazing pair of trees here on home fell in the Lake District they're just backlit by the Sun and you know just by separating them with a long lens creating this compression as well as just created quite a dramatic shot in fact in fact I've got just in front of me pretty but I was just looking so yeah so this is this is the print of that exact shot you can see that I've really create separation between the trees and the background and I've just been out to pick them out I was on a mounting a reasonable distance away from this and it's worked really really well so think about it for woodland here's some shots that I've taken that I probably not shared before all taken with a long [Music] sailors passing on the street are you ready for pee chips are filling up fast are you ready [Music] forget my memories leave those hurt and maybe just before I go I wanted to say something about the versatility of this lens as well because okay you can use it for landscape photography and I just showed you can do some flowers and you can you can use it for wildlife photography as well but I've always also used it for taking pictures of my kids and and pebbles like these shots here and it's fantastic for doing that it really is fantastic you can do some amazing amazing shots with it because it just isolates that subject speaking about pebbles I've just have these stickers made for my packaging so anybody that orders of print gets also a pebble sticker as well I wanted to say thanks so much for everyone that has ordered prints recently in this sale of 33 percent off I'll keep it going for a few more weeks I really do appreciate it he'll love printing it's really something that I enjoy when somebody buys one of my prints it's really special to me I'd also like to know what you guys think you know have you got any top tips for using a long lens I've not spoken too much about the technical aspects about it maybe if you've got any tips for using the long lens how you mount it on your tripod how you make sure you don't get vibrations where you might focus put them in the comments below and it'll be a really useful resource for everybody I'll make sure I check them out as well and reply to the comments as they comment okay thanks ever so much for watching I've got a really really exciting video next Sunday that's going to take me a bit I've been working on it most of this week as well so look forward to that I'll give you a little bit of a glimpse of it and some of the things that I'm going to be showing bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 222,932

Keywords: photography, 70200lens, telephoto lens, telephoto photography, how to use a 70-200mm lens, 70-200mm, Long lens photography, nigel danson, Nigel Danson photography

Id: -XdGYsngMBE

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Sun May 03 2020