Wish I'd Known About THIS Lens SOONER

if you could only have one lens which one would you choose it's a question i get asked a lot and my answer is always i shoot in the range of 16 millimeters up to 200 but my one lens answer has always really been the 24 to 70 and in almost all genres of photography that will still be my answer it's great for portraits you can do a little bit of macro with you can do landscape with it you can do pretty much everything in that focal range but when i'm looking at my portfolio for the last couple of years my actions say something different i think now my one lens solution especially or at least for landscape photography is now this the 70 to 200. a wide-angle lens like this the 16-35 is often sort of touted is the thing for landscape photographers but the 70-200 opens up a new exciting realm of opportunities to create some very unique landscape photographs in a world where now a lot of the big wide vistas have become very famous and very well photographed so coming up within anything new and original can be really hard with that but with this it's really easy it's exciting and in this video i want to get out into a couple of different places across the uk and show you what can be done with this lens and give you some examples of things you can do to create some truly unique photography and it's not even that expensive this lens it's light so it's easy to hike around and it's affordable as well and pretty much every manufacturer makes a lens in this range so let's get this one lens packed up for a trip across the uk and yeah let's just go and do it so i would love it if you'd come with me let's go [Applause] so i've come to this location which is absolutely perfect for the 70 to 200 ml lens when i look behind me there and in a place like this it feels amazing it's these rolling hills and there's some beautiful depth in what i can see but it's actually really difficult to get a really good landscape photograph and the reason for that is because every time we're doing landscape photography we're battling with the fact that we are bringing the 3d world down in to the 2d world so we automatically lose that depth that we see with our own eyes and brain and in a location like this it's absolutely full of depth and it's that i need to try and put in to my image but if i just whack a wide angle lens on to the camera and shoot what i can see essentially you always end up in a place like this with a very flat horizon line and if you look behind my face now you'll see that flat line in this image and i'm not a big fan of that in my landscape photographs it's why i love mountainous photography so much because you just get those shapes and peaks all the way through the image but having that flat line whether it's on the rule of thirds or not i'm not a big fan of unless it is seascape photography because we expect that when we're stood at the sea it's that classic flat horizon line so it works but that's the beauty of the 70 to 200 lens because we can whack it on the camera and pull out those beautiful details look at i mean look at that now i've got to shoot that i'm already focused in i'll talk through the composition in a minute but look at that light i'm in at 200. and just look at that shape behind me it's so beautiful as we wind through that valley with that beautiful beautiful s curve and with this light dipping in and out from behind the cloud it's just looking incredible so i'm right in at 200 millimeters at the moment to really make that part of the image and it's about the contrast of that soft light against the shadowy areas and then the brighter areas and that really enhances the depth in the image which is what i want to put back into that 2d image and as it winds its way through we've got those intersecting triangles all the way through triangles like i've said so many times before work so well in images and that's what i'm doing here using those triangles all through that valley with that s curve leading line going through it because i don't like that horizon line though i'm not even having any sky in this image at all so it's actually going to be a fairly artistic type image i guess i don't like saying that but i think that's gonna work kind of what it's gonna be there will be some depth in there but it will the sense of scale might be reduced i don't know actually because we've still got some trees in a distance i just i am absolutely excited about what's going on here i really am let me just have the lights there soft light just coming out from behind the cloud now that's what i've found is working oh that's so nice that's what i'm found is working best is those like i said the moment when the light's direct but soft it's not oh that's just perfect yes down there in the valley there's also this spiral sort of shape took out into the grass and that's adding an even extra bit of interest to the scene so that's down in the left-hand side of the frame and then we work round that curve intersecting triangles great light no sky in it the shape is just lovely and if i take a step back from the screen on the camera i can see that even more and it's working so nicely i'm not quite sure how i'm going to process this yet because the green i'm not a huge fan of i'm thinking black and white i'm thinking a strong bluish tone with a split toning i don't know it'll be interesting to experiment around with this one the thing with this 7200 lens because you can get any closer it's so much more zoomed in than your eyes see you're looking at the light it's working so well right now you're looking at the light where does the light work and you can get in close on it like that and in a landscape like this which is amazing like i said but difficult to photograph especially with a wide angle there's no mountains there's no interesting clouds even at the moment it's very blue sky back there nothing would be working if it wasn't for this 70 to 200 lens and that's working really really well at the moment i'm chuffed to bits with that and it's a similar story doing this kind of thing picking out detail from another wide otherwise wide scene that works so well in this kind of landscape but also will give you those unique shots in places like the lake district places that are very famous wide views but you're getting tighter with this lens and you can pick out something pretty special and that's what i'm gonna do now as we transport forwards in time to the lake district right so i've made it to the lake district and i am running a workshop today i have rust with me and we're having a great day he is a big fan of waterfalls though so we are currently at this very very impressive waterfall however i have a slight issue with waterfalls in that when you're stood in front of one as impressive as this it's really difficult to do it justice because you have those natural leading lines of the water going up the fall but then very often and this is the case here you end up in a spot towards the top of the waterfall when nothing then really happens it's where your eye is led it's your pathway through the image to nothing essentially just a few trees or a very uninteresting sky so by using the 70-200 i'm going to do a similar shot to what i've just done in i'm picking out details of this otherwise exciting landscape that a wide-angle lens just wouldn't do just this too i'm focusing at the moment or thinking about when trying to come up with the composition i'm thinking about texture i'm thinking about tone and i'm thinking about shape and trying to formulate them into something that's going to be interesting to the eye again though it's not going to be a classic landscape image it's going to be and as much as i don't like it again something a little bit more artistic and thoughtful and subtle maybe it isn't going to be an instagram banger but when it's printed put into series maybe with other images like it will be something quite good now it's quite an interesting way i'm having to do it because i don't have as much gear with me today as i would normally have i'm in at 200 millimeters and there's this little bit of water where there's it's essentially minimizing or what's the word minimalizing this scene so taking one small bit of the waterfall and blowing that up into a bigger image using the 7200 so i'm focused in at 200 millimeters right in on a small portion of the waterfall where there's two different tones of rock there's a few leaves stuck in behind the water there and then you've got that interesting flow of the water i've got the 10 stop filter on the front of the lens as well because i want to just smooth that water out i don't want detail in that water like i said it's all about texture and it's the texture of the rock juxtaposed against the smoothness of the water that i think is going to create the interest in this image i am then because then because there's some light or the sun is just above us here i want to then take some of the sheen off the water which you need a polarizer for but i don't have the bracket to go on the front of the polarizer so i'm going to have to hold this one right in front of the lens which is going to be a little bit tricky but i think it'll work because i have my composition set i think i'm going to go for a square crop as well to make this really work i'm at f 8 because it's going to be quite a flat image there's not really much depth in it and then i'm going for a five second exposure so let's try this so there and then hold that filter in front on the two second timer trying not to move the camera at all let's have a look at that i mean it's gonna need some post processing i'm imagining kind of putting quite a strong vignette on it pushing that contrast to emphasize the difference between the water and the rock and again i think that's gonna be quite interesting it's one of those lovely detail shots that i'm always encouraging people to take that link your day up to the wider vistas that you might end up taking but standalone i still think that's going to work really really nicely so yeah i just love it when you can do that with the 7200 you you just this just simply wouldn't work with the wide lens and picking out details of the landscape with this lens is really what it's all about good stuff [Music] [Applause] so the beauty of this lens is it can be just so useful in so many different types of landscape as well so i wanted to give you a few more ideas about what you can do with this lens in these different landscapes and to do that we're going to look at a few examples here so straight into the computer here and this is the first one this is a tree from wales as i'm climbing up a mountain in wales and this is a good example of where if you just simply can't get anywhere near the subject you want to take there was quite a big ravine a big drop between me and this tree and it just allowed me to get in closer to frame that tree use that contrast to make that tree pop out from that cliff face i'm gonna go through through this very quickly so here's another example and this is seascape photography this time and it's allowing us getting in a bit further a bit closer to use objects that are more distant from us from where our feet are and bring them into the foreground of an image the foreground of your image doesn't have to be right in front of you so the rocks are forming this foreground we've then got that beautiful water and then the sky just a nice clean simple image using that lens next one now i love this kind of thing it's using this lens in the mountains to get in and pull out detail and texture of those mountainous scenes this is from the top of great gable in the lake district it's one of the bigger mountains but the view is very well known and if i was to take a wide view it wouldn't be particularly unique but by using this lens getting in close on that scene with that sky with the colors and beautiful soft light on those mountains this is pretty much a unique shot from a very popular spot and in the mountains that's what i love about this lens here's another example this is shot from the top of le frig fell another very popular spot but with that light with the weather conditions getting in tight on this lens or with this lens again i think that's something fairly unique that would be very difficult to recreate love it i love these kind of mountainous shots here's another example this was from the other day when i actually filmed a bit with the waterfall didn't film anything with this one this is a hand-held panorama at 200 millimeters and it was just an off-the-cuff type of thing as we stopped by buttermilk lake and i quite like it i like the moody feel with that light and you can do that with this lens so if you're shooting handheld at 200 millimeters a good rule of thumb is to double your shutter speed to make sure you're getting those sharp shots so 200 millimeters you want one 400th of a second shutter speed these days though with image stabilization and ibc you can get a lot lower than that but you can be sure you're going to get sharp shots if you double the focal length panoramas handheld with this can be very effective because you're filling your frame with the detail and here's another one again using that 200 millimeter focal length to get closer to the sun to make the sun bigger in your image and this is from a mountain top on a sunrise lovely lines through it as you can see here and yeah it just lets that sun be bigger in the frame and then about 20 minutes later i got this shot again from the mountain top so this is uh there's more depth in this image we've got that s curve working its way through to that distant lake there and that again is just shows the versatility of this lens from having that sunrise with just that quite flat image to this one with loads of depth in it it's so versatile it's got quite a good range between 70 and 200. here's another one just getting in close on the detail of the shot that beautiful sky one of my favorite shots of all time a once in a lifetime moment again captured with this lens it's getting excited just thinking about it here's another one from the top of wallace craig i've talked about this one many times before but it's just allowed me to get in close to make this minimal image using all that cloud down on the lake looking at it from on top and creating something again i think relatively unique because in the same spot using a wide-angle lens this is what we got and that's fine i like it it's nice colours interesting with the cloud but i don't think it's anywhere near as good as that one and that's the point is that that's a very common spot even with a bit of a cloud inversion it's still there's other shots like that but that previous one is unique and it's all thanks to this lens and a little bit of skill maybe and here's another one this was short on a sunrise and again it's just allowed me to use those trees which were quite distant from me but use those as my foreground using that reflection and i've then got that slightly layered type image up into that sunrise with that nice blue sort of morning misty feel and yeah i mean again it's just a shot that i couldn't have done with a wide-angle lens because i couldn't have got any closer to those trees to still use them in the foreground like that and here is another example again one of my favorite images over the last couple of years that i've taken this beautiful subtle misty morning which i call this curiosity and again it was shot with this so it's just getting in a little bit closer to show the detail in the distance and you could have shot something nice with a wide-angle lens from that point but i just like the detail and it's allowed me to do something a little bit different a little bit more unique again with this lens from a very very popular spot and that's pretty much what i love about this lens and i think you will too if you shoot in this focal range it opens up such an a big new area of landscape photography for you and you take this lens into those very very popular spots put this on getting close pick details out of that landscape and you will come away with unique shots almost every time because they're not the classic wide view you're being more artistic you're thinking about it like a photographer much more deeply and you can come away with some amazing images this one as well is not particularly expensive it's an f4 if you go for the f 2.8 it will be much much bigger although that the 2.8 lenses are beautiful this f4 is pretty small it's pretty light and the image quality is still very good because with most landscape photography we're never really shooting below f5.6 f8 so the the f4 lenses will do you just fine and this is not too expensive at all you get second hand for about 400 pounds if not a little bit less i hope you found this very useful and it's inspired you to go out and capture some of these types of images and explore the landscape with this increased focal range what i do as well is i sometimes just use my phone zoom in on that to give you an idea because you're looking at a focal length much longer than your eyes you're using your phone to getting close before you whip your camera out can be very useful i do that quite regularly as well so anyway i think i've talked for long enough i'll see you on another one very very soon make sure you check out the raw room all the tutorials on there if you haven't done so already and i'll see you very soon i'm adam this is first man photography [Music] out [Music] you

Channel: First Man Photography

Views: 42,222

Keywords: photography, landscape photography, photography ideas, photography tips, landscape photography vlog, outdoor photography, landscape photography tutorial, landscape photography tips, how to use a telephoto lens, telephoto lens, 70-200mm landscape photography, nature photography, photography documentary, best lens for landscape photography, canon 70-200 f4, best landscape lens, photo hacks, landscape photography for beginners, photography tutorial, adam karnacz, 70-200mm

Id: plncPS4yoMA

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020