crash course 3: lenses

For me, lenses are far more important than any camera will ever be.  I’ll keep my lenses throughout camera changes or upgrades.

Lenses can be broken into zoom, where they incorporate a range of different focal lengths and prime, where the focal length is fixed.

This can be further broken down into wide-angle, standard and telephoto focal lengths.  It is these attributes along with the lens’s aperture that enable me to manipulate a scene and create the look I want.

The lenses I predominantly use are a 23mm wide-angle prime and a 32-64mm standard zoom on my Fujifilm GFX50R, and a 10-24mm wide-angle zoom and a 55-200mm telephoto zoom on my Fujifilm X-T3.

The lenses have different attributes and give vastly different looks and results.

Wide-angle lenses:

The staple of any landscape photographer’s kit bag, a wide-angle lens (anything in the range from 14mm to 28mm on a full frame camera) will enable you to photograph huge vistas.  But as I wrote in a recent post this is a waste of the lens’s true capabilities.

In the above image, I captured the whole scene in front of me with a wide-angle lens.  Its effect though is to reduce everything in the image to a miniscule scale.  There is nothing wrong with this, as sometimes I will want to capture a really wide, sweeping vista, and in this particular image I wanted to show the desolate isolation of the chapel in its mountain top location.

However, I prefer to use a wide-angle lens to change the perspective of a scene.  I do this by setting my camera very low and very close to an item of foreground interest.  This gives an interesting illusion to the image and using some of the compositional tools I covered last week draw the viewers eye through the image.

In this image I used my wide-angle lens positioned close to the dry-stone wall and shot using the road as an S-curve to draw the eye up to the distant mountains, with the lone tree placed on the upper-left third on the way.

Similarly, with the focus on the foreground I tried to convey the vastness of the landscape while still retaining a foreground element to draw the eye in to the scene, though not so dramatically and obviously as the “road” image above.

Standard lenses:

I consider lenses with a focal length of 35mm to 50mm as having a standard focal length.  Broadly speaking these more or less accurately portray the scene in front of you.  They are therefore ideal for documentary and street photography but also have their uses in landscape photography.

Here, I used a 50mm equivalent lens to shoot this beautifully side lit still-life study.

I tend to use lenses in this range (and telephoto lenses) to shoot a series of images to stitch together as a panorama though.

The above image is comprised of around 5 or 6 single portrait orientation shots with a 36mm equivalent focal length stitched together in Lightroom.

Telephoto lenses:

You might not think a telephoto lens would have any place in landscape photography.  But you’d be wrong.

As well as being essential for searching out and shooting little vignettes within a larger overall scene, they also help change a scene's perspective.

The above image is a snippet from an otherwise boring and cluttered scene.  However, my telephoto zoom at 200mm isolated this far more interesting part of the scene.

These lenses are also capable of compressing the elements of a scene, bringing the background and foreground together.

This image was shot with a 90mm equivalent lens, bringing the far distant hills more into the overall image.  Had I shot this with a wide-angle or standard lens then they would have appeared far more insignificant.  I wanted this image to convey several, coloured layers within the scene.

Of course, there are many other types of lenses such as macro or tilt-shift with specialist uses.  But the ones I’ve shown above are the ones I like to use, and more importantly how I like to use them.