Usually, I use wide angle lenses for my landscape photography. To challenge my creativity, I used my telephoto lens exclusively today. And I actually enjoyed it.
I own 4 lenses, 2 of them I usually use for landscape photography, those would be my 18-55mm kit lens and my 22mm pancake lens. Today though, the only lens I used was my 55-250mm telephoto. Except for the photo of that lens.
I’ve known that you can get pretty good results shooting landscapes that way before, it just never really was my style. I always preferred to stay wider than 35mm, barely using the 55mm setting on my kit lens. But today tought me differend. I realized that it is easier than I thought to get results using unfamiliar focal length if you just think about your composition more. Because as always, composition is key.
Using longer focal length, you gain the ability to pull close what’s far and to make little things look bigger. The background compression is also nicer and gives a sense of a more complete picture, at least to me. An added bonus is that there’s way less distortion than at those shorter focal lenghts.
While I was at the Stadtweger Teich just outside of Zellerfeld to try out shooting landscapes with my telephoto lens for the first time today, I came to have a conversation with an 81 year old baker. I was just about to leave again and had just stopped at a bench to have a cup of water. We spoke about many things, bread not being one of them.
Using a telephoto lens can also help you to isolate your subject from the background, even at f/8.0. Like the hoverfly and the thistle.
Off course the main use for a telephoto lens is to bring you closer to the action, like in sports photography where it’s not always possible to get physically closer to the subject. But they’re useful for landscape photpgraphy as well, as I learned today.
Robin Ho Fotos 