Lenses: The Correct Choice

Note: I have been writing about lenses recently so I thought I would include this piece, originally published a while ago. It is a short article but necessary reading if you do a lot of landscape photography.

Lenses: The Correct Choice

by William Lulow

I had an interesting personal shoot a while back, that highlighted how to make the correct choice when it comes to which lens to use for a particular shot. I wanted to do a landscape of the New York City skyline, something I have done many times before, but this time it was going to be from a distance of 30 miles or so. I positioned my camera up on top of the Montclair, New Jersey highlands at Highlawn Manor which is now a memorial to 9/11. When you are this far away from your subject, there are special considerations as to the right lens to choose.

If I had made the shot with a wide angle lens to encompass the entire skyline, the image would have been way too small even to see. The solution was to shoot with my long telephoto lens (I used my Canon 135mm f/2 which, on my crop sensor camera acts like a 216mm lens) and make a composite shot. Now the trick to making these “merged” images is that Adobe Photoshop can combine images that are overlapping, but they need to be shot on exactly, or as close as possible to the same plane. That means that ideally, the camera needs to be on a tripod, leveled and then panned on exactly the same axis. (I have sometimes been able to do this while hand-holding the camera, but it’s not as exact a method). You also need to make a mental note in the viewfinder of just where the overlapping points would be because the program uses these for reference when executing the merge.)

This image is a composite of three separate images:

Even in this shot, the buildings themselves are fairly small. A larger print would have made them larger, of course. This is sometimes the only way to get a decent shot of a skyline or an object in a landscape that is quite a distance away. You also might notice that you have a pretty decent depth-of-field at this distance, even though you are using your long lens. The factors which affect depth-of-field are the lens you use, the aperture you use and the distance from the camera to the subject. In this shot, the background is the furthest from the camera so the depth-of-field might be anywhere from infinity to a few hundred yards. Here we have much more than that distance so the depth sharpness holds up.

You can just about forget doing shots like this unless you can use a professional-type camera with some decent optics and a tripod. Again, if you don’t use a telephoto lens, the buildings or objects will just be too small. This is one of those images that you can’t really make effectively with an iPhone.

Most other scenic landscape images are usually best made with a wide angle lens. My lens of choice is a Canon 20mm f/2.8 on my crop sensor camera. It acts more like a 32mm lens which is just about the right focal length to do scenics with a slight wide-angle effect. Here is one example:

When you shoot scenic landscape images with a wide angle lens, remember that the foreground is the most important element because it will be closest to the camera and therefore recorded as the largest object within the frame itself. The background will usually take care of itself, because it will be much smaller. In the past, when I was making an image like this with my view cameras, I could adjust the back element so that the film was parallel with the vertical lines of the building. Today, shooting digitally with a 35mm-type camera, it’s much harder to do this. The trick is to get the camera high enough so that you don’t have to aim up, which is the cause of converging vertical lines.

Here’s another example:

Here you can barely see the city off in the distance, so the focus was on the water itself and the boat’s direction just naturally leads the eye eventually to find the city. It’s an example of a circular composition that keeps your eye in the image.

Again, the nature of wide angle lenses is that they tend to render objects smaller in the frame. For telephoto lenses, the effect is the opposite. You would use the latter to bring distant objects closer and/or to render them larger. The former should be used to include more of a scene, but the compositional emphasis should always be on the foreground.

So, first you need to decide on exactly what kind of image you wish to make, then choose a lens that will render your subjects large enough to see clearly.

This image, again, was made with my wide angle 20mm f/2.8 lens. I was just the right distance from the subject to capture it along with the reflection. This lens is my usual lens for doing landscapes.

So the take away here is that when you are shooting distant landscapes, try using a longer lens. If you are close enough to render the scenic in a single shot, then use your wide angle lens. All of the above information is applicable to your zoom lens as well. Just be aware of what each focal length does to your image and you will be able to select the right one. If in doubt, these articles can be very helpful.