Focal length and how it can affect your landscape photography.
Each lens will have its own focal length. Wide lenses tend to fall around 16-35 on full frame whereas a telephoto zooms will be in the 70 -200mm range.
The focal length doesn't refer to the actual length of the lens it refers to the distance between where light converges in the lens and the front of the camera's sensor. When you increase the focal length or zoom in on a zoom lens, that point of conversion is moved away from the sensor increasing the focal length.
When we increase the focal length of a lens our subject becomes closer and our field of view becomes narrower.
When we decrease the focal length of our lens our subject will become further away and our field of view will become wider.
Focal length and field of view
The shorter the focal length the wider the field of view.
The longer the focal length the narrower the field of view will be.
18mm will roughly have a 90-degree field of view.
200mm will roughly have a 10-degree field of view.
For me, there are two other huge characteristics that lenses have, and we can use these as well as the reach of our lens to compose an image.
The first being depth of field.
So briefly what is depth of field?
The simple answer is, the distance between the nearest and furthest objects within your photo that appear acceptably sharp and this distance can be controlled by adjusting the aperture of the lens. F2.8, for example, will have a very narrow depth of field whereas f16 will have a much larger depth of field. Aperture will be for another post, so let's get back to focal length.
So focal length can also affect depth of field within an image. Typically the shorter the focal length the greater the depth of field. It may be possible to get the whole scene acceptably sharp with a very wide angle lens say 10mm at an aperture of only F5.6 whereas, if you shot the same scene at 200mm at f5.6 the depth of field would only be a few feet, unless we moved away from the subject of course.
This one of the reasons wide lenses are so popular in landscape photography apart from the field of view of course.
So let's talk about my second reason.
Compression
Lens compression is something that is really useful in landscape photography. It allows us to make objects feel closer together. This can be achieved by moving away from the foreground subject and using a longer focal length. This has the effect of reducing the distance between the foreground and background. This is great for mountain photography.
The amount of perceived compression is dependant on 2 things the focal length and the distance to your foreground subject. The further you are from your foreground and the greater the focal length the greater the compression will appear in your photo.
One thing to mention here is if you take a shot with a wide angle lens and take another from the same spot with a telephoto the perspective and compression will not change only the amount that the image is cropped. depth of field will also be reduced. The only way we can change the compression is by moving further away from the foreground elements.
So generally speaking when we use a telephoto lens we stand further away from our foreground subject, this results in an image where the background appears larger than it actually is. Also, the opposite with a wide angle we tend to stand a lot closer to our foreground subject making this feel larger than the background.
Both can have incredible results for landscape photography and can really help us to compose compelling images that look amazing.
So what focal lengths work well for landscape photography?
Choosing a focal length for landscape photography is an artistic choice and there really isn't a definitive answer, unlike say portraiture for example. Typically for portraits, we like to choose a focal length which will not make a person's features look distorted. Using a focal length between 35 and 50 mm will give great results because it is similar to how our own eyes see things. Landscape photography is completely different, because we are creating a piece of styled art, we are able to push the boundaries and use different focal lengths to achieve different looks.
Having looked at my landscape photography photographs for the last couple of years, a few things have become apparent. When I'm shooting in the woodland my focal length tends to vary between 28mm to 50mm. I think this is because I like the woodland to look as natural as possible and I never seem to want to make things look too distorted. When I'm shooting in the mountains however, it is a complete split between wide angle around 18mm and telephoto which generally falls anywhere between 100 and 200mm. When I'm shooting seascapes however my focal range almost always is very wide around 14mm - 18mm
This is just the way I shoot and it isn't really a conscious thing, it's just what I have found when looking at my focal lengths in my Lightroom catalogue.
Of course, this probably isn't very helpful because we will all have different interpretations of how a landscape should be captured. Putting your own artistic take on it is what it's all about.
So if I could only take one lens which would it be. When looking at my focal lengths it would depend on where I will be shooting.
Woodland would be the 24-70
Seascape would be the 16 -35
Mountains is a tuff one, but I would have to go with the telephoto 70-200 it just allows you to pick out compositions within the landscape from a distance and this is vital for mountain photography.
Focal length and depth of field.
As we mentioned before using a wide angle lens will typically give us a larger depth of field but again this is all relative to our distance to our foreground subject. In landscape photography I quite often like to get very close to my foreground subject and shoot very wide. Sometimes as close as a foot or so. When you get this close to your foreground it is almost impossible to gain enough depth of field in the scene to get everything acceptably sharp.
So what happens when we cannot get enough depth of field in our photograph?
When we cannot gain the correct depth of field we have 3 choices.
Firstly to let either the foreground or background fall out of focus.
Secondly to focus stack.
and thirdly introduce a tilt and shift lens.
The first method can be used to create a very artistic view of the landscape where the foreground elements are blurred and it appears as if you are shooting through the bokeh. You can also do this in reverse where you foreground subject is sharp and your background is blurred. This isolates your subject and can be great for flowers and trees.
I’m no expert on tilt and shift lenses, but generally speaking a tilted lense will have an area of focus across the image, that area can be increased as the lens is tilted, this can give incredibly large depths of field.
Personally from the three choices I prefer to focus stack, mainly because I do not own a tilt and shift lens and because almost always, I like to have everything sharp in my landscape photographs. Focus stacking is a technique I use a fair bit as it allows me to use the sweet spot of my lens. I just take several images focused on different parts of the scene and blend them together in photoshop. it's pretty straight forward and incredibly effective.
I hope you enjoyed the post, feel free to check out the video below for more information and landscape photography tips.
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Backlighting your landscape photos can be a great way of producing interesting and dynamic photography.