If you use a wide angle lens for your landscape photography, it is very easy to get it wrong …

The foreground/midground/background composition sounds easy doesn't it ... first you find an impressive scene, then you hunt around and find a thing to put in the foreground, you get close to it, put your wide angle lens on, take the photo and your home in time for tea.

But there is a little more to it than that.

Some scenes are huge and require a wide angle lens to fit everything in, whereas other landscapes are a lot flatter.

… and a traditional wide angle lens will just send a distant background way off to the infinity point making it so insignificant in your photograph.

Now this doesn’t work every time, but if you flip your current thinking on its head, this will get you closer to getting good images with both wide angle camera lenses as well as telephoto lenses.

Think of your wide angle lens as a close-up lens and your telephoto lens as a reaching lens.

A wide angle photograph with a wide angle lens ... you can do much better than this ... — This is a wide landscape with a wide angle lens I took at Clee Hill … this is bad and you can do so much better.

At a location like this, a telephoto lens works really well.

With those light beams, I took out my Sony RX10iii, (This is a camera and lens all built into one), which is a 25x zoom or the full frame equivalent of a 24-600mm reach.

This enables me to get shots like this:

The landscape has to be pretty big for you to break out the wide angle lens, and even then, I use it with caution. In North Wales, in the Snowdonia National Park, there are some big mountains and these are perfect for the wide angle lens.

In Ogwen Valley, there is a river called Avon Lloer. Following this up the mountain gives plenty of opportunities for different foregrounds … it’s just finding the right one …that’s the key.

So if you are struggling with your wide angle lens compositions, or it feels like the background just doesn’t work at all when you use it …

think of the wide angle lens as a close-up lens and the telephoto lens as a wide open vista lens.

If you have any questions about landscape photography, do get in touch. I do one to one lessons online and in person, workshops and tutorials on photography. My aim is to get you taking better photographs so you can confidently go out on your own and get an amazing shot that you’d be proud to hang on your wall.

Cheers

Mike

info@mikesmithphotography.com