Why you Need a Telephoto Zoom Lens for Landscape Photography Read more: http://www.digital-photography-school.com/why-you-need-a-telephoto-zoom-lens-

Why you Need a Telephoto Zoom Lens for Landscape Photography

A wide angle lens is not the only lens to pack into your camera bag - sometimes a telephoto lens is best.

by Guest Contrib

In this post naturalist, photographer, and computer scientist Steve Berardi from PhotoNaturalist explains why you need a telephoto zoom lens for landscape photography.

When you think about landscape photography, you might immediately think of the wide angle zoom lens, which is great for capturing those expansive landscapes and “taking it all in.”

But, a telephoto zoom lens can also be helpful when photographing landscapes. To understand why, it’s important to know what determines perspective and how perspective can help convey a particular feeling in a photograph.

What determines perspective?

As Ansel Adams repeats so often in his wonderful book, The Camera: “perspective is a function of camera-to-subject distance.”

There’s a common misconception that perspective is determined by focal length, but in reality, the only thing that determines perspective is where you put the camera.

There are at least two rules of perspective that you should be familiar with:

1. the closer you get to a subject, the larger it will appear on the image frame (yeah, this one’s obvious)
2. as you move closer to your scene, the closest objects will increase in size faster than the distant objects (not so obvious)

The second rule is the one we often forget, and it’s best illustrated with an example, so take a look at this photo I took in the Eastern Sierra of California:

In this photo, I was standing about 100 ft (30 m) from those boulders in the foreground. As a result, the dominant object in this shot is the mountain in the background, which stood miles away from the boulders.

Now, look what happens when I move just 50 ft (15 m) closer to those boulders:

All of a sudden, the mountains in the background don’t look so mighty, and now those boulders in the foreground are the dominant objects. This photo has a drastically different feeling than the previous one. The perspective you choose for a landscape will depend on the feeling you’re trying to convey.

Personally, in this case I prefer the first photo, because as I stood there in front of the scene, I felt like the mountain was in charge: it had an overpowering effect on me. So, I decided to give it an overpowering effect in the final image.