Go Long - tyneholm
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Go Long

Assignment L23

Due to their stretched perspective, wide angle lenses are the obvious choice for photographing landscapes. But it is not healthy for your photography to grow over-reliant on any one lens. Therefore, for this assignment, you must only use a focal length of 200mm or longer. 

By the end of this assignment, you will better understand how focal length influences the way you capture the landscape. Telephoto lengths appear to foreshorten perspective and help place emphasis on distant objects and interest, such as rolling hills, mountain peaks, or far-away buildings. A longer lens will allow you to exclude unnecessary elements from the frame and simplify chaotic-looking landscapes. Compression will create a “stacked” or “layering” effect-where objects in the landscape appear pushed up closer to one another. 

Using a telephoto lens will increase your versatility and creative options. And once you’ve completed this long lens assignment, you will consider one an integral part of your landscape kit! 

View the images

Technique

  • Telephoto lenses have a reputation for being heavy and expensive. However, only fast optics (with a large maximum aperture of f/2.8 or f/4) are really costly. A standard telephoto zoom lens in the range 70-300mm is usually an affordable and a useful lens to add to your system. 

Special Kit

  • A telephoto zoom lens 

Field Notes

  • Perspective is simply an effect of camera-to-subject distance: the further you are from your subject, the smaller the gap appears between it and its background. Therefore, long lenses do not actually compress perspective, they just create this impression. 
  • Due to their larger size, longer lenses are more prone to being caught by the wind. Check image sharpness regularly and select a faster shutter speed if needed.