Landscape photography with a telephoto lens

Tuesday 17 January 2023, 22:44 by Erik Nevels | 4,514 views | 1 comment

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Have you ever had that? You walk through nature, looking around for a photogenic landscape, but you can't find one.

The combination of foreground, background and sky doesn't appeal to you. In that case, it may still be worth stopping, zooming in and swapping your wide-angle lens for your telephoto lens.

Look out for contrasts

It was only a month ago that I went out in the Leudal, one of my local patches in Central Limburg. Even though it was December, the trees still had quite a lot of leaves.

The landscape to my left showed a meadow in the foreground, a woodland edge in the background and a fairly uniform grey sky. I decided the whole thing wasn't interesting enough for a photo, but details in the woodland edge caught my eye.

This was mainly down to contrasts in textures and colours. Another 100 metres on and I was standing directly opposite the detail I wanted to photograph. I took the rucksack off my shoulders and set up my tripod.

Sky and foreground out of shot

I was interested in a yellow tree among the brown oaks. By leaving out the boring sky and foreground, the emphasis was placed on the colour contrast.

I swapped my wide-angle lens for the 70-300mm and zoomed in quite a way. The expansive landscape suddenly became intimate.

The yellow colours stood out beautifully against the brown tones, while the dark trunks formed the third contrasting colour. At 208mm, I had the right composition. No sky, no meadow, just woodland edge.

208mm, ISO 100, f9, 1/4s

Even more millimetres

The great thing about a zoom lens is that you can quickly adjust your framing on the spot. So I decided to zoom in even further on the yellow and brown leaves of the trees. Half yellow and half brown was the image I had in mind.

At 300mm, I couldn't get close enough, and stepping into the meadow over the barbed wire wasn't an option either. Luckily, I also had the long lens with me today, as I call it, with a maximum zoom range of 600mm.

I found that I needed that one too for the image I wanted. By turning the brightness down a little in post-processing, the level of abstraction was increased further.

600mm, ISO 160, f11, 1/8s

In contrast with the background

Two weeks later, many of the trees had dropped their leaves, but not all of them. This time, I was walking near the river Swalm, also in Central Limburg.

My photography partner and I had just decided to call it a day when I spotted some more lovely contrasts in the distance, with trees that still had leaves standing out against a background of trees without leaves.

I was also far enough away, and the trees were 'small' enough, for them to blend completely into the dark background of the woodland behind them. The rucksack I had just packed went back on the ground and the tripod was set firmly on its legs.

I could nicely keep the uninteresting sky out of shot with the 200-600mm telephoto lens. Unfortunately, I couldn't do the same with the meadow posts and barbed wire in the foreground, so I accepted them as part of the image.

594mm, ISO 400, f6.3, 1/250s

Same viewpoint, but a little further to the right

I had already seen them. The two oaks, which were also still full of autumn leaves, stood out strongly against the dark background.

These trees were closer, and I decided not to include them fully in the frame. As well as leaving out the sky, I also left out the meadow, with its fence, at the bottom. I even needed the full 600mm for the composition I wanted.

The great thing about this is that the background becomes even less noticeable, partly because of the limited depth of field and partly because of the small angle of view.

At home, I was still undecided between a landscape-format image with both trees partly in the frame and a square crop showing only the tree on the right. After discussing it with my photography partner, I chose the duo, titled 'strong together'.

600mm, ISO 160, f6.3, 1/80s

'Moral' of the story

A wide landscape view is far from always being photogenic. Distracting and/or boring elements may quickly make you decide to keep walking. By zooming in on details in the landscape, you can still create attractive images.

A telephoto lens is the answer here. You can bring your subject closer without walking. The limited depth of field and angle of view remove too many details from the background.

In short, the 'moral' of this story is: don't just view the landscape with your wide-angle lens, but also with your telephoto lens.

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