Photographing a forest with a telephoto lens

Saturday 26 March 2022, 16:32 by Nando Harmsen | 4,156 views | 0 comments

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

Landscape photography is less straightforward than it may seem at first. That applies to wide landscapes, but certainly to forests too.

A wide landscape often looks empty, while a forest is often chaotic and busy. There is a solution for both. For a forest, that includes using a telephoto lens.

Photographing a forest quickly results in a busy landscape. Too many trees, too much going on with all the branches, or the forest in the photo looks nothing like it did in reality. There is a good chance you are using too much wide angle.

This wide-angle photo produces a very open forest. On top of that, there is nothing to draw the eye. You get a little lost in a photo like this.
The solution to the chaos in a forest is using a telephoto lens. This lens allows you to keep much of the scene outside the frame because of its narrow angle of view. You therefore focus on a small part of the forest.

Wide angle does not make it easy to look through a forest. Or rather, it makes it too easy, because the trees are further apart than is desirable in many cases.
A wide-angle lens pulls distances apart. At least, that is how it appears. As a result, a dense forest suddenly looks open. It also immediately reveals the chaos mentioned earlier. Using a telephoto lens is exactly what allows you to bring more calm and order to the scene.

Using more telephoto makes this forest look much denser. Yet the photo is still missing something: a subject.
A telephoto lens alone is not the solution. In the two examples above, the second photo is still busy and chaotic. The forest is denser and more impenetrable, but because there is no clear focal point, it remains difficult to see through it.

The solution is a subject. Choose something in the frame that draws attention. This could be a contrasting colour, an unusual object, or light shining through the forest.

By introducing a striking subject, you give the viewer something to look at. The photo becomes more accessible, so to speak.
By introducing green leaves into the frame in the photo above, I gave the photo a point of calm. The forest is still dense, chaotic and impenetrable, but it is more pleasant because there is something for your eye to go to. A subject.

This is just an example. It does not mean that wide angle is not possible in a forest. It can work very well. But using it well is difficult and requires good composition and filling the frame. The photo quickly contains too much.

So use a little more telephoto to show the forest in all its beauty. Look for a focal point. Sunlight, an unusual colour, or a special shape that differs from the rest. You will see that photographing landscapes in a forest even becomes an enjoyable challenge.

Do you ever photograph in a forest? What do you find most difficult about this type of landscape, and have you found a solution? Share your experiences in a comment below this post.

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