Beyond the Horizon: Redefining Landscape Photography with Telephoto Lenses

Ask any photographer what lens you should purchase for landscape photography, and the answer is almost always a wide angle. But let's challenge this conventional wisdom. Is there a strong case for using telephoto lenses in landscape photography?

Telephoto lenses, often associated with sports and wildlife photography, have a unique potential in landscape photography that is yet to be fully explored. By using telephoto lenses, you can shift the traditional perspective on landscapes, literally seeing them in a new light—pun intended. This approach challenges the traditional wide-angle scenic shots, offering a unique take on landscape photography that will inspire you to experiment and explore new horizons. 

What Is a Telephoto Lens? 

A lens with a focal length greater than 70 mm is a telephoto lens, and a lens with a focal length of 300 mm or greater is a supertelephoto. A telephoto lens allows you to bring your subject closer to you, isolating your subject from the surrounding environment and creating more intimacy. Telephoto lenses are great for wildlife and sports photography; they can also be an excellent choice for landscape photography.

Upgrade Your Composition With Compression

You may have heard of compression when using telephoto lenses. What is compression? Compression brings everything together; the background and foreground will be closer in the image than in reality. Compression as a compositional tool will create more exciting photographs by creating layers in your image. 

Minimalism

Simplicity can be king. While sometimes we like to make complex compositional images, taking a more simplistic route can relieve us of frustration and the feeling of giving up. Minimalism will simplify the scene, which can create a visually interesting photograph. It also helps the viewer focus on the subject and tell the story you are trying to capture! 

Suboptimal Weather Conditions

How often have you encountered a day with subpar weather, especially the sky? When the sky lacks texture, detail, or interest, it makes our job as landscape photographers ten times harder. With the use of a wide-angle lens, we will capture a grand scenic landscape. This will encompass the sky and all the details of the landscape. If the sky lacks interest and detail, so will our image. Using a telephoto lens will allow us to focus on parts of the landscape other than the entirety of the landscape, including the sky!

Make Sense of the Chaos

We often look at a complicated and chaotic scene in our viewfinder. We know an image must be made, but we usually need help finding it. Pulling out your telephoto from the bag helps to make this scene orderly. It will allow us to start looking at the scene with a more focused approach, as a telephoto lens gives us a more narrow angle of view. This will allow our brains to make sense of the complicated scene, allowing us to focus.

Focus on the Light

Our number one goal is always finding the best light! A telephoto lens can help us focus on the scene and its best light. We may see a beam of light highlighting our subject or even a backlit subject. Doing this lets us draw the viewer's eye to the subject.

Photograph the Details

We may think of a macro lens for detail shots in landscape photography. The telephoto can be your best friend for these shots as well. Sometimes, we need to shoot a detail shot, but the macro lens has too short a focal length and, for some reason, can’t get closer to our subject. The telephoto will allow us to achieve the image we are looking for!

Crafting Unique and Distinctive Photographs

In a world where billions of photographs are shared daily, it may feel like you are lost in a sea of photographs. You may be visiting an epic location that has more than likely been photographed before. More than likely, it was shot with a wide-angle lens, but has it been shot with a telephoto? Using a telephoto is going to have many advantages, and it allows you to create more dramatic and unique photographs that more than likely have not been made before, allowing for more unique and distinctive photographs. 

Final Thoughts 

Ultimately, we will always think of a wide-angle lens for landscape photography. Telephotos will allow us to create more distinct and unique photographs and open a whole new world for you as a photographer. Remember to pull out your telephoto lens the next time you embark on a landscape adventure!