Tip of the Day 17th January 2013

Tip 4: The three L’s – try using your Longer Lenses for Landscapes! There is a tendency sometimes to think that good landscape photography can only be captured using wide angle lenses. Not so. I firmly believe that a longer focal length lens is great for landscape work and can produce a greater sense of being there with the photographer. This seems to work on two levels:
1. it can extract the more interesting landscape from the bigger scene, which may have distracting details and
2. it compresses perspective to get the shot in – in other words it stacks the landscape up more. Have you ever seen shots of mountain ridges where they seem to be growing out of each other even though they are quite probably miles apart? This is perspective compression – and can look very effective indeed.
Try it – next time you go out take a long lens with you and see how you can get great LLL’s!

Barn in Littondale Yorks Dales. Note how I have deiberately omitted the sky and used the lens (200mm) to pull the barn and surrounding area in closer. The sky added little or no value here – the shot was all about the barn and its immediate surroundings.