Mastering your wide-angle lens for landscape photography

 

 

People often associate wide-angle lenses with landscape photography and with good reason. If you want to capture a sweeping vista, it's tough to beat a wide-angle lens. However, that doesn't mean that capturing good landscape shots is as simple as attaching a wide lens to your camera. There are a lot of special considerations you must make when using a wide lens.

To help you master wide-angle lens photography, Nigel Danson has published a new video with many tips and techniques for improving your wide-angle landscape photography. In the video below, Danson uses a Nikon D810 and Nikon 16-35mm f/4 lens, which he shoots exclusively at 16mm for the purposes of the video.

So how do you get the most out of your wide-angle lens? Danson suggests that you start without your tripod. Go around, explore, try different compositions and then when you find one you like, get your tripod out. Wide-angle lenses can be very tricky to use because a lot of the time, you end up with way too much sky or just a lot of clutter in the scene. Finding the right subject is hard enough, but finding the perfect angle can take a lot of experimentation and a tripod can get in the way as you search for your shot.

An important thing to consider about wide-angle lenses is that they show a much wider field of view than the human eye. That might seem obvious, but it's important to keep this in mind because ultimately you want to convey a visually pleasing image to your viewer rather than show them something heavily-distorted and odd-looking. If you can take advantage of the wide field of view of a wide angle lens without introducing a lot of distortion and odd perspective, that's ideal.

(Via Nigel Danson)