Telephoto Landscapes

When we think of landscape photography, most of us think of the grand vistas of the American West. Often taken with wide angle lenses, these images draw us into the scene by including a strong foreground element (e.g., a rock or a cactus), a middleground with some leading lines (perhaps a winding stream or a carefully chosen wildflower pattern), and a background of mountains, usually with an interesting sky and nice early morning or late afternoon light. Take a look at virtually any cover of the magazine Outdoor Photographer, and you’ll see what I’m describing (and while these cover images are always nice I sure do wish they would show a bit of variety in their covers from time to time ).

But there are some other types of landscape images that give us a glimpse into a particular place or ecosystem — telephoto landscapes. The use of telephoto lenses does four things for us in our landscape images. First, they allow us to isolate a section of a scene so that we can portray to the viewer what we found most interesting. At the same time, we eliminate unwanted elements (maybe a gray, uninteresting sky, an electric wire or telephone pole) that would be hard to avoid with wide angle lenses. Second, telephoto lenses compress the scene, shortening the apparent distance from foreground to background. This allows us, for instance to suggest that mountain ridges are tightly packed together when the actual distance between each ridge may be quite great. Third, telephoto lenses make great use of atmospheric conditions such as fog and mist. Because of the distance from the photographer to the subject (usually quite great) humidity in the atmosphere is amplified in the scene. And fourth, telephoto lenses by their very nature of having a narrow angle of view bring distant objects to a larger magnification. So objects that are very far away, such as a tree on a distant hill or the setting sun, can now take a prominent position in our compositions. You can also isolate a very small portion of a scene, say flowing water, for a great landscape abstract.

Since telephoto lenses show us only a portion of the scene that our eyes can take in, we are free to choose the compositional elements that most interest us. So as in any other type of landscape photography we need to pay close attention to considerations such as leading lines, diagonals, and the power points at the thirds of the frame. Light and clouds can be of great help in telephoto landscapes as they obscure or illuminate certain parts of a scene when viewed through a telephoto lens. When shooting a telephoto landscape, I always prefer either broken clouds with some sun shining through or the misty conditions typical of Costa Rican cloud forests. The former means that shafts of sunlight may break through at any time, leaving some parts of a scene in shadow and others in bright light. And the latter condition is a joy to work with as the clouds and mists swirl through mountain passes, continuously revealing and hiding parts of a scene. If you come upon a promising scene under these types of conditions you may need to work quickly before the moment passes but most likely you will want to stay for a while, watching the changing scene and picking your moments to photograph.

All manner of telephoto lenses are useful for this type of landscape photography. I have successfully employed prime lenses such as the Canon 300 mm f2.8 as well as zooms such as the Canon 70-200 f4, Tokina 80-200 mm f2.8, and the Canon 75-300 mm IS. I have even put my 100 mm macro lens to use for telephoto landscapes on occasion. Zooms have a great advantage in allowing you flexibility in composition, but prime lenses may offer the advantage of being faster in terms of having a larger maximum aperture which means faster shutter speeds if you are caught without a tripod. But, you might ask, why would I want to take a landscape image wide open? Good question, and though you may not want to shoot a telephoto landscape at f2.8, you don’t need as much depth-of-field as you might think because your subject is very far awa. As a result, the relative distance between your foreground and background elements is not great. Indeed, you’ll find that f-stops between f4 and f11 can give great results for telephoto landscapes and that concepts such as hyperfocal distance (where you set the focus at a certain distance that gives you the maximum possible depth-of-field for a given focal length) are not that important. If you have your tripod handy, I certainly recommend using it as this will allow you to stop down a bit more and to use mirror lockup and cable release to ensure ultimate sharpness.

So, the next time you are out for landscape photography, don’t forget your big lenses. And if you are a bird photographer, remember that your multi-thousand dollar lens can also take landscapes!

Please visit this telephoto landscapes gallery to see some examples of the concepts discussed in this article. All images have the EXIF data so that you can see the shooting settings.

Text and images by Greg Basco. Submit a comment or contact me with any questions.