Why a Telephoto Lens is a Game-Changer for Landscape Photography

So we've walked further down to this next lock down and just waiting for the light now. We've got a little while before the light gets above the hills behind you there. So it's just going to be a case of waiting around to see what happens. Hopefully we'll get some nice warm light. There isn't any atmosphere which i was kind of hoping for. I thought there might be a bit of fog, something like that, All we can really hope for is we're getting some clouds coming over now. Hopefully those will start to light up and at least give us something. So yeah just a waiting game now really. So just found a composition here now and i'm just kind of doing it frantically trying to get this camera mount on so you can see what i'm looking at. But basically if i describe it to you we have the mountain range off in the distance and it's just catching first light because the sun's rising from behind us here and the tops of the hills are just catching that kiss of first light and i've got different layers. We've got the pine trees, of course i've just moved the camera trying to get this sorted, but the pine trees in the first layer then another mountain range behind that and then the mountain range that's illuminated is beyond that. So that's the idea of the shot. If i tell you the settings at the minute that i'm on it's 1 60th of a second and i just need to adjust this but i'm going to change that altogether because i'm having to underexpose so that i don't blow out those highlights that are hitting the hills on the top there. So i'm actually at 25th of I'm just going to get this plugged in and then you'll be able to see what i'm looking at. Bear with me a minute but absolutely beautiful this morning really is. But things just you know these sort of things happen really quickly so you're just going to kind of bear with it for the minute. Right if i press record now so what you should see is i've got this four by three aspect ratio and you'll see there's different layers if i bring up the the exposure a bit i just raise my iso a bit you'll see the foreground then. So you'll see i've got two layers i've got the first layer of trees the next layer of mountain and beyond that if i just lower the exposure you'll start to see the mountain beyond which is just being illuminated. Now there's a beautiful cloud above it as well dark clouds which are just helping to add that bit of depth and a bit of drama and atmosphere to it. So yeah simple enough shot when i first saw it i thought it's quite a nice square crop but then i opened it right up to the full frame and it just looks really really nice so i'm going to go with that one. So yeah just waiting for that light to illuminate and those clouds just to move across a little bit more and then i'll grab that shot and here it is. So that was a beautiful start to the day some lovely light in here and we're just waiting for it now because there's some cloud behind you and the sun's just come up over the mountain range and now it's stuck in some cloud but i did grab a couple of shots over here with a long lens there's some of the pine trees there's two pine trees over here together and they work really really well but it was like a split second so i didn't really get a chance to walk you through any of it because it just happened so fast and sometimes that's the way especially at this time of the morning the light changes so quickly it's really quite hard to kind of walk you through it but i think this shot was actually definitely worth it because it just got that first bit of warm light and the reeds down in the lower section of the image really glowed as well so i think that would work well. Anyway here's that shot that i just grabbed. Using a telephoto lens in landscape photography here are some tips to level up your shots. First always use a tripod to avoid shake. If you're hand-holding make sure to enable image stabilization for smoother shots. Shoot during golden hour for the best lighting although this isn't totally necessary. Focus on details like textures or distant features. Experiment with compression to bring distant elements closer. Remember to use a narrow aperture for sharp focus and capture beautiful bokeh with a shallower depth of field. Keep an eye on weather conditions as telephoto lenses can exaggerate haze. Shoot in manual mode for full control over your exposure and focus. Also try long exposures for a dreamy effect and frame your shots with intention to make your compositions pop. So i've just walked along the loch shore a bit more and found this group of birch trees here and they're absolutely beautiful all gnarly and twisty and crowding over into the scene the main one is back here behind me in this it's almost like a valley it comes into like a point and it's just sitting up and leaning over towards my left here there's another tree behind me here which is this one here which is kind of leaning into the frame as well from the right hand side of the frame it works really nicely because we're getting the sun coming up from behind you over that direction now and it's just illuminating these trees giving them nice soft light but what i'm going to do is take you to the back of the camera and i'll be able to show you the frame better now i've tried it in 4x3 aspect ratio i've also tried it in my crop pano as well and i'm going to see which one works best but i'll get you back over there and you can see what i'm looking at so i'll show you this frame that i've got lined up now now what you'll see this is the 4x3 version and you'll see i've got these grasses in the front of the frame here which i quite like there's the grasses and the heather that obviously isn't blooming yet it's not the time of year but it just adds that bit of texture in the foreground and then that leads in to that group of trees and as you can see that trees are leaning in from the right frame and then on the other side i've balanced it out with some trees that are kind of almost leaning out of the frame towards the left and then the tree in the middle of the frame which is the gnarly one is also leaning left as well so i just think it works really well you'll also see if i move my focus point over here this branch which is kind of a broken branch is also leaning in like a hand coming this way which works really really well now it works as a 4x3 because it includes all those grasses but if i change that now you'll see what i'm looking at if i change it to the crop pano you'll see it kind of gets rid of those grasses and if i just raise it up a touch there we go it gets rid of the grasses and you still get that tree that's kind of the dominant one which is in the middle of the frame there i'm just not sure which but works best i'm possibly leaning towards the 4x3 but i don't know they both work to me anyway especially when you get that bit of light that just kind of illuminates everything and gives it more of a 3d feel but i'm just going to grab that shot now and i'll pop both shots up side by side and let me know which one you prefer the 4x3 or the pano crop so now that i've grabbed that shot i'm looking for other bits of shots that i can find to work with and right down on the shore line here because the locks frozen over because it's so cold i've found a few little grasses and reeds underneath the ice now the thing with it ordinarily it wouldn't look that fantastic but what it's actually got going for it are lots of little air bubbles and those air bubbles are all dispersed in amongst all the reeds so it's got a really unique look to it so i'm getting really tight in i've got the long lens on i've got the 100 to 200 on and i've got my camera positions right above pointing down onto these ice bubbles now what i am doing is using the polarizer because obviously we've got ice and the sun is over this direction and it's just giving that bit of glare on top of the ice so i'm using that polarizer just to get rid of that and eliminate it as much as possible because there's no actual reflections that i'm looking to work with it's basically i want to look through the ice into the bubbles and into the reeds and that's what makes up the shot so yeah that's what i'm going to work with here is just kind of wait for that it's not so much about the light with this shot it's more about the texture and the details although we are getting a little bit of light and it is lighting up some of the greener colors in there so it is giving a little bit of how do i put it a definition to the ones that have a bit more light on them they're a more vibrant green if that makes sense so from the other day i saw this shot when i was out in the water over there and i was trying to shoot back towards the mountains but then i noticed this other shot and it's basically if you look off in the distance there's a tree comes out to the end of a peninsula out there and that's where i'm kind of focused in on i quite like the separation that that's got because of the atmosphere behind it and the and the shadow or the shade of the mountain range behind that it separates quite nicely now also in the scene if i press record on here what you'll see i've got this set up as a strip pano so basically what i'm doing is there's an old dead tree off to the right hand side of the frame so i'm kind of balancing the two out by putting that dead tree off to the right side that other tree that's on the peninsula off to the left and it's kind of in the middle intersection but the left side of it and then you've got this kind of open space off to the left which is kind of quite light and that's adding to that separation in the background there so basically what i'm doing is i'm lining everything up just make sure i'm all level but what you can see has happened is is since i started talking to you of course the wind has picked up and that glass reflection has now disappeared um it might come back it's just going to be a case of waiting but there is a bit more breeze than the first when we first arrived here i did manage to get a couple of shots um but basically what i was doing is using that mirror reflection of that old dead tree and that other one on the peninsula there to kind of give me like a double looking image there with using that reflection the white section of the image what i was doing is making sure that i get a exposure that makes that area as bright as possible without blowing anything else out and the reason for that is i can probably do that in post as well as enhance how bright that is but the brighter that section is the more separation it's going to give that tree that's off on the peninsula there and that's the whole idea of the shot so simple enough settings for this i'm an iso 100 f 16 roughly an eighth of a second is where i was although to get it right now it will be a 13th of a second but it was around about an eighth of a second because i had slightly more light you can see the light is kind of moving across it's kind of overcast today so we are getting patches of light coming through but it's just going to be one of those days that we just have to react to the light and this is one of those shots so hopefully it's turned out and here's that shot