When you hear the phrase “nature photography,” what comes to mind? I’d bet money you picture a big, sweeping landscape. Mountains, clouds, trees, maybe a lake? Perhaps even someone’s girlfriend reaching behind and pulling them along by the hand? These kinds of images are usually taken with a wide angle lens.
They’re also very original.
On 35mm film or a full-frame sensor, a wide angle lens is generally considered anything less than about 35mm of focal length, while telephoto usually refers to lenses upwards of 100mm in focal length. The lenses in between those focal lengths are sometimes called “normal.” Mathematically, 43.27mm is “normal” for 35mm film or a full-frame sensor, but generally 50mm lenses are the standard “normal” focal length. Lenses longer than 50mm but shorter than 100mm are often called “short telephoto.” Confused enough? Good, let’s move on.
I used to think telephoto lenses belonged firmly in the realm of portraits, wildlife, and sports photography, without a whole lot of application for nature photography. But in recent years, I’ve found myself getting out my wide angle lenses less and less frequently.
I still take a lot of pictures of trees. These trees were photographed at 210mm.
So which kind of lens is better for nature photos? Obviously that’s a pretty subjective question, since the answer is basically “it depends.” Here are a few things you should know about each kind of lens, in order to help you decide which one to use in a given situation:
Telephoto lenses make it easier to get a shallow depth-of-field, wide angle lenses make it harder. If you want your entire landscape to be sharp, you’ll have a much easier time of it with a wider lens. If you’re purposely going for some out-of-focus elements, a telephoto lens might be a better choice.
Wide angle lenses often suffer from something called “barrel distortion” which stretches things out closer to the edges of the frame. This is why I try to avoid going any wider than 50mm for group portraits, since the people out at the edge of the group might end up looking 20 pounds heavier. Telephoto lenses have the opposite problem, called “pincushion distortion,” where the edges of the frame seem to pinch inwards. Both types of distortion are pretty easy to correct in Lightroom or Photoshop when it’s actually necessary. In nature photography, it’s often not really noticeable anyway.
Telephoto lenses help the background seem larger compared to the foreground, while wide angle lenses give the foreground the emphasis while making the background much smaller by comparison. Take a look at this series of example photos. It’s the same scene, and as I zoomed in more and more, I stepped back more and more to keep the main foreground element the same size.
Signed prints of this breathtaking parking lot scene have been submitted to the Library of Congress for permanent archiving.
That makes a nice segue into the most important part of this whole post: There’s a big difference between zooming in and walking closer to something. When you zoom in (or increase focal length), you magnify every single part of the image equally. If you zoom in until the rock in the foreground is twice as big, the mountains in the background will also be twice as big. If you walk closer to the rock until it’s twice as big without changing your focal length, the mountains in the background will barely get any bigger at all. So by physically moving closer to or further from the scene you’re photographing, you can change the relationship of how big the foreground is compared to the background. This is a powerful compositional tool.
Keep in mind that this relationship between foreground and background elements is dictated not by your lens, but your physical distance to the foreground and background. It’s just that if you’re really close to a large foreground element, you tend to need a wide angle lens to fit it in the frame, which means you’re zoomed way out of the background, and it looks smaller by comparison. Ansel Adams used to recommend carrying a card of mat board with a rectangle cut out to the size and shape of your negative, and using that to compose before you decided on a lens. While that’s probably a little extreme, I do think it’s a great practice to take some observations about the relationship of foreground vs background elements before you choose a lens. If you know you want the log in the foreground to take up more space and demand more attention than the trees in the background, that’s going to be easier to achieve with a wide-angle lens than a telephoto. If the mountains in the background are important to your composition and you want to emphasize them, a telephoto lens will help you achieve that—just plan on taking several steps back from your foreground so it fits into the frame at the same time.
Next time you’re out shooting, take an extra second to think through whether a telephoto or a wide angle lens will help you tell your story more effectively. You might find, like me, that you’re not reaching for the 24mm lens every single time anymore.