What Lenses Do?


One of the greatest strengths of the SLR camera is that it allows the user to change lenses with a minimum of difficulty, instead of being limited to one view of the world.

In a full frame camera, it is accepted that any lens with a focal length shorter than 35mm is considered wide-angle.

Telephotos are the opposite of wide-angle lenses; they have long focal lengths and give a narrow angle of view. This narrow angle means that they enlarge a small part of the scene, and so are good for closing in on a subject without having to move nearer.

Photographers often ignore the normal or standard lenses. Why?

Let us start our brief study of what the three main lenses do to a landscape.

Wide-angle lenses

The outstanding feature of these lenses is that they cover more of a scene than usual, but they also have other subtle merits. By compressing a wide angle of view onto a sensor frame, they create a strong perspective that can give photographs a distinctive flavour. Wide-angle lens decompresses the landscape, making distant objects seem even further away than they appear to our eyes. At the same time they accentuate near objects, drawing the viewer into the picture. So, the total effect is an emphasis on the space between foreground and background in any composition.

The most obvious use for a wide-angle lens is to cover a scene that you cannot manage by moving further away with a standard lens: the sweep of a broad landscape from an overlook, or top of a mountain.

However, the graphic effects of a wide-angle lens are usually more interesting. Lines and shapes are stretched towards the edges - giving an exaggerated perspective.
Diagonals become a strong part of wide-angle views, often converging towards the distance. You can use these to put energy into a photograph, but beware of distortion. Use the viewfinder to experiment with the composition, keeping it to your eye as you move around - a small change in the camera position will make a big difference to the image.

A wide-angle lens can effectively change the relationship between foreground and background elements and expand the scene to encompass more within your view. You can create strong, relationships between the nearer and far parts of a scene.

There are other more specialized wide-angle lenses, (ultrawide) that I will not cover because they are not normally used in landscape photography.


Telephoto lenses

Telephotos give a compressed perspective, which can make interesting compositions in which the different parts of a scene are stacked. It also makes distant objects - like the moon or a setting sun - seem much larger. By being able to pick out parts of a view, telephotos are good for isolating and emphasising a single subject. Their depth of field is very shallow, which you can use to good effect by making subjects stand out against soft backgrounds.

A medium telephoto, around 150mm focal length, will gentle compress the landscape. A long telephoto, let us say, 200mm upwards, will pick out distant details but will greatly flatten the scene.


Normal Lenses

Normal or standard lens range between 35mm to 80mm - these are some of the most underrated of all lenses. But that should not be so. The only limitation of any lens of any focal length is the photographer. The camera is only a tool.

The standard lens is equal to the field of view of humans, this means that when looking through one of these lenses you will see as much of the scene in front of you as with your naked eye.
So, it could be that the reason the standard focal length is often omitted is because photographers are looking for something other than what they see.

Because these lenses capture the same scene as our eyes, they give a natural appearance to the elements of the scene in relation to each other.

As we have seen lenses make all the difference - in fact, they are the most important component in a camera.

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