📖 GOOD READS

The Perfect Lens for Your Landscape Composition

One of the more common questions I’ve heard recently has to do with the deciding factors that should be accounted for when determining which lens is best for a particular composition. I think as landscape photographers we all generally fall into one of the following two categories, we’re either the single composition or multi-composition type of photographer. If you’re the single composition kind you’re the type that gets on-location, identifies the composition, sets up the shot and waits for the conditions to be best ultimately walking away with a series of images of the same exact composition with the only difference being the conditions. Or, if you’re the multi-composition kind, then you’re the type that gets on-location, settles on a composition, grabs a couple of images and moves on looking for additional compositions within the scene.

I personally see pros and cons to each approach, if you’re the single composition type then you’ll more than likely be the one that comes away with the single spectacular image that has the best conditions, but it’ll only be one image. And if you’re the multi-comp kind then there’s a chance you could miss the very best conditions with your favorite composition, but you’ll more than likely come away with a series of good images that better tells the story of the particular location. And, the reason I bring this up is because I don’t think there’s always a single best answer to the question, “What’s the perfect lens for this composition” rather I think each lens in your bag has the potential to create a unique and intriguing version of the composition you’re facing.

This is something I’ve been trying to improve upon over the last year called ‘working the scene’. Where you create a set of images that better tells the story of your particular location and each lens in your bag is a tool that can be used to create the images for this story board. Something that’s helped me recently in my quest to create sets of images is when I’m on-location I think of the following four items which in turn helps me determine the lens to reach for with a particular scene.

✅ 1) Supporting Elements

When I’m surveying a scene in an effort to settle on a specific composition I ask myself what are the supporting elements of the scene or stated differently, “what do I love about this scene”? Asking myself this question enables me to inventory the situation to better understand which lens or focal length will be required in order to capture all the supporting elements I love about the scene. >> Read More​

🤓 PHOTO NERDS

• 👀 The human eye equivalent f-stop is f/8.3 in bright conditions and f/2 in darker conditions.
• 💻 The Knoll brothers created a piece of software in 1987 called ImagePro. Adobe purchased this & created what we now know to be Photoshop. Version 1 was released in 1990 and was for Macintosh only.

✨ INSPO

🌳 FINAL WORD

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