How to Choose the Right Focal Length for Landscape Photography

One of the most important decisions you have to make in landscape photography is the choice of focal length. If that is something you struggle with, this great video will give you some helpful advice on how to choose the correct focal length for any given scene.

Coming to you from Nigel Danson, this excellent video discusses how to choose the proper focal length for a given scene in landscape photography. No doubt, most of us default to using wide angle lenses for the majority of landscape work, but that being said, longer focal lengths can give you more unique shots that stand out from the crowd and can challenge your creativity by forcing you to create more abstract and unusual compositions. And of course, remember that the beautiful thing about landscape photography is that there are many ways to photograph any single scene, and instead of committing to a single one, you can always take multiple shots at different focal lengths to create different looks. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Danson.

And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out "Photographing The World 1: Landscape Photography and Post-Processing with Elia Locardi." 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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7 Comments

Nice try, spammer.

Not watching a 26 minute video. Write it out in a couple paragraphs, include photos.

Not watching a 26 minute video. Write it out in a couple paragraphs, include photos.

Not watching a 26 minute video. Write it out in a couple paragraphs, include photos.

Alex is merely the middleman, passing on the video link to watch... I don’t understand why you think he is going to do all that because you don’t want to watch a video.

And then, they took the time to tell us 3 TIMES that they're here to NOT watch a video.

I dunno. I found it informative anyway. I'll take 26 minutes to learn something.

Set the playback speed to 2x and watch a 13 minute video