Wide, Medium, Close: A Filmmaker's Trick for Landscape Photography

You get to a beach at sunrise, the light finally shows up, and nearly every frame you take is the widest view your lens allows. That habit leaves most of a location unphotographed, and it pins the whole morning on one composition and one patch of sky.

Filmmakers cover a scene with a wide shot, a medium shot, and a close-up, and Jason Friend borrows that same sequence for a sunrise shoot at Old Hartley Bay on the Northumberland coast, just north of St. Mary's Lighthouse. He starts with the establishing shot on a Nikon Z7 and a Nikon NIKKOR Z 14-30mm f/4 S, walking the rocks handheld until he finds a curve of stone that the 14mm end stretches into something more dramatic, with a band of cloud overhead echoing the shape. The lighthouse sits tiny in the distance on purpose. This frame exists to say where you are and what time of day it is, and the lighthouse gets its turn later. Then the clouds move faster than he'd like, and when he tilts the camera forward to keep an empty gap out of the top of the frame, the foreground grows even larger and the lighthouse starts to lean. Watching him juggle those small compromises against a rising sun shows more about how an ultra-wide lens behaves than any finished image could.

For the middle frame, he switches to a Nikon NIKKOR Z 24-120mm f/4 S and treats anything from roughly 35mm to 70mm as "normal." Now the lighthouse is the subject. The sun isn't where he wants it, and the slick green rocks limit how far around the bay he can get for a better angle, so he settles for side light from where he can stand. Then it rains, which wasn't in the forecast. He adds an ND filter, pushes the exposure beyond 1 second at f/14, and leans into a mood he never planned for. His view on realism is refreshingly plain: he wouldn't take that kind of liberty with wildlife, but a landscape is his interpretation, so smoothing the water with a long exposure is fair game. The Z7's weather-sealing gets a genuine workout in the process.

Thinking in sets of images fits how photos get seen now. Instagram raised its carousel limit from 10 images to 20 in 2024, and a sequence that moves from a wide view to a subject to a texture gives someone a reason to keep swiping, where three versions of the same vista don't. Travel magazines and photo essays have worked this way for decades, since a layout needs an opener, a supporting frame, and a detail to break up the page. The approach also spreads your risk on mornings when conditions are uncertain. If the sky goes flat, a close-up of wet stone barely notices. You can practice it with a single zoom by setting a rule before you leave the car: one frame at the wide end, one near 50mm, one at the long end, and you don't pack up until you have all three. A constraint like that keeps you looking at a place longer than you otherwise would, and the third frame is often the one that surprises you.

The close-up turns out to be the hardest of the three to find. A big open view makes its subject obvious, while a detail has to be hunted down among pebbles, puddles, and weed-covered slabs, and Friend spends a while searching before he commits. Along the way, he takes a hard fall on the rocks and ends up coated in mud down one side, with the camera safely packed in his bag at the time. He eventually settles on a portrait-orientation frame of pebbles and a sculpted green rock, then adds a polarizer to cut the reflected sky off the wet surfaces, and the colors deepen right away. Working that close shrinks depth of field even at f/14, so he focus brackets by hand for a later blend in Photoshop, framing a little wider than he needs to allow for focus breathing. By the end of the morning, he has worked his way from 14mm up to roughly 90mm, covering the same ground a film crew would with a wide prime, a 50mm, and something near 85mm.

Friend's full sequence, from the first curving ultra-wide frame to the finished focus stack, plays out in the video above.