A Common Mistake Landscape Photographers Make With Wide Angle Lenses

Landscape photography is a challenging genre, and the tool of choice is often a wide angle lens. Wide angle lenses can be particularly tricky to work with, however. This excellent video tutorial will show you a common mistake landscape photographers make with wide angle lenses and how to correct it and improve your images. 

Coming to you from Mike Smith, this awesome video tutorial will show you a common mistake landscape photographers make with wide angle lenses and how to correct it. It is a common experience to find a beautiful location and to instinctively reach for a wide angle lens in an attempt to capture the entire scene in one frame, only to be disappointed by the result. The often happens because of a lack of a foreground element. A wide angle lens tend to push the background away, and thus, without a foreground element, the frame tends to feel very empty and overly two-dimensional. If you change how you approach using such a lens from defaulting to it to shove a lot of the scene into a frame and instead using it to create layered compositions, you will likely see a lot of improvement in your results. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Smith.

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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2 Comments

Great images! I would have been down close to the water and let the water flow lead the viewer into the image, both downstream as well as upstream. If you were with me on the location you would find me flat on the ground. A good chance to stack images as long as the grass isn't moving. I would have loved a chance to shoot at your locations.

Thanks very much Chris!
It is all about getting closer to the ground isn't it. I didn't want to go into too much detail this time about focus stacking to keep it simple, so I stayed up high ... also lying in wet muddy grass doesn't work well when trying to talk to camera!! :-)
Thanks for watching.