Landscape Photography at 200mm? | 5 Top Telephoto Tips

Telephoto lenses. You probably associate them with wildlife photography, sports photography, or spying on your neighbours. If there's one genre of photography that you don't necessarily associate them with, it's landscape. But I think there could be a match made in heaven, so today I might look like an idiot with this 200mm monstrosity strapped to the front of my camera whilst going out for a pleasant walk in the Yorkshire Dales. But in this video I want to share with you five tips to help you to realise the magic of, and master, telephoto landscape photography. Ah, what a beautiful rainbow. That pheasant really isn't in the right position. The first thing that we need to do is learn to look further ahead. When we're doing traditional landscape photography, we're often looking for that wide open vista. But when it comes to telephoto landscape photography, ideally we need to compartmentalise what we see into smaller chunks. We can look for specific subjects on the horizon line, like trees or barns that stand out and say look at me. We can look to the way that the landscape forms certain shapes, like the zigzag of a river meandering through the frame, or the undulations of a hillscape. We can also look to the way that the light hits the landscape, the way it catches the trees or a mountainside. I'm sorry, I've just realised that this might look a little bit dodgy. It also pays to realise that when it comes to telephoto landscape photography, we don't have to get absolutely everything in. In fact, it's pretty impossible to do so. So what we can do is create cross-sections of the landscape, picking out little areas that are of interest, that don't necessarily have to show off the whole scene to make you realise what you're looking at. My second tip is all about layering. When it comes to landscape photography, layering is already vital, because we need to present foreground, mid-ground and background interest, not only to create interest, but to create depth in our frame. When we take a telephoto photograph, we're automatically magnifying what we see in front of us, and that magnifies the flatness of the scene, squashing perspective. So we really need to think even more about how we're presenting our viewer with layers of interest and depth. In a standard landscape photograph, you might use a rock like this in the foreground. But of course, if we did that with a telephoto shot, then it'd start looking all on top of you and very flat very quickly. So ideally, what we need to do is, as of the first tip, look further ahead to find layers in the distance. So this could be a line of trees across the middle of the shot. It could be lines taking you in on diagonals, creating that depth and also leading the eye. Or it could be a subject framed by another element of the landscape, like this photograph that I took earlier of the barn on the hill, surrounded by the trees. Here, the trees formulate the foreground and the background at the same time as drawing your eye to the subject by isolating it in the field at the centre of the picture. It also pays to have a look at how light and shade interact with the distant landscape. In this photograph of a cross-section of a wood, you can see that the light and shade create three very distinct layers. Although it's apparently quite flat in reality, these light layers create depth within the picture and lead your eye through it as they jump from one to the next. My third tip is to keep things fast. Although it's often tempting to use a tripod with telephoto lenses, as I've been walking around today, I've found it much easier to go freehand so I can frame my compositions up at a distance. But by doing that, what you need to do is keep your settings on your camera fast. So using a slightly wider aperture, which can also help with that depth, creating a bit more of a shallow depth of field at distances, you can also speed your shutter speed up. So I've been working around f5.6 and a shutter speed of either 250th of a second or faster, which is giving me that frozen shot even though I'm handheld and zoomed right in. If you're out shooting on a day when it's duller than it is today, which is quite frankly every other day here in Yorkshire, then you may have to increase your ISO to achieve those faster shutter speeds. And as I say that, the sun goes in and it starts looking like rain. Perfect. I found the shelter of the trees now because the heavens have opened and it started sleeting. I thought it was meant to be spring. Anyway, tip number four is to be more abstract. I often find that with telephoto lenses, your eye is drawn more to the shapes and patterns within a landscape rather than those big wide vistas that we were referring to earlier on. So emphasising those shapes and patterns can go a long way to creating different perspectives through your landscape photographs. I often find that with traditional landscape photography, creativity can sometimes go out of the window as we're always trying to tick the boxes of perfect light and composition. But with telephoto landscape photography, being a little bit more abstract by picking out the patterns in a distant woodland or looking out for textures on a hillside or the way that the light hits the landscape in different ways can lead us to produce those different perspectives that with a wide-angle lens we just simply wouldn't be able to do. Thankfully, for tip number five, the sun's come back out again which is rather pleasant, it is to embrace negative space. When we're dealing with telephoto photography, it can often be tempting to fill the frame. After all, we're zooming into things, magnifying them and making them more prominent. But in landscape photography, it pays to leave a little bit of space for the eye to breathe a little bit. So whether you're down low, looking up and isolating things against a brooding sky, or if you've got elevation like I have here, looking down and isolating trees in fields or the church in the village in the valley below, utilising that negative space around it will not only give your subject room to breathe, it'll also help it to stand out much more in your composition as well so your eye is not having to dart here, there and everywhere to find something that might not even be there. So yes, I might look a little bit strange wielding this massive beast on the front of what is quite a small camera, but I feel that by looking further into the distance rather than searching for that wide-angle vista, by layering up my compositions constructively, by keeping things fast so I can compose on the fly, by thinking more abstract, looking for patterns and shapes within the landscape and utilising that negative space to isolate subjects that stand out, I feel like I'm going home from my walk today with some really interesting and unique photographs that if I'd have had my 35mm lens on my camera, which is what I go with most of the time, I just wouldn't have been able to get. So next time you head out to do some landscape photography, then don't forget to pack your trusty telephoto lens and look to the distance to find some unique inspiration. I hope you've enjoyed this video, if you have then please give it a like and consider subscribing to the channel if you haven't already done so. I think there's another shower going to pass through any minute so I'm going to make a hasty retreat back down the hill. But until the next video, thank you very much for watching, I'll see you again soon. Bye for now.