Using A Telephoto Lens In Landscape Photography

You know a common misconception when it comes to landscape photography is thinking that you need to be out on a big epic grand location and don't get me wrong that definitely is beneficial especially if you like capturing the grand landscape like I do. However, a part of my portfolio has always been dedicated to the smaller more intimate scenes and that's what we're going to be talking about in this video. How can you have fun as a landscape photographer when you don't live somewhere epic? My favorite element to photograph and that's been pretty much a constant throughout most of my photography it's water. Now when it comes to photographing more intimate scenes water is so fun because it has unlimited possibilities and what we're going to be looking at today is creating images like this where we're just really concentrating on flow, on texture and on light. What lens do you want to use for this type of photography? Definitely a telephoto lens. I've got the 100-400mm on today. You might have a 70-200mm. A 24-105mm can do the job as well. But definitely the more reach there is the easier it's going to be to access those little interesting areas of the water. For the lighting I've picked a day where we have some intermittent cloud and this way I'm going to be able to shoot with soft diffuse light. It's definitely quite interesting when you can have light reflecting off the trees and bouncing color around or just getting those different highlights on the water. Definitely try this in the golden hour too especially if you're on the beach or by a lake. What you want to be looking for when you approach the body of water is any interesting areas where there's patterns, textures, movement. Specifically when it comes to rivers I'm looking for the white cascades and areas where the cascades are creating a sense of flow and direction. That way the image won't be so static. You can see here for example these rocks are very nice but it's going to be more interesting if we can pick up some of the swirling water. I'm looking down this way at the moment and I think we might find something down here. I'm going to get the rocks in the frame also so I'm going to say about 1 over 20, currently f16 and iso 100 and I just love the way that the water is cascading over these rocks and there's a good contrast of getting the solid rock with the soft water. There's a color contrast of cool and warm and there's a textural contrast of the the soft and the firm there. Just play and have fun. So shoot lots of frames and experiment with the shutter speed. That's one of the big tips. You need to experiment with different shutter speeds. Your focal length, your proximity to the water, the speed of the water, all of them will determine what the texture looks like in conjunction with that shutter speed. So just give it a good mix of speeds. I'm shooting anywhere from 1 over 20, 1.10 right down to even 1 second. I do like to be slightly faster though in order to retain some kind of texture. When you get down low you'll probably get shallow depth of field and a blurred foreground because you're using the compression of the tele. So I prefer to be up and shoot down just so I can get everything in focus. So even though it's an image of soft water texture, I still don't like having much out of focus personally. I still want to actually have it in focus. Sometimes with this slow shutter work you'll get a frame you really love straight away. Other times I might shoot 200 frames and not like a single one. Think of it almost as a little bit of meditation. So where I'm shooting is right here and it doesn't look like much but through the lens it's just spectacular. This is what you've got to look for. What is the water doing? Where are the little shapes? Now you can hear me shooting off lots of frames and that's because every single frame is just totally different because the water is changing so quickly. So I've been experimenting with different shutter speeds, different focal lengths, shooting three, four, five frames, quick look, adjust the shutter speed, shoot a few more, quick look again. Now we're going in on a bit of a chaotic zone to pick up the layering, the repetition, the splashes and this can be really fun as well and just like before definitely want to go in and experiment with those different shutter speeds. It's a whole different ball game now when you're going right in on the cascades. I'm looking for balance in some of these comps where I'm getting either a clearly defined breaking point which I'm trying to get in the centralized part of the frame so the eye, you know, we've got something to really fix on and I'm actually avoiding the rocks in the background now so I don't get anything static. Definitely getting a few here that I'm liking the look of Gatorade water. So what about the post-processing now mate? These are so fun and so easy to process because you're working with such a simple colour palette and relatively simple range of light. I find most of the time all I'm doing is maybe brightening the exposure, slightly adjusting my colour temperature, maybe I'm cooling things down, maybe I'm warming it up slightly. The colour grading is really powerful here as well, particularly if you are shooting in the golden hour. But my key tip when it comes to processing these, because we're shooting on the long lens, you don't often have an indication of where light's coming into the frame and that's one thing I like to do, have that indication of where light is. It just helps pull the eye to a particular point in the image. So what I might do is often darken the whole image down and then just drop in light selectively. It's just basically dodging and burning, that's all we're doing here. One thing I'm avoiding now is just having, mainly I'm avoiding having too much of just a flat mid-tone, I do like to have some whites in there and small highlights just so the image doesn't look so flat. So you can either lean into more of a heavy contrast with these or do the opposite and go for a really low contrast scene. I'm probably a sucker for somewhere in between but every scenario is different. Like I said, can't really go wrong, these are really fun to process. It's just so peaceful being out here. Photography shouldn't be about going to get the shot, photography should be about having that experience with your subject matter and then that experience potentially being translated through an image. You can just sit here all day and enjoy it, bring a picnic down, make yourself a coffee. It's very subjective. I've got to say these images work really good as prints, as wall art because they're somewhat open to interpretation and you can select a color palette that is very simplified and works well with the interior design. Alright, time to head off. Thanks for watching this video guys, really appreciate your support. Hope to see you in a new video soon.