Lens Selection for Outdoor Photography

Let's talk about the most fun part of outdoor photography. Lens selection. If you're shooting landscape photography, you'll probably wanna start off with a standard, wide-angle zoom. My go-to wide-angle lens for landscape photography is something like a 16 to 35 millimeter lens on a full-frame camera. Or maybe like a 17 to 40 millimeter. There are also wider options. You can move into the specialty, ultra-wide lenses. Such as Canon's 11 to 24 millimeter on a full-frame camera. I've also got the Tamron 15 to 30. Nikon makes a wonderful 14 to 24 millimeter lens. There's other options available as well. These lenses have very wide field of views. They're kind of specialty lenses. 'Cause it's not that often you're gonna wanna go that wide. If I'm outdoors, I tend to reach for these lenses if I've got a really big background feature. Like really big mountains that are close by. And I need to zoom out really, really far to include both the background and a prominent foreground. Or if I've got really big clouds building in the sky. Or if I'm working in a cramped interior. Like a slot canyon. There's also what's known as a tilt-shift lens or a perspective control lens. And these are specialty lenses that allow you to do all sorts of fancy things. Including extending your depth of field by tilting the lens axis. So you get more near-far focus. And it also allows you to correct for distortion. If you're shooting, for example, in a forest and you point your lens up or down with a wide-angle lens. You'll get a lot of distortion. And this lens allows you to correct that distortion. Moving up, I think it's always good to have a mid-range zoom lens. For example, this is a 24 to 70 millimeter lens. So when you're not doing a really wide-angle shot, like a classic near-far landscape shot. If you've got something where you need to zoom in a little bit more. This range of lens really comes in handy. Moving up from there. I like to carry around with me a 70 to 200. This allows me to zoom in on some more intimate landscape details. If I wanna shoot something that's not a very wide-angle scene. Also, this is very useful when you're photographing wildlife. If the wildlife gets relatively close. If you're working with big wildlife. Let's say you're on a safari in Africa. A 70 to 200 is a really useful option to have. You can go even longer for wildlife. This is a 150 to 600 millimeter lens. It's known as a prosumer lens. Which is a lens that's designed to be cheaper and lighter in weight than the very large super telephoto lenses that are very popular with wildlife photographers. So this'll get you some good wildlife shots. But if you're really serious about wildlife, you've gotta move into the super telephotos. The super telephotos are very expensive. They tend to be very big. This particular lens is a 200 to 400 millimeter zoom lens. With a built-in 1.4x converter. So this allows me to zoom in and zoom out with wildlife. If the wildlife gets really close, I can zoom out. If it's farther away, I can zoom in. And get a nice, tight portrait out of it. You'll also have super telephotos that are in the 400, or 500, or 600 millimeter range. They tend to be the same size and weight as the lens I have here. But because they're a fixed focal length, they have a wider maximum aperture. Which allows you to capture faster action.