Originally posted by Conqueror Originally posted by Mikesul I agree with those who like longer lenses. Wide angles sometimes work but they tend to diminish the impact of the size of the mountains. A long lens can also be used in panoramas for startlingly sharp and wide vistas.
Yeah this is exactly what I found when I was near the french/swiss border.
Shooting the same view with a multitude of different focal lengths will certainly create a wide variety of images, each characterized by the individual lenses handling of the view. This is why, when asked for the best lens for _______ - you fill in the blank - mountains and hills, its really about 'scapes (landscapes, cityscapes, etc.). The answer comes back any lens - in particular the one you have with you. Its how you use it.
You can take the traditional landscape in landscape mode, or turn the camera up on edge and take a series of portraits to be stitched, giving the feeling of drawing in the scenery at the photographer's foot up through the sky.
- Fisheye - A lot of folks tend to shy away from fish-eyes. In many cases a fisheye will produce a more natural looking image than a rectilinear wide angle. Wide angles tend to pull the image in certain ways.
- Wide Angle - WA's are great in pulling in a lot of view. The question is where do they put it - there are only so many pixels. They pull-in the view from along the edges and push back the center. This distorted some of the detail - some times it matters, other times it does not. You can also get excellent depth of field here. Longer focal lengths tend to flatten the images.
- Normal - After about the mid 20's the distortion goes away, but to get the wider expanses of views, you can stitch (you can also stitch with fish-eyes and wide angles too - which replaces the edges of one image with the center of another, in this way helping to calm the distortion). With the normals, you get additional detail in your field of view, that can produce that 3D rendering to the eye.
- Short Telephoto - These lenses let you shoot over the near foreground and concentrate on the view that the WA's tend to push into the background. You start to get the compression of stacking the view up here - one mountain/hill in back of the other. Also, the view tends to get flattened - in the sens that everything is the same distance away from you (a bit of a lack of reference because you are lacking the foreground here).
- Telephoto - These just amplify the short telephoto views. Letting you really pull in the detail you wish. All of these can be stitched into the same view that WA's have - you just have more of them and the detail increases, along with the wall space.
You are the photographer - the image creator, so you get to choose how you wish to present the view in front of you. The lenses and camera are just the tools of the trade. One size does not necessary fit all. You can bring (lug) all the toys and use them all to capture all the different views available. There is nothing wrong with one view over another (WA over a stitched normal). This is your freedom of expression.
Think of it this way - the full pallet of tools - 10-17FE, 8-16, 21 Ltd, 31 Ltd, 43 Ltd and the 60-250 which covers everything from 180 degrees wide in one image down to a few degrees in field of view - with some of the best glass available - all in 6 lenses.