3 Zoom lenses for Landscape Photography you NEED

Essential lenses for landscape photography

What are the lenses for landscape photography that you actually need? Avoid the mistake of over-buying lenses you won’t end up using!

In this tutorial, Mark Denney shares his thoughts on the only three needed zoom lenses for landscape photography.

The three lenses you need for landscape photography

You don’t need a million different lenses to take awesome photos! Prime lenses (fixed focal length with no zoom ability) will limit your landscape photos. 

Especially taking landscape photography, these zoom lenses are all you will need.

Don’t be like Mark and have an over abundance of lenses you don’t use!

Landscape Lens you need #1: Wide angle Zoom Lens 

Mark Denney uses a 16mm-35mm Sony lens. 

This creates a depth to the photos where it feels like you can actually just step into the scene. It’s eye catching and captures a lot of detail and width of the scene.

The wide angle lens can also create an interesting distortion, making details look larger or closer than they are.

The drawback of this lens is that it is dependent on the conditions being right. A lot of the image depends on the sky having interesting elements as the sky will take up a lot of the photo with the wide angle for lanscape.

A couple examples of this lens you can buy:

• Sony 16mm-35mm lens 
• Sigma wide angle zoom lens 

Landscape Lens you need #2: Telephoto Zoom lens

A telephoto or super telephoto 100mm-400mm lens.

This lens allows you to zoom all the way into a small detail in a scene to capture an interesting scene. 

For landscape photography it is really helpful to have that wide variation of focal length to work with for many different scenes.

The lens also gives an illusion of compressing the foreground and background of a scene which gives it an interesting effect. You can isolate interesting areas in a scene with that crisp zoom detail from a telephoto lens.

You don’t need optimal conditions with this lens so in this way it tops the wide angle lens.

A few examples of this lens you can buy:

• Sigma 100mm-400mm lens
• Canon 100mm-400mm lens
• Tamron 100mm-400mm lens

Landscape Lens you need #3: Mid-Range Zoom Lens

With the wide angle and telephoto you have two choices: go wide or go long! But what if you need a middle ground that can capture both width and zoom depth?

The 32mm-64mm mid-range zoom lens gives you the versatility of both the wide angle and the telephoto zoom lenses. 

There is a good width of the scene as well as the focal range to zoom in or out of details. 

A couple examples of this lens you can buy:

• Fujifilm 32mm-64mm midrange zoom lens
• Nikon midrange zoom lens

These three lenses will give you the ability to create beautiful photos no matter the conditions of the landscape!

You won’t be sorry when you have these three lenses in your gear bag when you go out to shoot landscapes.

Looking to improve your photography skills? Check out this comprehensive guide!

Which of these lenses for landscape photography will you add to your lenses NOW?

Comment below!