Perspective

Lens focal length and what it does to your image, with respect to perspective.

You know, the range between say, 14mm and 600mm. There is the varying angle of view captured in the resulting image, of course, this is first and obvious demonstrable difference. The difference, in essence, is the section of the scene you have captured. The majority of the scene has been grabbed by the 14mm lens; the least by the 600mm. Cool clear and obvious.

What has changed in perspective? The 14mm lens has a lot of funky stuff going on. There is a distortion, that varies by lens and and lens focal length, in one way or another. eg. vertical are no longer vertical. Extreme Wide angles lens can achieve a vast depth of field at a relatively large aperture. Extreme Telephoto lens compresses features from front to back and depth of field appears shallow, the features that are in focus, front to back, are not all in focus. Distortion and compression. Both effects are independently desirable if they are the intention.

Talk landscape and most think - wide angle lens. If you go wide and you have a large sensor you can crop, so. Yes true but if you want the entire scene, you have the distortion. Additionally, the foreground is enlarged and the back ground is reduced. Not what you see. There has been a change of perspective. If you want to faithfully reproduce what you see, for whatever reason, you cannot go wide.

If you want the distortion, for effect, wide serves a purpose. Wide is a trend now. Some people know there are other options, or perhaps to them perspective matters. Personally I don’t walk into the mountains, where they are dramatic and stunning - to capture them with a wide angle force them further away, removing the drama. Forever. Never to be share with anyone. It was dramatic there, honest.

I like wide angle for the effect it gives, but not every landscape will rock with it.

So how do you grab the entire scene? With a great deal of effort. But you can reproduce it faithfully, sometimes.