Master the Art of Intimate Landscape Photography with the Telephoto Lens

Introduction

One of the most powerful skills I learnt as a landscape photographer was learning how to see a photograph without raising the camera to my eye. When I learned how to previsualise, ‘seeing’ the landscape like my camera — and, more importantly, each of my different lenses — I noticed huge shifts in the quality and depth of my photographs. The quality of my photographs again improved significantly when I bought my first telephoto lens and began to understand how this lens could ‘see’ the world in which I walked. The unique perspective that a telephoto lens gives me has been instrumental in the transformation of my worldview and development of my photographic vision.

By understanding the power that the telephoto lens holds in landscape photography, we can create some of the most unique and interesting photographs, captivating our audiences in ways that every photographer dreams of and introducing them to new ways of seeing the world. In this article, I aim to inspire you to go out with your long lens equipped, looking at some of the smaller and more intimate scenes that the landscape has to offer.

Simplifying the Landscape

When we discover a new landscape, it is common to become overwhelmed with the sheer potential for photographs. Attendees of workshops and one-to-ones often tell me that they know there are photographs to be made on location, but they just have no idea where to start. It can be tempting, especially when starting in photography, to equip the wide-angle lens and try to capture the majesty, including everything in one photograph. That is the easy option in landscape photography, but it doesn’t necessarily make for the most impactful photographs. In my opinion, in fact, it very rarely does.

The beauty of landscape photography is that we have the power to control what the viewer sees and, more importantly, what the viewer doesn’t see. As a viewer, I am much more drawn to photographs where the photographer has intentionally left out much of the landscape and chosen, instead, to focus on one subject or an intimate section. That is why I usually choose to create photographs just like ‘Silent Waters’ below.

My preference these days is to create five or six intimate photographs as a collection from one location, rather than creating one big vista-style photograph that tells the entire story of a landscape. To get the ‘right’ visual effect for my photograph ‘Silent Waters’, I chose to use a longer focal length and created a two-frame vertical panorama. Not only did this maximise its potential for print, but it also maintained the desired compression, bringing the distant trees closer and emphasising depth. I will share more about telephoto panoramas and landscape ‘compression’ later.

When I discover a new location, I often like to break it down into sections, which helps me to make sense of it. When running a photography tour of Snowdonia for a client in 2024, I used the analogy of the landscape that we were in being like America. I then pointed to various states: the trees beside the water being one, the details like the reeds and lilies being another, and rocks and plant life at the other end of the lake being another, and so on. I then challenged her to go and make a series of photographs from Texas, for example. This seemed to help her make sense of and simplify the landscape, whilst challenging her to look for alternative options to the wide-angle lens which would have included too many other ‘states’.

It is common, especially when starting out in landscape photography, to look nearby for interesting foregrounds and ‘leading lines’ to include in photographs. One of the best things about the telephoto lens, however, is its ability to scope out individual subjects from afar, such as the lonely tree down below. By stepping back a hundred metres or so from the subject and zooming in on it, we can add to the sense of isolation by eliminating much of the landscape surrounding it and adding mystery to the photograph. A wider-angled lens here would not have told the desired story, as it would have given too much away about the location of the tree and would have placed emphasis on the foreground rather than my desired subject and the story that it holds.

If there is an interesting foreground that you feel drawn to photograph, it can sometimes prove beneficial to equip a longer lens and step back a few metres or more, rather than using a super wide-angle lens and getting up close. If there is also an interesting subject in the background, it can help to bring it closer by making use of a longer focal length.

Creating Compression and Enhancing a Subject’s Stature

The telephoto lens compresses the landscape and gives the illusion that the space between subjects, such as hills, is less than in reality. One of the best ways to take advantage of this illusory effect is by getting up high and photographing mountain ranges or hills. It can emphasise the layers upon layers of landscape and imply that the mountains or hills roll on forever. The telephoto lens can also make forests seem denser than they are, so it can be great to use one on a foggy morning to add real depth to a woodland photograph. The main appeal of these kinds of photographs is that they seem so foreign to the human eye, which sees the world at around 50mm. When you equip a telephoto lens, the eyes are often captivated by the mystery. The longer the focal length, the greater the intrigue usually is.

Finding Beauty in the Details

It is easy to find the beauty in a grand vista or spectacular sunset, but it takes hours upon hours of intentional effort, connecting practices, and real presence with the landscape to begin seeing beauty in places that are often overlooked. I find these kinds of photographs to be the most rewarding, as they communicate who I am as a visual artist and reveal a deeper, more thoughtful approach to my craft. The telephoto lens carries my eyes much closer to my chosen subjects, and I can start to see things that were previously unseen, such as the buds of new spring growth emerging from these overhanging branches, or the intricate details of the marram grass in the dunes beneath. If you’re someone who wishes to make unique photographs that no one else can make, then I believe the telephoto lens will become your best friend in the landscape.

Create Abstracts & Shoot Minimal

The telephoto lens is a fantastic choice of lens for creating abstract, thought-provoking photographs. You can zoom in on intricate details and patterns contained in rocks, light, and sand, for example, adding a sense of complexity to a photograph and forcing a person to slow down to make sense of what they are looking at.

Less is often more in a photograph, and with the telephoto lens, you can easily create minimalist-style photographs that leave plenty to the imagination of your viewer. Take a walk to your favourite lake and keep an eye out for intricate details such as grasses and reeds in the lake. With the right light and conditions, you can create clean, minimal, evocative, and quietly impactful photographs that tell a completely different story of a lake than the usual mirror-like reflections of surrounding hills.

Shoot Panoramas

One of the main issues you might face when using a telephoto lens for landscape photography is that you won’t be able to include as much of the scene as you desire due to the limited field of view. You can overcome this by learning how to create panoramas, which will enable you to include more sky and foreground in a frame. In my method for creating panoramas, I level the tripod, flip my camera into portrait orientation, and then stitch a series of portrait photographs to make a panoramic landscape photograph.

The best thing about creating panoramas using the telephoto lens is that you also get the benefits of a more compressed photograph, which is great for woodland scenes where you wish to emphasise the density of the forest, for example, or mountain scenes where you wish to accentuate the grandeur of the mountains. With a traditional wider-angled lens, the scale of mountains is often lost to the foreground, but by creating a landscape-oriented panorama with a series of stitched, zoomed-in portrait photographs, you can maintain the impact of the mountains or highlight the density of the forest.

Exaggerate the Atmosphere

Finally, the telephoto lens does a brilliant job of exaggerating the atmosphere in a landscape. It works particularly well on a misty morning. Our eyes see the world at around 50mm, so looking at the landscape at 100mm+ can make a profound difference to what we see. The camera can often see what our eyes are blind to. It can be difficult to see mist—not to be confused with fog, which tends to be a lot denser—and it is only when we look through the telephoto lens and get a closer, more compressed view of the landscape that it becomes clear there is mist in the air. Combine this knowledge with my favourite ‘shooting towards the light’ technique for some beautiful depth and magical colours and tones in your photographs.

Conclusion

When it comes to landscape photography, it is easy to overlook the telephoto lens in favour of wider-angled lenses that allow us to include more of a scene in one frame. I hope that, by sharing my photographs and thoughts with you, I might have sparked some curiosity and inspired you to step outside in pursuit of new perspectives to view the world. By using the telephoto lens, I believe that the abstract and out-of-the-box thinkers are rewarded with more interesting, thought-provoking, and conversation-opening photographs.