Why I Stopped Using My Wide Angle Lens 

✅QUICK QUESTION: What's your favorite lens for Landscape Photography?

Where I currently live in North Carolina is the worst during the winter months. Everything is dead; it rarely snows. I dabble in so many different genres during the winter months to help ease the seasonal doldrums.

I really love my 16-35mm and also my 100-400. I love the look both of those lenses offer. - But for convenience sake, especially when traveling, I find that the 24-105 is on my camera most often.

Great video, Mark. I really needed this, thank you. I'm an architectural and interior design photographer by trade, but Iandscape photography is my 'therapy.' There's only so much neutral colours you can photograph before going crazy LOL!

I do the same things with maple leaves here north of Tampa. About now the leaves are falling and brilliantly colored.

Glad to see someone else who takes photos of seeming random mixes of leaves on the ground. ;-) And appreciate your thoughts on the challenges of wide angle lenses.

Up here in Minnesota, the shoulder between fall and true winter is a liminal time, a time of ice and snow coming. It can be magical in the right conditions (or just grey and brown if the conditions do not cooperate)

My go to lens for most landscapes and panos is my 24-70mm, but occasionally I will use my 100-400mm.

Glad to hear that I am not the only one going through post-fall depression. Living in Colorado there really is a lot to shoot even after the leaves have all fallen but there is still that depression that hits. I have found that a couple of solutions are to focus more on wildlife and to go southwest. Fall is way different in the desert southwest.

Macro lenses are not just for shooting macros. If you find a longer macro, say something between 90mm and 180mm, they serve as both great prime landscape or portrait lenses. Back in the day when shooting portraits, the Canon 100mm “macro” lens was one of my best, and sharpest portrait lenses. Like I said, great for landscapes as well.

As a photographer that has plenty of experience with lots of different genres of photography what i've found out is that you will get what you are actively looking for when you're out and about. Like when i am out for landscapes i never encounter wildlife or hawks flying for example cause my mind is concentrated on landscape compositions thus this is what i find or rather what i only see when i'm in that zone. But when i'm literally out for wildlife with my 200-600 lens and my mind is focused on this task then the wildlife appears literally everywhere, and i'm only shooting locally so the places i visit for wildlife are the same that i go for landscapes so it's kinda bizarre if you think about it but it holds true. So when i put on my ultra wide angle lens it's exactly the same deal, i mentally choose to reject any other photo opportunities like wildlife or long telephoto landscapes or portraits of trees leafs etc and i get in "the zone" of only hunting for ultra wide angle shots and guess what? i find them all the time! So there's a lesson to be learnt here for anyone reading these lines, focus on what your lens that's on your camera can do and you will find the subjects for that lens. As long as you don't think of what other lenses you got in your backpack thus not actively think outside of the lens you're using right now cause this will throw you out of the zone and you'll end up always swaping lenses and losing the mojo at that photoshoot. A good trick i do is to try ultra wide angle compositions with my phone's camera before i decide that is worth it and proceed to swap to my ultra wide angle lens on my camera. Also after years of practing with my ultra wide angle lens the scenes that call for it are now profound to me when i encounter them and i happen to use my other lenses at that time and with the phone it's easy to test them out before actually swaping lenses. But as i said before my advice is to concentrate on what your wide angle lens can do and you'll definitelly find the scenes that call for it. Try it out for a week, go out with only your wide angle lens and i bet you'll get the shots you want. Just focus mentally on that focal length only

I was just out today and found some remaining colorful trees in my area. I think I got some decent shots but I didn’t think to look down. Perhaps tomorrow. My most used lens is my 24-105. I have a 20mm but don’t use it much for landscape and I feel somewhat guilty about that!

Beautiful and inspiring. Thank you. 👌 Btw. because Macro lenses are mostly focused manually anyway, I prefer an old adapted manual macro lens which is great.

Probably just my TV, but I was seeing a weird shimmering effect when you were zooming on your final images. Went away after the zooming stopped. Too bad about the mushrooms!

Photography fashion trends develop over the years. First people "discovered" bokeh, and every picture had to have bokeh. Then is was "smooth water", which looks totally artificial. After that it was wide lenses. Which I personally think is the worst of trends, as the main subject is then tiny,. while the foreground is either nondescript or not special, like rocks you can find everywhere. Well, it seems at least some people realize that these technical novelties become boring in the long run. -- Of course a shallow depth of field has its place in portraits, and wide lenses are actually necessary when taking pictures of interior designs. But in landscape photography a "standard" focal length still is best. Just my 2 cents and 100+ years experience from artists' work.

I’ve listened for 10 min now and you are still talking in generic terms. What is a wide angle zoom ? Which one ? What zoom range ? Could you start with the punch line ? 😂

Thanks for the helpful video Mark! I constantly look for your new videos every week. Random question what tripod do you use? Thanks

Checking out your tripod head. I've been considering same for a head that can get e low and doesn't get dirt trapped in it. I've been a touch concerned as the head is so wide. So what's the good, bad, and ugly with the head?

Lots of people struggle with woodland photography but I do it the way you showed it in this video. Find subjects to photograph and use the woods as the backdrop. Great video.

I only have a 16-35 on full frame, my milky way astro and ocean vista shots wouldn't be the same without it. Definitely not because I can't afford more than one lens

You might consider a vintage macro lens, like the Minolta 100 mm macro. This one cost me €135 and it is a great lens.

what camera bag you use in this video? love your videos.

making a very important point... i dont use mine that much either and wonder if worth having as still capture good landscapes

I think it largely depends on the environment that you live in. I sell a lot of prints and people in Australia don't want to put woodland photos on their wall. They want nice sweeping seascape or some day shots of the beach or a nice area but they don't want zoomed in shots of a particular subject, but that's just Australians and how they see art. So from a selling point of view I shoot mostly wide angle but not super wide probably around that 22 to 24 mm ... But on a personal level, I love using my zoom and doing different things as well. It just doesn't sell. That's the issue and I've looked at that I've looked at how many wide angle shots I've sold in frames or canvases compared to zoom in shots and in my opinion, some of the zoom shots are probably better photos but they just don't sell Mark so it's an interesting dilemma. And yes, I do want to generate some income from Photography because it helps fund, new equipment trips and other things. My favourite lens is the 20 to 35 on my GFX, which I've only just recently purchased, but I love it already.

While I tend not to use wide-angle lenses for landscapes, I do like to switch to a wide-angle prime and go out into the woods or hit a trail. I use the wider lens to force myself to get really close to my subject in order to prevent the miniaturization of terrain. Getting really close to a foreground element with wide angle prime makes me think differently and more deeply about composition and subject.

Hey Mark, you should try extension tubes. Cost almost nothing.

Extension tubes work on pretty much any lens. And they're cheap.

Good Video. I'm in Wisconsin and our autumn colors are long gone. My approach this last week was to focus more on contrast, such as a white birch tree in a dead forest. Pine Tree photography is also still good, as they don't have leaves that die and fall off. Also finding contrast between light and shadows in a prairie or valley. I've also used a wide angle lens exclusively in my photography. It has it's challenges, especially when I see a subject in the distance and the only way to photograph it, is by physically moving closer to it. That's difficult especially when there's no trail or easy way to reach the subject. I've trained myself to focus on only a few points of interest, knowing I will crop a lot out.

Mark, I'll share a thing I like to do too with fungi photos. Carry a Cree zooming style torch and use it for lighting. You can darken the entire exposure and highlight the subject like you have a spotlight. It just adds a whole new way of presenting small things.

I like this video particularly because I have the fuji GFX system and oddly enough, I find myself using my 100 to 200 more often than not. Rather than use my standard 32 to 64, I prefer now to concentrate on isolating part of the scene. When it comes to macro, I cannot justify the cost of the fuji offering. I follow a couple of Brutish - well one is Canadian living in Wales - and they use an adapted Pentax 120mm macro off the medium format system. It has to be said that at a cost of around £150 used, in pristine condition, these lenses perform excellently. OK, so they're manual focus but that is no issue with focus peaking. It's a very affordable way to get into macro on medium format, and you have it with you all the time. I would highly recommend one.

Agreed. I shoot a GFX100S also, and hardly use my 20-35mm. However as my medium zoom is the 45-100mm, I really have to take it along, just in case. The 100-200mm gets most use. You think a wide angle would be great for mountainous vistas, but, as you say, the focal length minimises the grandeur of the mountains in the distance. One solution I am playing with to some success is to use transform in Lightroom as a sort of software tilt shift method.

You should consider getting extension tubes, very cheap and produce a good quality with the right lenses

I love my Sony 90mm Macro for Autumn scenics and landscape....Macro too, of course!

I've been using my wide angle lens less and less over the past year, almost to a point where I might use it for a few shots of a particular location, and then switch to my travel zoom (24 - 120mm) for the remainder and many of the ultra-wide shots are more or less "documentation" shots of the entire scene, and maybe 1/3 of the time I'll actually use those shots, but lately I've been enjoying going in tighter and eliminating and isolating subjects. Part of this is because many scenes are generally shot wide, and that's fine, but it's a common field of view for some subjects that have been shot to death (like the Grand Canyon or Horseshoe Bend) to a point where it starts to get old, and with a travel zoom, I have the flexibility to create some more unique interesting compositions and isolating subjects is a bit easier. As with any FL, it just gives a different view from what we're generally used to seeing, and I feel a lot of people approach landscape as needing to be shot wide, or that wide is the only way to shoot a landscape and that's not necessarily true. While they do have their place in landscape and travel photography, I sometimes think they're overused as well and that by going to a more narrow focal length, you can find new compositions that you didn't see before.

I won't stop one kind of lens Another to have all kinds of Plants in my bag for all situation But I think people need to understand how pin point accurately located you need to be to properly use the benefit of wide angle lens, Elsa it will just makes every shot looks empty

Post-fall blues are real! Thanks for sharing some ideas to work through it.

Many thanks for your great video. I think there's a problem with showing photos in video maybe editing video affect on photos and photos doesn't look stable in video and look like photos with high amount of sharpening.

I love going out with my Sigma 150-500mm lens and point it down! Any time of the year. Look for small things, colors, forms, whatever. Haven't taken much time for it this year, but your video has nudged me in the right direction! 😊

I also find myself using a wide angle less and less. Even when I want to shoot wider, I have been using my 70-200 a lot and stitching panos ( don't currently own a 24-70). I find that shooting pano gives a better perspective of scale, especially shooting waterfalls. I just shot a 12 shot pano of a local fall and compared it to the wide angle shot of similar crop, no comparison on which was better.

Fuji 50-140mm 2.8 oh and just ordered the bag but 25 lt shimoda

You don't use your ultra-wide lens, because you change your photography style. I use it only in canyons or when your object is to close, and you like to get more on the frame.

I'm enjoying the Sigma 18-50 on the X-t5. It is also excellent for mini landscapes, close-ups, and easy to pop on the extension tubes for macro.

When you focus stack in macro, do you use the internal camera settings to create the stack or do you do it manually??

I always say If you don't like the conditions of your grand landscape then look down at your feet.

I had a 14-24 i used rarely, and sold it to get a 200-500. Happy days!

I have a question that is off topic that I've been meaning to ask. When you travel to another time zone, do you adjust your camera time accordingly or do you just leave it at your home base time zone?

Re mushrooms; how about convert to black and whi😮te?

So how was sleeping in the woods? I look forward to seeing the mushroom photo 😂

What is the tripd combination you are using?

Less than 3 minutes of the topic in the title - rest not so interesting. Clickbait?

16-35mm gm ii and 70-200 f4 macro 💪🏽

The one on my camera is my favorite one. Thanks for the tips

What tripod is that

Hi Mark, I'm a big fan, I've seen almost all of your videos on RU-vid. I'm planning to go on safari in 2024, I currently have an X-T5, but I'm considering buying a full frame camera (GFX50S II). Do you think it might help in low light or high ISO conditions? Or doesn't change much for the X-T5?

The 120 F4 is also a good portrait lens. Dual purpose. It's a bit big and heavy for general purpose (and that terrible clunk when you chimp or turn off the camera). But I have no regrets purchasing it.

Thanx Mark, your reports are outstanding 👍🙏👍It’s shameful that for the gfx100s there are only a few options choosing alternative lenses concerning the g-mount.Maybe you have some alternatives.Usually I work with the 32-64 zoom for interior photography bu,t it would be nice to expand some possibilities 😉greetings from the Netherlands 🇳🇱

I have been shooting Nikon for longer than I like to think. Back when I began photography zooms were junk. I have always shot primes and I have most every Nikon prime from 20mm to 500mm. My favorite set up for shooting close-up of spring flowers and fall leaves is a 50mm 1.4 with a +2 diopter on it. My favorite landscape lens is my 20mm 1.8 with Lee filters.

Funny, I always thought of 90-135mm lenses as my portrait mainstay. And I just changed from a 50mm prime lens to a 28mm as my general use mainstay. That will soon change to a 35-70mm Yashica zoom for both my new Yashica AF camera and my Contax ST pair.

Great video, Mark! Thanks for sharing how to stay motivated and creative. What tripod are you using? Also, do you suggest using any filters during this time of the year?

I prefer to shoot landscape, but that requires going to the landscape and everything that it involves. Sometimes you just can't. You can shoot macro in your own yard or nearby park. I have a 100mm macro lens, but it has a very shallow depth of field. If shooting an insect, I can only get part of it in focus. Flat subjects like leaves are fine with my 100mm. Caterpillars and honeybees are easy to get close to, but butterflies can be skittish. Sometimes I need to use a 300mm prime to maintain a distance and crop the image.

I used my macro lens a lot more in the past when I had a crop sensor and built in flash. Don’t use it much anymore (for multiple reasons) but always like having it there if I need it. I’m not sure what a rental costs, but I picked up my Canon 100mm macro lens, second hand, of course, for a price I can’t remember, but it was cheap, even by my standards. I can’t remember your camera set up, but might be worth checking second hand options. I’m not sure you’d need to spend “thousands of dollars” to get a pretty sweet macro lens. :) Enjoyed the video, as usual. 👍

Most of my wide-angle images are of the city skyline from across the river, up the river of a bridge, or up into the night sky. I'll usually shoot with my 50mm f/1.8 or my 24-70 f/2.8 for landscape.

Just get the Laowa 65mm macro lens for one of your Fuji X cameras, instead of a GFX macro lens! One of the most affordable macro lenses yet one of the best and most powerful. ;-)

I believe that this correlates to what I see as "easy". I find focal lengths around 35-50 (full frame equivalent) to be "easy", because I can compose the image without the camera. When I look into the viewfinder I basically see what I saw without the camera, so if I saw something interesting, the picture will be interesting. If I go wider than that I need to look into the viewfinder to make sure I didn't get anything along the edges that I didn't really notice without the camera, and with a telephoto I need to check that nothing interesting was cropped out of the image. It's still fully possible to get good pictures with telephotos and wide angles, but it requires a bit extra mental effort.

Thanks for the walk around. I lived in NC near Statesville for 30+ years, and have moved to Phoenix. I miss the vibrant Fall in NC.

Fall seems to be hanging on, I find the 24-70 micro seems to work, I live in an area where deep canyons and hills, 16-35 works well with big skyline. 😊

Here in South Wales, Uk, the trees were really late to turn this year into Autumn. But now we have had 5 storms in the last month and very little foliage is left! I've just started my photograhpy journery using the fuji 18-55mm so I'm happy to hear that I've picked the right lense to start?! I walked to the top of one of our nearest peaks to photograph a grand vista at sunrise, but I ended up taking a shot of a solitary toad stool instead which I was very pleased with so I agree with your advice! Thanks for the great videos as always!

I learned several years ago that I just don’t have much need for an ultra wide. The widest lens I currently own is a 20mm prime that I bought used to save some money. The thought was I’d have something a bit wider when 24 didn’t quite cut it and also an option for astro. Now if I were in the desert or on the coast I might think very differently.

If they grow in your area, this is a prime time for Amanita mushrooms, which are VERY photogenic.

To me it is interesting if you want to avoid the grand over landscape, you focus on the details. So what lens do we use, actually two: the macro and the telephoto, yes how interesting that these two very different lenses seem to achieve the same thing. And Mark if you rent that macro lens too many times over the years, you've actually paid for one, just buy it....

Excellent video Mark! Great subject. Thanks!😊

Love it Mark. Keep it simple to capture the spirit. Used to simplify for underwater photography as well.

Nice pictures. It is so nice to see you outside doing a video. I know you feel more comfortable at your desk but it still was nice to see you out. Thanks for all of the information you always provide. I am always learning from you.

Hi Mark, great video! Very refreshing approach to post fall/pre winter "let down", if you will. I would've never considered using a macro lens, so great idea. I have an OLD Tokina 35-105 w/ macro manual focus lens that I used with my Nikon FE film camera in the early 80's. I think I'll take it for a "spin" on my D500 to see what I can come up with. Thanks for the inspiration.

I see you have one of those new Shimoda Urban packs. What size was that in your video? Ordered one yesterday. Your thoughts on it ?

Great timing. I was panhandling my property this morning for any leaves with color. I agree about the wide angle lens. It’s hard to beat the effects of compression you get from longer focal lengths. When I bought my first wide angle lens, I thought I’d be taking grandiose images of large areas from far away, but I found that a wide angle lens actually shows it’s power when close up on subjects, still managing to pull in the background. My most used lens for landscape is my 70-200, but I’ve been experimenting with an 85mm prime lately and I’m loving the character it has. Have a great rest of fall!

50mm for me 🙂

Recently upgraded to a R6mkii and while my 70-300 f/4 L lived on my 5Dmkii I have been in love with my Helios 44-2 on my mirrorless. It's given me more of a challenge with composition and focusing over pointing and shooting. I tried the RF 16 f/2.8 and wasn't happy with it over my EF 17-40 f/4 L even tho I shot at 17 most of the time.

I use my macro lens throughout the year. It's probably my most used lens. I do use my wide angle lens just enough to find it has a place in my bag.

What is it about mushrooms that can make them so photogenic though? I'm also a sucker for a good mushroom shot.

Those mushrooms just needed some "set design." There wasn't anything stopping you from collecting a few colorful leaves from the area to serve as background color, or framing.

Time for photographing mushrooms.

Great video, Mark. I also use my wide-angle zoom less and less.. One reason is that, if the sky is not interesting, it is hard to eliminate it without a longer focal length.

Nice video. Thanks for the inspiration.

Who knew you could find leaves under trees.

Great video Mark, some nice photos

Is that the 25L or 30L you're using during the video?

Switch to Sony 😂😂😂😂

Nice! Thank you.

Hi Mark nice video. Love Autumn.. Great advice.

24 is wide...

Great video!

Your "past peak" color is still waaaay beyond anything we ever get down here in the deep south. LOL

Enjoyed the video. Do you have some suggestions on how to reduce glare in outdoor leaf photos? In addition to a polarizer? Thanks.

I almost always have my 24-70 on. If you want to truly understand how much you rely on today's new technology, use your first digital camera. My Sony had to go in for repairs. It was killing me that I was missing the fall colors. so I dug out my old Canon 7D, and looked for the batteries and the charger. Once I got everything up and running out to the local Arboretum I went. What a shock! I had to relearn everything about the camera. And then I realized how much I now allowed the Sony Camera to do for me. I chuckled to myself that I felt like I was back using a pin box camera, Photography 101. No more LIVE VIEW - OUCH! That took some relearning. Anyway, I found it rather fun after a while. It brought me back to the basics and old memories and DEFFENTLY made me appreciate what I have now.