Brendan van Son takes us on a fun adventure of photographing landscapes at 500mm. It might seem like a silly experiment given most photographers take landscape shots with wide angle lenses (e.g. 16mm or 24mm). However, if we don’t take a chance to try new things how are we going to innovate? After all, artistic expression cannot be relegated to a set-in-stone formula. We should always try to escape our comfort zone and see what interesting new ideas we can come up with.
I myself have never shot a landscape at anything longer than 100mm. In that regard, Brendan’s challenge was quite an eye opener. Despite him not being very impressed with what he was seeing on the back of his camera initially, I thought his images turned out quite well. When dealing with such a narrow field of view he had to rely on other elements to really make the images pop.
Two of these elements gave incredibly pleasing results. I very much enjoyed the leading lines of the dunes behind his subject. One shot in particular (at 1:55 in the video), was framed in a unique yet visually pleasing way. Shooting at a narrow depth of field (F5.6) blurred the foreground slightly creating a very surreal result. Further, allowing the top right corner to grab a bit of the sky really accentuated the image and provided a bit of relief from the abundance of orange in the background. What do you think of this shot? Let me know in the comments below!
What I took away from this video is that I need to experiment a bit more with my focal lengths. While I will probably never own a 500mm lens, I can still experiment by cropping into my images. I am sure there are a lot of interesting compositional elements I can discover. I suppose our collective challenge is to go back through the photos we have already taken and see if we can reinvent some of our shots!