Photographic Myths and Platitudes — ‘Landscape Photography Lenses’ (Part II)

(The “Myths and Platitudes” series of posts concerns common photographic beliefs that may be open to question. This article has been updated periodically.)

Submerged Boulders, Lake, and Cliffs
Submerged Boulders, Lake, and Cliffs

Recently a reader asked about lenses for landscape photography. As part of my reply (see “Landscape Lenses” in my “reader questions” series) I referred him to the older article on landscape lenses: .”Photographic Myths and Platitudes – ‘Landscape Photography Lenses’ (Part I).” In doing so I realized that “Part I” had been written way back in 2009, and that Part II was way overdue! (And… in the years since I originally wrote this article, parts of it have also needed updating.)

The myth or platitude that I left out of  part I is a perennial one: Primes lenses are best  for landscape photography. Given how often this comes up, it might seem surprising that I didn’t write about it sooner, but I put off dealing with it for several reasons. It can become a very big subject. Not everyone cares, since today most photographers have moved happily to zooms. The “primes are best” notion has been cherished by some for a long time. It is a subject about which folks can become quite passionately partisan, perhaps in part because it is one of the gear issues that lend themselves to technical arguments, or because lens choices can be a way to try to align oneself with certain approaches to landscape photography.

We often hear arguments for using prime lenses in landscape photography that include the following:

  • Primes can produce higher resolution
  • Primes may better control certain kinds of image distortion
  • Using primes will slow you down and make you think more about your photography. (Conversely, using zooms will make you lazy.)
  • Great landscape photographers have relied on primes for a long time.
  • Primes provide some features that aren’t available from zooms

Before dealing with the question, let me reveal my own background and point of view. When I started out there wasn’t really much choice — zooms weren’t really an option, so we used primes, and I shot with only primes for many years. Even after good zoom lenses became more available — and after I owned a few — I continued to accept that they were optically inferior and that I should use primes whenever possible. Eventually my thinking evolved further, to the point that I no longer use primes for landscape photography. (I still use primes for other things, such as street photography, but that’s mostly a topic for another time.)

To be direct about it, I could have titled this article, “Why You Probably Should Use Zoom Lenses for Landscape Photography.” I no longer give much credence to the points favoring primes in my own landscape photography. Most landscape photographers, including most who are very serious about the quality of their work, are best served by shooting with zoom lenses, and they will generally have little or no reason to use primes for landscape photography. (There are some situations in which a prime may be the right choice — and there are some outstanding landscape photographers who prefer to use primes.) I’ll addresses the premises listed above one by one.

Primes can produce higher resolution — This is technically true, but with some important qualifications. At one time the difference between the image quality of typical primes and typical zooms was significant. Today the difference between excellent zooms and primes has decreased a lot, to the point that some zooms produce image quality that is arguably equal to or occasionally better than that of comparable primes. In most cases I think that should be enough of an argument regarding image resolution, but let me deal with a few additional considerations.

  • Some primes still test better than the best zooms at the same focal lengths. But the differences are so tiny as to be essentially meaningless, and any potential gains (if all other parameters are perfectly optimized) are so tiny as to be more theoretical than real in actual photographs. We are talking about small differences between things that are both really good — not the difference between good and bad options.
  • Primes can produce better image quality at the largest apertures — and they can have larger maximum apertures than most zooms. However, it is rare for “typical” landscape photographers to shoot at the largest apertures, and at more typical landscape apertures the differences (which are often quite small to begin with) diminish to imperceptibility. Two lenses that differ at f/2.8 are often virtually the same at f/8, f/11, or f/16.
  • Primes may have better image quality in the corners. This is often (but not quite always) true. But the differences tend to be at their greatest at the very largest apertures, and those who typically don’t shoot their landscape subjects wide open find that the corner quality improves a lot as you stop down — again, to the point that the differences are usually meaningless. In fact, the best recent zooms perform very well in the corners wide open and are extremely good stopped down a bit.

In the end, while lens “sharpness” or resolution is not an unimportant thing, it is not the only thing. When we are comparing primes and zooms that both produce really excellent image quality, we have to ask whether the difference are even visible and whether they are more important than other aspects of lens performance. (More on that topic below.)

Primes may better control certain kinds of image distortion — In general, zooms have tended to be more prone to image artifacts and distortion including chromatic aberrations, barrel/pincushion/mustache distortion, vignetting, field curvature, and so on. However…

  • Lens designers have made steady and impressive progress in narrowing what used to be a larger gap between primes and zooms. Today the best zooms often control these issues at levels comparable to primes. (And primes are not immune to them either.)
  • Some of these “distortions” are not really visible in photographs. While a bit of pincushion or barrel distortion might be visible in architectural photography, with its plethora of straight lines, except in extreme cases they are generally invisible in landscape photography.
  • Some distortions, such as vignetting are not necessarily a bad thing, are frequently regarded as pleasant and are even introduced intentionally in post.
  • Even if these things are visible in raw files under close inspection on the computer screen, they are quickly and easily eliminated in post-processing.
  • (That said, there are certain landscape-oriented uses where primes can have image quality advantages — for example certain primes can produce somewhat better corner quality when shot wide open for things like photographing the Milky Way.)

Using zooms will make you lazy — Ah, my (not!) favorite pro-prime and anti-zoom argument! This idea has a basis in human nature and the observation that casual photographers may use the zoom to frame the primary subject and shoot from wherever they are rather than moving around to find a better composition. That approach exists, but that doesn’t mean that zooms are bad… nor that serious photographers will act this way. In fact, if you watch me shoot with primes and zooms you will often find that I move around more and take more time finding the right composition with the zoom rather than the prime, with which I have more options to deal with.

  • Focal length differences do much more than let us fill the frame by zooming rather than moving. Focal length variation is an important compositional tool, and zoom lenses give you more control over this aspect of your photographs in several ways. One of the most important has to do with the relationships between a primary subject and secondary foreground or background subjects. Shooting with a prime you can move forward and backward (e.g. — “zoom with your feet”) to make your primary subject fill the frame as you wish. However, foreground and background secondary subjects then simply end up being what they are at the given focal length. Varying the focal length while framing the primary subject the same way lets you make background subjects larger or smaller relative to the primary subject. For example, with a longer focal length you can move back and limit the area of the background subject that is included in the frame and perhaps place a non-distracting small section of that background behind your primary subject. With a shorter focal length you can move closer and include a much wider angle of background behind your primary subject and make the background seem smaller and more distant. With a long lens you may be able to step back and include foreground objects in the frame; with a wide-angle you can move up in front of those subjects and exclude them. With a zoom lens you can carefully and precisely fine-tune these relationships so that they are exactly the way you want them in your composition.
  • Choosing to zoom with the lens rather than, to use the common expression, “zoom with your feet” is sometimes simply a necessity, and this is especially true in landscape photography. At times, changing the size of a subject in your frame “with your feet” would require you to levitate 100 feet beyond the edge of a cliff face or drive 20 miles in 2 minutes before the light fades, or set your tripod up in 20 feet of raging water.
  • The zoom also lets you  change more quickly from one focal length to another. When your lens is on the camera and both are on the tripod, you can instantly change to any focal length that the lens provides. When you use primes, you can change to other focal lengths, but only the limited number of them corresponding to the lenses you are carrying and only by taking the time to remove one and attach another in its place.

Great landscape photographers have long relied on primes — Much of the great and iconic classic photography that we know and admire was done with cameras that did not use zoom lenses — the photographers shot with just a few prime focal lengths and produced beautiful work. If it worked so well for them, shouldn’t it work for us?

  • It could work for us, and I suspect that at least some prime-only shooters are looking for a link back to those great photographers who produced wonderful work in an era largely without zooms. But the fact that great work has been made with primes does not tell us that great work cannot be made with other lenses nor that photographs made with primes will be superior. In fact…
  • … there are quite a few currently active photographers who did work in that older manner, many of whom began by using large format view cameras. Some still do. But among those that I know there has been a steady (and happy) move away from the older and more basic systems to smaller cameras largely equipped with zoom lenses! (One friend among this group likes to tweak film traditionalists when he gives talks on his photography by saying, more or less: “Today I shoot digital. With zoom lenses!“)
  • Another common notion is that landscape photography is a thing to be done in a slow and deliberate and thoughtful manner, and that using easier and more flexible equipment leads one to a less thoughtful working process. My response to this one is pretty simple. You can still work slowly if you choose to. Sometimes I work as slowly and methodically as any LF photographer would. But you can also work quickly when necessary — and quite a few landscape opportunities require quick work as light fades, clouds drift, and subjects move. (Read the story of the making of Ansel Adams’ “Moonlight, Hernandez, New Mexico” for an example.) So, while you can work as slowly as you want with a zoom lens on your camera, you can also work faster when you need to.

Primes provide some features that aren’t available from zooms — There are two general responses to this. First, it is true!  Second, the opposite is also true! So the real issue is to look at the strengths and weaknesses of both options and then determine which are the most significant in your photography.

  • What can primes do that zooms cannot do? Generally primes of a given focal length can provide larger maximum apertures than zooms covering the same focal lengths. Many popular zooms, including the most common ultra-wide, mid-range and short telephotos, do not have apertures larger than f/2.8. It is easy to find primes in most of this range with maximum apertures of f/1.4 and larger, and f/2 apertures may be available even at much longer focal lengths in this range. Larger apertures will let you shoot at higher shutter speeds in lower light, perhaps letting you photograph moving subjects more effectively and also extending the low light shooting range. The larger apertures also allow you to create very narrow depth of field. In some cases using only a single prime allows you to shoot more quickly, since it eliminates the variable of focal length — and you have one less decision to make. Many primes are smaller and lighter than zooms. Primes are available with features that are not (typically) available with zooms. For example, there are excellent tilt/shift prime lenses for DSLRs. (There are also tilt/shift adapters that allow the use of some zooms from medium format cameras in manual mode only.) Some excellent prime lenses are available at very low prices. Certain types of night photography almost require the larger apertures of primes — particularly those popular shots that feature unnaturally visible images of the Milky Way.
  • What can zooms do that primes cannot? Primary they provide a great deal more flexibility and adaptability. A single zoom lens can cover a wide range of focal lengths, and a complete and flexible kit might be built around only two or three lenses. Zooms allow the photographer to precisely crop in camera, thus maintaining all of the quality of the original capture, rather than diminishing it by cropping in post. They reduce (and sometimes eliminate) the need to switch lenses, thus minimizing sensor dust and making it easier to work in windy, dusty, and similar conditions. They often come with image stabilization, which allows hand-held photography at lower shutter speeds.
  • Since both zooms and primes have strengths and weaknesses, we have to ask how they line up with the needs of the typical landscape photographer… and you need to consider how they line up with your photography. To broadly generalize, a typical landscape photographer will want to shoot at multiple focal lengths, may have to shoot in challenging weather conditions, usually uses a tripod, generally shoots at smaller apertures, often works out a composition to combine elements at varying distances, sometimes has to respond very quickly to changing conditions, and may produce large prints of detailed subjects — all of which are things at which modern high quality zooms excel. If your landscape photography often requires larger apertures than those found on zooms, relies on tilt/shift lenses (and you aren’t interested in the MF zoom plus adapter options), and is usually done at one or two specific focal lengths, you might feel differently. Both lens types can produce outstanding image quality — good enough to make very large prints.

Many years ago serious landscape photographers essentially all used prime lenses. Today I see more of them shooting with zooms than with primes, and by a wide margin. In my view and in my experience it has become increasingly the case that zoom lenses generally are a better option than primes for landscape photography, even when image quality issues are paramount. Most photographers will find that the potential advantages of primes are small and countered by stronger advantages from zooms… and they will be better served by zoom lenses for landscape photography.

What are your thoughts? 


This article is part of my Photographic Myths and Platitudes series.


G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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4 thoughts on “Photographic Myths and Platitudes — ‘Landscape Photography Lenses’ (Part II)”

  1. A quibble with your wording: In your Feb 23, 2015 post, you say “I often want to use focal length as a method of carefully controlling composition, particularly in regards to controlling the relative sizes and other aspects of subject, foreground, and background”. I think a lot of readers may misconstrue it to mean that changing focal length changes the RELATIVE sizes and locations of objects in the scene. I’m sure you know that these are a function of the position of the camera only. Given a camera location, varying the focal length only changes how much of the scene will be included in the image — the objects in the scene will have the same relative sizes and locations. My experience is that a lot of photographers believe that relative sizes and locations change with focal length. For example, a friend had heard that “a 70 to 100mm lens gives the right perspective for portraits” and thought that applied for all sensor sizes. I explained that on a “full frame” (36x24mm) camera, framing a head shot or head and shoulders shot will make you position the camera at a distance from the subject that will result in pleasing relative sizes and locations of their features, so what you want for a different sensor size is whatever focal length results in the same camera to subject difference. In short, I would have said something like “After I have carefully positioned my camera to optimize the relative size and locations of the objects in the scene, I have to select a focal length to select the part of the scene to be included in the recorded image”. That makes it clear that if you don’t have the needed focal length, you either have to crop the image later or compromise the composition by moving the camera.

    1. I understand the point you are making, but I think you may be misconstruing what I wrote, or possibly missing parts of it.

      My point is that when you use a zoom lens you can use the variables of both focal length and distance to subject freely, thus having more control over the relative presence of elements of subject, foreground, and background in the composition. With a prime you have one choice — but with a zoom (or multiple primes, but with less flexibility) you can, for example half-fill (for example) the frame with your primary subject from any distance within the focal length range of the zoom… with very different relationships between that primary subject and foreground and background elements… as I point out in the text to which you refer. To quote:

      “With a shorter focal length you can move closer and include a much wider angle of background behind your primary subject and make the background seem smaller and more distant. With a long lens you may be able to step back and include foreground objects in the frame; with a wide-angle you can move up in front of those subjects and exclude them. With a zoom lens you can carefully and precisely fine-tune these relationships so that they are exactly the way you want them in your composition.”

      Changing focal length does alter the apparent relative sizes of objects in the scene when combined, as I describe in my post, with changes in distance to subject. That’s precisely the scenario I describe and precisely the advantage I I’m calling attention to.

      In actual practice, the combination of focal length and distance-to-subject (and other factors) is often determined by intelligent guesses plus trail and error on the scene. For example, I may discover that my initial thinking leaves some distracting element (say a bright spot) in the background. If I cannot eliminate it by moving up/down, left/right I might try to back up and use a longer focal length that positions the primary subject about the same in the composition but which also narrows the area included in the background.

      Dan

  2. The prime versus zoom question is yet another one where compromises are always present, and where each photographer has to determine which costs and benefits play out best in his/her photography.

    I’ve long used both, and for a long time I felt that primes provided image quality advantages that could make a significant different in my photographic prints, thus making the loss of flexibility and the increased complexity of switching sense more often worth it in some cases.

    My personal view has changed or perhaps evolved recently. Today the best zoom lenses produce truly excellent image quality. While a prime might measure better, the zooms are so good that even careful observers would not be able to sort large prints based on whether they were shot with zooms or primes. As an example, there are quite a few reports that the image quality from the Canon EFS 16-35mm f/4L IS (which I have) can rival that of the Canon 17mm and 24mm T/S lenses (which I do not have) in many landscape shooting situations. I know for certain that I have not sharpness issues in very large prints that I make from photographs made on a full frame DSLR using a range of Canon L zooms.

    In my view (and “your mileage may vary”) the image quality advantages of primes for many kinds of photography are more theoretical than real. Yes, they may measure slightly sharper, but a) this makes little or no difference in prints and b) in can actually work against you.

    Let me explain that last point. Let’s say that you have an excellent 24mm prime and an excellent 35mm prime, both of which measure slightly better than the 16-35mm f/4L IS on the test bench at those focal lengths. As long as you shoot at those particular focal lengths, the optical performance of the primes may slightly exceed that of the zoom. (Though I still think that the difference will be insignificant in a print.) However, I often want to use focal length as a method of carefully controlling composition, particularly in regards to controlling the relative sizes and other aspects of subject, foreground, and background — and it is rare that the ideal composition for me is at exactly 24mm or 35mm. Let’s say that the ideal works out to be 29mm. With the zoom I “crop in camera” and still get the very same excellent image quality at 29mm. With the prime I must either compromise my composition to make it “work” at 24mm or 35mm, or I must shoot at 35mm and crop in post. Cropping in post only degrades any IQ advantage of the prime, diminishing or even reversing any advantage it had over the zoom

    I still use primes for certain purposes. There are a few situations in which I want the very narrow depth of field of a f/1.4 lens, and that is definitely a job for a prime. In addition, when doing street photography I usually want to work fast with less time spent considering all aspects of composition, and here a prime may let me respond more quickly, given that I have removed the variable of focal length from the decisions.

    That brings us back to where we started. Each person needs to come to his or her own decisions about these things, and the decisions need to be made in the context of one’s own photography. What works well for me may not work so well for you.

    Good luck with your decisions!

    Dan

  3. My biggest bugbears are corner softness and chromatic aberration.

    Good Prime lenses have these down to a minimum, and often in a reasonably light package. I would be interested to hear which zooms are remotely comparable to good primes.

    If you know that there are one or two specific focal lengths that you like to use then surely one or two good Prime lenses is the more rational choice. Apart from the consistent image quality over the whole frame the overall weight is likely to be less, maximum apertures will be greater, and the weight of the outfit is likely to be less.

    When I shot film I used a 35mm PC lens with a NIkon F3 some 90% of the time, and when I used a Leica M6 for a few years I used only the 35mm f/2 for everything. I never felt very restricted.

    With the massive pixel counts of current DSLRs, and the potential for cropping without reducing the quality hugely, we have even less reason to carry very long (and heavy lenses … whether primes or zooms). It makes the one or two Prime lens kit very practical in a way that it wasn’t when DSLRs shot at 4Mp or 6Mp.

    If I am wrong about this, please tell me where and how.

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