Nature Photography How To

Most photographers turn to wide-angle lenses when shooting landscape images. But as you’ll see in this quick tutorial, there are times when a longer focal length will deliver superior results.

Danish pro Mads Peter Iversen is one of our favorite nature photographers, and he’s also a great instructor. In this behind-the-scenes episode you’ll watch him capture some beautiful images with a telephoto zoom lens.

After an unusually cold spring, Iversen is eager to embrace the warm summer weather, as he heads out to photograph the rural landscapes of Denmark with a powerful 100-400mm telephoto zoom. And it turns out that a long lens is perfect for his unique, minimalist style of nature photography.

Iversen provides a number of helpful composition tips as he uses his telephoto zoom to photograph a tree in one of Denmark’s distinctive canola fields. He also gets even more intimate with the scene by zooming in even tighter to capture a few flies.

Experimenting with different framing techniques, Iversen shoots one image with a tree in the lower third of the frame, and another with his subject in the upper third of the image. He explains the necessary camera settings and focusing techniques he used to get the shots.

In both of his images, the bright yellow foreground combined with the vivid blue sky results in a beautiful summer effect. He also demonstrates the different results you can achieve by shooting from both a low and a high camera position.

Iversen’s YouTube channel is a great source of landscape photography tips, so be sure and take a look. And don’t miss another tutorial we posted, with a quick editing technique for giving outdoor photographs deep blue skies.