What equipment is the best for landscape photography?

When you are ready to pack your bags and walk around, a digital camera is already a must. If you just want to simply record what you see and get, then all digital cameras can, even two or three million pixel camera phones are good visual recording tools. If you want to shoot more wonderful scenery films, you must prepare the equipment. The following are my carefully recommended equipment suggestions for landscape photography, hoping to help you.

Compared with film, landscape photography is the last vast pastoral that film sticks to. At present, there are still many landscape photographers who insist on using film.

But the most important reason why landscape photographers insist on using film is often to record more details with large and medium format cameras. In addition, some landscape photographers use film because of their habit. They are used to controlling the color characteristics and tone characteristics by choosing different types of reversal films.

As far as the imaging quality of mainstream digital cameras is concerned, it has actually reached or exceeded the imaging quality of traditional 135 system film. The top 135 digital SLR already has the imaging quality of a medium format camera.

In terms of resolution, it is an indisputable fact that digital surpasses tradition. On the tone level, the 16 bit color scale of RAW electronic film is rich enough. In addition, the exposure latitude of digital camera has surpassed that of reverse film, reaching or even surpassing that of color negative film. On the issue of post-processing, computer is used to replace the darkroom of digital photos, which gives full play to the advantages of digital photos.

In addition, the flexibility of digital photos to facilitate communication is incomparable to traditional films in the Internet age. Many professional photographers can't grasp the impression of some photos with special themes, so they need to get people's feedback through the Internet. People who study landscape photography can't lack communication with their peers.

Because of the advantages of digital camera, it has begun to enter the field of landscape photography on a large scale.

What is the choice of camera? Traveling here? After that, digital cameras helped more and more people step into the palace of landscape photography. Most serious photographers will still choose digital SLR as a tool. Needless to say, the advantages of digital SLR, but the practice of landscape photography tells us that portable digital cameras have their own advantages.

The dust on the image sensor is the biggest disadvantage of digital SLR. At the end of the day's shooting, I took out my laptop to browse the photos and found black spots left by dust and even the shadow of wool, which may be the most annoying problem for digital SLR users. At present, although many manufacturers attach great importance to this problem in the design of digital SLR, it has not been completely solved so far.

There used to be a club called f64. Their idea was to narrow the aperture as much as possible in landscape photography to get the maximum depth of field. This idea is indeed a common practice in many landscape photography subjects. In our commonly used digital SLR system, there is no chance to use an aperture like f64, but f 1 1 and f22 are commonly used.

The aperture of f 1 1 is enough to make tiny dust invisible to the naked eye appear on the CCD/CMOS image sensor, while f22 will tell you that there are hundreds of particles on the seemingly clean image sensor. These indistinguishable particles are very difficult to clean, and there is no perfect solution at present, so they can only be repaired by hand in the later stage. So we can say that the advantages of SLR come at a price, especially in areas where sandstorms are more serious. Comparatively speaking, portable digital cameras with non-replaceable lenses do not have this problem.

For landscape photography, it is often necessary to go through arduous trekking and hiking, and sometimes it is even necessary to bring tents, sleeping bags and cookers. At this time, the portability of portable digital cameras is quite advantageous.

Of course, we are not saying that portable digital cameras are superior to SLR. Digital SLR is still the first choice for landscape photography, but it is not necessary. If your photography is just for self-entertainment and there is no requirement for perfection in the eyes of professional photographers, then a high-end portable digital camera with non-replaceable lenses is also a good choice, such as Sony R- 1 and Fuji S9600.

The choice of lens is the most decisive photographic tool for landscape photography.

The ideal lens configuration is of course to cover all focal lengths, with both zoom and fixed focus, and the larger the aperture, the better. But in reality, we often can't afford such a cost, and we have to recite so many lenses, so we still have to weigh and choose. The choice is mainly based on your own photography habits and preferences, while taking into account your own purchasing power and physical ability to carry equipment.

1. telephoto and wide angle

There is a view that wide angle is suitable for taking scenery and telephoto is suitable for taking portraits. But in fact, landscape photography needs both wide angle and telephoto. Some people compare the wide-angle lens to the conductor of a large symphony and telephoto to the performer of an instrumental solo. Although this statement is not entirely correct, it is more vivid.

Landscape close-up

As the name implies, wide-angle lens can contain more extensive information in landscape photography, so it is more suitable for shooting huge and magnificent scenes. In contrast, telephoto lenses can cut out the most interesting content from messy scenes.

The theme of landscape photography is sometimes composed of a single element, and sometimes it is composed of many elements. In the case of a single element, all kinds of shots can express the theme well as long as the perspective allows, although the performance effect may be exactly the same.

Many very successful landscape photos often have many elements. In the case of many elements, sometimes it needs a wide viewing angle to be inclusive, and sometimes it needs perspective compression to superimpose unrelated elements. At this time, the role of wide-angle lens and telephoto lens in organizing photographic elements is very different, and they often cannot replace each other.

In practice, it is often difficult to use a wide-angle lens, especially a lens with a viewing angle greater than 24 mm, because there is too much information, and various problems are prone to occur in the process of organizing the theme of the photo, such as too many elements and chaotic pictures. The perspective distortion of wide-angle lens itself is often difficult to control, resulting in side effects.

For beginners, telephoto may be more helpful to cultivate observation ability and make it easier to take satisfactory photos, while wide-angle may be a better recording tool and it is more difficult to make good films. In a word, both telephoto and wide angle cannot be neglected in landscape photography, and a zoom lens with a viewing angle equivalent to 135 camera 24 ~ 105 mm may be a good starting point.

High-end fixed-lens digital cameras like Fuji S9600 provide near-perfect focal length selection. Its manual zoom lens covers a focal length of 28 ~ 300 mm, and it can be easily obtained whether it is a grand scene or a beautiful detail sketch in the distance.

2. Large aperture and fixed focus

There is a view that there is no need to emphasize large aperture in wide-angle lens in landscape photography. Although we need to narrow the aperture more in landscape photography, this does not mean that the large aperture lens is not important. In many dim indoor and night light environments, especially in landscape photography in humanistic environment, tripod is helpless, and large aperture lens is a sharp weapon to record specific light atmosphere. Therefore, the large aperture zoom lens of f2.8 will have a wider application environment than the lens of f4.

However, it is difficult for the zoom lens to reach the aperture of f 1.x, which is generally limited to f2.8, so many digital SLR users will choose a fixed-focus lens with a large aperture to cope with the special lighting environment. Different from portrait photography, landscape photographers tend to choose wide-angle fixed-focus lenses, such as 24mm, 28mm and 35mm, which still have enough depth of field when using large aperture to avoid too blurred background. A large aperture fixed-focus wide-angle lens is usually enough.

Use a polarizer

Many landscape photographers are used to twisting a polarizer in front of the camera all the time, especially when the light is good. Polarizer can eliminate diffuse reflection light in the air, improve air permeability, make the blue sky bluer, partially eliminate annoying reflection on the surface of objects, eliminate light spots formed by reflected highlights on the surface of objects, and improve color saturation.

In the sun, polarizer is almost a necessary tool for landscape photography. Another purpose of the polarizer is to be a mirror with medium gray density, which can reduce the exposure time by at least 2 steps. When shooting waterfalls, streams and other subjects, a long exposure can get a blurred effect. A polarizer can help you extend the exposure time by 2 times under strong light, and two polarizers can be screwed together to extend it by more than 4 times.