Focusing On Focal Lengths
One of the questions asked most frequently at my seminars is, What’s the most desirable focal length for landscape photography? I always answer that I use all focal lengths, and I tend to use the extremes—long telephotos and extreme wide angles—quite often. It’s all about perspective. If we can show the scene to the viewer in a different way than they see it on a day-to-day basis, there just might be a reason for them to look at our pictures.

I choose wide-angle lenses to expand the depth and put emphasis on the foreground. This allows me to choose a strong subject, like a group of flowers, and place it in the foreground of its environment, perhaps a plain leading to mountains in the distance. The result shows not only my beautiful subject, but a sense of its larger place.

Used in landscape photography, telephotos place the emphasis where it should be. I call this technique "optical extraction." The idea is to look around the landscape and see what grabs your attention. Call out that detail with your telephoto, eliminating distracting elements around it. An example might be beautiful light on a distant peak, where all the darker forest around it is unnecessary and distracting.

The technique requires practice. Photographers must know the field of view of their lenses and train themselves to see the landscape as the lenses would. The image of Mt. McKinley is interesting as an overall shot, but an optical extraction with a Canon 100-400mm zoom set to 320mm put the emphasis on the peak and clouds above it.

Each landscape offers many possibilities for interpretation, and the wide range of lenses available gives photographers all the tools we need. Which is the most desirable focal length? It’s the one that captures your own vision.

Cave Photography

I’d like to take pictures inside a cave, where there’s light on one side but not on the other. There are rapids running through the rocks in the cave. What suggestions do you have for solving the lighting problem?
Charline
Via the Internet

Whether the available light is incandescent within the cave or sunlight is coming through an opening, you have the same problem: contrast. Exposing for the bright areas will leave the shadow areas completely devoid of detail. This is a perfect situation to employ all the possibilities of High Dynamic Range found in Photoshop CS2 and CS3 and Photomatix software.

Use a tripod, and make a series of exposures starting with an exposure for the brightest area, and in one-stop increments, lengthen your exposure (shutter speeds only) until you’re capturing information in the darker areas of the cave. Process this series of exposures in one of the software programs. The result will be an image that gives you far more detail in the bright and shadowed areas than has ever been possible before. The water running through the cave will appear to be blurred, suggesting its motion.

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