How do you decide which DSLR lens to use when tak­ing travel or land­scape pho­tos? Do you go by focal length because you like to shoot wide or get tight on your sub­ject? I wish that I could choose one style or the other, because my back is killing me from car­ry­ing around too much glass when I take a vaca­tion. I almost always travel with the Nikon Trifecta:

1. Nikon 14-​24mm f/2.8
2. Nikon 24-​70mm f/2.8
3. Nikon 70-​200mm f/2.8

Believe me, they’re all won­der­ful lenses. You can check out my reviews of each one and know that I love every­thing about these lenses, except car­ry­ing them. I should save myself some has­sle and get the Nikon 28-​300m for travel. Of course, the same issue applies because you’re still faced with the same choice. What focal length do you choose?

Choos­ing a Focal Length

This deci­sion isn’t really a mat­ter of decid­ing whether to use a Prime (fixed focal length) lens or a Zoom lens. It’s about the rea­son we choose a par­tic­u­lar focal length. The eas­i­est way to make that choice is to deter­mine your shoot­ing posi­tion and decide on the com­po­si­tion you want. The focal length has to give you either the width or the reach to make that com­po­si­tion work. Those deci­sions are rather easy.

There are other cre­ative issues to con­sider when you choose your focal length. Every lens has dis­tor­tion that impacts the final image. My Nikon 14-​24mm lens is an ultra wide-​angle lens that can gen­er­ate some seri­ous bow­ing, caus­ing build­ings to lean dra­mat­i­cally into the cen­ter of the frame. On the other end of the focal length spec­trum, tele­photo cam­era lenses cre­ate com­pres­sion — mak­ing objects appear closer together than they appear when viewed by the naked eye.

You can use these kinds of per­spec­tive dis­tor­tion for cre­ative effect. In fact, you see them used in movies all the time. Have you ever watched a chase scene where the car was dri­ving very fast and seemed close, but took for­ever to get to the point of action? Maybe two cars seem to be zip­ping around very close to each other, so close they could crash? That’s lens com­pres­sion at work. It fools your eye into think­ing that things are much more dan­ger­ous than they really are.

DSLR Lens Com­pres­sion Example

I had a chance to put my focal length choices to the test dur­ing a trip to the Oak Avenue at the Worm­sloe Plan­ta­tion near Savan­nah, GA. It’s a dirt road with lines of oak trees on both sides that seem to go on for­ever. Great place if you like con­verg­ing lines. Since the width between the rows of trees had quite a bit of room, I started off using my Nokon 24-​70mm lens. Here’s an exam­ple at 24mm.

I stopped at var­i­ous points along the Oak Avenue and took mul­ti­ple shots with this lens, rang­ing from 24mm to 70mm and points in between. To be hon­est, I was really dis­ap­pointed with all of my images. Look­ing at the shot above, you can see the prob­lem. The wide-​angle empha­sizes the point where I’m stand­ing and dimin­ishes the point of con­ver­gence in the dis­tance. In other words, this photo makes it look like I’m in the place to be and that road is just going nowhere interesting.

You can see plenty of spac­ing between the oak trees and the sky above. How­ever, noth­ing about this photo really grabs you and makes you want to travel down that road. I needed a change in per­spec­tive. Now let’s look at the oak avenue through a 200mm focal length.

Now we have some real changes in the image. Notice how the trees seem much closer together? That’s the lens com­pres­sion elim­i­nat­ing space between objects. You may also notice that you don’t see the open sky above in this image. That’s because our longer focal length doesn’t have the same wide angle of view. It’s look­ing down the road, not all around it. That lim­ited angle of view and lens com­pres­sion forces your eye to the point at the end of the road. Sud­denly, that’s the place to be.

In this image, the trees cre­ate a canopy above and walls on the side. Your senses tell you there’s only one way to go, and your eye fol­lows the path. By clos­ing off those gaps in the wide-​angle image, we’ve also elim­i­nated bright spots that could dis­tract the eye from the focal point of the photo — the end of the road.

You can shoot some­thing like this with a a DSLR lens of any focal length, but your focal length deci­sion can have a dra­matic impact on your results.