What lens do I need for landscape photography?

For landscapes, I'd start with a wide zoom. Around 16-35mm on full frame, or 10-24mm on APS-C, gives you big skies and strong foregrounds. It's the classic choice.

A standard zoom, 24-70mm or similar, covers the scenes that don't need going wide. A telephoto zoom, 70-200mm or longer, is underrated. It picks out layers of hills, a lone tree, or light on a distant ridge.

You don't need a fast lens. You'll usually shoot between f/8 and f/11 for depth and sharpness, so an f/4 zoom is a great choice: lighter and cheaper than the f/2.8 versions. Avoid stopping down past about f/16, because diffraction softens the image.

For the reasoning behind these picks, see Landscape.

Written by Claude from this site's pages.