The Best Landscape Lens

When you're trying to find the best landscape lens, you should only be considering one type: wide-angle.

Wide angle lenses capture a very wide field of view, and are ideally suited for capturing all of the magnificent scenery in front of you.

The best landscape lenses are also exceptionally sharp, so that every detail is clearly rendered.

The Impact of Wide Angle

Why are wide-angle lenses the preferred lens for landscape photography?

The answer is simple: because they draw the viewer in.

When you attach a wide angle lens to your digital SLR camera, you'll notice that it is showing you a view of EVERYTHING that your eyes can see.

If you tilt one of these lenses down too far, you can even capture the tips of your feet at the very bottom of the image.

The neat part about viewing a beautiful landscape captured with a wide angle lens is that it makes you feel like you are part of the photo. A wide-angle view gives the viewer the impression that they are standing right next to the photographer.

By way of comparison, standard and telephoto lenses are better at focusing on the details of the scene, and are not as good at capturing the "big picture".

The DSLR Cropping Effect

The focal length of what's considered a "wide angle" lens has changed since the introduction of the digital SLR.

This is because many digital SLR cameras have a crop factor, which eliminates parts of the image and creates an artificial zoom effect.

For example, a 28mm lens is a fairly wide angle lens when you attach it to a standard film SLR camera. However, this same lens on a digital SLR frames images more like a 42mm lens - no longer wide angle.

This means that a wide angle lens for a digital SLR must be VERY wide angle. In many cases, the best landscape lenses for a digital SLR camera are going to start around 11mm (16.5mm when cropped) and can go all the way up to 15mm (22.5mm when cropped).

Color and Clarity

This may come as a surprise, but the lens that you choose can affect both the COLOR and CLARITY of your images, regardless of the camera you attach them to.

For example, a cheap lens attached to the high-end Nikon D7000 may yield images that are hard to tell apart from a high-quality lens attached to the (significantly cheaper) Nikon D3200.

Since the lens is responsible for focusing the image onto the camera's sensor, the glass inside of the lens must be precise.

Here's the thing: light doesn't always bend in exactly the same way.

Cheap lenses just let the light pass through and do nothing to correct and re-focus errant beams of light. Expensive lenses are specifically designed to ensure that the image that winds up striking the camera's sensor is clean, clear and perfectly sharp.

If you really want your landscape photos to have impact, you're going to need to get the best glass that you're able to afford.

If you've got a Canon or Nikon digital SLR camera, these lenses are easy to identify: Canon's pro-quality lenses all bear the "L" designation while Nikon's include the letters "ED". Find a lens with either an L or an ED as part of the name, and you'll know that you're getting a great lens.

Zoom vs. Prime

When zoom lenses were first being developed, they didn't have the clarity and accuracy of lenses that didn't zoom (also called prime, or fixed focal length).

Since prime lenses didn't have to zoom in an out, none of the lens elements had to move, which made prime lenses more precise.

Today this is much less of an issue. The quality of zoom lenses has improved significantly, so that the images captured by them are hard to distinguish from those captured with a prime.

Since this is the case, you'll notice that many of the best landscape lenses that I have selected below all fall into a category of lenses called "wide-angle zooms".

I recommend the wide-angle zooms rather than the static primes simply because the zoom offers you a little more flexibility when you're trying to get just the right composition for your landscape.

Best Canon Landscape Lens

Canon EF 17-40mm f/4 L USM

Best Nikon Landscape Lens

Tokina 12-24mm f/4 AT-X Pro DXII

Best Olympus Landscape Lens

Olympus Zuiko 12-60mm f/2.8-4 SWD

Best Pentax Landscape Lens

Tamron 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5 SP Di II LD IF

Best Sony Landscape Lens

Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 ATX Pro DX