I was intrigued by the title of a recent Fstoppers article - Stop Using a Wide Angle Lens for Landscape Photography - mostly because I only use a wide-angle about 20% of the time, so maybe I'm a bit of an outlier.
The piece was making the point that many landscape photographers default to a wide-angle lens, with the result that they may be missing interesting shots that only a telephoto or mid-range lens would pick up. The article uses a great composite shot - shown above - to illustrate what the wide-angle is seeing while the inset shows what a telephoto from that same position could be seeing.
The article isn't saying one lens is better than the other, but rather that landscape photographers would do well to allow themselves to see potential beyond the wide shot. And I couldn't agree more. In fact, I tend to start with the small elements I'm seeing in the landscape around me, and only "think wide" if something really grabs me.
Here's a recent example: I had driven to the beach and it was cloudy, but nothing that I hadn't shot many times before. I was about to drive off when I noticed some breaks in the cloud that - isolated by a telephoto lens - might make for a nice shot. On the left, you see the shot that I had in my mind when I was surveying the beach, while on the right you can see the wide shot from roughly the same place. The wide shot's nothing to write home about and the break in the clouds is barely visible, but by zooming in I think the break in the cloud takes on more drama.
These are taken straighten out of the camera (I tend to shoot a bit underexposed). I see some nice potential in the telephoto shot - probably will work with that in black and white to bring out more of the drama that I see in it.
