Is a zoom more important in a telephoto than a wide angle?

[Tom Pinchenzo]

I’m talking about landscapes specifically. It feels like with wide angle compositions, you just get up close to your foreground interest - you might want to include a bit more or less background in; but with a telephoto landscape the composition is more dependent on the focal length (your subject is generally further away with telephoto landscapes and so more difficult to ‘zoom with your feet’.

For more context I’m asking the question because I chose a telephoto zoom lens over a prime (with help from advice on this forum) as I thought conpositional flexibility was more important than image quality; but I feel I could get away with a prime wide angle. I like the idea of primes for their better quality, cost, speed and lightness.

Obviously a £1500 fast wide angle zoom would be ideal but that’s not an option!

Any thoughts?

 

[ancient_mariner]

It took a little while to uderstand what your title meant - I think you mean to ask 'is the ability to change focal length more important when using longer focal lengths or shorter ones for landscape work?'.

IMO it depends.

Zooming changes perspective and depth of field, whether you're using WA or tele. I would suggest it matters less for tele landscape shots because, past a certain point, perspective and depth of field won't change much if you crop, where as for WA the actual focal length you use can change both those parameters very considerably. There's more to using a WA lens that 'getting it all in' and zooming with your feet can never compensate for the change in perspective that altering focal length creates. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using a prime, and some of my favourite photos have come with primes, but they will force you to fit your image to their constraints, especially at the wider end, that fitting creatively around what you want to shoot.

Hope that's useful.

 

[sk66]

For any given image there is usually only one optimal FL, Ap, and SS (or a very small range). But with landscapes, if you have a wider FL you can generally crop the image to simulate the effect of a narrower FL.