The best Canon lenses for landscape photography

Landscape photography can place you in some unforgiving climates – just ask wilderness photographer and Canon Ambassador Valtteri Hirvonen who regularly shoots in conditions as low as -35°C from his base in northern Finland. "The camera and lenses are tools for me, and I don't baby them, so weatherproofing is important," he says. "The most epic moments happen when the weather isn't perfect – quite the opposite. When there is a storm, when everyone else stays home, that's when the magical moments happen in nature. I want my gear to work in those situations." Radomir Jakubowski is a nature photographer and fellow Canon Ambassador who firmly agrees with Valtteri. "There is nothing more boring than blue sky – I love storms, I love the rain, I love light that changes before your eyes," he says.

Valtteri's go-to lens for landscape photography is the Canon RF 24-70mm F2.8L IS USM, but each of the lenses he owns brings something unique to the table, opening up fresh creative options. Here, Valtteri and Radomir talk us through the contents of their lens kitbags, ranging from wide-angle lenses for capturing a broad field of view to telephoto lenses for isolating small details from a distance. Meanwhile, Mike, an expert on lens technology, explains why these lenses are particularly suited to the landscape genre.

"The Canon RF 24-70mm F2.8L IS USM is a great all-round lens. If you have it, you can survive pretty much any situation. I always have this lens with me and 80% of the time it's the only lens that I use," says Valtteri. "At my favourite focal length of 50mm, I see no quality difference compared with my prime lens – from the centre of the picture to the edges – and f/2.8 is fast enough for most situations. A major bonus is that the RF version of the lens features stabilisation, whereas the EF version does not, yet it remains a similar size and weight."

Telephoto lenses can create new, dramatic ways of capturing a landscape: isolating subjects against a blurred background. This technique comes naturally to Valtteri. "When I'm in my familiar home country, I often reach for a telephoto lens," he says. "Because it's often about discovering new details that interest you within a common scene that you've seen many times."

Mike also suggests the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS III USM lens as an excellent medium-telephoto zoom choice for DSLR shooters. "Most landscape photographers will shoot using a tripod, but if you need to shoot handheld in the field, this lens has a 3.5-stop Image Stabilizer that helps keep pictures sharp," Mike explains. "As in other L-series lenses, the autofocus is powered by a ring-type USM motor that sits around the lens and drives the focusing very quickly. If you want to, you can manually override the autofocus instantly by touching the focusing ring. The lens has a fluorite coating that keeps it clean. If it rains, the water just runs off, without drying and forming hard droplets that affect the image quality."

"Telephoto lenses are not always the most obvious choice for landscapes," says Mike, "but they allow you to change how you view the scene. The Canon RF 100-500mm F4.5-7.1L IS USM lens, especially, enables you to get a perspective of an object that is impossible from other angles. It gives you the ability to compress a landscape like a range of hills, or isolate objects on the horizon – it's not always about big panoramic views."

"Many people would think of this focal range only for sports action and wildlife, but it's also great for landscapes," Mike continues. "It's about looking at landscapes in a different way, isolating areas or details such as groups of trees. One nice feature is the Zoom Touch Adjustment ring, which enables you to adjust tensioning for the zoom, according to the subject you're shooting. It also stops the focal length changing by accident if you tip the lens up or down."

A flagship lens that epitomises the hardiness and technical prowess of Canon's RF range, the Canon RF 15-35mm F2.8L IS USM has become a must-have for wildlife and landscape photographers. "If you need a fast aperture for shooting nightscapes, the Northern Lights, stars and so on, you have to go for the RF 15-35mm F2.8L IS USM," says Radomir.

For Mike, this lens is the obvious high-performance choice. "This is our best performer in the RF range," he explains. "Overall, it's the sharpest edge-to-edge and it has the least distortion. It's got 5-stops of IS, it's fully weather-sealed and the faster aperture allows the user to reduce the shutter speed and ISO to capture astral landscapes without the Earth's rotation blurring the stars."

Mike adds: The selling point of the Canon RF 14-35mm F4L IS USM is its wider field of view and that it features UD [Ultra Low Dispersion] and aspherical elements designed to compensate for a whole host of lens aberrations typical with such a compact wide-angle lens."

Mike still highly recommends the Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L III USM lens for EF users wishing to add a wide-angle zoom to their kitbag. "It's very sharp at all focal lengths and is especially impressive at the 16mm setting when shooting with the lens wide open. Also, the ability to shoot at 16mm gives you the kind of width you don't normally get in a photograph. It's good for scenes with a lot of detail, such as cityscapes, and the broad field of view is similar to what we see with our eyes."

If you're an enthusiast photographer looking to take your landscape photography to the next level, the Canon RF 16mm F2.8 STM is an excellent option. "Traditionally, it's been quite complex to design 16mm lenses for a DSLR, requiring lots of extra glass and expense to get the optical point 16mm from the sensor," says Mike. "But the RF mount has enabled super-fast communication between lens and camera, and a simplified product – making 16mm an affordable option to explore."

The Canon RF 15-30mm F4.5-6.3 IS STM is a great buy for photographers looking to get into landscape work via an affordable zoom. "It's probably one of the cheapest ultra-wide-angles available on the market and it's got 5.5-stops of IS," says Mike.

The ideal focal range for landscape work is 15-30mm, and the impressive level of performance you get for this price opens up new creative possibilities: "Whether that's getting closer to a mountain biker or just going to a more challenging location," adds Mike.

If you use an APS-C mirrorless camera such as the Canon EOS R7 or EOS R10, these entry-level wide-angles for landscapes would be an excellent introduction to the RF lens lineup, delivering the performance you need as your photography skills improve.

The low-cost, multi-purpose, compact and discrete Canon RF 35mm F1.8 MACRO IS STM has suited Valtteri's approach for focusing on individual elements in a scene and pushed him to try new techniques. "When you force yourself to use one focal length, you begin to see things differently," he explains. "For example, it's unusual to have a wide-angle lens that can focus so close. I use it to find really small details in the forest, but you also have a wide shot where you can see the trees in the background. I am always looking for details, something to focus on, I don't always want to show everything I can see."

For landscape photographers looking for a lightweight, affordable 35mm prime lens using the EF mount, Mike suggests the Canon EF 35mm f/2 IS USM, which features 4-stops of image stabilisation, a fast f/2 maximum aperture for shooting when the light starts to drop and a short 0.24m minimum focusing distance for close-up focusing. "The Canon EF 35mm f/2 IS USM is a lovely little lens – compact and lightweight, yet still offering high performance," explains Mike. "This is one of my go-to lenses, its flexibility makes it the ideal travel lens to capture urban or conventional landscapes."