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Sometimes you can walk away from a location with the gnawing feeling that you didn’t quite find the best angle. It happened to me in Iceland here. I took lots of shots of the famous Kirkjufellsfoss mountain and waterfalls, but it was a struggle to capture the waterfalls and mountain from my position. I simply couldn’t frame the foreground waterfall without leaving the mountain looking puny in the distance, when in the flesh it felt huge and imposing.
This is often the case when shooting landscapes with a wide angle lens. We want to capture the details in the foreground, but the exaggerated perspective you get with a wide angle can leave the distant elements in the scene looking small and insignificant. The only way to make the distant details larger in the frame is to use a different lens or move closer to them, but this can mess up your foreground composition.
There’s a solution to the problem that you may not have thought of: focal length blending. For this we need to capture two frames – one wide, the other slightly zoomed in – then blend them together afterwards. Some might call it cheating, but it can result in better-balanced landscapes that might even convey how a place felt at the time more effectively than the exaggerated wide-angle version. It’s not a difficult editing task but it can work wonders on landscapes. The two frames are taken moments apart so the light remains consistent, which makes blending them together a simple task in Affinity Photo.
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