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Features

Capture Fabulous Fall Landscapes with These Great Lenses

Brett Day
No Comments
09/04/2020
5 Mins read
Brett Day The Phoblographer Canon RF 15-35mm f2.8 L IS USM Product Shot

The fall landscapes you’ll capture with these lenses will be your best yet.

It’s almost here! Soon crisp air will surround us, pumpkin spice everything will be in our faces, and gorgeous fall colors will amaze us. All photographers want to make beautiful fall landscape images. If you want to capture these landscapes and do them justice, you’re going to need lenses that are up to the task. In this roundup, we’ll take a quick look at some beautiful lenses on various platforms that will make your fall landscapes come to life.

fall landscapes

Fall landscapes (in my opinion) are the absolute best. We can see the world changing before us, and the palette of beautiful colors that present themselves are magical. If you want to capture this natural beauty, you’re going to need lenses that are good enough to portray the intricate details of your scene. You’ll also need glass that can produce colors that jump out of the image. All the lenses we’ve included in this roundup are exceptional in just about every way. If you want to create the best fall landscapes ever, take a closer look at the lenses we’ve listed below.

Rokinon 14mm f2.8 AF

sony e mount

Here are the pros and cons from our full review:

Pros

  • Sharp output
  • Accurate autofocus in most situations
  • The clear, crisp color that we’ve come to expect from Rokinon
  • Bokeh when needed
  • Weather sealing

Cons

  • We still really are wondering why Rokinon chose to make this lens for DSLRs
  • A few inconsistencies with the focus

Buy now Canon EF: $599

Buy now Canon RF: $699

Buy now Nikon F: $575

Buy now Sony E: $599

IRIX 15mm f2.4 FireFly

fall landscape photography

Here are the pros and cons from our full review:

Pros

  • Weather sealing
  • Fairly lightweight
  • Accurate focusing depth of field markers
  • Sharp optics
  • Innovative features like the ability to lock the focus with a separate ring

Cons

  • Focusing communication with a Sony FE camera via a Metabones adapter wasn’t the absolute best

Buy now Canon EF: $424.95

Buy now Nikon F: $424.95

Buy now Pentax K: $424.95

Sigma 16mm f1.4 DC DN Contemporary

sony e mount

Here are the pros and cons from our full review:

Pros

  • Fast aperture
  • Weather sealing to a point
  • Fast autofocus performance for the most part
  • Nice bokeh
  • Sharp, surprisingly sharp

Cons

  • To be honest, nothing

Buy now Canon EF-M: $419.99

Buy now Micro Four Thirds: $399

Buy now Sony: $399

Sony 20mm f1.8 G

Fall Landscapes

Here are the pros and cons from our full review:

Pros

  • Nice and light (0.82lbs)
  • The small footprint makes it easy to carry around for long periods
  • Super fast, silent focusing
  • Weather sealing
  • Very sharp optics
  • Colors rendered are pleasing, and the bokeh isn’t too shabby either
  • The aperture ring can be de-clicked so that it can be used for video
  • The large, smooth manual focus ring

Cons

  • A slight amount of purple fringing is evident in some images

Buy now: $898

Fall Landscapes

Pro Tip: Many people assume landscape photography is easy to master. That couldn’t be further from the truth. A lot of hard work and effort goes into finding great locations, and knowing how to compose a scene is vitally important. If you’re new to this genre but would like to try your hand at creating fall landscapes, check out this guide. Here you’ll learn everything there is to know about how to produce jaw-dropping images. Arm yourself with knowledge, and make the most of this great time of the year.

Fujifilm 8-16mm f2.8 R LM WR

Fall Landscapes

Here are the pros and cons from our full review:

Pros

  • Solid image quality
  • Fast autofocus, which is expected
  • Lets you handhold it to very low shutter speeds due to the reciprocal rule of shutter speeds
  • Weather sealed

Cons

  • This lens is pretty darned expensive

Buy now: $1,999.95

Olympus 7-14mm f2.8 PRO (Micro Four Thirds)

Fall Landscapes

Here are the pros and cons from our full review:

Pros

  • Very sharp
  • Relatively low distortion
  • The small form factor that will make this lens almost permanently attached to your camera.
  • f2.8 is awesome for light-gathering abilities
  • Fast-focusing
  • Weather sealing
  • Super wide landscapes and buildings at one end while street photography ready at the other end

Cons

  • The bulbous front element is easily affected by the rain or any other sort of precipitation that you take this lens and camera out into

Buy now: $1,249

Tamron SP 15-30mm f2.8 Di VC USD G2

Fall Landscapes

Here are the pros and cons from our full review:

Pros

  • Fast maximum aperture of f2.8
  • Durable construction
  • Ultra-wide focal length range suitable for everything from Architecture, Real Estate, Landscape, Street, and Travel Photography
  • Includes vibration compensation, Tamron’s name for their optical stabilization tech
  • Moisture-resistant construction
  • Canon version includes an integrated filter holder on the lens mount side

Cons

  • Considerably heavy
  • Chunky in size
  • Noticeable distortion (although correctible)
  • Traditional filters aren’t supported, the front of the lens lacks filter threads, and the front element is also convex and protrudes significantly

Buy now Canon EF: $1,199

Buy now Nikon F: $1,199

Panasonic 16-35mm f4 PRO

Fall Landscapes

Here are the pros and cons from our full review:

Pros

  • Small
  • Amazingly lightweight for an L mount lens
  • Sharp optics
  • Weather sealing
  • Nice feeling in the hand

Cons

  • We wish it had a faster aperture, but understand why it doesn’t

Buy now: $1,497.99

Fall Landscapes

Pro Tip: One of the best tools for landscape photography is a stable tripod. Landscape photography is all about capturing the details, and to do that your camera needs to be held firmly in place for the sensor to resolve as much detail as possible. Did you know that you don’t have to spend a fortune to get a great tripod? Take this one, for example. It’s as sturdy as a mountain goat and will keep your camera and lens still and secure while you work on your fall landscapes. It’s priced nicely too.

Sigma 14-24mm f2.8 Art DG

Fall Landscapes

Here are the pros and cons from our full review:

Pros

  • Weather sealing
  • Solid overall image quality
  • Autofocus works pretty damned well
  • Versatile range
  • Price is right

Cons

  • We wish that it had lens flare, that would be epic!

Buy now Canon EF: $1,197.80

Buy now Nikon F: $1,099

Sony 12-24mm f2.8 GM

Fall Landscapes

Here are the pros and cons from our full review:

Pros

  • Excellent overall build quality
  • Weather sealing
  • Speedy autofocus
  • A fast, constant aperture (f2.8) across the focal range is always nice
  • Flare and chromatic aberrations are controlled very well
  • Uses drop-in filters that sit in front of the rear element
  • Great image quality overall
  • Renders nice, natural colors

Cons

  • Some distortion on the wide end but it’s expected
  • It’s bigger and heavier than the competition

Buy now: $2,998

Nikon NIKKOR Z 14-30mm f4 S (Nikon Z Mount)

nikon z mount lenses 14-30mm

Here are the pros and cons from our full review:

Pros

  • Lightweight and compact
  • Can accept threaded filters without needing to resort to cumbersome (and often expensive) filter mounting systems
  • Ultra-wide focal length
  • Weather sealing

Cons

  • Maximum aperture of f4
  • While the retracting mechanism keeps the lens smaller when not in use, it’s an added step that gets in the way of you taking the shot

Buy now: $1,296.95

Canon RF 15-35mm f2.8 L IS USM

Here are the pros and cons from our full review:

Pros

  • Five stops of image stabilization that works really well
  • Plenty of weather sealing
  • Wonderful overall build quality
  • Focuses very quickly
  • Images are ridiculously sharp
  • Great color reproduction
  • Silky smooth manual focus ring

Cons

  • A fair amount of vignetting at f2.8 and 15mm
  • A little more distortion than we would like to see, but easily fixed in post
  • The zoom ring is just a little too stiff
  • While the build quality is great, the plastic feels a little cheap
  • No gap between the zoom and focusing rings means you’ll turn the wrong one often

Buy now: $2,199

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