In 2019, I set off on a photography trip to Canada, a journey I had been dreaming about for years. The Canadian Rockies had long been on my bucket list, and when the trip finally became reality, I thought I already knew exactly how I wanted to photograph them.
Back then I believed that a big trip demanded new camera gear. A few weeks before departure, I bought a new ultra-wide zoom lens. If there was ever a place that demanded dramatic wide-angle landscapes, surely it was Canada. Towering mountains, turquoise lakes, endless forests, and vast skies seemed perfectly suited to a lens designed to capture as much of the scene as possible.
When it arrived, I was immediately impressed. It was sharp, lightweight, and seemed perfectly suited to the sweeping landscapes I imagined photographing. Before long, I’d convinced myself it was the only lens I really needed for the trip.
Looking back now, I realise I became slightly obsessed with it. It was new, exciting, and I left it on my camera for almost the entire journey. My standard zoom barely came out at all. At the time, I genuinely believed ultra-wide lenses were the best landscape lenses. Why would I want to zoom in when Canada offered such wide and epic landscapes?
The trip began in Vancouver, a city framed by water, forest, and mountains. I spent hours exploring Stanley Park and photographing the skyline across the harbour, always through the ultra-wide lens. I never once considered swapping for my standard lens and zooming to isolate distant mountains or compress the layers of the city. My approach was already fixed – the ultra-wide was king.
Leaving the glass towers of the city behind, we headed east towards the Rockies, stopping at Bridal Veil Falls along the way. Here, the lens felt completely at home. Foreground logs, rushing water, and towering trees all fitted comfortably into a single frame. Standing there, it felt like exactly the right lens for the scene.
By the time we reached the Icefields Parkway, with glaciers hanging above the road and mountains stretching to every horizon, the lens rarely left my camera.
Driving through the Rockies was one of those rare experiences that exceeds expectations. Sometimes we’d pull into a lay-by with no viewpoint or sign, simply because the mountains looked impossible to ignore. We’d stand beside the road in silence for a few minutes before climbing back into the car and carrying on. The scale was difficult to comprehend.
Banff and Jasper offered endless opportunities for the ultra-wide lens. Rivers and waterfalls seemed to suit it perfectly, and I was genuinely impressed by the image quality. Yet every so often, as I reviewed photographs on the back of my camera, something felt slightly off. The images didn’t quite capture the scale of the mountains in front of me.
At the time, I assumed the problem was my composition. Perhaps I hadn’t found strong enough foregrounds, or maybe the photographs simply didn’t do the scene justice on a small camera screen. It never occurred to me that the real issue wasn’t how I was composing the images, but that I had become so committed to one focal length that I wasn’t considering any alternatives.
That feeling stayed with me throughout the trip, although I couldn’t quite explain it at the time. It was only later, looking back through the photographs on a much larger screen at home, that I understood what had been bothering me. The mountains often appeared smaller than I remembered. Lakes dominated the frame. Valleys stretched across large portions of the composition. The photographs contained everything I saw, yet somehow communicated less of what I’d felt.
I don’t think the lens was the problem. It performed brilliantly throughout the trip. The problem was that I became more focused on using it than on choosing it. The gear shaped my attention more than the landscape itself.
Looking back through my images, I could see other possibilities I’d overlooked: mountain layers that would have suited a telephoto lens, forest details that deserved isolation, and moments where compression would have communicated scale more effectively than simply including everything.
I noticed something else. My favourite images taken with the ultra-wide lens weren’t successful just because they were wide. They worked because the composition was strong. Clear subjects, visual balance, and a sense of intention mattered far more than focal length.
If I returned to Canada today, I suspect I would photograph it very differently. The ultra-wide would still come with me, but I would give just as much attention to using a standard zoom or a telephoto lens. Rather than trying to include everything, I would look for relationships within the landscape. I would isolate layers, pick out patterns, and use longer focal lengths to express scale rather than simply breadth.
Every focal length tells a different story, and part of learning as a photographer is understanding which story a scene is asking for.
When I think back to Canada now, I remember standing beneath mountains that felt impossibly large, watching glacial rivers carve through valleys, and pulling over repeatedly just to take it all in. The photographs are reminders of those moments, but also of where I was as a photographer at the time.
In many ways, the trip taught me that landscape photography has far less to do with fitting everything into the frame than I once believed. Choosing a focal length isn’t just about how much of the landscape you can include. It’s about deciding what deserves to be there, and what doesn’t.