One of the best ways to bring intimacy to your landscape photos is to shoot with a telephoto lens.

I’ve written about it before but a telephoto’s ability to bring you into the landscape enables you to feel like you are RIGHT there.

And for the last week or so I’ve been lucky enough to play with the XF 100-400mm F4.5-5.6 R OIS WR on loan from Fujifilm Australia.

And boy does it bring you in! I really hadn’t thought how much of a difference it would make from my XF 55-200mm f/3.5-4.8 R LM OIS.

I really wanted to put this beauty of a lens to the test in harsh light conditions. I don’t know what made me choose to do that, but I just went with my gut. And it didn’t disappoint.

This little area of Curlewis is one of my favourite parts of the Bellarine Peninsula. Just a simple road, lined either side with farms and smallholdings, homes to sheep, cattle and horses alike.

I packed up my gear, and jumped in the car just as the sun was winding down for the day and drove up and down this favourite road of mine until the light was just right along with the right field-inhabitants too!

I did a u-turn (probably the tenth in half an hour – can only imagine what people who lived around there thought of this car going up and down!) and double-backed to this gorgeous field of furry friends.

I was really happy to find (after about 15 minutes of supreme sheep eye to human eye interrogation) that this flock didn’t mind terribly that I was hanging around the edge of their field.

Having a telephoto like the XF 100-400mm allowed me to really capture the characters of some these sheep without scaring them off. As you can see, one really had quite the character!

I was really surprised at the lovely depth of field that could be achieved with the lens, which helped me achieve that feeling that I was actually in the field with them, ensconced in my own long grass!

What I loved the most about this lens was how sharp it was at it’s longest focal length. I didn’t have to do much at all in Lightroom to make them just that little bit crisper.

And of course, I couldn’t help but get some shots of wheat ebbing and flowing in the wind. I thought the lens was going to be really slow at picking up on this small details to focus in on whilst they were moving in the wind, but I was pleasantly surprised at how little shots I had with motion blur at the end of the shoot.