 Once again, this is an area where you can produce powerful images with virtually any lens. Great landscape photos can be made with almost any lens, wide-angle or telephoto, depending upon whether you are trying to isolate and visually "compress" part of a scene, or show a wide, sweeping vista. One lens that's perfect for a wide range of shots is the versatile 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens, which covers the full zoom range from wide-angle to moderate telephoto with excellent image quality.
It's a fact that selecting a smaller lens aperture – "stopping down" – produces better sharpness from foreground to background, and therefore is often desirable in landscape and scenic photos. With smaller apertures, though, come slower shutter speeds, making the camera more susceptible to movement if you're not using a solid tripod. Image Stabilization comes to the rescue here, reducing the effect of camera shake and providing the photographer the option of shooting at smaller apertures even in overcast conditions or at dawn or dusk. The 28-135mm's Image Stabilization makes it an excellent choice for this kind of shooting. You can also find Canon's Image Stabilization on lenses like the 75-300mm f/4-5.6 IS, and professional lenses like the 300mm f/4.0L IS, 100-400 f/4.5-5.6L IS, and the superb 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM.
One thing that often separates a great wide-angle scenic photo from a good one is what's in the picture's foreground. Experienced scenic shooters know that putting something in the foreground -- flowers, foliage, textured ground, etc. – visually "leads" the viewer's eye into the rest of the photo. The closer a wide-angle lens can focus, the more powerful the results can be. Zoom lenses like the 28-105mm f/4-5.6 USM can focus as close as 19 inches (0.48m), making them very useful if you're willing to make the effort to get close to something. And fixed focal length wide-angle lenses like the 28mm f/1.8 USM can get as close as 9 inches (0.25m), a significant improvement.
Two final things to consider, at opposite extremes on the lens scale. There is probably no single thing that will change the look of your photography more than an ultra-wide angle lens – especially when you get close to something in the foreground, as mentioned above. Lenses 24mm and wider provide a visual power nothing else in photography can equal, and Canon has options in both zooms and fixed focal lengths (as wide as 14mm!) to let you explore this. Sometimes, though, a telephoto lens is the right approach to landscape and scenics. Even a long super-telephoto lens, such as a 300mm or longer, may be the right way to isolate part of a scene and rivet the viewer's attention on just that area that originally caught your eye. Whether you prefer a zoom like the 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS, or a professional fixed focal length lens like the 200mm f/2.8L II USM or 400mm f/5.6L USM, Canon EOS photographers have more options in telephotos than users of any competitive brand.
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