Perspective

Normally when you take a photo, you lift the camera to your eye, compose your image and press the shutter button. This type of photos, taken at eye level, reflect the way we see the world every single day of our life. And though they can result in very nice pictures, it’s not always the most interesting point of view.

A slight change of perspective can make a big difference. Instead of taking all your photos standing, you could try to kneel down and see how that already changes the look on things around you.

You can also lie down on the ground to see the world from a frog’s perspective or, if there’s anything (stable) around, you can climb up to look at the world from a bird’s perspective.

When taking pictures of smaller subjects, you will get better results if you lower your camera. For example, when photographing children, lower your camera to their eye level.

You can use your camera to create the illusion that two objects with a different size at a different distances from the lens are at the same scale. For this you need a large depth of field so you have both subjects in focus at the same time.

To achieve this effect, you use a wide-angle setting and compose your photo in such a way that both subjects seem to be standing next to each other.

You can do this with point-n-shoot cameras since most have a rather large depth of field. With a DSLR you will have to change the settings so you’ll have a really small aperture.

With digital, there is no cost involved with taking photos. This gives you the opportunity to take photos without actually looking at your subject through the viewfinder. For instance, you can hold your camera up high, aim in the general direction of the subject and take several exposures. Afterwards, you just delete the ones you don’t like and keep the ones that did work out.

To learn how different perspectives can work with or against you, you can do following exercise:

• look around you and pick out a subject
• point your camera at it, make a nice composition and take a photo
• now recompose, and forget about all the rules when you do this (no rule of thirds!):
  • look for an original angle
  • cut off parts of your subject
  • climb on your subject
  • turn it around
  • ...
• take several photos of these new compositions
• check on your computer how they compare with the first photo you took

When tilting your camera to make compositions at unusual angles, make sure it looks that you meant it to be that way. Nothing looks worse than a water surface that is just a few degrees off level.

For more information on this topic, you can also listen to the following TFTTF shows:

TFTTF03 - FTR / Perspective
TFTTF50 - Anniversary show
TFTTF73 - Think outside the box