Hikers near Mount Cook, Aoraki National Park, South Island, New Zealand
There’s no better way to give a sense of scale than to incorporate human figures into the shot. I’m shouting instructions across to my wife and brother-in-law to get them to pose in a suitably intrepid manner. The first sunlight of the day is playing across the snow-capped peaks of the Southern Alps, silhouetting my reluctant models. If I were to move back the perspective of the mountains would appear bigger in relation to the figures, but I feel Wendy and Simon would be somewhat lost in the image, and they’re doing a sterling job. Crawling out of your sleeping bag pre-dawn and hiking several miles to stand on a hillock looking in awe while being shouted at by a demanding photographer before breakfast isn’t everyone’s perfect way to start the day. Funny that.
• Fuji GX617, 180mm lens
Distance
I could call this section ‘How to make things look big’, as we’re talking all about scale here. How do you emphasize the size of the Himalayas, for example? Easy, show them in relation to something relatively small that we all know, like a tree. Fine. But if you’re standing at the foot of the tree with it looming over you it looks massive even compared to the towering mountains in the distance. Take a few steps back and the effect is lessened. Come back 100 feet and the tree is still large but not as dominating. Come back a mile and the tree looks dwarfed by the mountains looming over it. It’s only from this distant perspective that we see things at their true size in relation to other features around them. The trouble is, by definition, we have to be a long way back. It’s a view on the world photographers call a long-lens perspective, as that’s the tool we use to emphasize it. Anything longer than about 100mm (in 35mm-format terms) does the job, but the longer the lens the more pronounced the effect.
Carcassonne, Languedoc, France
The Cité of Carcassonne is everyone’s fairytale castle realized. Situated in one of my favourite corners of France, it takes some beating. Every year we seem to end up drifting through this part of the world in a haze of croissants, cassoulet and carafes du vin. I’ve shot the Cité from all angles, up close and personal and from afar. This evening we’ve driven down a farmer’s track and have the luxury of working from the tailgate of the Land Rover with a baguette and fromage on the go to ease the passage of time as we wait for the evening light. I spent all of the previous day cycling through the countryside surrounding the town looking for this viewpoint, it has taken some finding but it’s worth it. I’m about two miles away working with a 400mm lens to flatten the perspective of the Cité and Montagne Noire beyond. The narrow angle of view also has the advantage of enabling me to exclude all the clutter of the modern town, which sprawls around the base. I’m worried about the risk of wind causing lens movement, which is always an issue when working with long lenses, but it’s a relatively tranquil summer evening in Languedoc so I should be OK. As the sun sinks into the haze the light loses some of its punch, softening it a touch, but also giving the warm tone I’ve been waiting for.
• Canon EOS-1Ds MKII, 100–400mm lens
The Rockefeller Center, New York City, USA
From one extreme to another, from a French long lens perspective to a fisheye in New York. I’m crouching by the tripod underneath a statue at the Rockefeller Center, craning my neck to look up through the eyepiece. The extreme wide-angle perspective allows the foreground to dominate, with the camera looking almost vertically up and the towers leaning into the shot. Using the unusual perspective of either long or short lenses is often a very useful way of getting a new slant on well-known vistas, particularly in cities.
• Nikon F5, 16mm fisheye lens
I often use a 400mm lens to really flatten the perspective. Similarly the up-close view with the eye dominated by the foreground and the distant objects tiny in relation we call a wide-angle perspective. A focal length shorter than 35mm gives this view, but to really emphasize this effect to the ultimate degree I use a 15mm fisheye lens with a 180-degree field of view. With this perspective everything from a few inches in front of the lens to the distant mountains needs to be sharp, so a correspondingly small aperture for maximum depth of field is usually prescribed.
So, in the field, tramping around in the heat of the day, chasing locations, choosing viewpoints, it pays to be thinking about perspective. It’s all about the foreground, do you want it to dominate or not? Those wild flowers blooming in an alpine pasture, how do you want to feature them? Get down amongst them with a fisheye lens and the plants virtually touching the front element, in which case the distant mountains will be but pin pricks on the horizon, or stand back and have the flowers as a carpet of colour in the bottom of the frame with the peaks rearing above? Or something in between? The choice is yours.
Roussanou Monastery, Meteora, Greece
Strange people, monks. They tend to site their monasteries in the most inaccessible places. I guess there’s a reason for that, and not just for the benefit of future photographers. I saw the monasteries at Meteora in northern Greece featured in a Bond film years ago and they struck a chord, so here I am, scrabbling across rocky slopes in search of the definitive angle. With the soft evening light sidelighting the scene, I shoot with a long lens to isolate the monastery and cliffs. This perspective emphasizes the dramatic sighting of the monastery dwarfed by the surrounding rocky pinnacles.
• Nikon F5, 70–200mm lens
“It’s only from a distant perspective that we see things at their true size in relation to other features around them”