09

What’s Your Point of View?

IN THE LAST CHAPTER’S DISCUSSION of line and shape, I mentioned that our perspective with the camera (our position or point of view) plays a part in how the lines and shapes find their final relationships in the photograph itself. It is one thing to accept this on a fundamental level, but it’s another thing entirely to embrace it as an extraordinary creative tool in the making of our photographs.

When painters paint their pictures, they are unbound by anything but the limits of their imagination and skill. They put the barn where they choose in order to balance it against the mountain in the background, and they strategically place the tree where it will balance out the whole canvas. You and I have fewer choices, but setting aside the obvious conversation (and subsequent rabbit holes and arguments) about the possibilities we have with software, that doesn’t mean we’re powerless. Limited as we are by the constraints of the real world, the photographer still has an astonishing ability to move the elements within a scene, in relationship not only to each other but to the frame itself. We leverage that ability with our choice of lens and by moving our feet. It is the latter that’s relevant now.

Have you heard the expression “zoom with your feet”? It’s a well-worn platitude that, like so many platitudes, is used to sound pithy and wise but gets applied far more broadly than initially intended. I’m quite sure it was initially meant to suggest that we not be lazy and use a zoom lens when we could just as easily, and perhaps with stronger effect, get physically closer to the subject. It’s solid advice. But when we misunderstand it to mean that zooming and using our feet are the same thing, we are not recognizing that what a particular focal length does to lines and shapes in an image is different from what moving our feet does to those same lines and shapes. In fact, it is the combination of both lens choice and physical position that has the most potential creative power over the lines in the final picture.

Your lens cannot change your perspective. Only your point of view (often abbreviated POV) or position relative to the scene can do this. The lenses only help to exaggerate this position. Together they are very powerful. And this power is lost the moment a photographer arrives on a scene, plunks down a tripod, and uses only a few half-hearted twists of the zoom lens to refine the composition. He or she completely misses the ability to change it all by walking around, crawling on the belly, standing on a rock, and in doing so to change the relationships of all the elements one to another and to the frame.

Imagine you’re standing on the edge of a lake, which forms your midground. In front of you is a large rock, your potential foreground. And in the background, at the far side of the lake, is a mountain. You could walk to the rock, choose whatever focal length allows you to get it all in, and make the image. But you’d miss a hundred potential photographs, maybe thousands of possibilities, by not noticing how a longer lens (perhaps a focal length of 200mm) has the effect of pulling the rock and the mountain together, making the similarity between them even more apparent. Or how a wider focal length, perhaps 24mm, makes everything much smaller. But wait, don’t put the camera down just yet. Keep that 24mm lens on and walk closer to the big rock. Notice how it gets larger relative to the mountain in the background; it gains more mass in the frame. The photograph is now more about the foreground rock than the background mountain. Move even closer and the rock obfuscates the mountain entirely—a 10,000-foot peak hidden behind a 3-foot rock.

Now move back a little and to the left. The rock moves to the right of the frame, and the mountain moves, relatively, to the left. Lie on your belly and now the rock breaks the horizon, just like the mountain does. Nothing but you has moved, but in the photograph, everything has changed. Most of us know this. But it’s important to truly understand the impact of these choices, not just on the aesthetics of the photograph (what it looks like) but on the message (what are you trying to say?). How does what you are saying or implying in the photograph change when you intentionally create distance between elements or bring them together? How does your point of view on the scene determine what is included and excluded, and what do those choices say about your intended subject? In the case of photographing people or making portraits, would a change in POV make your photograph feel less condescending (by looking down at them) or give your subject greater power (by looking up at them)? Would photographing lions from a lower perspective, say at eye level, make the image more empathetic to the plight of its prey?