Point of View

By Steve Thomas
The Powerful Photography Coach

"Digital Photography Success" is a perfect companion to the lessons you are taking.

• Just released are two incredibly extensive, written-in-plain-English, ebooks called "Digital Photography Success" and "Advanced Digital Photography".
• They cover everything you need to know about how to go from getting photos you are unhappy with to professional looking photos in just a short amount of time.
• Imagine being able to take your camera anywhere and get the shots to turn out exactly the way you want, every time. 
• And knowing, just by looking at something in front of you, how to make it into a beautiful photograph, even before you pick up the camera.
  

  How proud and excited would you feel!

What is point of view?

The position, direction and height of the camera define the point of view of a picture. You can change the way your subject is perceived by changing the camera position. If you are photographing something that you want to seem very tall, arrange the shot so that the camera is looking upwards. As I did with the piper. This is done routinely in movies to make a actors look taller or shorter than they actually are. John Wayne, for example, was almost always filmed with the camera looking slightly up at him. He wasn’t a small man, but by filming him this way he looked bigger than life. The mood and effectiveness of a picture can be very much altered by what is in the background. The mood of the picture of the piper with the girls in the background is much less solumn than low point of view that isolates him and makes a much more solumn picture.

Take multiple pictures of your subject so you will have plenty to use as you are selecting your most powerful images. Notice that these three images all were cropped to emphasize the subject and eliminate parts that could weaken the picture.

How changing your point of view changes the picture

The viewer’s reaction to the picture will be different depending on the point of view used by the photographer. For example, if a photographer wanted to show a political figure as small and weak, a point of view looking down at the subject would subtly get across that idea. If, on the other hand, the photographer wanted to show the same political figure as strong, powerful and bigger than life, than a point of view looking up would have that effect. Changing your point of view can help you eliminate distracting backgrounds as I did in these two pictures.

When you are taking pictures of children, try getting down to the child’s height or lower to get pictures that emphasize more than how small the child is.

Boy with snake, taken at eye level	Boy with snake, looking down

Is there a “best” point of view?

The best point of view depends on the intention of the photographer. By thinking about the point of view of a picture before you take it, you can make choices to make your picture more powerful. I was taking pictures of the interior and exterior of a rental house some time ago. I wanted to show how big the backyard was so I arranged to take a picture from one corner of the backyard. A prospective tenant could then see the entire backyard. The picture said more than the words “a large backyard” ever could. Of course this is a large backyard by California urban standards - in other parts of the world it would probaby be considered tiny, not much more than a postage stamp.

The living room pictures required some work to correct perspective distortion. It can be difficult to get vertical lines to be vertical, especially with wide angle lenses. Notice that the window isn’t square in the uncorrected picture. There are numerous photo editing programs that give you the power to alter the perspective of pictures. A future lesson will discuss photo editing software so you can do this sort of thing – and that is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the ability to change, and, I would hope, improve your pictures.

Picture without perspective correction	Picture with perspective correction

Lesson 1 Subject Placement
Lesson 2 Leading Lines
Lesson 3 Light and Shadow

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(c) Steve Thomas 2007-2010 All rights reserved. This is copywrited content and may not be reproduced in any form without the express permission of the author.