Point Of View

There are a lot of moving parts involved in photography. Many are focused on all the bits anb bobs of technology. Cameras, lights, lenses, lighting modifiers, post processing tools, on and on. All of those things are merely there to serve the subject of the photograph. When it comes down to it, especially when people are the subjects in your photographs, paying attention to light, eliciting a mood from the person/people in front of the camera, choosing a point of view, and hitting the shutter release at the right moment are really the important elements. The rest of it is pererferal.

Style is the perfection of a point of view.Richard Eberhart

I playing in a friend’s studio this week with some somewhat fashion-y setups and attempting to make ensembles that looked good by combining inexpensive random pieces and was exressing some frustration with how height challenged the space was for my purposes. I wanted to jot down a few notes before I forgot to illustrate how important and dramatic point of view is in just one way, let alone the countless others.

Looking at the two photos above how tall are these two people? You can tell one is taller than the other but how tall are they? What’s your point of reference? Well that point of reference would have to be me. So how tall am I? Am I standing up? Am I taller than those two, about the same? You can probably guess at all these things based on just looking at these pictures.

The answer is you really don’t know how tall they are but you’re gessing I am about the same height and if you look a little closer you may even think I am taller than both of them. I’m actually slightly shorter than Jesse but I’m standing up with the camera at eye level. It’s almost as if I’m looking down ever so slightly or at eye level at best. Let’s take a look at another and see what happens with a slightly different point of view.

In the above photo I bent my knees slightly, moved closer and shot from below the chin line of both people. They probably seem taller now. Watch what happens when I move down to around waist level and have Jesse ever so slightly in front of Jehanne.

One last photo to illustrate the point. Here I’m slightly above waist level but this time I moved Jesse slightly behind Jehanne and she’s closer to the camera. I’d say that this is a massive difference in proportions between the to or perceived proportions based on what could be considered a very subtle change in the distances between each and my camera. Keep in mind I am using a 50mm on a full-frame 35mm body. The differences would be even greater the wider and closer I was shooting. Or looking at it another way, I’d have to move my point of view less and adjust the models less to achieve the same effects.

My frustrations with the height challenged space was that there really was no way to shoot below waist level with even ³⁄₄ length shots let alone full length without running out of background height. Sure You could use a much longer lens and back up farther but that woule defeat the point. The farther you are away the more massive the difference in POV needs to be. If I doubled the focal length and the distance I was shooting the difference between head hight and chest height and maybe even waist hight would hardly be noticiable.