Lessons

Lesson Info

Angle of View

All right, so thinking about your angle of view. Once you have determined your point of view, which lens are you going to use and how exactly are you going to frame things up. So we have our wide-angle lens, our telephoto lenses, and you are really are, think of yourself not as a photographer, but as a director. You are telling a visual story. Who is in the photograph, who is part of the picture and who is not. Okay, what's in, what's out. That's going to help determine what lens you are going to want to use. All right, a little competition here. Who knows where this is shot at? See if you can determine at home where we are. You'll eventually figure it out. What focal length does it take you to figure out where we are? Okay this is just gratuitous animation on my part. I had an extra one of these and I thought I would throw it in here. So, do you know where we are now? Colosseum in Rome. Right, right. Thinking about the different lenses that you can use. Each one of them is a different...

tool for telling a different story. What is the story that you are trying to tell in that particular photograph. Oftentimes we are trying to tell the best story that we can depending on whatever that story happens to be. Here in Morocco we got here early in the morning. We have a great fortress over here. I set up, this was honest to goodness, my first shot. I don't know if this is a good shot. But this is one of those things that gets the creative juices flowing. You gotta get that first photo out so that you can start thinking about things. So I took this photo and I looked at the back and I just went, blah. Not good, something needs to be improved here. I'm starting look around, what can I do. Is there anything that I can use? And I looked at this, does this get your excited down here? This little mud puddle down here? I got excited. This will get me excited. Because that's going to have a reflection in it. It's not got water going through it, it's still water. I moved down there, but this is when the light comes on. So we talked about the polarizer, remember the polarizer section? And now I'm going to use a little wider angle lens and I'm going to include that mud puddle. Mud puddles I used to think were bad things. Maybe moms think they're bad things because kids go through them and get the carpet dirty and stuff. Mud puddles are great because they have water that is still that if you get down low enough and maybe that's why kids like mud puddles is they are down low and they are seeing all these great reflections. Adults are up here and they don't see the reflections. But you get down low enough and you're going to see some nice reflections in there. And that just adds a nice little element that supports our main subject. Sometimes it's hard to tell the whole story in one photograph. And it might help trying not to limit yourself to how do I get this in one photograph. Back off on yourself. Don't give yourself such tight rules and regulations. See if you can say, okay let me see if I can tell the big story because you often want to tell a big story about something that's going on. And then I'm going to tell a separate story that's more tighter and focused in what I am doing. And so there are some situations where, okay, look at the wide shot and figure out what you can put in there and where you need to be. And then figure out a second shot that is a companion shot. So there are two shots that work together that tell a different part of the story. And so this is kinda a self assignment that you can give yourself on subjects that are appropriate. The instinct for the well seasoned photographer is get in there and tell a tight story. Remember I said that earlier. Get in there, really don't have all that extra stuff around it. And sometimes I'll shoot that photo first and then I'm like wait a minute, lets show the environment around the subject. And see exactly more of the way we see it with our own eyes. And they are both effective photographs for different types of purposes. Some prayer flags in Bhutan. Giving a little wider sense of where these are on a hillside in this particular valley with the clouds and so forth. But there's another beautiful pattern in really tight with a telephoto lens. So coming away with two good shots from the same scene. I love the wide angle story here with the penguin. South Georgia Island with the snow-capped peaks and all the other penguins dotting the landscape in the background. I also like telling the really tight story of the penguin itself and the way it leans back onto it's tail like a kickstand, tucks it's feet up and brings it's fat in to keep it nice and warm. In Yellowstone in wintertime, this took a lot of effort to get to this spot and it really wasn't the weather that I wanted. And so I didn't get the clouds that I wanted but going in with a telephoto lens I found a little pattern. Do you see a little pattern in here? I think it looked really nice right on the edge of the pool, right here. So I pulled out the telephoto lens to get that shot. And I think that tells a very simple and clean story. It's not the whole story of the area and I think together those two photographs work well. Scanning with the telephoto vision and the wide-angle vision at the same time. So this is my first shot. I like this one, shows a little bit on the environment around it. Then I'm going to go in real tight and fill the frame with those colors using a slow shutter speed. And this is one of those situations where, actually Kenna was with me when we shot this, and there was not many people that carry tripods because it was the middle of the day in there. But with the slow tripods you are able to do something a little bit different that makes it look a little bit more mysterious. And so shooting the wider shot, showing a little bit of the greater environment and then pulling out the telephoto and going in an pulling out some of those details. Telling both sides of the story. In Bhutan, there is an amazing monastery up on the hill. Taktsang Monastery, known as the Tiger's Nest. Not a good photo, I'm not saying that this a good photo, but as you get up there there is still huge staircase that you have to climb and climb and climb and climb to get up there. In fact, there was a woman who couldn't climb down so her guide had to carry her down. Which, oh boy, that would be tough. That's a lot of work. And so as you get up here, it's a very touristy point. It's been seen by thousands, millions of people. There's little lookout points for taking photos up here. So you are going to end up with lots and lots of photos that are exactly the same. I'm going to play around and try to find my own spot in that location. I'm going to play around with this on the hillside. I'm going to find a couple different compositions that I like. I kinda like this one here, even though it's got a big open area on the right hand side. It shows how exposed this is on this hillside. I think it tells that story very well. But then as I looked at these prayer flags that extended from one part of the hill over to the other, these really, really long prayer flags, I thought that there was a good element for lines to include in here. But I was having a hard time because they were blowing and flapping around in the wind and I was trying to find the right position and this was just part of the walkway and it wasn't an official shooting platform, which in many cases that is a terrible place to shoot because that is where everybody shoots. So I'm just along the walkway trying to find some place I can get in to to have them properly in the frame where they are not cluttered but they add to it. It's getting this right mixture. It's one of those things I sometimes have a hard time articulating the time that I'm shooting. I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it. I found one spot where I saw this one streaking across and I saw what was happening. The wind was pushing up the valley and it was pushing the flags up higher and higher and higher. And it just kept getting better and better until that flag got all the way up to the top and it just stretched it really taut and now it becomes a really nice line that leads us into our subject. So I ended up with a couple of photos that I really liked that tell different types of stories in that environment. And so thinking about more of a several picture photo story is another way of approaching the subject, going from one to two to multiple. Coming from my photojournalist background, the standard technique is to start wide and move in closer. Establish the scene so the subject is in there. Get a little bit closer, show the details and as you get in closer and closer start examining the actions, the interactions, how they work, what's going on. And your getting closer and closer with each of the shots, until you are eventually just showing tight details of the subject. This gives you a great method of really investigating a subject. You start wide and you move in close and you get to see it from all angles. Remember the telephoto lenses, they add a lot of compression. It's just another tool for using within the angle of view. Those telephoto lenses, the wide-angle, moving our way in. Notice that subject out on the bridge. Comparison to the front of the stairway. It's the compression effect of using those telephoto lenses. So think about where you can stand with a wide-angle and a telephoto lens to get the same type of shot. Maybe that telephoto lens will help tell your story much better. The pyramids in Egypt. Giza, there are two pyramids that are relatively close together but there's one that's notably off. If you hike over to the right angle of view where they are all lined up, then they'll all line up like they are right in a row next to each other. Then we add another little element in the foreground. I didn't have to pay him, he just happened to come through there at the right timing. Using that telephoto lens to compress our subjects together. Usually needing that 200, 300, 400mm lens depending on where you are. We are adding different subjects at completely different distances. Very effective technique. We are pulling out some sort of nice little details. Compressing the subject against our background. We ended up having a smaller background. Another concept is Wide and Close. The wide-angle lens is a very, very valuable tool. But it's often very challenging to use in many cases. So here we are with the 35. A wide angle, a basic wide angle, but not extreme. Let's go back to our really ultra wide angle lens and compare what we are seeing between these two. Let's pull up the frame lines of what we are seeing. You'll notice that with the wider angle lenses you go, the more of the foreground you get. And so this is where you can really start to include foreground elements into your scene. This is really where you have to be thinking about what's in the background and what's in the foreground. These are a lot of fun where you do have a nice background and then you are scouting everything around you, in front of you, where can I get the camera down nice and low and close to the subject so that I have something down low and something up high. Maybe different nature to hold your attention. A lot of times it's getting down lower in the ground. Now using a wide-angle lens without thinking about the foreground ends up with a photo like the left. So just a plain old wide-angle lens without thinking. You really gotta think about exactly where the placement is. Your positioning as a photographer is critical in these types of shots. Shooing a telephoto shot of Mount Rainier, not nearly as critical moving left or right 10 feet, but when you are shooting these wide angles it has a huge difference a few inches left and a few inches right. Finding that subject in the foreground, eyes bounce back and forth between the top and bottom of the frame. So this is very common in nature photography. Where you find something interesting in the background and you then hunt around in the foreground to find some sort of interesting element that you can line your camera up with. It's obviously a lot easier to do this vertically because your camera is going to reach it's angle of view much further in vertical than horizontal. So this is a very common technique. It's an easy formula, if you will. So for doing that Wide and Close, finding that foreground element, a wide lens, 35 or wider, you'll want to get down low and fairly close. One of the problems, the mistake that most people make, is that they don't get close enough. Let's do a little experiment here. This is our foreground element, exciting huh? You can tell I've really thought this one out here. Where is my camera? Here's my camera. Some people will go, there's the flowers and there's the mountian, okay I can get both of them in there. And they are standing this far back. That is just so small in the frame, what I need to do is, I need to get down here about like this, right here. Like a foot away in this case to get that shot. This is why you want to have a tripod that can get down really low to the ground. It depends on how big your subject is, but that's the type of effort, the type of effort, some people stand up like this. No, that's not going to work out at all. You've got to get yourself right down there. And that's really, it's really handy having one of those flip-out screens, otherwise you've got to really get down there. I like having those flip-out screens when they do put them on the cameras. You've gotta really get in close in that case. Maximum depth of field. Remember the focusing section, do you remember the hyperfocal section. How do we set our aperture, where do we focus on that. And you're going to get some very interesting shots.