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Lesson Info

Unique Perspective

All right, next up. Maybe you've told the best story, maybe you've told a claim story, maybe you've got the nice lighting, but sometimes you just gotta give somebody something unusual. Just shake it up, do something different. And so, using that unique perspective from time to time is sometimes the answer. And so you saw this wall earlier. I'd shot a tight photo of it earlier in this section. And this is your straight on look. Just do something creative. In this case, they have a little sitting stool, and so I went down with a wide-angle lens, set it to that maximum depth of field, that hyperfocal distance to try to get in there, get the foreground and the background just to have a different play of foreground and background to it. Salar de Uyuni down in Bolivia. It's the largest flat spot on the earth. And this is all of a salt plain here. It's very high up. It's about 12,000 feet or so in elevation. As you get down to the exact surface of it, you can start to see the texture of it. A...

nd so in this case, I actually mounted my camera on my tripod upside down, so that I could get the lens resting on the ground itself, because I needed to get this close with some side lighting, if you recall our side lighting section, really shows the texture very well. And so now you can see the texture of this. And now that I look at it in a different way, you haven't really thought about this before, but there's nothing in here of scale. And this could be small little mountains that people would have to climb over. It's kinda hard to see scale. And I do have another photograph. I'll add it in next time. The other photograph that I have is I had my camera and put my boot right in front of it for scale, because these things are really tiny. They're only about a half inch in hight. But it shows the texture, getting down to that really low angle of view. In Venice, getting up higher, shooting straight down. We've seen a few of these photos before, these twirling dancers. And I was shooting what I thought was a good shot with my photo group in Turkey, and then I saw one of the people on my group kind of off down lower. And I thought, "Wait a minute, "that might be a really good idea." And I went down there. She was shooting something completely different than me. But I realized that once I got down here, I was able to see the feet a lot better, and I kinda wanted to get some shots with the feet in there. And so those of you that have those articulating screens on the back of your camera, the little flip out screens, that can be really handy for getting your camera into an unusual position, especially up in the tulip field, because they often are middy. You don't wanna get down real low into the mud there. And so, getting down nice and low. As I mentioned before, photographing kids and animals, getting down nice and low. When we were in South Georgia, I had a camera on the monopod, and I had a cable release so I could stick the camera kinda right in the penguins face, and they wouldn't freak out because I was still about six feet back. I was still within their comfort zone. I would've really appreciated a Wi-Fi function on the phone, so I could see where my camera was pointed at, because I was just guessing with lens as if I was getting the subjects in there. I was shooting with a really wide angle lens, so I was pretty close but getting the horizon right and so forth. And so getting down really low is one of my favorite things. The funny back story on this is this is in Cuba. And Cuba they have a lot of kind of strange regulations. And one of the regulations they have is that all dogs should be licensed, tagged, and carry photo ID with them at all times. And so they actually have photo ID. And you look at him, he's got the exact same expression when the original photograph was taken. "Why are you taking my photograph? "This is not right." And so, how do you see that? You get down low so that you can see that tag on there. And so, think about what things look like from standing up, and then those lines here. What is the angle of those lines? They're very straight up and down. And as you move down lower, and lower, and lower, these become more dynamic lines at steeper and steeper angles where they have more impact. And then at a certain point, when you get down too low, well then the lines start disappearing. So you have to kind of figure out where is that just right balance to get those lines for an interesting angle of view. So, finding that good angle of view by moving up and down for that unique perspective. That cross country team that I coach gets together and they do this big chant, get themselves all pumped up for the race. And I wanted to get a different shot than they had before. And so I put the camera on a monopod with a fisheye lens, and hung it right over their heads to get this shot here. To me, this just looks like, I think it's called a chum of fish. You know, those fish, they go around in those balls, and that's just what... They're all just packed in there as densely as they can. So it's a long story for another time, but the quick version of is my buddy and I took a canoe, we drilled a hole in the bottom of the canoe, and put in a pedal-powered prop system so that we could pedal our canoe rather than paddle our canoe. And we did this on Canada's longest river, the MacKenzie River. It's a thousand-mile trip into the Arctic Ocean. And of course I'm gonna take a lot of photos on a trip like this. But working from a canoe is one of the worst places in the world to work because you're so limited on your point of view. It's basically you sit there and you're at pivot point. Don't stand up, don't go to left, don't go to the right, we can't back up. You're just basically pivoting around. And so what we did is we took a monopod, and mounted it in the back of the boat so that we can get some fisheye wide-angle shots of both of in the boat in the environment going down the river. And then we would take the monopod, and we would put it in front of the boat, so that we could show us relaxing and enjoying the boat. We would take photos from the point of view of being in the captain seat here where we're pedaling our pedal-powered boat down the river. And then we got real brave, and we started duct taping the monopod as a boom off to the side of the boat, do that we could get shots looking back in the boat, because we didn't have anybody else to take these type of photos, so we needed to have photos with both of us in it, because that's the story we're telling. We took one shot that was very carefully timed, and this was done in one shot, and we got it perfectly timed. And folks, if you're jumping off a canoe, you have to be very careful about the forces. They're balanced forward and side ways. And then we also got this perfect little separation. You notice how we're not overlapping on the boat. We timed that just perfectly for getting us in the water. But my favorite photo is those one. We were running out of food, and I wanted to tell the story of running out of food. And that's not a real interesting subject. But by getting the camera into an interesting point of view, it makes that whole subject a whole lot more interesting. So this is just how creative are you? What can you come up with, what can you work with the tools at hand? And so, in case you're wondering, we cut off the bottom of the peanut butter jar. And just to let you know, we did not let any of that peanut butter go to waste. Okay? Trust me, every single bit got lapped up. John, for a lot of these sort of the low-angle shots, it appear that you were using a pretty wide-angle lens. For these unique perspectives, is there sort of a thought process with regard to lens choice? It's usually gone be wider-angle lenses, just because the things we're shooting usually aren't building heights. So you can go downtown of a city that has large buildings, and you can shoot maybe with a normal lens. But most of the times, you're shooting on the ground. That's when you're gonna need those ultra wide lenses, and so something 24 milimeters and wider. Full-frame equivalent is where those things can really be handy. Great, thank you. Through a lot of these images, people were curious about certain lens choices that you are using. So, if you ever feel like throwing that out there, that would be awesome too. Okay, will do. All right, so let's talk about looking up. Down in California, at the Redwood National Park, they have these huge trees, and you walk around. You're of course gonna be looking up, and you're gonna wanna shoot some photos to try to encompass the whole tree, which is very, very difficult to do. And it's not just enough to be in a pretty good area and look up, because there's a lot of different places that you can go. What you're trying to do is trying to make it as good as you can. And what you wanna do is you wanna try to get the most density of those trees as possible. And so, the place that I found that was the best was a place that I found the two largest trees that were within six feet apart. So I could put my hand on one tree and on the other. And so, filling the frame with as much bark as possible because then we have a little bit more dark texture, the good stuff, rather than the bad stuff, which is these bright highlights in the background. And this was shot with a fisheye lens. And most people, if you were guessing which lens I shot this with, you wouldn't have guessed fisheye because there's no curve lines. You remember back to the fisheye section, one of the techniques I showed you in a lot of photos there was disguising the fisheye effect. And how do you disguise the fisheye effect is you have all the lines run through the center of the photograph. And so in a situation like this, fisheye works perfect, nobody knows about it. Well, now, there's a few thousand people that know about it, but it's not evident in your photograph. Using the fisheye lens up in the tulips, which are not nearly as tall. Taking photos as I get the camera lower and lower, and resting it against the ground. Can you see what I also did with this photograph there? Remember the starburst section, getting that sun slightly obscured by the petals of that tulip there, getting that little burst of it. You just need one little more element. Can we add another something that helps? You don't wanna add stuff that doesn't help or doesn't improve the photograph. So, downtown Seattle using a very wide-angel lens pointing up. The problem here is that in Seattle, we don't have enough super big buildings to do a lot of this type of photography. But there was a sculpture that I was able to get up next to that kinda filled that empty spot in the frame. So this sculpture here is only about six feet tall, compared to the hundreds of feet that the buildings are. In Hawaii, Bamboo Forest, looking straight up. It's not enough just to shoot up. Scout it out, walk up and down. Don't just shoot the first one that you see. Find the thickest best place that you can find.