CEE’S COMPOSE YOURSELF PHOTO CHALLENGE: WEEK #13 Perspective

This week’s CCY Theme is Perspective.

For your weekly assignment I would like to see at least 4-6 photos of photos taken with perspective in mind. You can either show original photos with a quick description of where the perspective is do a photo shoot like I did (see my essay below) showing perspective of two items. Please described what you learned in this lesson as well.

Each week I will select several features from everyone who submits an entry. And from those posts that I feature, I will grant one blogger the Gold Star Award. To find out who was awarded the Gold Star Award and Features for this week, please see CCY Features Week #12 Critique My Work.

Note: Participants who do not have at least 4 photo showing their attempt at this week’s topic in their post will not be featured nor be considered for the Gold Star Award.

Essay

Sometimes the hardest thing is to decide what you want as your main topic of your photo should be. I would suggest as a general rule that your main topic should be the biggest object in your photo. There is a simple exercise you can do to help you get the concept of perspective.

For this exercise you will need one smaller object and one bigger object. In this case I’m using a two spice jars and a large bag of rice. For all three photographs you will keep your camera in the same spot.

Start out with the smaller subject close to your camera and take a photograph. You will notice that the smaller object dwarfs the bigger object in the background. Notice, also, that the depth of field puts the background object out of focus, but it still gives interest to the whole photo.

For your next photograph, I moved the spice jars about half the distance to the rice bag. Notice what happens to the perspective between the appearance of their sizes.

For this last photo, the spice jars are directly in front of the rice bag. Notice how small the spices are in comparison to the rice bag. Also you will see the objects are size appropriate. The little spice bottles are actually quite small compared to the rice bag.

Imagine you are standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. The question is do you want the people you are with to be the main object in your photo or do you want the Memorial to be the main subject. It might depend, and you may actually take both. If you want the people to be the main subject, shoot with your camera close to them, and them standing away from the Memorial. That way the Memorial becomes part of the background. If you want the Memorial to be the subject, place the people closer to it but shoot from farther away.

Here are a couple of examples that I have taken where you can see this theory applied in real life.

This photo was taken with a dahlia right in front of my camera and you can see the field of dahlias behind. I really wanted to get some of the background fields. This dahlia is nearly 10 inches in diameter.

In this next example, I really didn’t want the car to be the main focus of this photo so I made sure there was plenty of field in front of the car. This makes the car size appear to be normal and it really shows how large this dahlia field is.