Visual Techniques: Viewpoints

Time for another ‘visual techniques’ post (See more here, here, and here). Let’s take a look at viewpoints today - it’s quite a practical topic that most of us should be able to relate to.

Have you ever looked at photos of children, and felt like they were just tiny, or something just didn’t feel quite right?
Or maybe you’ve seen a photo of a skyscraper before (like the ones below) and felt pretty impressed by the size of it?

So, here’s a breakdown of the two main viewpoints:
1. High angle viewpoints (you might have heard of it before as bird’s-eye view): Taking a photo from above makes your subject look small, and therefore seem vulnerable and weak. You’re looking down on it, literally.
This might seem a bit negative, which it can be if you’re taking photos of people. So whenever you’re taller than the person you’re photographing make sure you bend your knees a bit to be on the same level as them. I don’t usually have that problem, as I’m quite small, but sometimes it’s still good to go down a bit - it does make a difference!
High angle viewpoints can be useful for some things, though. For example, to give a clean background, or for overlooking an event/situation/place to give a general view of what’s going on.

2. Low angle viewpoint (or frog perspective): Taking a photo from below makes your subject look huge, impressive, and therefore emphasizes power, strength, and maybe even threat.
Just look at this famous photo by Elliott Erwitt to give you an idea of how powerful this technique can be.

If you have any good examples to illustrate either of the viewpoints, do post a link below. I’d love to see!

Visual Techniques: Frame within the frame

Framing is a very important technique to know about, which probably happens naturally most of the time. When I take a photo I don’t usually consciously think about how I’m going to frame or compose the image. It just happens.
Still it’s really useful to be aware of what framing does - a photo that contains some kind of ‘frame within the frame’ is so much stronger than one without.
Let’s look at this famous image of W. Eugene Smith for example - it’s probably one of the best examples to illustrate this visual technique. The trees give the image a second frame, which nicely puts the focus on the two children. Now imagine the photo without the trees, just two children walking away from you. It would be nowhere near as strong.

The frame within the frame leads the eye to the subject, and it fills in the foreground. Filling the image is important, too.

The first image in this post shows the technique in a very slight way, the people at the bottom of the photo kind of give it a border from below. The second photo frames the flowers through the bodies and heads of the ladies around it. Image three blurs the background which gives it a soft border. The next one does the same thing but in the opposite way - the foreground (the two women) is blurred, which puts the focus on what’s behind it. And in the last photo Charlotte’s arms nicely frame the flowers she’s holding.

A lot of the time different techniques will overlap as well - reflections in mirrors for example are also part of the frame within the frame.

Consciously give this technique a go at least once, and you’ll see over time it will happen naturally. :)

The power of visual techniques

A few days ago I decided my Google Drive needed a bit of a ‘clean up’, so I spent some time sorting through all my documents, deleting some stuff etc. While doing that I came across some blog post notes I must have created ages ago - all on visual techniques.

It’s funny, I actually wrote one post on this topic pretty much one year ago when I thought I’d build a column out of it. Well, that never happened, so now I’ve decided to give it another go and share some visual techniques with you on a regular basis.

Last year’s post was on reflections. Before I dig in any deeper though, I want to talk about the power of visual techniques.

You might naturally take interesting photos, and you probably play around with composition, perspective, etc. already - but it’s useful to know what exactly you are actually doing in order to figure out what it is that turns an average photo into a strong photo.
So you can control what you get (same as with photographing in manual mode), you can try different methods to distinguish your photos from others’, and you can play around with techniques if something doesn’t seem to work.

It all comes back to analysing your photos and knowing what you’re doing really - basically taking control over your camera and the outcome of your photos.

I hope you’ll enjoy this ‘new’ column. I’m trying really hard at the moment to come up with some new blog post ideas, especially regarding photography advice posts. I feel like I’ve written so much on this already, and since I’ve been photographing myself for quite a while now I find it difficult to know what others might struggle with. So please, if there’s something you’ve been dying to know or learn about let me know! I want to hear :)

Visual Techniques: Reflections

I’m starting a new column focusing on visual techniques that will make your photos look more interesting - I’m excited, and I hope you are, too! :)

Today I want to have a look at reflections, and give you a few tips on taking reflection photos.
Reflections are a great way to make a photo look more interesting and more intriguing, since it's up to everyone's own imagination to decide what they see (e.g. as with the photo below).

Useful objects for reflection photos are glasses, windows, vases, the front element of a camera, water/puddle, mirrors, etc.

Another (not so obvious) advantage of reflections is the ‘frame within the frame’ which you get when you use a mirror as a reflection object for example.
I’ll talk about the ‘frame within the frame’ in a bit more detail some other time.

When taking a reflection photo make sure you never focus on the actual material of reflection (e.g. glass of mirror), but on the actual object. The real point of focus is actually behind the mirror.

Applying this visual technique will definitely add a little special to your photo, so I hope you can make good use of it soon. :)