When I first picked up my camera, my goal was to simply capture a moment. I didn’t know anything about focus, composition or lighting. I didn’t pay attention to angles and perspective. I simply picked up the camera, aimed and snapped. And while those photographs have made for some wonderful memory makers, that certain oomph is missing. It’s the oomph that takes pictures from being meh to wow.
When taking pictures of flowers, for example, I used to only take them with me standing over them and looking down. A nice picture and incredibly “useful” in many cases. You get a nice overall view of the flower and the surrounding “grass” but there’s nothing eye catching in the shot.
For this picture, I laid down on the sidewalk to get a side view of the flower. From this angle, you can see that petals curve upward, and that there’s some “puff” to the flower. It looks more dimensional. And this is an angle of the flower that most people would never see. Seriously, how many folks are going to lie down on the ground to look at a dandelion? As a photographer (or wanna be photographer, in my case), your job is to help people to see ordinary things in extraordinary ways.
This is the same photo as above but more closely cropped. Crazy what a close crop and a different perspective can do to an image, huh?
Now I’m not saying that all photos need to be all artistic and perfectly framed ’cause I have some doozies out there that while not “picture perfect” are some of my favorites because of the memories attached to them but when taking pictures for your blog, it’s definitely more fun and interesting to change your perspective just a bit.
How often do you change your perspective when taking pictures?
