Change Your Point of View

As a large format photographer, I generally try to find my subject before I get the camera out of the car. I tend to walk around and try to find the vantage point from which I want to make the picture. It makes the most sense to find the image before lugging the camera out of the car.

The problem with working exclusively this way is that I tend to make only a few photographs from one vantage point and rarely look at a different way to see the scene.

I have to remind myself that I can move. I can pick up the camera and tripod and simply move it. I can change lenses. I can (gasp) change the height of the tripod. I can do any number of things to vary the point of view for my images.

When I worked with 35mm equipment, my mantra was “bend your knees.” Either climb on top of something or place the camera in a lower vantage point. Moving the camera and finding new ways to see the subject was the standard way of working.

When I am working with thirty or forty pounds of equipment it is just as important to find different ways of presenting the scene. A variety of images from the same subject matter can make the layout of a show or a book easier. If you have two or three versions of the same idea one or the other will fit better in sequence or design. After all variety is the spice of design.

Below are four different images.

This was my initial thought about shooting the scene. Fairly straight forward- an old cabin surrounded by a fence. On the left edge is a tree framing the image, in the center lower third is an old truck with mountains in the background, and a blank sky. The right side of the image is dominated by a row of old cottonwood trees. This image was shot with a normal lens. It maintains the relative relationship of near and far objects in the frame.



For the second I moved the camera slightly closer and lowered it. I still have a tree framing the right side of the frame but the left side has opened up and I see that this old house is actually in a corner lot in a small farming community. The trees on the right side have moved about a third of the way into the frame. The right third of the image has a vanishing point at the distant mountains. The gate and Cottonwood trees anchor the center and the left 2/3’s give a view of the rest of the valley. Because of a slightly different point of view the modern barns in the background are now plainly visible with mountains receding into the background. This image was made with a wide-angle lens, changing the sense of space in the photograph. The mountains appear more distant. I have been able to create a dual vantage point relationship in the frame. One vanishing point is the group of trees on the very right hand edge. Because they are smaller we know hey are further away. The second vanishing point is the barns in the distance on the left hand side of the image. The roofs are lighter therefore they draw our eyes back to them. Again, because they are small in the frame they feel “distant.” The gate is gaining in importance. The setting sun is lighting the inside of the frame and the door of the house is located within the frame of the gate.



I have finally figured out that the gate is the key to this image. I moved the camera very close with the wide-angle lens. The gate frames the photograph and the house and truck are within the framework of the gate. The mountain is very distant. The wide-angle lens exaggerates the distance between the gate and the abandoned house. Because the camera is almost on top of the gate, it is huge in the frame. The use of the frame within a frame with a wide-angle lens creates the illusion of depth. Unfortunately even stopped all the way down, the image doesn’t have the depth of field to be sharp from foreground to back ground.



For this photograph, I backed up and put my longest lens on the camera. The use of a 24” lens on the 8x10 view camera compresses space, much as 100mm lens does on a 35mm camera. In this image the light on the edges of the gate and gatepost are important. The long lens compresses the sense of space so that the house feels as if it is but a very short walk from the front gate. The old truck anchors one edge and the cottonwood tree and grass hold the other side down. Any sense of the valley or of the mountains in the distance is lost. This farmstead could now be almost anywhere rather than located in a small Idaho town in a valley between two mountain ranges.

By changing lenses and camera positions, and by understanding how each change affected my image I was able to create four different photographs from the same scene.