Introduction
As you embark on your photography journey, understanding perspective becomes essential. This comprehensive beginner's guide demystifies perspective and explores its significance in photographic composition. Whether you're using wide-angle lenses or telephoto lenses, altering your position or angle, perspective plays a crucial role in capturing captivating photographs. Join us as we delve into the world of photographic perspective and unleash your creative prowess.Section 1:Â What Is Photographic Perspective?
So, let’s get on to the use of perspective in photography and first things first, lets dispel one misnomer that many a novice photographer has been told by an uninformed peer. Perspective does not change when you change your lens from a wide angle to a telephoto. If you take a photograph with a 200mm lens, do not move, then take exactly the same photo with a 14mm lens, the perspective within that image will be exactly the same, the only thing that has changed is the field of view.Â
However, if you take that 14mm lens and then move forward to fill the frame in the same way as the 200mm lens, then your perspective has changed. In short, perspective is about changing position any of the three planes of movement, up/down, right/left and forwards/backwards. It is also changed by the angle in which the camera is pointing. So how does perspective relate to photography? How can we use it to our advantage in composition?
A Wide Angle PerspectiveÂ
Wide Angle Perspective. Lets go back to that 14mm lens we were just discussing. This is a very wide angle lens, and using any wide angle means we need to understand perspective. As we said to get the same image as the 200mm lens we would have to walk forward to the the subject, but as we do, we would notice through the 14mm lens that the apparent distances between our foreground and background subjects would appear to get bigger. That is the change in perspective.Â
This is one of the reasons that landscape photographers use wide angle lenses, they give huge depth to the image. Now lets assume our subject is a tall building. In order to to show the whole edifice, we might need to tilt our camera upwards, this also changes our perspective but can also introduce a sometimes unwanted side effect, converging verticals, or the appearance that the straight sides of the tall building appear to be converging together. To counter this, we would need to change our perspective, either by moving further back, so the camera does not require pointing upwards, or by getting higher, again so the camera is pointing straight at the building.Â
Now, whilst converging verticals might be an unwanted effect of perspective, if we take those same converging lines and put them down on the ground, for example a dead straight road, we have a powerful compositional tool, leading lines. If we shoot our road at eye level, it may seem an average composition, but if we get down low to the ground, we again change perspective and create a more dramatic image.
A Telephoto Perspective
Telephoto Perspective. As we said before changing lenses to change perspective is a misnomer, and much of it stems from people that talk about the compressed perspective of telephoto lenses. In fact, that compression actually comes from our position not the lens itself and the fact that the telephoto lens has a much narrower field of view than the wide angle.Â
This is why with a telephoto, the subject and background seem to have less distance between them. When we combine this knowledge with a unobtrusive background and a shallow depth of field, we get the classic telephoto shots, be they, portraits or wildlife images. By using perspective and shallow depth of field with a telephoto lens, we can isolate subjects either from their background or from other similar subjects nearby but on a different focal plane.
False PerspectiveÂ
The last area we will look at in perspective, adds a little fun into the mix. As we have already discussed, a lager object, further away, can appear the same size as a smaller object nearby. Because we see in 3D, our eyes and brain can differentiate between the two. However, photographs are of course 2D and because of that, we can play with perspective a little.Â
With careful positioning, we can make our subject appear to be the same size as a building or monument in the distance, maybe a friend holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa or holding the top of Big Ben in his or her finger tips. Playing around with this fun look at perspective is a great way to understand it in greater depth.
Conclusion
Knowledge of perspective is a key area in anyones photographic development. Understanding it, and how to use and change it, unlocks huge creative potential in any image you shoot. The easiest way to get to know it, is to just take many images of the same subject from many positions and with different lenses.
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