By: Julz.......artist, blogger, photographer, graphic designer
adventure, Blogging, cameras, Cee's Compose Yourself Photo Challenge, challenges, how to, Photography, studio, techniques, , , , , ,

Cee’s Compose Yourself Challenge – Week 13, Perspective

Last week I got a Gold Star for my take on The Critic, so I guess I had better follow up with something good? This week’s essay is about Perspective.

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.

I set my self up in the studio for the afternoon to work on a few different projects; an afternoon to play with my new speed light (yes more toys, bad aren’t I? lol) assignments for my Photoshop course, Cee’s perspective challenge and my 52 Week Challenge through Facebook. So I had plenty to get through…………but more on that anther time.

So I figured as I was doing some real arty farty stuff I may as well make some nice images for this challenge as well. I set the camera up on a tripod and after playing with lights and the flash and positioning everything so it could all be shot in one take I did the following;

  1. First I put the plums right in front of the camera with the bucket of flowers and bottle of wine in the background.
  2. Then I moved the plums to the middle ground
  3. Finally put the plums right in front of the flowers

ISO 100, f/5.6, 24mm (18-200mm zoom lens), first photo on manual focus and the second two on AF.

  1. First I put the rose right in front of the camera with the lights in the background.
  2. Then I moved the rose to the middle ground
  3. Finally put the rose right in front of the lights

ISO 100, f/5.6, 34mm (128-200mm zoom lens),first photo on manual focus and the second two on AF.

This was interesting to play around with perspective, I am one of those photographers who gets lazy and moves the zoom lens more often than I move myself, or my subject. I probably should have used my nifty 50mm lens, but oh well.

So what did I learn?

  1. Firstly the obvious (kin of already knew this) the closer an object is to a camera it looks bigger than the items in the background appear………move the item backwards and it gets smaller.
  2. My camera does not like to focus on something up close, low light, that is not in the centre of the screen, so I had to switch to manual focus
  3. My manual focus skills suck!
  4. I should have also tried with different apertures……..when the item is very close the the camera it is out of focus, but not artistically……..if I used a larger aperture (F/2.8) the background would have had a much nicer bokeh. Or it I used a smaller (f/9-11) the background would have been less blurry.

Great challenge Cee, really got me thinking on this one! And obviously I need to practice my manual focus and mucking around with apertures more.

Til next time happy snapping…….

-Julz