Perspective

When I’m out taking photos, I like to frame a scene while shooting. I’ll crop in once in a while or adjust the horizon while editing but try to get it right in camera as much as possible. I’ve given myself a guideline to not spend more than a few minutes editing any photo, so the closer I can get the shot in-camera, the better. Aside from a few basic adjustments, I really don’t edit my photos very much.

One thing I have been playing around with is rotating photos to change perspective. Here is a photo I took a month ago. It had just rained and I was playing around with using a big puddle as a reflective surface. There were these repeating lines in the building in the background that I thought would look interesting if I could get them to extend into the puddle.

The shot above was fine I thought, but was missing something. I found myself looking at the puddle area of the photo much more because it had a bit more distortion and ripples. So I flipped it upside down and here is the result below. I like it much better, mainly because the focus is more on the reflection area. Also it sort of muddies some of the subjects in the photo. For example, the building in the background looks less like a building from this perspective.

Another photo I tried flipping was this one I took recently of a cyclist on a bike path. The shot below is how I originally took it. What I like about this photo are the 3 elements that move your eye left to right. The white painted bicycle, the cyclist and then the shadow. I also like how the path and the lines narrow slightly and help draw your eye to the right of the frame.

Below, I tried to rotate the image so the cyclist is riding up through the frame. I like how the shadow stands out a bit more but it feels like everything is squished and crowded in the frame. Maybe this is because the lines start wide at the bottom and narrow as it leads up to the top of the frame. I also think there is something to be said for guiding our eyes left to right, mirroring how we read a number of languages.

This last shot is the full frame. When I shoot, I set my camera to crop a certain size automatically, so there is always a little bit extra on the sides. Sometimes it allows me to pull in an element that I originally left out, but usually I’ll stick with what I’ve shot. In this example, there are some extra elements including some additional street lines and a traffic sign. You could make an argument that they reinforce the narrowing towards the right, but I found them to be distracting. Also, with the extra space on the left and right of the frame, the 3 elements look crowded or bunched together, like they’re not spaced apart nicely.

Sometimes playing around with perspective works and it’s worth a look sometimes to see if it helps but this is why I try to make almost all of my decisions when shooting in the camera. You could spend hours just playing around with cropping and rotating an image!