The lost dimension, powerful optical illusion.After isolation the next big deal in photography is the loss of the third visual dimension.
Ever tried to catch a ball with one eye closed? The human visual tracking system faarks
out when the stereo view is lost. The brain uses the +- 7cm offset of the second eye to
calculate distance and velocity and scale amongst other things by trigonometric calculation like we use GPS satellites to calculate position. Yeah and?
This little phenomenon enables me to invite the biggest Katoom on the forum over to be photographed with my Tdub and gives me the ability to make the Katoom look like a wannabee pit bike compared to my Tdub when pitched in the same photo.
In travel photography we can use this phenomenon to create moods of wide open space, desolation, isolation, barren landscape, God forsaken country, freedom or to emphasise small isolated objects in such surroundings by making them appear moera big in relation to the rest of the landscape included in the photo.
Stripped from the third (stereo/depth) dimension, a photograph forces the brain to calculate scale or size by recognition of objects, your brain knows a lorry is bigger than a bike, so if the lorry looks smaller than the bike in the pic you??ll know it was much further away from the camera than the bike, but only because you know what a lorry looks like.
Picture this, if I were to strip a photo from any recognisable objects save the lorry and the bike, like shooting on Verneukpan, I could verneuk (bullshit) with an accurate small toy replica of a lorry, photograph it a meter behind the bike and your brain will tell you the lorry was moera far away cos it??s much smaller than the bike in the photo. Keep the picture, only now I put the scaled down lorry in front of the bike, now your brain??s going to say, ??faark that bike is bigger than a lorry!?? and only reason you might think otherwise is cause you have previously recorded the scale of a lorry and the scale of a bike in your memory. If you have never before seen either you are faarked as for judging distance or size on a photograph which depraves you of the third dimension for size calculation.
The down side of the phenomenon.You see a moera big lion 70 meters away, whip your camera out and gooi a pic on the memory card just as it walks past the biggest acacia tree in Kenya. You gooi the pic on the dining room table 3 weeks later tuning your bud to look at the biggest lion he has ever seen. He checks the tree, he sees a faarkin small lion under a normal sized tree and asks for another free beer. Now, don??t blame him for thinking you are mistaking meerkats for lions cause he was not there to see with two eyes how big the faarkin tree was, else he would know it was the biggest lion in Africa under the biggest tree in Kenya. If your bud knows a mother in law and you sent her to stand next to the lion back there in Kenya, his by now intoxicated-on-free-beer brain would tell him it??s indeed a moera big lion in your photo because it can calculate lion size by mother in law relationship.
Same goes for small things; your wife calls you and your camera over to record the smallest tortoise in history. You klap the macro function on the camera and take the photo of the micro tort checking you out where it??s parked on a bed of very fine sand. The picture on the dining room table shows a big tort on course gravel checking the photographer out, but if you were clever and photographed it next to a standard known-for-size object like a mom in law??s packet of Lexington plain, your bud would choke on his/your free beer and tune ??faark it??s a minute tortoise!?
Abusing the phenomenon to create mood.We now add optical lens characteristics to the equation for further bullshitting to our
advantage. When you zoom OUT to wide angle, everything appears further away and thus smaller. BUT, when you now put something VERY close to the camera it appears moera big in relation to the background and forces the viewer??s attention to it cause it looks more important than the rest of the far away stuff in the pic but yet the far away stuff support its story telling role in the pic. Whallah, a mood is created.
Once you try this you will soon realise it??s hard work cause you have to mobilise the camera to position foreground and background to your advantage. The ideal would be to have someone re-arrange the rocks and trees for you while you park in the shade with the camera sipping beer but alas, that only works in the studio. The zoom ??to fit it in? on its own does not arrange the foreground for you in relation to the background and thus all lazy photogs end up with snapshots instead of art works. Same mountain lazy oke??s way.
Sometimes a bit of scouting is needed to find something of interest to add to the
foreground. Same mountain, this time with interesting tree in foreground.
Now that was zooming out to wide angle, but there??s also bullshitting to be had by doing the opposite, zooming IN to telephoto. Basically the opposite happens, what??s in the background now appears bigger to what??s in the foreground. But now the job becomes even bigger cause now you have to step really far back to get everything to fit into the frame. Cooler bag is the answer for the far walk and the tripod will have to accompany you most of the time, but this will become clear when we talk about getting things in focus. Once you start looking out for these things you??ll get more clever as to where to stop the bike to save some walking, you check a nice mountain and as you ride, you look for the perfect foreground, tree, windmill, grave etc. Me riding a slow bike will start making more sense to you now, for faarking past everything at 160 gives you no chance to spot the shots while dodging stray cows on the gravel.
This ??compressed? telephoto/zoomed in visual effect works great on rows of trees, far away roads, telephone
poles in a row.
Last but not least about optical illusion, models. Reason for this is, wide angle makes
what??s close look bigger, so when you do a portrait-in-the-face shot of a babe her nose,
eyes, chin looks big in proportion to her ears and neck and you end up with the "I??m-not-photogenic? effect. We are talking very subtle differences but the brain is a
precision instrument.
The buffs will tune you ??portrait lens?, what they??re saying is zoom in, telephoto lens, and
your most basic snapshot cam is capable of doing so. If you have to add a babe to a wide angle shot, take her away from the camera further into the shot.
Playing around with wide and telephoto will also make you realise another phenomenon, that of focus, what??s in focus and what??s out of focus. This warrants an instalment on it??s own since this can be abused to isolate subjects from unwanted backgrounds.
Here are some photos done with more noticeable telephoto and wide angle, try and see if you can by now spot the difference, observe the scale relation of the foreground to the
background carefully.
Set the scale by adding a known for size object.
And close-ups, this one was done with my cellphone cam.
Final tip;
By now you??ll realise that whatever is closest to the camera appears most important and
biggest in the shot, so when someone starts waving a camera around for group shots, quickly move as close to the photographer as possible, doing so unobtrusively while he fiddles around with the controls which they always do
, and when he tunes you to ??stand back you don??t fit in? tune him to "ZOOM OUT." This especially holds true when suffering from "small bike syndrome? and could in the long run save megabucks on expensive big bikes
Until the next instalment.
Topic: Creating mood in photos (Read 3795 times)
