Low angle

On this shot I  could not see where the camera was pointing.

Sami Serola

While planning what to shoot for the weekly challenges, I have also tried to get my head around on the photo assignment #2 by Ted Forbes, which is low angle photography. Long time ago I optimistically thought a good photographer can use any camera to take good shots. And indeed that is true, but even a damn good photographer can't take super macro pictures without super macro lens.

During this year I have planned to focus on using my new mobile phone camera. It provides a pretty good quality, but for example for someone like me, who has previously used to use full rotating camera display, and remote control display, it really sucks when trying to shoot close to the ground. Especially it is difficult when I also would like to point the camera upwards, and not able to see the display.

My recommendation is to find a pocket mirror to use it for aiming. Couldn't find a handy one yet, but certainly will as soon as possible.

Here I was lucky to get those people just on right places.

Anyway, when taking pictures for the low angle shooting assignment, I kind of recalled my favourite ways to compose pictures taken from low angle (close to the ground). First of all I think wide angle lens is the best, because it much helps to really make it clear the view point is close to the ground. By following the classic recommendation to have something close to fill the foreground, and showing the context tiny on the background, it makes the view point sort of obvious.

I also absolutely love using portrait (vertical) composition on this kind of shots because the verticality kind of increases the distance between what is seen on the foreground, and the tiny things on background. This idea works especially well on the "trash season" series of mine. All kind of garbage people toss away and drop on the ground, looks enormous when seen from the low angle point of view and taken with the wide angle lens.