 So every morning when I wake up, this is what I see, and it's a great example of Viewpoint, which is going to be the subject of today's lesson. Viewpoint, and we're also going to talk about camera angle a little bit, although really we're talking more about Viewpoint. This is an example of Viewpoint because, well, when I wake up, I always see my friend Frank here looming above me on my, this is sort of on my window sill, and I one morning when I woke up, I just thought, you know, I should take a picture of this because, well, I wake up every day looking up like this, and it's kind of a cool image. So I took the photograph, and it's a perfect example of a low viewpoint. So you have in photography, you have low viewpoints, and then you have high viewpoints, and we'll show you an example of what a high viewpoint looks like in a second. You also have one called iLevel, which we'll be taking a look at later as well. So let's take a look here at another low viewpoint. Here we are back in Montana, where I come from, and this is my sister on her horse Jake. This is another example of a low viewpoint, and you can tell that because I'm down on the ground, I'm in the grass, and the reason that I chose a low viewpoint in this case is because I wanted to emphasize my subject. Every time you're making a choice in composition, you're making a choice about emphasis. You're picking your subject, and you're saying, this is how I want to pull them out of all the mess and confusion of the image, and emphasize them. And in this case, I thought, you know, the best way to make Sadie and Jake stick out on this background is to put them on the sky because it's a big empty palette where I can sort of make that shape that says horse and girl on horse really apparent. And you can see I can still see the mountains in the background, mission mountains that I grew up near, and you can still see the field, but I chose to put that all on the lower third. We've talked about this in our Rule of Thirds lesson, and I decided to put everything else up top here and to really pull them out of the whole picture and make them the emphasis, make them the star of the photograph. So that's one reason to choose a really low angle. It kind of adds drama, it adds emphasis, and it also adds a level of importance to this image. It kind of gives it a sort of a different feeling than if you're looking down on the subject. Here we've got a high angle image, and this is just a snapshot. I was riding in the bus one day on my way home from work, and the sun was shining in from the west, and you can see it's causing a really great silhouette on this biker's sort of on her hair and sort of on her coat, and you can see the car is kind of lit up very cool. It's the light shining into my lens and catching some dirt right here and kind of causing a little bit of lens flare, but I just chose this image because it's an unusual way of looking at a street. You don't usually see the street from this angle, especially if you're walking around on it all the time, and so it's just kind of a good example of a high viewpoint. A high viewpoint also kind of has a feeling of looking down on someone, so there's also a certain sort of power relationship involved in high viewpoints. A lot of times if you want to take a photograph of a child, you'll be looking down on them if you're a taller person, and there is sort of a power relationship involved in that. So like in the last image where we were looking up at Sadie and Jake, up against the mountains and the sky, we were giving them a lot of the power. In this case, we're looking down on them and saying, we're bigger than you and we're looking down on you. So that's another thing to think about when you're choosing a viewpoint for an image. Here is an example of a house guest breaking the rules of the house. This is Spencer. Spencer was not supposed to be laying on my bed, but Spencer decided to anyway. And when I came in one day while he was visiting, I thought, well, this is a pretty cute picture. So I took a low angle shot and then I hopped up on my chair and I took a high angle shot. Now these are two very different pictures and you can kind of see why. Here you can see we're at eye level and I just wanted to take basically a portrait of Spencer. I wanted to capture him as you would experience him if you were sitting on the floor next to the bed maybe. Well then over here, I kind of thought it was kind of funny how this leg right here sort of matched this camera strap that was coming off. This is my camera bag right here. It had been laying there because I was doing some photography work that day and I had a microphone case there for something I was doing too. And I just thought it was kind of a funny sort of mirror image in a way that's sort of like my camera bag and the dog were sort of similar. And so this picture was taken just to kind of capture some of the humor of that. It's not necessarily very funny, but it just kind of is sort of meant to be a little bit funny. And this kind of just gets at the fact that using your viewpoint can tell two very different stories and that's really important when you're doing photography. Storytelling is really what you're trying to do and if you're trying to tell the story, if you're trying to tell this story with this picture over here, then you're going to have a hard time. So you have to change up your camera angle. You have to try some different things. And I would recommend whenever you're trying to tell a story with a picture or whenever you're just trying to take a picture, try lots of different angles. Go low, go high, move around, try different things. Don't just shoot it from this angle, shoot it from over here as well. And that will produce more interesting and better images. Now here is sort of a more serious image. This is a very different image than the last one. This are some friends of mine from a project that I did a long time ago about them trying to get justice for their son Steven who was killed by a coworker. They felt that the government had mishandled the case in investigating Steven's death and so they were making a big case against the US government at that time and they still are actually even years later. I took this portrait of them with this picture of their son in their hands and I really wanted to make them important just like I did with Sadie and her horse in the beginning. I wanted to put them up against the sky but I didn't want to take them out of their context completely. So you can see here I put the background at about 50% so it's about half. You can see the background is taking up about 50% of the image and then I stuck them out up into the sky because I wanted them to be emphasized. I didn't want the sky if I was standing up straight up and taking the portrait from a normal eye level the background would have hit them right here and they wouldn't have seemed as important they wouldn't have seen as interesting and I also wanted to have Steven right in the middle of my portrait. You can see that I'm breaking the rule of thirds but I'm putting them in the middle and trying to create balance to offset that. You can also see that this is just a very different way of approaching horizon and this is getting at the point that you really want to think about what your subject is so our subject is here but you also want to think about your background and their relationship to that background. This background is important. This was this Steven right here worked in this corral a lot. This is where he kept his horses and this was his horse trailer over here for example or one that he used a lot and I wanted to have those things in the image because they told a story and I did that by lining them up so you can see that you have these three things all lined up right there. You can see that they're sticking out of the background and they're important but at the same time that this background is also important. So you want to think about those kind of things when you're composing your images and even if it becomes at some point subconscious you want to constantly be doing that sort of thing. Here's an image that I took at a local sort of community center on my street and I was just going to visit and trying to get some pictures of some people working. It's a sewing and sort of woodwork factory of types. And right here you can see our friend here is just putting needles into this cloth here. This image on the left is a very just standard picture that you would take as a photojournalist or even just as someone working at this place or taking a picture of your friend. It's eye level so you can see the camera is about at her eye level or a little bit below. And you're just trying to simplify the background but I felt like this image needed something else and so I thought okay. So here we've got our eye level attempt and then I thought well how about I get high and see what this looks like from above. So I stood on a bench and I looked down on the table and here I got this image right here which I thought I think at that moment and it realized was a lot more interesting because it really simplifies everything. All this stuff that's going on behind her right here all these shelves and things that are conflicting with the shape of her and kind of making her not stick out from the background. A lot of that stuff is simplified and yet you're still getting the same motion that you're getting in this image. You're getting it right here but it's just a little bit more interesting. So here we have a recent example of me kind of playing around with viewpoint and camera angle at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. So again we have here to the left we have a high angle shot and to the right we have a low angle shot. And these images tell very different stories. This kind of gets again at the storytelling element and some of more the maybe the kind of feeling part of photography that you're trying to kind of bring across to your viewer. Here to the left you can see the man is sort of searching and looking through. He has kind of maybe a feeling of maybe questioning where he's going and by taking a higher viewpoint you can kind of get to that feeling in a different way than you could if you were standing down at eye level with him or especially if you were down on the ground looking up at him it would feel like a very different thing. Maybe if you were low on the ground it would feel like he's conquering his way through this memorial and if you look at him from above maybe he looks a little bit more questioning in a way at the very same moment just by using changing your camera angle. And to the right here you can see this has just from the action of the person who you're photographing from your subject you have obviously a very different image. You can see these moving and jumping around and sort of playing so it's a more playful image. But it also has a different feeling because of your angle. Because you're looking down and you're kind of seeing this sort of like powerful young person diving across all of these big big stones and that kind of has a very different feeling than looking down on someone. So think again about the power relationship that you're kind of creating with this and sort of the emphasis that you're putting on an image here you can see the emphasis is sort of more on the sort of confusing sort of graphic element of the image where here the emphasis is really on the subject the young person kind of jumping across. So you want to kind of think about that as well. Here's also a recent example of a viewpoint sort of practice session that I was doing was I was shooting some people in a school and here we've got a high viewpoint and this is would be called if you were a cinematographer this would be called a POV shot. A POV basically means point of view and you're trying to see exactly how the person who would be working or doing or you're photographing would see something and you're just looking over his shoulder essentially and in this case maybe you're taking the point of view of a teacher who would be looking over the shoulder of your student. To the right you can see something I kept seeing the teacher of the class put his hands on the book and the students kept looking at him especially this student right here and I kept thinking how do I get this? Well I used then a lower, not a low camera angle but a lower camera angle so to kind of emphasize this I wanted to line up this action right here with this face and the only way to do that is to get low. If you don't get low then you just have the table and the finger and if you get too low then you just have the table and you don't have the student. So you want to have both of these things lined up and you can just do that by lowering your camera to a spot where you're gonna have this, this and these guys over here all in one image and not in two or three separate images. I was standing on the side of a highway once doing a little, I was doing some landscape photography and I saw this sweetheart bread truck coming plowing down the road at me and I thought I was in Eastern Montana so you can see things coming from a long way off there. I saw it coming, I thought how can I get this image and then I saw these little kind of sunflower-y sort of, I think they're called brown eyed susans I thought, oh boy, I need to line those two things up because this yellow is perfect for to kind of set against this truck. So I ran over and I got down low and I did the same thing I just did in the last image. I evened out the subjects. I wanted to have one subject in the background, a little blurred, I chose a slower shutter speed and I wanted to have the flowers in the foreground and I did that just by using my viewpoint. If I was standing up straight this image wouldn't have worked but by getting low, getting down at the level of this flower and then putting that truck right in the background you then have this sort of color tension from left to right. So it gives you kind of an idea of different ways that you can use viewpoint to make stronger images. You can learn more about photography and lots of other things at alversity.org.