Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Amateur Photography Part II: Height and orientation of the camera

Two more exercises from the first chapter of Langford's book: (a) take six shots of an object with a camera held high or low, and (b) take some shots of the same scene in both portrait and landscape. 

Easy enough. We go to the downtown Mission plaza.  The original intent was to attack the bears poaching for fish in the water, but there was a family there, so instead we go to Father Junipero Serra.





This is the setup shot with camera held at the eye level. Below is the same shot (left), plus the camera held high (center) and the camera held low (right) shots taken from the same position.  Nothing too exciting.





 The remaining shots (left is high, right is low):







Shooting portrait above the head or below the waist with my camera is not easy because the camera display swivels only up/down in the landscape mode, so I don't get to see the screen when holding the camera high or low (I can bend, but I cannot really grow extra two feet). Hence, both focusing and framing proved challenging. The frontal shot had to be done with a 55mm zoom just a couple of meters away from the statue because of the flower beds. I could not pull off a meaningful low camera shot from that position.  Below are some in-focus shots I got that caught only part of the padre. I actually kind of like them.




For the second exercise, I took a bunch of photos at and around the plaza.













The full sets are here and here.




No comments: