Photography Tip—Go Low with Your Camera to Create Highly Unique Images, Part 1

One of the common mistakes of many digital photographers (you know who you are) is to shoot virtually all their pictures from a standing position. Moving yourself and/or your camera to other positions is the easiest way to be more creative and take pictures that your family and friends will ask to see again and again. Going low with your camera is where you’ll discover unique, exciting and dramatic angles and views of everyday scenes and activities; plus, it’s good exercise to bend your knees. This two-part PhotographyTalk.com article provides a few tips and techniques that you should keep in mind.

Recommended Cameras:

Nikon D500 | Nikon D3300 | Canon EOS Rebel T5 | Sony A7RII | Canon 7D Mark II

Forget Your Viewfinder.
You’ll have to sacrifice looking through the viewfinder to take low-angle photos. You’d have to be the size of toy soldier to put your eye to the back of the camera. A flip LCD viewfinder is the only solution, if your camera has that capability. Here is another opportunity to train your photographer’s eye to “see” a picture worth capturing, without looking through the lens. Read the PhotographyTalk.com article, Digital Photography—How to Train Your Photographer’s Eye.

Shoot with a Wider Lens.
This may be your best solution to being unable to see the photos you want to take from a low angle. A wide-angle lens, 10–22mm, will reveal more of the scene you want to photograph, improving the likelihood of you recording the picture you want. The extreme angle of a fisheye lens (less than 10mm) will show even more, and create interesting distortions. A cost-effective option is to use a zoom lens of 18 to 200mm. It gives you both a wide and telescopic focal length, so you can shoot more types of digital photography without needing multiple lenses. The three-part PhotographyTalk.com article, starting with Digital Photography—The Wonderful World of the Wide-Angle Lens, Part 1, will also be helpful.

Become a Depth-of-Field Expert.
Taking low-angle digital photos will challenge your ability to control depth of field. With a wide-angle lens, your low-angle pictures are more likely to have objects in the foreground and background you’ll want in focus. That’s one of the reasons to position your camera at a low angle, so you can take a photo, for example, of a red ball in the foreground that looks large and distorted and your dog extending its paws from the background to grab it.

You can set the aperture at an f-stop that is the smallest lens opening: f/16, f/22 or f/32, depending on what lens you are using. That’s no guarantee, however, that both the foreground and background will be in focus. Once again, knowledge and practice is key. Understand the concept of depth of field backwards and forwards, and then practice with your camera, so you know how well it will help you control depth of field.

Shoot pictures, with foreground and background objects, from a standing position and find the aperture setting that puts them all in focus. Then, set that aperture with the Aperture Priority mode when you want to take low-angle photos. You may have a digital camera with a Depth-of-Field mode. Select it, and your camera is likely to set the correct aperture and focus point, automatically.

Recommended Reading: