Much of the time when I am shooting people, I think of the perfect quote by Marcel Proust, ” The real journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
In my portrait course here at BPSOP, called Eye to Eye – Capturing the Face, one of the things that I like to talk about is just what Proust was saying. Shooting from different angles is one way of having new eyes. This means to think outside of the box and capture your subject or model from a different perspective. So often, the photographer just stands in front of their subject and puts on a telephoto lens and starts to shoot. That works fine much of the time but there are so many other angles that can be incredibly dramatic and give you so much more impact.
One of the ways that I love to shoot is from directly above and shooting straight down on my models. There are many benefits that go along with shooting from above and one of the best advantages is that quite often they are in a very comfortable position that can make them look completely relaxed. Being comfortable in an image and getting someone in a great pose is so much more important than many people realize as it can really help the face look dramatically better and the end result might be a great result for both you and your subject.
In this first image above of this young girl with red hair, I was asked to shoot her 2 weeks ago by her father and when we went to the park, I decided to try something different. I had been shooting different angles of her against trees and laying down on her side, and was pretty happy with many of the images. But I decided to have her lay on her back and with my 24-105 Canon lens, I shot straight down and got the exact composition that I felt gave me the look that I wanted at that particular moment. The great thing about doing a shot like this and using a zoom lens is that you can zoom in or zoom out to exactly the perfect crop and composition that you want. Using a fixed focal length lens in this situation would also work nice but would not give me the freedom that a good zoom lens would have.
I realized that the horizontal framing worked best for her and you really have to play with vertical and horizontal to see which is the right camera position for that particular subject. I shot her in full sun at the park with my girlfriend holding a translucent diffuser above and to the side to soften the bright sunlight and give me a gorgeous quality of light across her face.
In the above shot, you can see that this is totally different but has a similar feeling as I shot this one indoors and also shot it vertically and not horizontally. It really depends from subject to subject and location to location and also lighting condition to lighting condition. Many times I know what I want to get before I pull my camera out of my backpack and other times I just play it by ear. This shot just happened in seconds as I was at a party at my cousins house and I was able to grab little Decklin and ask him to lay down on the floor while I stood straight over him shooting down. Sometimes your subjects don’t really care to listen to you but this gorgeous little 3-year-old was the perfect little model and did anything I asked. I told him to put his arms behind his head and look straight up at my lens and in turn, I got just what I had envisioned that moment. If I had shot him any other way, it might have been a pretty nice little image also and I did do some other poses too. But this was the one that gave me the most impact and quite often shooting like this can give you something completely different and is definitely a nice change of pace.
Below, is another image that I shot from above, with children who probably are my favorite subject shooting from above. Sometimes I put on great backdrops which I lay on the floor and quite often I am looking for great locations to shoot them on. Quite often just the sheets for a blanket on the bed prove to be a great backdrop or even just having your subject lay in the sand at the beach. The sky really is the limit for a great background beneath them but you also have to look for great lighting which is really the key to everything.
I hope you try something different like this as it’s definitely a lot of fun and can give you some pretty nifty little images that you might not have normally thought of. I love shooting portraits all over the world and whatever you can do to think outside the box and try something out of your comfort zone might open up only world for you. When your models are comfortable, which quite often they are when laying on their back, all of a sudden you might see a completely different feeling that was never there before. Keep trying different things as often as possible because you never want your photography to get stale and always be the same old thing. Change is good and looking at your subjects from a different angle is definitely using your creativity!
Scott Stulberg – BPSOP Instructor
Scott teaches: Eye to Eye – Capturing the Face
