Every Tuesday I bring you a tidbit of info to help you take better photos, whether you have a major pro camera or a consumer point-and-shoot. This week’s tidbit is short and sweet: how to convey size/scale to your viewer.
Often we take photos simply as a record of being somewhere, to help others understand our experience in a certain situation and even simply to help us remember for ourselves. This is probably most true for vacation photos–how many of us have taken the classic “I was here and I have the photo to prove it” photo a dozen times over? I’m raising my hand and I bet you are too. And how many of us look at some of those photos (especially the ones of major landmarks and monuments) and think “This photo doesn’t really do justice to how crazy ginormous/tiny/insert-size-word-here this is”? I remember a photo I took years and years ago (before I really started getting into photography) of this HUGE sculpture of a little boy on exhibit at the Biennale in Venice–seriously, it practically took up a whole warehouse–but every time I showed the picture to someone, they were like “oh. uh-huh.” instead of “WHOA! COOL!”. Why? Because there was absolutely no indication of how big this thing was…to the viewer, it was just another sculpture.
How would I have taken that photo differently now? I would have introduced an element into the picture that conveyed scale. How would I have done that? Include something in the image that has a relatively constant size and of which pretty much anyone would recognize. You know those product pictures on Ebay where they put a penny next to the product to show how large it is? That’s what I’m talking about. Whether it’s a person, a penny, a dog or cat…by putting something in the image that’s a part of “normal” life, your viewer will be much quicker to grasp just how large/small your object/scene is.
Here are two examples from our way-fun camping trip this weekend that show what I’m talking about: the first is of the Palomar Observatory, the second is of a super random tree in the middle of the Mojave desert covered in shoes (seriously…this was in the middle of nowhere). Look at these photos and think about how important having Michael in both images is to understanding the sheer size of the objects.
It’s simple, really, but something that you might not always consider when snapping away. Well, now you will. Happy shooting from Vantage!
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