Basic Photography | Point of View in Photography
© 2011 Wazari Wazir | HaiQal | Untitled Expression
Basically POV or Point of View refer to the position from which the camera take the photograph. Are you taking the picture from above, looking down on the subject or are you taking the picture from lower angle, looking up at the subject and how close or how far between you and the subject.
Normally most photographers took picture from their eye level, it is natural to do so, all we have to do is just raise the camera to our eyes and start composing the shot but sometimes this normal point of view tend to create a mundane or boring photograph, off-course there will be an exception depending on our needs or intention but it is a good starting point to take the shot from our normal point of view but to make our picture more interesting, why don’t we try to change our POV or point of view.
Most people will know that to take a better picture of our kids, we should photograph them from their eye level and not from our eye level, meaning that we have to get down to our knees and take the shot from child’s eye level, this will look much better and much more pleasing to the eyes than if we took the photograph of them from our eye level which is off-course from higher angle. Personally I think that taking a picture of our children from higher angle where we stand is a “Normal” point of view for us parents. We see our kids that way, we see them as a small child from our normal point of view but somehow our “normal” point of view can be boring to look at and that’s why most experience photographer will take a picture of a child from their eye level.
If you look at the picture of my son above which I took at our National Museum ( Muzium Negara ) in Kuala Lumpur, I choose to take the shot from a higher angle or “Normal” angle where how I view my son when I’m standing and the reason I do that is because I like the pattern of that red colored metal things, I don’t know what it is but my son were sitting in front of a locomotive, that thing where he sit were used as a connection to the other coach of the trains, I guess you got the idea of what it is.
If I choose to shoot my son from his normal eye level, I will not get that beautiful Red pattern there and instead I will get a dark plain background which I don’t think will look great as a background, so I decided to take this photograph from a higher angle and this shows that just by changing our point of view can make a picture look more interesting than just shooting it from our children eye level. Next time when you go out shooting, just keeps on changing your POV, don’t just look from our normal Point of View where we stand, instead try to look at something from higher angle or lower angle, you might find something interesting than our normal point of view.
