The Art of Composition Part 12

Returning back to the Art of Composition series here, it’s time for us to finish up the discussion on angle of view.

In the last article which discussed the psychological impact of getting low and angling our camera up toward our subject, there is also a completely practical reason for doing this as well.

When we discuss art, inevitably we must talk about the headier stuff given how that the impact art has on us is so intimately tied to how we see and think and perceive the world. But these concepts are usually two-sided coins: Psychology on one side, practicality on the other.

When discussing the tangible benefits to our compositions with getting eye level with our subjects, I explained (and showed) how this allowed us to take control of the background and help isolate our subjects from the surrounding environment. When it comes to getting lower than eye level, we go one step further by introducing a foreground to the composition.

Photography is a two-dimensional art. This can be a little problematic, however, because you and I are quite used to seeing the world in three dimensions.

This isn’t to say that photography should necessarily be an objective representation of the world around us. On the contrary, photography is a form of visual art and thus there will always be a high degree of subjectivity involved. Even with photojournalism, that hypothetically most objective of all forms of photography, the point is to communicate something about the situation that is being photographed. That communication, that’s where the subjectivity comes into play. When we speak of “powerful photographs,” we are really speaking of the emotional impact the photograph has on us. As we all know, emotions are not objective. Emotions are anything but that. And when a photograph evokes emotion, you can be sure that it was done intentionally, that the photographer set about trying to create a composition or tell a story with that composition that evoked that emotion, that made you feel a certain way.

While including a foreground in our composition is about the furthest thing from evoking emotion, at least at first glance, it does allow us to create the illusion of three-dimensions and reality. This is important. Consider how the best science fiction is often created by making only small tweaks to that which is real. Photography is a lot like this. We start with the baseline of reality, and then make small adjustments to the composition to do all the things art does in general.

In landscape photography, the importance of including a foreground, middle-ground, and background might as well be a mantra in that genre of photography. Wildlife photography is no different, however. And one of the easiest ways of incorporating a foreground in our composition is by simply getting lower than eye level with our subject.

Let’s take a look at the photograph of the porcupine I included with this article as an example.

While working down in Kenai Fjords National Park, I came across this little guy ambling along the gravel bar of a glacially fed river. Being that porcupines are smaller rodents to begin with, even getting down to eye level with this guy inevitably turned some of the river rocks into out of focus foreground elements. And getting just a touch lower than eye level created an ethereal look to all of the stones.

Not all subjects are small like this, however.

In this example of a bighorn sheep ram from the Wind River Range in Wyoming, I squatted down below eye level and incorporated a little bit of sagebrush into the foreground. In doing so, the ram visually leaps out at you from the surrounding out of focus environment.

But not all wildlife live in areas where you have large clumps of sagebrush to so easily climb behind to turn into a foreground element. Consider this next photograph of a wild horse from the coast of North Carolina which, I believe, bring all the concepts I have discussed about getting lower than eye level over the last few articles together nicely.

In this situation, the stallion was walking across the empty sand flats of the island between the dunes and the tidal marsh. The wind was blowing hard this day, however, and a thin layer of drifting sand blasted both my and the horse’s legs. Recognizing that I could attempt to use this blowing sand as something of a foreground element, creating a ghostly appearance to this part of the composition, all while making the horse appear to be larger than life.

These horses are quite small. Stunted by the intensity of survival on these barrier islands, the stand between 12 and 13 hands in height. In captivity, the grow to 15, which makes them a horse instead of a pony, but out here in the wild I always work from a low angle of view in order to create the feeling of they animals being large and powerful.

Civilization as we know it was built upon the back of a horse. These animals, more than almost any other, hold a special place in our collective psyche. There is much romanticism that revolves around these animals. We use adjustives like strong, powerful, and enduring when we talk about horses. And so, with my wild horse photography, I want to evoke those very same adjectives.

And by getting down low, much lower than eye level with this stallion, not only was I able to utilize the blowing sand as a subtle but effective foreground element here, I was also able to make him larger than life by playing to the assumptions we all hold about horses in general.

This is how we create art. Everything becomes intentional. You can’t control the wild horse. You can’t control the light. You can’t control the weather or the wind or the blowing sand or splashing water or whatever other X factor happens to be occurring while you are there. But you can control how you compose the photograph to incorporate those elements, to exploit the light to the best of your ability, to get low and shoot up to massage the near mythological like status of a wild horse and incorporate the blowing sand and mane and tail into it all. Compelling photographs, those pictures that make you pause in your tracks for a moment, are not accidental.

To be continued. . .