Capturing the same subject from different angles

Jim Foreman used to be a college photography instructor at one point in time. He mentioned to me that the first assignment he had his students perform was to go out and shoot 36 images of the exact same subject for later review by the class. The goal was to focus on the subject and find out how well different angles, exposure settings etc worked for capturing the image.

This idea intrigued me so during my Return to Port Burwell/Deja Vu tour I decided to try taking a series of shots of the wooden lighthouse to see what I could come up with.

A	B	C	D
E	F	G	H
I	J	K	L
M	N	O	P
Q

The pictures shown on this page are the unedited versions straight off the camera. The only modification from the original was to resize them in batch mode to be 800 pixels or 150 pixels wide instead of the much higher normal width. Each picture on this page is 150 pixels wide. Compression has also been used when saving the resized images to cut down on loading time of this page. Unfortunately this detracts from the photo quality but still leaves enough left to see the picture. Clicking on any picture will open a new browser window with the same picture 800 pixels wide.

My favourite pictures from this process are I, N and Q. Each of these pictures are very different and show the lighthouse in a different way.

Picture I is what I refer to as my traditional lighthouse shot. You can see the lighthouse, the general area and the lighthouse shed in the picture. The picture was shot at close to standing height.

I showed Picture N to several people in Port Burwell while I was there and most people expressed some disbelief that the lighthouse shown in the picture was the same one that existed in their town. The flowers are what made the difference. If you look closely at A you will see a small, square shaped flower box. I shot N by getting behind and slightly below the flowers in that box. By shooting through the flowers it created an image that is different then what you tend to see.

Picture Q is interesting because the lighthouse in many ways dominates the town. Once again there are flowers in the foreground with the lighthouse visible to the rear of the picture. In this case I was trying to use perspective to create a different kind of image. The addition of the car just in front of the lighthouse seems to add a touch of life to the picture as well making it stand out, for me, above O and P.

In practical terms the key thing here is that you can take dramatically different pictures of a subject just by changing your position and angle to it. Hopefully this article has given you a few examples of this that you might consider trying during your next bicycle tour.

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