P#5 Q#5: How Does Shooting From Different Angles Make My Outdoor Photography More Interesting?

Improve your outdoor nature photography by getting your knees dirty

Audri Lanford: One subscriber asked: I read a book that talked about shooting from different angles to create more interesting photographs. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this, as well as suggestions you might have to make nature photographs and outdoor photography more interesting.

Rob Sheppard: That's a great question. It relates well to nature photography as well as any other photography.

One of the things that photographers have a tendency to do is see things consistently at the same angle. I remember one time talking with Will Hopkins who was the art director of the old Look magazine a long time ago.

This was well after that that I had met him. He said something to me that was very interesting. He said, "The only people that see the world from eye level and a middle distance are photographers."

His point was that, "That gets to be pretty boring if all pictures are always done that way."

As soon as you start looking for different angles, immediately you start getting something different and making pictures a bit more unique, getting down on your hands and knees.

A nature photographer that doesn't have dirty knees is really missing a lot of opportunities because you should be down there.

One of the things that I really like about some of the digital cameras that are available today are the live LCDs that tilt and turn and swivel because you can put a camera literally on the ground and still be able to see what the lens is seeing. That just gives you some different angles. You can also set your camera up high and look down on things.

If people think there's not much they can do -- there are all sorts of things you can do. I've taken my camera -- this is great with digital cameras because you can always review the shot -- put it on a tripod, collapsed the legs, put the camera on the self timer, clicked it, and then held it up high so now I've got some height that there's no way I would be able to get otherwise.

Or, I've done the same thing from a bridge and actually held the camera over the edge to get a lower angle that I couldn't get there otherwise.

Of course you can't see the viewfinder so you have to guess that you're getting it right but because you can review the shot afterwards in your LCD, you can say, "Oh well, that works," or, "That doesn't work," and you can make some adjustments and really get the shot that you want.

The point of that is not that you always have to do those things. The point is if you look for different angles, you can get interesting shots that people haven't seen.

I think in nature photography, that's really important because I think that there are a lot of challenges to our natural world today.

There are a lot of things going on, our parks aren't necessarily getting the funding they need, there are environmental issues, and so forth. We could go into a lot of that stuff.

But the point is that if people always see the same old pictures of nature that they've always seen, then people get bored seeing them and they don't care so much about the natural world, and they think the natural world is fine.

Whereas if you start doing something different, and you start getting some different angles that grab people's attention, and people think, "Oh, I didn't see that before." It captivates them and makes them more interested in the natural world. I think that's true of any subject.

There are lots of subjects that maybe don't get the attention that they need because people just see the same old shots of those subjects. Just by getting a different angle will get some new attention to it.

In conclusion

Create interest in your nature photography by shooting from different angles. Try adding wow to your composition by photographing from above or below where you normally would. Grab people's attention by making them see things in ways they haven't seen them before.