P#20 Q1F: How This Exercise About Focal Length Can Teach You New Vision

Learn to See Beyond Your Eyes

Bryan Peterson: There's more to being able to see creatively than just understanding the language of your lenses. You also have to add, what I often refer to as, the different accents that live within a culture of a given country.

You go up to the north of Germany and their accent is different than it is in the south of Germany. The same is true in France, and not surprisingly the same is true in America. Up north, people talk about "Take the ca," and down in Texas, they talk about, "Yeah, I'm gonna git my truck."

You have the same language, yet different accents. I often refer to the camera in this respect by saying that you have the wide angle lens with its own accent, the telephoto has its own accent, and of course the macro lens has its own accent.

If you don't know how the wide angle sees the world, then you will never grab it instinctively to interpret what lies before you. The only way you can see differently with what lies before you is to know what the vision is of every single focal length in your camera bag.

You are seduced daily by what I call human visions. The human vision, first of all, is 3D. Cameras are two-dimensional for the most part, but you can get close in making a three-dimensional image -- a photograph of great depth and perspective. How do you do that?

Here's my suggestion. Take out your wide angle lens, and for most people out there today, that's going to be a street zoom. That usually starts around 17mm or 18mm and can usually stop at somewhere between 40mm and 85mm. In Nikon's case, it would be the 18-200mm.

Get a piece of duct tape. Put it at 17mm and put some tape on there so you can't change that focal length. Then all I'm going to ask you to do (and you can do this all day and all night long without embarrassment) is simply spend time in your house or go out in the backyard.

Start at one end of your house or yard, totally on your knees and belly, and crawl the entire time while you're looking through the lens. Move your head left and right. Then do the same thing, exact same, with the same lens, on your back and scoot across the floor or scoot across the yard looking left and right.

Then I want you to do the same thing again with a step ladder where you're literally going to just put a step ladder up, an eight food step ladder, out in your backyard. Get up to the top of the ladder and look down at the yard through the eyes of the 17mm.

Then just to go and lie at the base of a tree and look straight up with your 17mm. You do this for a lot of different reasons, not the least of which is that your brain is now beginning to assimilate that vision. You're making a memory of this.

To Sum Up

We see in 3-D. Our cameras, however, do not. If you want your pictures to really stand out from the crowd, you need to learn to do so. Bryan's focal length exercise is one great way to do just that, and you don't even need to leave the comfort of your home.