Choosing the right camera angle

When travelling, I frequently see tourist, or ask passenger to take a picture of me. Some time I am astonishing to see how some people can’t manage to find an interesting angle or use the zoom properly, so decided to talk about it in a very simple and illustrative way.

Interference:

Analyze the subject 360 deg.

1-Is there and aesthetical objects near by that you want to avoid? Most of the time, it is easy to frame them out by choosing a different angle.

2-Is it counter sun? If so you may want to use a flash (yes yes, the flash outside is a good thing!), rotate around, try HDR, or wait for a different time of day. However people with sun in the face, may have their eyes closed which should be considered as well.

3-Multi-shot combined with masking or long exposition can permit remove undesired people in a picture.

4-Can you move your subject to a better spot?

5-Sometime obstacles are just a good thing to give a particular look. You give have to choose and time them wisely.

Angle:

What are you trying to tell with your picture?

1-Up-Down or Down-Up photography can exaggerate the subject height.

2-Tilted photography can make them mess-ier.

3-Rules of third. Most of the time, you don’t want your subject to be centered. Placing it offset generally look better.

4-For moving subject, you want some open space behind the subject so that has place to move. A photography tell a story. If you fail to show the destination of your subject, it is probably missing a good point. Of course that goes in conjunction with rule number.

Zoom:

Most people believe that the zoom is a piece of equipment is used to enlarge the subject. Indeed, but it is way more powerful than that!

1-Zooming enlarge the foreground as well as the background. If you go backward while zooming, you will observe that your subject still fill the same proportion of your picture, but your background get enlarged. Even thus it sounds counter intuitive, give it a try! It also permits reducing the amount of background to be viewed and hide undesired obstacles.

2-Zooming reduce the depth of field. With a small sensor, it is sometime difficult to create a nice bokeh. With my DMC-Fz50, I frequently had to do a panorama with the zoom and at some distance to get the large sensor effect.

3-Zooming reduce the depth perception. If you want and object to appear thinner that can help.

4-Portraits are generally better at 75-90mm (equiv. 35mm) due to the increased bokeh and reduced depth.

5-Zooming sometime reduce the available aperture, causing less light to enter and also amplify the movements blur. Caution should be exercised when used a low light.

An example of scenario with undesired background: