Task: Choose a subject that is clear in appearance and compact in shape. It must be accessible from close to and from a distance. Take 4 different photos of the subject.
Tucked away behind an industrial estate in Middlehaven, Middlesbrough, there is a small recreation area that has become the home of some steel dinosaur sculptures. Their basic form and shape provided a good opportunity to experiment with different angles and distances of view. I chose a dinosaur which was at the base of a hill. This enabled me to experiment with altering the angle of view quite dramatically.
Standing on the hill enabled me to fit a lot of the surrounding scenery, such as picnic tables, into the frame. This provided the context that the dinosaur was in a park setting. Positioning the picnic table alongside the dinosaur illustrates the size and scale of the sculpture.
Moving forward towards the subject enabled me to fit the whole of the subject into the frame with it’s head in the top left-hand corner and it’s tail near the bottom right-hand corner. This image has also been cropped yo give a tighter fit to the frame.
A longer focal length of 135 mm, and narrow field of view, has crammed just the ribcage of the sculpture into the frame, adding interest to the image and making it unclear what the subject is.
Changing the angle of view has made a clearer distinction of the subject and it’s surroundings.
This project has enabled me to think about how altering the focal length can effect the resulting image. That a short focal length can often provide a wide field of view and a greater context for the subject, whereas a long focal length can provide opportunities to capture interesting features of a subject.