I have a project due for a Basic Photography class. The assignment is to take pictures of objects from unusual or unexpected angles. I am not quite sure that I understand what this means. If anyone has any suggestions, please help me out. My teachers says that it doesn't matter what the subject matter is it only matters that you take it from an unusual angle. What would work?

Tricia Lang

-- Tricia Lang (twbj322@aol.com), November 29, 1999

Answers

The assignment may be intended to make you explore how different shooting angles give the viewer different feelings about the things in your pictures. For example, if you stand up, put your camera to your eye and take a picture of a car, you get a plain ol' portrait of the car just like a boring car ad in a magazine. If, however, you lie flat on the ground in front of the car and and point the camera slightly upwards, you get a picture of the car looming over you like a pouncing cat (sort of ... I know it's not really a brilliant example [even if the car is a Jaguar]).

Alternatively, you could look for opportunities to make pictures which are interesting to look at because the shapes mean that the objects are not immediately obvious. Do you remember the type of kids' puzzles in which you are supposed to identify a very simply abstractly drawn object? One example that comes to mind consists of two concentric circles with thick black lines sticking out of the larger circle at the nine o'clock and three o'clock positions. This represents an overhead view of a Mexican on a bicycle. (The circles, of course, represent a big Mexican hat; I dont have any personal experience of Mexico or Mexicans and certainly do not mean to offend anybody with any perceived stereotyping in this example.) The fun of working out these puzzles is in the novelty of the point of view, both the unusual angle and the isolating of a few simple lines to represent the whole object.

Final example: Like many people who work in offices, I have received widely-circulated e-mails to which are attached photographs of buttocks (and other normally-concealed parts of the (usually male) body) dressed up with lipstick mouths, eyeglasses and so on, to look like cartoon characters. I don't find them especially funny, but my point here is that some of them deceive the viewer for a few seconds. (If you haven't seen these but really care to, e-mail me at dalsphil@globalnet.co.uk.)

So, your assignment may require you to look around without knowing in advance what you are looking for. I don't suggest crouching in front of cars, but around town you could look for new ways of seeing parts of buildings (columns, lights, adornments, signs, stairs and stairwells), street furniture (parking meters, lamp posts, bus stops) or even people (for example, extreme close-ups of boots and shoes, giving some abstract shapes).

Or, back indoors, you have household implements: you could photograph a blender looking a bit like a rocket, or a vacuum cleaner looking like an one-armed alien monster; or you could get a weird angle on a curvy object like a guitar or even a phone.

Or try getting above or below things: perhaps lean out of an upstairs window to take a bird's-eye picture of a friend (striding out, or carrying something big and unusual, or even riding a bicycle); or take a portrait of a friend or a dog from close underneath the chin; or lie flat on your back under a tree to get a shot looking upwards in the 'interior' of the tree.

(And if you have a scanner, post a reply later showing what you came up with.)

Good luck.

-- Philip Prescott (dalsphil@globalnet.co.uk), November 29, 1999.

Last spring I was tired of making photographs of wildflowers that looked like everyone else's photos so I decided to shoot from a bug's viewpoint. I put on a 14 mm lens and lay down and shot from below the flower. Maybe you can get an idea for something from this.

-- Joe Cole (jcole@apha.com), November 29, 1999.

There is a comic strip called (I think) Rose is Rose by Pat Brady. We get it in the Sunday paper. She draws the frames from all sorts of angles and viewpoints. Great stuff! If you can find this strip, It'll give you good ideas. Try a news and magazine shop if it's not in your regular paper.

-- Conrad Hoffman (choffman@rpa.net), November 30, 1999.

When I took first year B&W, we had a similar project. One of the girls took pictures of eggs in their cartons from different angles with a simple gooseneck lamp providing the lighting, also from different angles. Most effective.

-- Rosmarie Binns (mamoose@idirect.com), November 30, 1999.

Go shoot from the inside of things normally seen from the outside. For example go to the local zoo and see if they have an exhibit area that doesnt have an animal in it as see if they will let you shoot from the perspective of the animal. Get your friends with kids to come model as zoo-goers. Or set your camera inside the fridge and use a cable release to capture yourself in your jammies looking for a midnight snack. Lots of things like that come to mind.

-- Fritz M. Brown (brownf@idhw.state.id.us), December 01, 1999.