Camera Height, Angle & Crop

When the great English painter Joshua Reynolds painted Admiral Keppel in 1752 he tilted the view to make it more dynamic

Few people know that John Constable originally painted The Hay Wain, (1821) at a jaunty angle to make the cart look as if it was rolling backwards

In the 17th century, Artist Rembrandt painted many self-portraits with radical cropping, so that just part of his face could be seen on the canvas.

And in a recently found early painting by Da Vinci, shown here, we now know that he originally painted the Mona Lisa as if viewed from below.

Hold On … That’s Rubbish !!! We’ve seen that before the mid 19th century Western art was usually representational (not abstract), and ever since the Renaissance it had attempted to show the world as it really looked to the ‘normal’ human eye. Scenes were painted from normal eye height with horizon lines horizontal and with the subject seen fully (no crazy crops).

That’s more like it. THIS is how most artists used to paint.

Quite soon after its discovery in 1837, photography started to influence painting. George Stubbs, Molly Long Legs, 1762 This is a typical painting before the discovery of photography

These paintings by Degas were painted soon after the discovery of photography.

In its early days photography modelled its working practices on how painters ‘saw’ the world (e.g. photographing from normal eye height, looking straight at the subject, keeping horizon lines horizontal and so on). But from the 1920’s, photographers started to realise that the camera could ‘see’ in very different ways. They started to experiment with strange crops, camera angles and viewpoints.

Notice how the cropping of these photographs when they were taken is quite different to ‘traditional’ painting.

(by rotating the camera) Camera Angle (by rotating the camera)

Camera Height (looking down on the subject or looking up, or just getting up high or down low)

Prep Work For your first shoot, using your chosen object, take at least 3 images for each of the following categories: Creative use of camera height (looking up or looking down) Creative use of camera angle (by rotating the camera) Creative use of in-camera crop (this means no post-production cropping using Photoshop!) If you have time take a few images which combine 2 or more of the above techniques. Remember, link this to your Still Life brief and I am looking for creative quality, not just quantity!