Welcome to a start of a four week Ella Photography Series. For the last few Fridays (and one more to go!), Noel and Moon have been sharing their photography tips, tricks and challenges to help you take better photographs. Each week they will be focusing on a different topic. This week's topic is Perspective.

Noel shares...
Changing perspective is one of the easiest ways to add interest to a photo. I read once that if you take a photo from the same spot everyone else does, you'll get a photo that looks like every other photo you've seen. For instance, flowers are often low to the ground. if you hold your camera, look down and shoot... you'll end up with an average looking shot. However, if you get on the ground and shoot up toward the flower, you'll get a very different shot with lots of added interest.



After losing this shoe's pair in an unfortunate snow spin out in the Rockey Mountains, I wanted to document the one that didn't get away. I place the shoe on a stool and shot it on an angle. One tip for shooting on an angle, keep an eye on how that leaves your subject. You want the angle to feel purposeful, but not so angled that your subject looks like it is falling out of the frame.



Get low. Just like shooting a flower from a different angle, you can shoot people from a different angle. This is especially true of children. Being adults, we're often taller than children, so we naturally see them from above. Getting low, and looking at them, or in this case at her legs, gives a perspective you couldn't catch from simply standing and taking a picture.



Zoom in. Get pictures of just a piece of the puzzle, as well as the big picture. Zooming in to get a detail shot is a great way of adding a new perspective. I took several pictures of my daughter with her new missing tooth, but really loved this zoomed in shot of my little toothless wonder.



Beside the different angles you can shoot to get perspective... there is also the mental perspective. Taking pictures as a way to convey someone's life perspective. A few weeks ago I asked my daughter to put away the vacuum cleaner. When I came upstairs, this was what I saw. The vacuum, still plugged into the outlet in the living room, but put away in the closet down the hall. From a kid's perspective, she put away the vacuum, just like I said. From a mom's perspective... well, we can all guess. It was a funny way of remembering the big difference in perspective that 30 years and a couple of kids can make.


Moon shares...
I think Noel has pretty much covered the topic of perspective beautifully. Just wanted to add that you can also use perspective to focus on what you want to focus on. For example, in this photo, I wanted to capture the smallness of my nephew's head in relation to my brother's big hands:



The same goes for his tiny feet:



And speaking of feet, that's what I wanted to capture in the next photo-well, feet and legs of my kids. In keeping the focus on just their legs, it makes a greater impact than if I had their whole bodies in the shot:



I hope Noel and my examples get your creative juices flowing to try out different perspectives.

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Picture Perfect 

40 Top Tips for Better Photographs