Close Ups - Filling the Frame
Posted on August 15, 2009
Filed Under Digital Camera Features, Good Digital Cameras |
An ordinary composition of a photograph will contain one or more subjects as focal points and a surrounding consisting of other objects. Based on all these elements, an observer will be able to recognize, the subject, the environment, and the message. Close-ups, on the other hand, may provide some sort of ambiguity, which will keep any observer guessing.
Boring surroundings may have a very bad effects on your subject, because, most probably, they will not have elements to balance the photographs, leaving a lot of empty spaces. An effective remedy to this is to fill the frame with your subject, so as to get rid of these empty spaces.
Moving closer to your subjects can make your photo more interesting by removing the surroundings altogether. For example, consider this situation in which you are photographing a wild animal at the zoo. With a normal composition, you will probably include the animal, the cage, and maybe some spectators. But if you fill your photo’s frame with the animal’s face only, anyone might think that it was taken in the wild. The ambiguity resulted from close-ups lead observers use their imaginations to complete the picture . A photo of legs of a man and a woman standing in front of each other can tell many things. Here, all you did is that you removed the subjects’ personalities, so as to give a space for the observer to think.
Portraits are usually a strong candidate for closeups. While taking a portrait inside a specific environment is always nice, close-up portraits are used to give a very different sort of experience. A portrait in which your subject fills the whole frame gives some sort of a personalized feeling. A facial portrait usually makes you in direct contact with the subject, as if you are looking to someone sitting in front of you. Close-ups on other body parts produce great photos too; they may create an abstract feel, or emphasize a certain action.
Close-ups also suit still life photographs very well. Getting close to object show new details that are not obvious when photographing from a distance. This kind of photography is usually used in stock and product photography.
Zooming and cropping are the tools used to create close-ups. While zooming is an on-camera process, cropping is usually done using photo-editing software, giving you more flexibility to set your composition, but with sacrificing the image’s original size.
As you can see, close-ups open a new door for your creative expression using photography. So use your imagination, and make your audience use theirs.
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