Looking up, looking down

Most of the time a photo is just a frame, from different angles with different settings, but just one frame at the time. This means one view of one scene.

I recently challenged myself to review that concept and I came up with the idea of taking four views of the same scene in what I call from to bottom to the top.

I came up with the plan when considering how composition rules dictate that in landscape photography one should always aim at dividing the frame 50-50 between ground and sky, or 75-25 even, with some exceptions.

For a whole day I made a point of shooting every photo 'from the bottom to the top' as in taking four photos that included 100% of the ground, 50%, 25% and 0%. The images below illustrate this idea.

I don't think these results will change anyone's views on the principles of composition. I do hope, however, to encourage others to try something similar, to look lift the camera up and see the resulting images as context for that photo they initially wanted to take. 

Because this blog is about images and notes, I am going to be making a lot of emphasis on context and sometimes, like in this case, the context is provided by other frames that are not always part of the final picture.

River Thames view from Millennium Bridge, London, 2016

These, like all the photos in this blog, are free of any manipulation because I want them to be raw and I want to recapture the manual approach to photography.