Assignment:
Fair warning! I approached this assignment backwards!
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I first learned of the ‘near far’ technique from the Ansel Adams basic photo series. Many of his photographs feature a foreground element, like a rock, tree, or water, combined with a beautiful mountain, water fall, or clouds as the background. Many times this helps to add scale i.e depth, to the photo since a photo is a flat two dimensional object. By the way, I did not put this in the previous post, but did you know the only two dimensional object in the universe is a shadow?
The depth in a photo is one of the techniques to draw a viewers gaze into the image. But this is just a creative technique. There are many artists who have done just the opposite and smashed all of the elements into seemingly one plane, and were successful. Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai did many paintings where the different levels in the scene are ambiguous. He is most famous for the ‘Great Wave’ painting, but he did many other scenes like his ‘Red Fuji’ where scale is more psychological than explicit:
So how to create depth? I thought of finding a scene in nature with foreground, mid-ground, and background elements. That is a fun pursuit, and very enjoyable, but I am busy with many projects and did not think it wise to tear away and indulge in wandering. As you will see, I decided to play with forced perspectives and use depth in a different way. You no doubt have seen the ‘fun houses’ where the perspective of a room is changed as you walk into it, so it appears that the person is getting bigger as they move away from you. This technique is used greatly in movies. For example in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, the directors used the fun house technique to make the wizard Gandalf appear huge in the small hobbit houses, and perspective control to keep Frodo short and small, even though he is often much closer to the camera.
And now what you have been waiting for, the result. It might be amateurish, but I’m learning! Scroll down for a overhead view of the setup.
Here is the setup from above, as you can see I have:
- A foreground object, (wagon).
- A mid-ground object, (horse).
- A background object, (Mimi)!
- (And camera position at the bottom).
The End
This is brilliant! I am chewing on that phrase, that scale can be more psychological than explicit. In my work, I’ve struggled to quantify the secondary impact of reaching many people with an idea or program, even when they aren’t being measured. You only need the right people to be in audience or to hear your story for the idea to spread or unlock a new partnership that could change the game.