Creative Shots - Making Distant Objects Look Closer to Near Objects

Using your camera to zoom in on a distant object seems like a pretty straightforward way to make it look closer. Sure, you could walk to the object, but then it wouldn't be distant. Let's explore how we can use your camera's zoom creatively.

When you use your zoom, the camera takes a picture of a more narrow portion of what the camera normally sees without the zoom. For example, when I take a picture of the night sky without zooming, even a full moon looks very small. When I want to take a picture of the moon, I use my zoom to take a picture of the narrow portion of the sky around the moon. How narrow the portion of the sky depends on how much my camera can zoom. The more I zoom, the more narrow the view of the sky I see in the camera and the the larger the moon looks. The moon isn't getting any bigger, and I'm not getting any closer to it; I am just looking at a more narrow part of the sky.

"Angle of view" is the phrase for how wide or narrow the camera can see, and for most cameras this is adjusted with a zoom lens. A wide angle of view lets us see a lot of stuff, useful (for example) when shooting pictures at an indoor birthday party. A narrow angle of view lets us see a smaller amount of stuff, useful (for example) for shooting pictures at a baseball game.

What happens when we are taking pictures of different objects, some of which are close to the camera and some of which are further away? (Farther away? Help me grammar nerds!)

These pictures from last year both show Boyd and Sam sitting in the same place next to the Washington Monument, apparently after eating blue popsicles. The Lincoln Memorial is just under a mile away. In the first picture, I got close to the boys and took the picture with a wide angle of view, making the Lincoln Memorial look smaller than the boys' heads. In the second picture, I walked back a bit and zoomed in on the boys, using a narrow angle of view that made the Lincoln Memorial look larger than the boys. Because the Lincoln Memorial looms larger in the second picture and the distance to it looks compressed, it looks closer to the boys (QED, for the grammar nerds still reading).

This technique can also be used to make little boys look like they are giants crushing famous, distant landmarks. My boys will discover this someday and will be greatly amused by it. Until then, though, I will use this technique to compose creative shots of the boys.

By way of another example, last summer I took a perfectly innocent picture of Sam splashing a board in the Chesapeake Bay:

and made it look like he was playing in front of a nuclear power plant:

Don't worry, radiation is a source of superpowers (Hi Spiderman and the Hulk!).

I took the same picture this summer, but also included Boyd and a friend so they could be superheroes, too.

Let me know if you have any luck using this technique.

UPDATE

I found another image using this technique on a much larger scale at Creative Shots - MDOLCTNO Revisited.