Creative perspective and intentionality

Perspective can make or break a photograph. The choice of perspective is only second to the choice of light: perspective does not matter in complete darkness. However, with enough light for an exposure perspective begins to matter.

I like photography because it taught me to enjoy the world around me more. I enjoy noticing subtle and saturated colors and neat juxtaposition of things. However, capturing these ideas in photographs requires finding the right perspective.

As I walked around back streets of Escondido I saw a raw guard poles and a number bent ones. I thought to myself: "There are some bad drivers here!" I decided to capture that idea in a photograph. My goal was to capture it in such a way that the concept of bad driving would be immediately apparent to someone viewing my photograph. I walked to the side of the road and took the following shot:



This shot captured the scene, but failed to convey the idea of bad driving. In addition to having a busy background, this shot did not emphasize the crookedness of guard poles enough. As the result, I decided to show that poles are not aligned on a straight line by standing in line with them:



These shots showed that poles were uneven. There was enough variation in locations of poles that bent poles have disappeared among other poles. Again, not exactly what I wanted.

For my next shot, I moved a little to the right to visually align the poles with each other:



I generally liked the alignment of the poles this position produced, but there were too many elements in the photo that competed for view's attention. In order to make the lines of poles into the central subject of the photo, I got a little closer and to tilted the camera and placed the poles onto a diagonal:



I was finally happy with the result. The focus of the image was clearly on the crookedness of the poles.

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