GFF logo





   
First published March 20th 2006 - More than 2 years ago

Better fishing pictures: Go low

More ways to improve your fishing photos. This time about getting down to the level of your subject, kneeling, getting close to the water, getting a great perspective.

By Martin Joergensen

  
 Ordinary
 Ordinary 
Ken Bonde Larsen
Ambience
 Ambience 
Anders Dahl
 

One of the most common errors I see when I see people taking pictures is that they will be looking down on their subject.
An angler just caught a nice fish and landed it. It’s about to be released and the lucky—or skillfiul—guy kneels on the bank. The photographer hovers over the angler and the fish and gets a picture of a couple of shoulders, a cap with a bill that shadows the face and some bank and maybe a bit of water.
What’s missing?
How about a face?
What did the fish look like?
Where’s the horizon?
How did the place look?

By kneeling down next to the angler you get all this and more.

  • If you are photographing a standing person, bend your knees to get just a bit lower.
  • If you are photographing a kneeling person, kneel and bend even further down.
  • If you are photographing a person lying down, your camera needs to be on the ground.




Always take some pictures where the camera is lower than your subject.

  
 Camera low
 Camera low 
Martin Joergensen
 
If you really want to get down, you want to use an angle finder or a camera, where the display can be tilted. That allows you to keep the camera so low that you actually cannot look into it, but using an angler viewer or finder you can still see what’s happening.

But remeber to be careful with your low photos, particularly if you use a wide angle lens. The perspective can sometimes become too distorted and result in bodies and faces, which look odd.

The opposite is the case with telephoto lenses. The low stance will almost always give a great perspective to the image. By getting the horizon low and isolating the subject against the sky or background you can get a lot of ambience into your image.



You can visit 500th.net, which has much more on photography.


Want to comment this page? Fill out the form below.
Comment
Only comments
in English
are accepted!
Your name Your email

All comments will be screened by the GFF staff before publication.
No HTML, images or links, please - we do not publish such comments...
And only English language comments will be published.
Name and email is optional but recommended.
The email will be shown in a disguised form in the final comment to protect you against spam
You can see other public comments on this page

If you want to submit a private comment, not for publication, use this form

 
Did you find the above interesting?
People who looked at the above also looked at these pages:

Colorado camaraderie

Things to do near Denver -- not when you are dead but actually when you are very much alive and ready for some fishing adventures. Follow Kasper Mühlbach and GFF partners Steve Schweitzer and Martin Joergensen on a trip.

Rudi’s little gems

Take more than one day off for fly-fishing in Bavaria. The waters are outstanding and you have so many options! That's the advice of Tobias Renkawitz in this article about Rudi Heger's trophy trout and grayling waters on the Traun in the Southern part of Germany and in Austria.

Blog Creek

Like many of you we're chained to our computers, thinking about fly fishing. This webblog is our outlet to keep our heads from exploding.

Tie a muddler

Martin Joergensen: "One evening when I was tying flies with a couple of friends, one of them, Nils, asked me to tie a muddler, just as a demo. I did. Luckily the other friend, Henning, was quick and caught these great pictures of the process."
This other story related to "pictures" might also interest you:

GFF Gallery

Pix: All the oldie pictures from back when GFF was not yet formed and GFF partner Martin Joergensen was running Fishing Denmark. See them here

Click to see other stories with the keyword "pictures"
A few random articles for your entertainment

A Global Fly Fisher Publication
Copyright © 1994 - 2008, Joergensen/Petti/Schweitzer/Skehan
Portions of this site copyright © the contributors. All rights reserved.
This material is for personal use only. Do not distribute without prior written consent from each copyright holder.
Comments and suggestions are welcome