A New Perspective
Sometimes in order to get the results you're looking for you just have to change the way you look at things! By getting a different POV (Point Of View) than everyone else it will make your pictures different from the rest.
Lets take a fairly common subject as an example - birds at the beach. Anyone can take pictures of birds but how do you make your pictures stand out from everyone elses?
We will assume that we haven't been lucky enough and fast enough to capture birds in flight and that we have had to resort to a picture of the bird standing on the sand, a rock pole or some other object.
Right about now you must be thinking that's not too difficult. Perhaps not! But, in our example we are not trying to capture a common sea-gull but a much smaller, faster and wary species - The White Fronted Tern (a New Zealand Native species).
We are using an Olympus E300 DSLR with a 40-150mm Zoom (300mm equivalent on a 35mm camera). Perhaps not the fastest, or best lens for the job but the one that we had at our disposal. It was mid afternoon on an overcast day on a crowded beach. There was a flock of terns hanging around just waiting to have their portraits taken.
We wanted to isolate a single bird so decided to shoot at a small DOF (Depth Of Field) using an aperture priority set to F4.5 which resulted in a reasonably high shutter speed of around 1/500sec.
This first image was taken by us walking towards the subject and getting as close as possible without scaring the birds away. It was done from standing height looking down towards the birds.
This was about as close as we could get to the subject. I guess at around 6 foot 1 tall I must have looked quiet intimidating to them. This is not the type of image I was after.
What I needed to do was to figure out how to get closer to our subject without scaring them away. We were out in the open on a public beach, so some sort of hide was not really an option. So, we had to innovate.
It was down on my stomach, commando style slowly edging towards the flock. My camera was out in front about 6 inches off the ground. Although still very wary of me I was able to get considerably closer.
I did have one problem though. How do you stop children (some in their 20's) running through a flock of birds at the beach? It took a couple of attempts and about 20 minutes but I think you will agree that the effort was worth it.
You can view a larger version of the second image at our photo-gallery.
It also pays as a photographers not to be shy. Don't worry about what anybody else thinks! It's amazing how many people stopped to have a look.