If you've ever seen a photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco,
well you'll know that its golden, orange, rusty, red color is really
quite significant, and quite dramatic, and you don't see too much of it here.
Why is that? Well, I was blocked in essence,
by that fog but I was also too far away from the arches of
the bridge to be able to get through that fog, and to see the arches,
and to get that significant part of the bridge that everybody would recognize.
So what did I do?
Well, I didn't just put my camera down.
I realized that these foreground elements and
the background elements would have to reverse their roles.
The background elements weren't there, the arch wasn't there.
So what could I do with that foreground element?
Well, I could make it prominent and I could say you know,
my vantage point from what I thought I was interested in is too far, but
let me deal with what's close enough, what I can enclose in my frame.
When we take a vantage point that's, quote, too close, the ordinary content
of that subject, whatever was in front of the camera, can literally disappear.
It can be so transformed
by that close vantage point that it becomes something entirely different.
Are we looking from an airplane down at a strange jungle?
Are we looking through a microscope at some strange amoeba of some sort?
Or are we actually looking at a lily pad that's deteriorating,
floating in kind of a mucky lake?
Yeah.
Sometimes you'll remember Josie's nose and you'll remember my face.
Sometimes being too close to something turns it
into an element a subject that causes us great discomfort.
These pigeons were in the plaza San Marco in Venice.
Just minding their own business, waiting for people to throw bread and
when I got really down close with my really wide angle lens
all of a sudden they became something gigantic, looming up above me
from this vantage point that was too close and for most people too low.
In the picture I showed you a few frames ago of the surfers,
where I was too far away from them, I was not only too far, but
I was at a much higher than normal vantage point.
While I wasn't hundreds of meters away from these festively decorated tables,
I was certainly seeing them from a vantage point, and seeing a color pattern and
a pattern of the tables themselves, a whole new sense of what this place was,
very different from the people who simply walked into the plaza and
sat down to eat their meal.
So taking opportunities to get higher than normal, whether it's something as simple
as a person carrying a load of laundry across a plaza at a hotel in Mexico,