I got up close and pesonal
I’m quite sure a lot of you have heard this at one time or another by lots of different people in lots of different situations. It’s an important expression that’s been around for a long time, and I personally have been using it since the middle eighties in my “Stretching Your Frame of mind” workshops, and in the my online class I teach with the BPSOP. I don’t claim to be the author of it, but I figure after teaching this concept for thirty-five years, whose to say I didn’t??? At least, I can say that it’s one of my favorite Personal Pearls of Wisdom.
It’s a phrase I’ve been using for a while and one that occasionally appears in Cyberspace… ” Get up close and personal”. I’ve added… “get so close it hurts, then get closer”. I often quote a very famous photographer named Robert Capa who once said, ” If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”. For those that know who Robert Capa was you know he was a war photographer that was always close to the fighting.
Relax, I’m not suggesting you go out and get close to that kind of action, but I am suggesting you get close to your subject, be it a person, place, or thing. Sometimes it’s even a good thing to be so close that you don’t show all of it. This falls under one of the concepts of Gestalt called ‘Closure‘.
One reason I like to get close is to achieve depth. Since the camera has but one eye (the lens) it can only see in two dimensions, height and width. You can trick the lens and create the third dimension…depth, by getting up close and personal.
By getting close to your subject you’ll be anchoring it in the foreground, (and the best way to do this is with a wide-angle lens), you’ll create what I call layers of interest. This will keep the viewer around longer as he goes from your anchored subject in the foreground to the background. If you can place enough elements in-between, then he have more to discover on his or her way to the horizon…or implied horizon.
In the Psychology of Gestalt, we want to take control of what the viewer sees in our composition. It’s all about visual perception, and how the viewer will react to our photos. I like a strong reaction so in the photo of the Egyptian, I wanted to really get a reaction, so I got about as close as you could get without having to follow up with any ‘marriage vows’!!!
Take a look at some more examples of getting “up close and personal”:
Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com, and check out my 2019 workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime. I just announced my New York, New York Workshop beginning September 17th ,2019 and ending at noon on the 23rd. This will be my second workshop there and this time we’ll be shooting in all the five boroughs.
JoeB
