If you closely observe the lead image above you’d probably think that you were looking at some tall grass of sorts — and that the slow shutter speed really emphasized this. By all means, modern technology in cameras has become so good that you can handhold slow shutter speeds easily. So are you really looking at tall grass? LUMIX’s cameras like the S5II have class-leading image stabilization. Perhaps the image was shot when getting down on the ground and looking up, right? That’s part of the importance of vantage points.
This article is presented in partnership with LUMIX.
With cameras like the LUMIX S5II and lenses like their 18mm f1.8 or 24mm f1.8, you can focus closely and carefully on a subject to make it seem unlike what it actually is. That’s the importance of vantage points that cameras like this lend to photographers. Using features like AF-Scope, a photographer can very closely and carefully focus on a specific part of the frame. And the image can then be shot handheld using image stabilization.
What’s more, it can look perfectly unique using the camera’s Real Time LUT feature. Photographers can load LUTS onto the camera to embed into their JPEG files.
The importance of vantage points help photographers make more unique images than what we normally see. It’s something that abstract photographers use often in their photography. However, it’s also a very important part of storytelling. The photo above shows a child having fun on a bench of some sort. The average person would’ve photographed the child on top of the bench. But what we’ve done instead is photographed the shadowplay effect. We know that there’s a child, but we don’t know who the child is. Instead, it could be anyone — and that helps make the image a more timeless piece of art
What’s so nice here is that this can decided on later on when you’re reviewing your images on the camera’s screen. A photographer can edit the image in-camera using the features that LUMIX gives to photographers. Using something like the L Monochrome picture profile make a photograph like this feel so much more classic.
To help photographers understand this more, we’re going to analyze something that appeals to so many of us: food and drink. There are several factors where the vantage point can play a decisive role in how we feel about the images.
The images above were shot with the LUMIX S5II and various lenses including the 20-60mm, 50mm f1.8, 18mm f1.8, and 85mm f1.8.
Most food photography is often taken from a few different vantage points. One of the most famous is from above because it shows a human perspective of being at the table. This is commonly used with more normal or wide focal lengths to make us feel like we’re actually there. It’s a tactic that has been used by street photographers and journalists for years. Thankfully, LUMIX lenses let you do this by offering pretty close focusing distances when you’re traveling to shoot images like this.
But photographers can easily change their vantage points in a few ways. But the most common ways are pretty simple: shooting vertical or changing your angle. Sometimes angles can be a limiting factor because of the focusing distance. However, lots of LUMIX lenses remove this factor. Instead, framing an image vertically can change a lot of how we look at it. In portrait orientation images, lots of the rules of thirds are removed and instead, we’re mostly emphasizing the subject matter of the photograph.
Of course, other factors can also be at play. How the image is edited, cropping, framing, and colors are all major factors at play. But they can all be fundamentally changed by the vantage point in an image.
We hope this is a lesson that photographers keep with them, and that they think of all the creative options that LUMIX cameras offer them when shooting.