Photo Tip: Get Low
LOOK AT EVERYTHING AS THOUGH YOU ARE SEEING IT EITHER FOR THE FIRST OR LAST TIME, THEN YOUR TIME ON EARTH WILL BE FILLED WITH GLORY. ― BETTY SMITH, A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN
“I’d love to get down low” I whispered. “If we find a good spot you can get out” Pilipili replied. Get out? My heart rate rose a few more levels. Although the bull elephants appeared peaceful and benign, at six tons Big Tusker Tim could flip our truck with one casual swing of his trunk or step on me and it would be all over. Keeping an eye on the elephants, Pilipili slipped out of the truck and opened the door beside me. “You can lie down on the floor.” I squeezed myself between the front and back seats and stretched out on my belly. (Excerpt from my upcoming book — The Wisdom of Elephants)
Big Tusker Tim and his famous friends were 13 feet tall and weighed over 6 over tons each. Getting low emphasized the size and power of these animals.
Get low was my friend Tyler Shaw’s best photo tip. Tyler came to Kenya with us on the first volunteer trip I co-led in 2010. We often stood beside each other photographing the same scene, but my images felt flat in comparison. I asked him for advice, he replied, “Get low Kathy.”
Getting low is more intimate. In the image above, if I’d been sitting in the top tier seat in the Land Cruiser, I would have had a great view of the landscape and the tops of the young elephant’s heads. Lying on the floor allowed me to see into this family grouping, revealing the antics of the adolescent elephants at play.
Tyler loved animals as much as I do. I tried to capture his joy and the extraordinary size of the giraffes’ heads in the image above by bending my knees, so I was below eye level.
Eventually “get low” became a habit. When I survey a scene, I experiment with points of view. Higher? Lower? Move to the left or move to the right? Different perspectives impact the emotional charge of an image. With the advent of the iPhone, we’re all photographers now. Experiment. See what happens to your image when you get low. Assess the scene and ask yourself — Would this image be more powerful if I got lower?
