Find Your Perspective

Spring in Bel­la­gio — © Copy­right 2011 by William Beem

The Bel­la­gio Foun­tains are a pretty pop­u­lar pho­to­graphic sub­ject. Unfor­tu­nately, most of the pho­tos I’ve seen are from the same per­spec­tive — peo­ple on the side­walk shoot­ing dur­ing the foun­tain show with the Bel­la­gio resort in the back­ground. That can be a fine image, but it’s been done to death.

Some­times you need to approach a sub­ject from a dif­fer­ent angle or per­spec­tive, par­tic­u­larly if it’s a pop­u­lar sub­ject that every­one has seen a mil­lion times. Think about Old Faith­ful. Most every­one walks along the board­walk and takes a shot. How many peo­ple hike around behind it and take a shot includ­ing the board­walk? It’s more work, but you wind up with some­thing that’s unique.

This shot above was from the patio of Olive’s Restau­rant. I specif­i­cally didn’t want it dur­ing the water show. Instead, I wanted to use the under­wa­ter tracks because they reminded me of crop cir­cles. It’s just a slightly dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on a pop­u­lar sub­ject. I thought about tak­ing out that flare, also, but decided that it added a bit of feel­ing to the image that reminded me of spend­ing time on the patio.

Bel­la­gio — © Copy­right 2010 by William Beem

In the image above, I used a fish­eye lens while vis­it­ing the top of the Paris Hotel’s Eif­fel Tower Replica at sun­set. Again, the idea is to get a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on a com­mon sub­ject. Using the fish­eye allowed me to put that curve on the hori­zon. Obvi­ously, get­ting a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive from the tower changed the viewer’s expe­ri­ence. So look around. No mat­ter what sub­ject you have, there’s bound to be more than one way to shoot it. Take the tra­di­tional shot, but explore your alter­na­tives, too.