WARNING: Sort-of-technical terms used. For those suffering from Severe Boredom Syndrome are warned to avoid.
My first epiphany about photography is a concept I believe some might know, and obviously some might not. Uncertain of whether such a concept has yet been named, your guess is as good as mine. Anyway, here it goes. I call it The Infinite Spherical Vantage Point, or at other times, The Infinite Sub-Spherical Vantage Point. Gee.. what’s with the fancy name you might wonder. Who the heck knows. When I first thought about it, that was what came to me.
The concept is pretty simple. When taking a picture, a beginner might snap a picture with the subject dead in the center, standing directly in front of it. Simple? Yes? Objective achieved (to capture part of- or entire subject)? Yes. Interesting? Not really, perhaps only to the subject or shooter.
Now to make things a little more interesting. Trying to understand the concept. Firstly, as the name suggests, the distance required to capture the subject can be near or ridiculously far, hence the distance is ‘Infinite’. ‘Spherical’ sort of speaks for itself. But just in case – ‘Spherical’ means that you can be at any position in relation to the subject you are capturing. Up, down, left, right, back, front, top and bottom would still seem sort of two-dimensional in comparison to a position anywhere along a sphere. So by imagining a sphere around the subject and knowing that you can shoot from any point of this sphere, makes it limitless when coupled with distance.
For certain situations, where you can’t get below the subject, for obvious reasons such as that it might be illegal (think skirt and a camera at the bottom) or for the fact that you just can’t be below the subject unless you start digging, there exist the term ‘Sub-Spherical’ .
With this simple knowledge, and the power to discern, you might just start capturing images you never thought possible. There are times unfortunately, that a subject looks better from the back than the usual front.
I suppose the idea behind this is to not only simply think outside the box, but also more around a sphere. Break all the rules of photography, because hey, there ain’t exist a photo-cop and no arrests have been made – so far.
