When I think of scale in photography, I immediately think of perspective. Perspective is the lens from which we view and see the world and create our reality. It helps us measure distance, space, and size and discern which elements are near and far away.
But in photography, when we are dealing with two-dimensional objects, that perspective can often be misleading.
This is why we need to create a sense of scale and comparison in our photos.
Because we live in a three-dimensional world but only get to photograph using the flat, two-dimensional image, something invariably gets lost in translation. Learning how to use scale photography means that all is not lost, and you can communicate it better with the right visual cues.
What Is Scale In Photography?
Simply put, scale is a crucial aspect of composition that enhances the sense of three-dimensional space in a photograph. It allows you to measure elements in your image, as in depicting the size of one object in relation to another object in the same photograph. It also shows depth, or the distance and space between two objects.
For example, a magnificent waterfall can look ordinary without context. The scale provides that context. It’s the small person at the foot of the waterfall that shows the viewer just how spectacular this waterfall actually is.
However, scale photography involves more than just finding something in your image to provide a comparison with the majesty of nature – you are also shaping the viewers’ perspective and telling the right story with the right visual elements.
The first trick is cashing in on the viewers’ familiarity by including something that is within their frame of reference. A matchbox photographed alongside a fish, for example. Or a pen next to an apple.
Here are other tips for effectively using scale in photography:
Choose Your Depth of Field
A narrow depth of field is achieved by zooming in on your subject, having a lot of distance behind your subject that becomes blurry, and choosing a wide lens aperture.
By choosing your depth of field, you will be able to illustrate distance better. With a blurry background, you create a sense of distance if you’re photographing a runner with a long road ahead.
Play With Parallel Lines
While on the subject of the open road, parallel lines that never meet can be used to convey a sense of vastness. A road stretching off into the distance on a faraway hill will do well if there’s a tree on the horizon – something that gives your road a vanishing point. Likewise, a skyscraper rising up against a blue sky in front of you can communicate a towering sense of scale known as diminishing perspective.
Work With Negative Space
Also known as white space or dead space, negative space is your friend when it comes to not just showing a sense of scale, but also a sense of mood. Photographing an animal, human, or object such as a tree in a vast amount of negative space can convey a sense of loneliness with respect to your subject, as if it’s in the middle of nowhere.
Negative space provides great context if, say, you’re photographing a beautiful flower in a forest against a blurred background of a green, forested canopy.
The use of negative space here will suggest an abundance of nature. The temptation as a photographer would be to try and photograph the forest in all its glory. Resist this temptation by having a narrow depth of field with your flower in focus and the blurry green background, leaving it up to the eye’s imagination to picture more forest behind the flower.
Try Different Lenses
A long lens will shorten the distance between your foreground and background, making your scene appear larger than life. A wide-angle lens is great for capturing vast landscapes, but you may well still need a house on the horizon, a human in the foreground or an animal in the distance to show just how vast the landscape is. A telephoto lens is a long-focus lens that can magnify distant objects. By removing depth from the photograph, it squeezes perspective.
Even though you are enlarging your background (let’s say the ocean against the sky), you still want something to show the size of the ocean (let’s say a lighthouse in the middle of the ocean). So the photographer still needs to use the right lens and perspective to draw the viewer into the frame.
A tilt-shift lens tilts and shifts with a moving mechanism and is used a lot in landscape and architectural photography. It can also be used to create a miniature effect, i.e., change the scale of a building to make it appear very small. What it does is correct the vertical converging lines that I mentioned earlier.
Change Your Perspective
Quite simply, walk around a bit to explore different vantage points that offer you different perspectives. This will assist you in deciding how to use scale photography to realize your desired perspective. For example, if you lie down on the floor at the harbor and shoot a bollard close up, it will appear huge in comparison to the ship in the background that it is moored to.
Walk around and you’ll be sure to show the scale of the boat in relation to other boats or the vastness of the sea.
The best possible viewpoint gives you the best possible chance of communicating a mood. Remember that you are using scale photography to tell a story, to describe a relationship between two things.
As photographers, we use our lenses to tell a story. By effectively using scale in photography and shaping the right perspective, we’d have been successful in our pursuit.
So the next time you’re out on a shoot, ask yourself whether there’s someone or something you can include in your photograph to offer your audience a better understanding of your story.