Looking Down: Photographing Straight Down – Simple Photography Tips by Michael Blyth

Five Simple Tips for Photographing Straight Down

• Stand somewhere others don’t. Most sports photography happens at eye level. Step above it, look straight down, and the familiar becomes something else entirely.

• Seek to remove the horizon - it does things to the brain when you do. You Start to look for shape, and balance.

  Rowers and kayakers stop being athletes for a moment. They become lines, spacing and rhythm across the water.

• Wakes, ripples and reflections create lines you could never place yourself. In rowing and canoeing, every stroke leaves a trace. Wakes, ripples and blade marks become part of the composition.

• If your subject is moving, learn to become better at predicting where movement takes the subject. Watch how athletes position themselves

  Even in training, there’s structure… spacing between boats, alignment of oars, timing of movement. From above, those relationships become visible.

• From directly above, the picture rarely arrives immediately, trust your instincts rather than looking to see where the subject is - you may miss it!

  
  

There sometimes arises an unexpected opportunity in how you capture images.

I'm doing a short series on photographing looking down, rather than horizontally or upwards. This one is sports photographs taken from right above, in such a way that I appear to be hovering. - Photographing Straight Down

Having arrived in Sevilla late the night before, settled into the Airbnb and gone out for what was a truly excellent meal, at La Barca de Caldarón, we were awoken by the March sunlight streaming through the windows, warming and invigorating.

I was suitably drawn by the sunlight, and the sight of people paddling and rowing beyond our balcony.

In the middle distance was a substantial bridge passing over the Canal de Alfonso Xiii, and some-while later we headed over on our way for coffee and yummy things.

I was actually filled with an extraordinary sense of excitement at looking down and seeing a boat appear directly below me. Such an unexpected but visually interesting scene.

I spent quite a while testing my wife's patience (she did pretty well, but then she always does!) by dashing across six lanes of traffic to see what was coming boat-wise and where it might pop out.

Really useful, less hazardous, and easier to asess their approach, were those coming in the other direction, heading for the bridge. Generally speaking heading for the centre of the arch, they were much easier photographic subjects.

Image One - Sweeping patterns on the water

Image One, like two and four is quite surreal as there is little by way of context, the movement is only indicated by the glistening of the water, which in itself leaves beauty. Although the image shows the boat going 'downwards' that is in a sense my choice of presenting it, it is of course going horizontally, which the brain can only partially compute.

Image Two - timing and centrality

The second Image is one of the moments when my position coincided exactly with where the rowers were passing under the bridge, so they become part of a pattern as well as being actually just boats, people and oars and patterns in the water.

The timing gives a sense of beauty to the image, while the very centrality challenges the reality of the scene sending it in the direction of the surreal.

Image Three - surrealism destroyed by the bridge.

Image Three has been included to show how catching the corner of the bridge has destroyed the surreal nature of the image - I'm no longer in 'virtual hover', the message to the brain is that I'm on a bridge, gives it a reference point, and understanding of what is going on, and calms the drama.

The position of the paddle is not as dramatic or to my mind as beautiful as in Image One, the sunlight is not picking out the movement in the water so much.

Image Four -Drama, speed and light

With Image Four the two teams are clearly racing, the colours of the boats suggest they are representatives of the same overall team, which perhaps adds tension to the image, the wake seems somehow more frantic and the paddlers on the boat lying second, are putting so much effort that they further increase the drama.

Unbeknown at this point was the fact that the boats were from the Seville rowing centre on the Guadalquivir River, just up from the bridge, so a great place to photograph some top quality rowing and paddling.

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