Setting up the shot

You might ask what the big deal is about setting up a shot. It seams simple enough when you have your camera out at your brothers birthday, you point it in the general direction of what's being depicted, and fire away. And if its simple in real life it should be even more simple in "virtuality", when you have absolute freedom when placing the camera. But as in real life freedom comes with a price.

The principles discussed here are applicable to both still life and animations. We will return to these principles about setting up a shot, but first something about the human mind.

Preconceptions

The human mind is a wonderful thing, it receives thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of impulses every second, and filters them to about ten. It does this by recognizing familiar patterns. This recognition of patterns is important to have in mind when making pictures, because when the mind receives enough of a familiar pattern it will "fill in the blanks". By associating to known patterns you can fool the observer to add details to your picture that you never can model. And by providing simple visual references you can improve the quality of your pictures.

Your first mistake

Now you've made your object and it's time to make a picture of it. The obvious thing to do is to place the object square in the middle of the frame and fire away, maybe add a little ground for it to stand on. It might look something like this:

setting_1.JPG (8263 bytes)

This might be what your looking for but it is quite flat and even dull, or static. Coming away from this staticness do not require animation, instead you might want to incorporate some more objects into the scene, and maybe alter the position of the present one.

Foreground and background

Things standing in front of and behind other things provide a strong visual clue about its location, and adds to the feeling of depth in the picture. These references may or may not be overlapping the other object, but of course overlapping provides a stronger visual clue. Another way to provide a sense of depth is by varying similar objects size.

setting_poles.JPG (7823 bytes)
Size

setting_overlap.JPG (5517 bytes)
Overlapping

We can use the principles illustrated in the examples above to improve on our bowl example. We will first add a little something to our bowl, then we place some reference objects in front of, and behind it.

setting_2.JPG (8497 bytes)

This is the picture with something added inside the bowl. The overlapping of the thing and the bowl helps the viewer to identify that it indeed is a bowl, and that you can put something into.

setting_3.JPG (8703 bytes)

At this stage we have added a little coin in front of the bowl. Due to the fact that the coin and the bowl does not overlap takes down the sense of depth added by it, but it still establish the "ground" as a real object. By adding more coins in a scattered around and behind the bowl we dramatically improve the depth.

setting_4.JPG (9162 bytes)

Not only have we added a bit of depth to the image, we have also made it a much more appealing one.

Still to come

This discussion will be extended, add a bookmark if you want to read more on this subject.

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