The Polestar 2 BST 230 is a rather great car in my view. It looks pretty damn good, goes like stink, and the build quality is second to none. But this isn’t meant to be a two bit car review.
I’m here to talk about something else. Angles, focal lengths and perspectives.
You see, I shot this car in a completely different setting to the one you see in these photographs. I had got up really early, headed to the location I knew I was going to use, and braved the horrendously cold 3 degree pre-sunrise morning. Using my strobes (flashes), I lit up the car, all while doing my best to avoid losing my fingers to what felt like arctic cold. I completed the photo shoot, packed up my gear and headed home to defrost the extremities.
The next day I had another early morning shoot to do, this time in Tulln, a smaller town outside of Vienna, where I was photographing a Mercedes-Benz dealership. After that shoot, I had to drop the car off with my colleague, in order for him to do his driving and get his impressions for the article that was to follow. You see, I work with another guy, Patrick Aulehla, producing images and content for Fast-Foward.
After having finished up at the dealership (it was a quick exterior photo that was required) I headed off towards Patrick’s house. On the way, I got completely swept up in the landscape and the magical blanket of fog that was draping itself over everything. So, as one does, I decided screw it, I’ll see if I can get some more photos of this car. As luck would have it, the location I went to (the one in these photos) was caught wonderfully in between a layer of fog, and the sun burning its way through said layer. This made for a stunning backdrop for my photos, but also filled me with that dreaded “shit, I need to get these photos done quickly before the light changes” feeling, that so many of us photographers know all too well. In my rush, I just shot off a bunch of angles that I thought worked, without giving any of it much thought. I was particularly taken by the head on view of the car, and ended up shooting several variations of the same angle, but at very different focal lengths and with differing perspectives.
24-70mm lens @25mm, shot from eye level.
I had no intention of shooting these images for this blog post, or for any type of comparison between images. Once I got back home and started looking through them though, I saw the 3 shots I had taken, and how different they all looked based on the perspectives / angles they were shot from, and with which focal length. That’s what prompted the idea for this blog post.
This first shot was taken on my Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 lens at 25mm, so basically at its widest. I took this photo from eye level, and it was actually taken as more of an “exposure check” photo (yes, I do that) than as an intentional frame. This shot is fairly aggressive, utilising a pretty “in your face” angle. The wide angle lens and relatively close positioning to the car make it feel like a face off, a bit of a “it's you or me, buddy” vibe. This aggressiveness is exacerbated by the sporty / angular front end of the Polestar.
24-70mm lens @25mm, shot from about 3.5m
This second shot was taken from slightly higher than eye level. It was shot from about 3 1/2 metres in height, and as you can see, gives a very different perspective on the whole scene. I was not shooting from a ladder for this one, and it’s not from a drone either. The exact technique used here is not really a big secret, as far as I know. However, seeing as how it was told to me as a “keep it hush hush” technique, I am not going to divulge the info here.
The fact is, this shot varies substantially from the first shot. For one, it’s way less aggressive. Due to the much higher angle, the confrontation element that is so present in the first shot has been lost. The high angle also helps to make the car smaller, further reducing its agression. Another big difference is that it incorporates far more of the background, emphasises the leading lines in the background. The lines are further aided by the fog, as it allows the viewer’s eyes to follow the lines to the point where they disappear into the mist. The foreground in this image is made a lot more prominent through the use of the high angle. In this case it is nothing but uninteresting road and grass, but given the right circumstances, this could be quite useful, and would allow for a lot more interest to be piled into the front (bottom) of the frame.
70-200mm lens @ 87mm, ground level
The last image I’m using here was shot on the same camera (Nikon Z7ii) but with my 70-200mm f2.8, but at 87mm. There was still a fair bit of zoom left in the lens, and I am somewhat bummed that I didn’t get another shot from even further back. It is what it is.
What is most striking to me about this image, when compared to the other two, is the two-dimensionality of the image. Everything in this photo is running along a very flat up/down plane. There is not a lot of depth to this image. This is of course exacerbated by the fog, and therefore the lack of background, but we basically have the horizon line, and the car popping up over that line. Not much more to it. Even if there had been no fog, the compression from the longer lens, in combination with the low angle, removes a lot of the three-dimensional depth from the image.
Using a lens this long (or longer) is always a nice alternative to the more “standard” stuff one sees out there, most of which has been shot somewhere in that regular 24-70mm range. The difficulty with using a longer lens in car photography, can be space restrictions. A car is a fairly big object, and in order to get the whole car with a good amount of background into the image, one needs to be able to move back quite far. Not every location allows for this, especially here in Austria, where the city streets are super narrow and everything is quite compact. Using a lens like this when and where you can is always a good way to get a different view of the scene. I’m not sure where or when I heard this piece of advice, but I recall hearing “move back and zoom in” as a way to get a different view of the scene you’re shooting. It’s a good piece of advice.
There you have it. 3 angles / views / perspectives on the same shot. As you can see, I kept the grading / colour treatment on all three of them the same in order to use the perspectives as the differentiating factor. I hope this was of interest to you.
That’s all I have for you. Was this a tutorial? No. Was it a guide, or how-to? No. It was simply a bit of a rambly blog post on how different lenses and perspectives can and will lend “the same shot” a very different look and feel.
Go out there and have some fun using different angles and lenses!