The long lens approach
Michael shows how using long lenses can alter a composition for the better
Lens focal length is a critical tool in handling juxtaposition, because it’s the one certain control over the size relationship between key subjects. On the previous pages, a 20mm wide-angle lens from close made a 60cm stone head similar in apparent size to two 15m towers. When the subjects are more closely matched, a long lens comes into its own.
For the kind of effect I’m talking about here, the longer the better. Admittedly, the lens I’m using here, 500mm, is fairly extreme, but it makes the point. Long focal lengths are, by nature, highly selective, allowing us to choose and pick out details from a scene, that alone makes them useful for finding potential juxtapositions. That
Even more important is that a long lens squeezes layers of distance together in a planestacking effect
compensates for what they don’t allow, which is an easy change in how two subjects fit together. Any meaningful shift in viewpoint means there will be plenty of walking, or driving. In the picture on the previous pages, moving the camera just a few inches made a difference, but when you’re a few hundred metres away, as in the shot here, you’d need to move a hundred metres or more to see a difference. Maybe even more important is that a long lens squeezes layers of distance together in a plane-stacking effect that’s best explained by a diagram, as seen below. This works best when there are indeed several identifiable distances, and one of the greatest aids for this is shooting towards the sun, when there’s some atmosphere. The example here is a classic one, with early morning mist rising and catching the low sunlight, while the different distances of temples appear as silhouettes, getting lighter in tone the further away they are.
In this particular case, the idea was to fit together a hot-air balloon and temples, and as these balloons are about 25 metres tall, they’re in the same approximate size range. That meant the most effective juxtaposition would be when a balloon and a temple were close to each other and at the same distance from the camera.
This is where a long lens comes in, and the longer the better, from a great distance. It’s the opposite problem from the Buddha head and brick towers. Hot-air balloon rides are popular over the temple-strewn plain of Bagan in central Myanmar, and are reasonably predictable. They fly in the early morning, when the air is cool in the winter, and generally follow a similar route. The only issue is finding a viewpoint at the right distance for a long lens.
Viewpoint, in this instance, means some other temple from an elevated view. I was using a 500mm lens (actually an old Nikon mirror lens, which with careful use, gives good results), and there’s a simple formula for working out how far away I’d need to be to get a frame-filling shot. This works for any lens-sense combination. First step is to know the factor for that combination – divide the focal length by the width of the sensor. For a 500mm lens on a full-frame Nikon, it’s 21. Then just multiply this by what you think the size of the subject is; here the balloon is about 20 metres wide, so that’s about 400 metres to fill the frame. I want it filling about a third of the width, so that’s little over a kilometre. It’s a rough estimate, but still useful for the cause.
Before dawn I was up on a temple called Shwesandaw, facing east because I wanted all the atmosphere that came with shooting toward the sun. The balloons eventually drifted over and the long lens, from an elevated viewpoint, gave me the extra bonus of keeping most of the balloon just below the horizon line. The result of all this is the shot on your right.