It took me a while to decide which animal was the right height for when your camera is sitting on the ground. I like the idea of a rat's-eye view.
After focussing on just grass a couple of weeks ago I decided to broaden my view a little. The aim here was to photograpically explore our garden from ground level using a telephoto lens. This combination has great potential for a more unusual aesthetic where blur is perhaps even more important than whatever is in focus. I wanted to take photographs through plants to get blur in both foreground and background. Layers of smooth, natural colour with a little bit of focus to set the scene. A touch of breeze added to the possibilities.
All these photographs were taken with my Sony RX10 zoomed to its fullest extent (x25). Most were from ground level but not all of them - so this rat can climb and has telephoto-vision!
Exactly what they are photographs of is not important to me except for it all being from our garden. It's more about the aesthetics and the atmosphere of a place. I think only one of the plants deserves some explanation. The hair-like tangles are aerial roots hanging from a weeping fig tree.
There were two aspects of this technique that I found particularly enjoyable. One was the range of possibilities for the background. Being at ground level meant that the camera could be pointed upwards and still photograph the ground plants. This brought into play patches of sky poking through more distant plants.
The second fun part was simply the amazing range of possibilities that only become apparent when you get down and look through the viewfinder (a screen that can swivel was a great help here). Just changing focus could produce a significantly different shot but even a slight change of angle sometimes made an enormous difference. This easy variety with quickly changing compositions made it always interesting and I could happily spend thirty minutes sprawled on the ground exploring less than a square metre of grassy bank from different angles.
However, living in the tropics (Thailand) is a bit of a problem. It doesn't take long for the sun to get too high in the morning or disappear in the evening so we never get anywhere near a golden hour. Sometimes it feels more like twenty minutes. And the ants are always active so taking care not to lie across their trails is always a priority.
