City Big Things photo

I love photos like this, looking up at the City of London’s Big Things, which I found above a piece of “partner content” at the FT:

Like I say, I like photoing upwards at the City of London’s Big Things.

So, although that “partner content” is very dreary, I do like the photo.

A way to think about photos is to arrange them along a spectrum, at one end of which is a photo that looks exactly as whatever it was looked like if you had been there yourself. But at the other end of the spectrum are photos which emphasise how differently the way the camera can sometimes see things to the way we humans do, and makes whatever it is look quite different to the way we’d mostly see it. Both sorts of photo are worth doing, one way or the other, depending on what you and trying to do with the photo. I’m just saying that they’re two distinct ways to do photos.

Because of all the reflections in the above photo (helped by the the fine weather), because of the untypical direction things are being looked at from (cameras (especially cameras with twiddly screens) don’t get cricks in their necks), and because of the difference between how humans see perspective and how cameras typically do this (this difference being why human artists actually had to discover perspective), this photo is much nearer to the looks-different-from-how-it-looks-to-us end of the spectrum.

Which is all part of why I like it.

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