Common Raven (Corvus corax) ©Mike Spinak
[Editorial Note: This is the third part of a series, showing methods of isolating photography subjects. Part one is here. Part 2 is here.]
In the picture of a common raven, above, I isolated the subject from the surrounding elements of the scene by using a lens with a rather narrow angle of view. Generally speaking, the longer the lens’s focal length, the narrower the angle of view. I took this picture with a 300 millimeter lens, with a 1.4x teleconverter attached, for a total focal length of 420 millimeters.
“Angle of view” is the angular extent of a scene shown by the lens. Imagine a cone of everything the lens takes in, extending out from your lens into the scene you’re photographing; the angle of view is the angle of that cone. Here’s a top-down diagram, to make that concept clearer.
The narrower the angle, the smaller the area of the scene that the lens shows, while any given part of the scene takes up a larger portion of the picture. This applies not only to your subject, but also to the background behind your subject. The narrower the angle of view, the narrower the slice of background area which will be visible behind the subject, too. Here’s another diagram, to show how this works.
Here’s a quick demonstration of this:
Photographed with a 15 mm Fisheye Lens, with a 180 Degree Diagonal Angle of View
Photographed with a 420 mm Lens, with About a 5.5 Degree Diagonal Angle of View
The two pictures above show the same flowers photographed at the same size (i.e., they cover the same length in both photos). I photographed the first with a 15 millimeter fisheye lens, which has a full 180 degree angle of view, including literally everything in the scene forward of the lens (with “fisheye” non-rectilinear distortion). I did the second shot with a 300 millimeter lens with a 1.4x teleconverter, for a 420 millimeter total, which has a narrow angle of view of only about 5.5 degrees. In the first picture, you can see everything from the sidewalk I’m standing on (in the lower right corner) to the wall and fence of a building (along the top). In the second shot, you can only see a few square feet of the area almost immediately behind the flowers.
The ability of long lenses with narrow angles of view to show just small slices of background almost immediately behind subjects can be utilized to isolate subjects, by selecting angles to the subject which single out small patches with a minimum of distracting elements behind the subject. That’s just what I did, in the case of the common raven picture at the top. I photographed this raven at Bryce Canyon National Park – where the bird was perched on a trash can in a busy parking lot. I positioned myself at an angle to the raven where there was a small slice of greenery from a tree behind the bird, and then waited for the bird to turn to an angle and pose that I liked.
To give you a better idea of what the entire scene around the raven looked like, I’ve made a crop of the raven’s eye, and enlarged it, brightened it, and supersaturated it, to make the reflection in the eye clearly visible.
Crop of Common Raven's Eye, Showing Parking Lot Reflection
As you can see, I was able to dramatically reduce the extraneous elements of the scene and isolate the subject, using just one of a few sparsely spaced trees as carefully selected background.
If you have a telephoto lens and any small patch of uncluttered area somewhere in the background of your subject, then – with a little bit of observation and effort – you can often employ a narrow angle of view to isolate subjects from their busy backgrounds quite nicely.
If you want to isolate a subject, use tunnel vision.
Common Raven (Corvus corax), Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah
All pictures and text are © Mike Spinak, unless otherwise noted. All pictures shown are available for purchase as fine art prints, and are available for licensed stock use. Telephone: (831) 325-6917.
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