Lesson 1 of 4
Where to stand
Walk the camera around the vehicle, raise or lower it, step in or back. See which panels the lens can reach and where the horizon crosses the bodywork.
Before anything about the camera, there is the question of where your feet are. Three numbers settle it: which way round the subject you are, how high the lens is, and how far back you stand. Nothing about the lens can undo a bad answer to any of them.
Move the first slider and watch the four edges of the plan. An edge goes grey and dashed when the camera can no longer see that face at all, and thins out as the face turns edge-on, because a panel seen at a glancing angle projects into almost no pixels even though it is technically in shot.
Left: where you are standing, and which panels that position can reach. A grey dashed edge is a face the lens cannot see from here. Right: the horizon sits at lens height, always — that line is the one thing camera height controls.
Changes the vocabulary, not the geometry. A boat has a bow and a port side.
- Horizon crosses at
- 36% up the body
- Near / far size ratio
- 1.31 : 1
Presets
The horizon is your lens height
The dashed line in the elevation panel is not a stylistic choice. In any photograph the horizon appears at exactly the height of the lens, so the fraction of the subject below it is lens height divided by subject height. Standing at 1.55 m in front of a 1.45 m sedan puts the horizon over the roof, which is why photographs of cars taken while standing look like photographs of roofs. A crouch to 0.45 m puts it a third of the way up the door, and the car reads as something with a wheel at each corner.
Distance is the other half of a wide lens
The near/far ratio in the readout is the whole of what people call wide-angle distortion. Two panels of the same real size render at sizes inversely proportional to their distance, so from 2 m the far flank of a 1.9 m wide car is nearly three times further away than the near one and renders at about a third of the size. From 8 m the ratio is under 1.3 and both ends look like they belong to the same car. The lens did not stretch anything. Standing close did.
Off the shot list
The warning under the first slider is not an opinion about the angle. It fires when your position matches none of the angles in the guided shot list for that subject, which is a statement about the checklist and not about the photograph. Free positions are often fine. It is there so you know when you have left the list.