DRAMA BY DEGREE

A typical wide-angle shot (28mm) of a subject where mostly all proportions are rendered normally. 

By MICHAEL PERKINS

WATCH ENOUGH COP OR LAWYER SHOWS, and you’ll see it: the establishing shot which shows the hero’s home base, be it the local police HQ, the county courthouse, or an Uber-powerful law office, stretched to angles of ultimate exaggeration by super-wideangle lenses. Normal optical proportions may be used for all other shots that follow in the episode, but that kickoff image, like as not, will make the locales seem larger than life, seething with drama. Something important is happening here, goes the message. The look is a perfect photographic blend of effect and intention. We want these particular buildings to look unreal, simply because outsized things are occurring within them.

In everyday photo work, however, we often tend to use an effect for its own sake because, well, it looks so cool. We aren’t really justifying all that distortion and surreality with any narrative purpose. We fall in love with the custom look of selected optics, for example the bend-stretch of an ultra-wide, without always asking ourselves if their use serves any other purpose except, “I like it”. I fully cop to this in my own case. I sometimes go from discovering how to master the technical use of an effect and slide easily into the habit of shooting damn near everything with it, until, eventually, I come to my senses.

Same subject, taken from the same distance, but with an ultra-wide, 11mm diagonal fisheye. One question comes to mind: why??

After indifferent luck over the years with variously priced “fisheye” wide angles, I decided to lay off the enclosed circular framings that they delivered, as the bending at the edges, not to mention the color fringing and uneven sharpness, seemed claustrophobic to me. Then, last year, I discovered the very different experience of shooting with a so-called “diagonal” fisheye, which renders a rectangular full-frame image with a wider area of bending at the perimeter. Problem was, I was so relieved to finally get the kind of nearly panoramic images I had been seeking for so long that I started applying the look to things that, for the sake of visual story-telling, don’t really call for it. I was, in effect, shooting too many normal buildings and making them look like Shot One On A Cop Show.

The two images seen here, shot on a 28mm wide-angle and an 11mm diagonal fisheye, show that the features of the hotel in the images are not particularly well-served merely by giving it the Silly Putty stretch treatment. In fact, it actually draws attention in the wrong direction. For me, there is always a risk that, during the break-in period for a new piece of kit, I will mistake the novelty of the results for a true all-purpose go-to approach to shooting any and everything. Eventually I sober up, but, while the high lasts, my work can go a bit giddy. Such is life.