Scale - A Personal Development Exercise
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Without the people at the base, the size of the pyramid is unknown
We recently had our annual Member’s Print Show at my camera club. We don’t engage in competitions because I think that they are destructive BS, instead encouraging members to share their work with the other members, to share how their skills have been grown. This year’s group of images was superb.
One of the members brought two very large framed prints. They did justice to the massive subjects, a tall narrow waterwall in Iceland, and the ice cliff on the short of Greenland, photographed from the sea.
The issue with this kind of work is that if there is no indication of scale, the viewer misses the true sense of grandeur, because they have no frame of reference for size.
This is Scale
the buildings and vehicles provide scale for the immensity of this smaller example of the nazca lines
By including something in the photo that is recognizable to the viewer, and whose size is easily understood, we can help the viewer get a better sense of scope and scale of the primary subject. Failure to do so, leaves the viewer guessing.
In this example, the photographer had a human standing at the base of the waterfall. The viewer immediately gets the sense of the waterfall easily being 100 feet tall. In the second image, by including a boat with a few people right at the base of the cliff, it is plain to the viewer that the cliff itself is easily 200 feet high.
Without these scale markers, the viewer would have no idea, only a guess.
Your Assignment
Go out and make some images with the intent to show scale. This means finding a suitable subject and ensuring that there is a scale marker or indicator that is easily recognized and the size of which is easily determined. Many photographers actively choose not to include a sense of scale in their images, and this leaves the viewer less likely to get a sense of the primary subject.
how big is an airbus 380? The tiny person on the lift provides a scale indicator
The sample images in this article, all sourced from Adobe Stock and NONE made using any AI BS, are good examples of using scale indicators effectively. You can use them as ideas of what to go look for.
Wrapping Up
This is a simple exercise where the real work is finding a subject and a scale indicator. Completing the exercise will require you to go out with your camera and observe, not just see. And that folks is a superb thing.
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