Micro Shot Setups
If you are in a great location or find yourself on walkabout with little or no inspiration, make the most of your time by working through this checklist of micro stock shot setups. The take might yield some surprisingly lucrative and appealing images. Low cost legal images can have a sophisticated photography approach.
1. Tilted Horizon
Used to show a skewed perspective, often used in photography to heighten a diagonal line occurring in the frame or grab or capture the area of a certain effect. This can have a comic book look, and appears in movies as a Dutch angle or canted shot.
2. Crane Up Entrance
Try to gain a heightened physical perspective using a ladder, standing on roof of car, or other object. Perspective from above heightens lines and draws a forced perspective. Creates an aura of detail or mystery. Very good to start a series.
3. Fly Over
This can be done from a vidoe frame capture while flying, or it can be faked using the best perspective from a high viewpoint or lookout over neighboring buildings. Show topography when buildings and landscape or urban settings are their own “character”.
4. “Fake” Masked vignette
The binoculars effect can be faked using intentional blur editing effects on background to bring our high resolution perfect clarity subject of shot. Uniform or minimum detail surrounding preferred. The delimited field of vision promotes the idea that the viewer’s focus is equally narrow. Excellent for wildlife or nature shots.
5. Reflection
Show the “Hitchcock” viewpoint. The suggested effect is both indicative of the “viewers” reaction and the reaction to the subject shown in the reflection. Picture a police car with a whirling light in a rear view mirror, (suggesting the threat of an impending ticket), or a too tight or too garish dress on a woman in the “dressing room” mirror.
The projected composition is not only the subject, but the POV reaction of the suggested perceiver. Reflection angles “reflect” what the viewer sees through a purposefuly suggestive context, like a car window or psychiatric asylum reinforced steel glass window square.
6. Shapify
Amplify the effect of a unique appearance, shape or color when exaggerrated by a mirrored glass or oblique reflection angle. Focus on a tall office tower by shooting its reflection in a security mirror, or render a series of Main Street facades interesting by capturing them through a gleam of the barbershop window. Contribute the character of the subject if possible by composing corresponding detail into the shot.
7. Portal
Shoot an object through a series of framing doors or a subject in relation to a topical scene on the television or computer monitor. There is an instant story that is created. What are we seeing and why are we seeing it?
8. Superimposition
These can be got from clever video frame captures. if you grab images where the action superimposes one layer of one scene form the previous scene, you get a thoughtful and provocative study suggesting a relationship, mystery, fragility, and an idealized second focus and possiblt even two points of view.
Superimposition of people suggests family relationships, romance, grief, or terror. Lots of emotion and subtext present in a superimposition shot. Thematic action and detail can be crowded into the frame, excellent for themed microstock shots for topical keywords such as “relationships”, “sex”, “Â dating” etc.
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