Developing a New Point of View

One of the things nearly all of us do, as photographers, is to shoot from the same point of view. We tend to do this all the time. I'm as guilty of this as everyone else is but, from time to time, I try to break out of the predictable, and try something different. I have been shooting a fair bit of video recently and decided I wanted to make a short movie in the park where I walk most mornings. My dogs are the models of course (responding well to food and other bribery - and no fees to pay...) so I decided to shoot from their point of view (i.e. from a height of three inches).

Here's the resulting movie...

Bark in the Park from Robin Nichols on Vimeo.

I attached two tripod heads together and attached the double rig to a Velbon monopod (the handle). Because there are 2 heads, you can angle the heads so that the second head is in the normal vertical position and attach the HD Video DSLR as normal. This worked well for both my EOS 5D MkII and a Canon Powershot SX30IS - the latter had the distinct advantage of having a flip-out LCD screen to act as a framing aid as I was running along - but more importantly, its image stabiliser really made the results look considerably more stable. Just as well because the resulting footage was jerky. The film was edited in Adobe Premiere Elements 9.0.

Creating a different point of view from Robin Nichols on Vimeo.