Part four: People interacting with place - Learning points

Pulling back so that people appear small in the frame does not necessarily make them appear insignificant, but rather shows them in a different context.
Such a picture is conceived exactly as this, but it is also an interesting and restrained way of establishing a connection between people and their wider surroundings.
Such figure-in-a-landscape images pitch a small human being against a dominant location, so an extreme size relationship is key.
Typically, contrast is in the form of colour difference or tonal difference – dark against a light background or light against dark.
One thing that you are forced to abandon with this kind of extreme composition is identity.
There may indeed be an advantage in this kind of anonymity, in that it keeps attention more firmly focused on the location.

When the place is the principal subject, but when it will look better inhabited, it is often useful to find ways of reducing the visual attention that a person or a face tends to command. Among the most common ways of achieving this while shooting are the following:
1. Small and many. A crowd of people naturally have a certain dominance because of their numbers, but individually they command less attention.
2. Facing away. The human face is such a powerful visual attractant that simply photographing someone from behind or with their head turned away from the camera alters their relationship to the rest of the image.
3. In silhouette. Shooting from darkness towards a bright background, as in the example shown here, communicates ‘person’ but rarely ‘personality’.
4. Partly obscured. Figures and faces even partly hidden behind some other object are automatically reduced in visual importance.
5. Motion blur. Useful if slightly mannered technique when you have a tripod and the light is sufficiently dim to use a slow exposure. Needs experience to judge the effect of length of exposure on the appearance of a moving figure. Light figure against dark background is always more noticeable than dark figure against light background.