Normally, a photograph is composed of one or more subjects (not necessarily human) in the foreground, and everything else in the background. The subjects and the environment around them are the tools with which the observer will build his assumptions about where the photo was taken, what happened then, and what message it tries to convey, if any. All this is good, but what if another impact on the observer is desired? What if you want to leave little hints, in order to keep him guessing?
From a scenic point of view, taking a photograph of a subject filling a small area in your frame may leave you with many empty spaces that if not effectively used, will render your photo boring. An effective remedy to this is to fill the frame with your subject, so as to get rid of these empty spaces.
Sometimes it is even better to include nothing but your subject. For example, consider this situation in which you are photographing a wild animal at the zoo. The most common composition is one that consists of an animal, a cage, and maybe spectators. But if you fill your photo’s frame with the animal’s face only, anyone might think that it was taken in the wild. The ambiguity resulted from close-ups lead observers use their imaginations to complete the picture . A photo of legs of a man and a woman standing in front of each other can tell many things. Here, all you did is that you removed the subjects’ personalities, so as to give a space for the observer to think.
Portraits are usually a strong candidate for closeups. While taking a portrait inside a specific environment is always nice, close-up portraits are used to give a very different sort of experience. A portrait in which your subject fills the whole frame gives some sort of a personalized feeling. A facial portrait usually makes you in direct contact with the subject, as if you are looking to someone sitting in front of you. Including only some body parts in the frame is usually done to produce an abstract feel, or to focus on a certain action.
Even with still life, close-ups work great. This allows you to see usual things in very unusual ways, revealing many details that were not obvious before. This is particularly important when photographing products and machine parts.
Zooming and cropping are the tools used to create close-ups. Cropping allows you to cut any part you want from any photograph, making it flexible to carefully choose your composition, but you have to know that the image size will be smaller than the original.
As you can see, close-ups open a new door for your creative expression using photography. So use your imagination, and make your audience use theirs.
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