The Tripod Hack for Lower Perspectives

Hey, what's up guys, professional outdoor photographer David Johnson here for Outdoor Photography Guide. And today I want to show you a little hack that I've found with tripods. And I love tripods and you absolutely need one for outdoor photography, but a lot of times the less expensive tripods, or even sometimes the more expensive ones have this center column here. Now, today, what I'm doing is, I'm out photographing macro, small scene photography and these little ferns in the winter that are kind of shriveled up, and a little bit purple in color. Just one of the subjects that I really enjoy photographing. One of the problems though, that I always find when I come out and photograph small, macro scenes like this that are so close to the ground, is that I can't get my camera close enough to the ground while also keeping it steady on a tripod. Now I want to get it close enough to the ground, because I think background is the most important part of any macro photography. You really want your subject matter to stand out from the rest of the frame. So what I'm trying to get is enough separation between the subject, which is the fern, and the background to really have that contrast difference of focal length to provide me with a really specific subject in the scene. Now, I can do this in a variety of different ways. Since this is in the sun, I can have shaded in the background, or I can find a secluded solid color, but that doesn't get me around the problem that I'm facing right now of not being able to get my camera close enough to the ground, because of this center column on my tripod. So, what I like to do here in these situations is flip my camera upside down. So what this is going to do is, it's going to allow me to get my camera close enough to the ground where I can actually photograph this. Now, I just raised the center column in this. And every tripod is a little bit different. If your tripod doesn't do it this specific way, it probably does it in another way. And I just rotate this down, and then center it back up, so that I can get as far away from the ground as I want to. So when I connect my camera now, it's going to be upside down, hanging from the bottom of my tripod, and I can photograph this however I want it. Now, the trick to doing this, as you may be thinking, "Well that's just going to put the image upside down." Well, in post-processing, what you can do is actually rotate your image, so that it's right side up, and continue the editing process however you want to. It's just a really fast and easy hack that I've found has been really beneficial to a lot of my macro scenes that I've photographed in the past, that allow me to get really, really close to very small subjects that are situated very close to the forest floor, that allow me to photograph really low perspectives, to get a nice background throughout the scene, and seclude my subject in macro photography, which is absolutely essential to what you're trying to do with it.