Forced Perspective

Forced perspective is a technique that employs optical illusion to make an object appear farther away, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is. It is used primarily in photography, filmmaking and architecture. It manipulates human visual perception through the use of scaled objects and the correlation between them and the vantage point of the spectator or camera.

Types of Forced Perspective Main Categories:

1. Making a main subject smaller

2. Making a main subject larger

3. Bending gravity

4. Merging subjects

To create a forced perspective image you will have to combine line of sight, distance and depth of field.

Depth of field- (see link for a more in-depth explanation with visuals.)

is how much of your image that will be in focus before and beyond your focus point.

Subject matter size vs. distance. If you want to have some one crushing a mountain top the person will need to be a mile or more away from the mountain. 

You will want to use a wide angle lens (35mm or less) to capture these images. You will also want a large F-stop-(see link for more info on F-stops). F-stops is the term used to talk about the aperture (the adjustable opening in your camera lens.) that allows light to hit your film (we use digital but same concept) to capture the image. The amount of light changes the angle in how the light hits the film which changes the depth of field.

Examples of Forced perspective:

 How does this image use forced perspective? Explain.

Before we start taking our Forced perspective go do some image research. Once you have found several (7) images and uploaded them to your research page on your website answer the following questions for each image:

1. What is the image of? Describe it in detail.

2. How does this image use forced perspective? Explain.

3. How do you think they created this forced perspective? Explain.

4. How would you have created it? Explain.

5. How do you think line of sight, depth of field and distance affected the image? Explain.

Once you have edited your force perspective and uploaded it to your website answer these questions:

1. What is your image of? Explain.

2. How does this image use force perspective? Explain.

3. How did you create this image? Explain

4. What was hard about creating this force perspective image? Explain.

5. How do you think line of sight, depth of field and distance affected the image? Explain.