Chapter 9 — Exercises
This chapter is about your feet, so almost every exercise sends you out to move. The best camera here is the one you'll actually carry — a phone is ideal, because nothing about a phone stops you from crouching, climbing, or circling. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up), ⭐⭐ (core), ⭐⭐⭐ (stretch). Do the starred and odd-numbered ones at minimum; model answers and critiques for those live in the book's Answers to Selected Exercises. Keep everything you shoot — some of it feeds your Portfolio. The single discipline running through all of these: make the obvious shot, then refuse to stop there.
Two habits to bring to every exercise below. First, shoot more than you think you need — these tasks reward volume of positions (not volume of near-copies). Second, do the cull and the sentence. After each shoot, lay your frames out, choose your best one or two, and write a single sentence saying why it beats the rest. That sentence — "this one wins because…" — is where your eye actually develops; the keeper is just its evidence. The exercises are grouped by interaction type so you can mix recall, seeing, and shooting in a single session; an interleaved set at the end (Part G) deliberately combines this chapter with earlier ones, because real photographs use every control at once.
Part A — Camera height (Shoot This)
Exercise 9.1 ⭐ — The three-height pass. Choose one stationary subject — a chair, a mailbox, a potted plant, a parked bicycle. Photograph it from exactly three heights: a worm's-eye view (camera on the ground or near it, aiming up), eye level, and a bird's-eye view (held high or from a chair, aiming down). Same subject, same lens, three frames. Lay them out and write one sentence on what each height says about the subject.
Exercise 9.2 ⭐⭐ — Make the ordinary monumental. Find a small, humble subject you would normally photograph at eye level — a shoe, a coffee cup, a toddler, a dog, a fire hydrant. Get low, aim up, and make it loom like a monument. Use the low angle to put a clean background (sky, ceiling, a plain wall's upper half) behind it. Keep the one frame where the subject most clearly acquires power it didn't have at standing height.
Exercise 9.3 ⭐⭐ — The flat-lay. Arrange a few related objects on a table — breakfast, your everyday-carry, art supplies, tools. Stand directly over them and shoot straight down, keeping your camera's sensor parallel to the tabletop so the arrangement reads as flat pattern. Move objects on a thirds grid. Make the bird's-eye view a deliberate graphic composition, not a snapshot of stuff.
Exercise 9.4 ⭐⭐⭐ — Height changes the story. Photograph the same person (with permission) from a worm's-eye view and a bird's-eye view, keeping light and expression as constant as you can. Then write two captions — one for each — describing how the vantage alone changes how a stranger would read that person's status, mood, or power. The point is to feel how height editorializes.
Part B — Compression and expansion (Shoot This)
Exercise 9.5 ⭐ — The move-and-zoom proof. Pick a subject with something clearly behind it (a person with a building behind; a sign with the street beyond). Make two frames in which the subject is the same size in the frame: first, close with your widest lens; second, far back with maximum zoom (or shot wide and cropped). Compare how the background changed size between them. This is the chapter's central demonstration — do it before anything else in Part B.
Exercise 9.6 ⭐⭐ — Stack a scene (compression). Find layers receding into distance — fence posts, parked cars, telephone poles, market stalls, a row of trees. Back up as far as you can and shoot long (or crop hard). Make the layers visibly stack into a dense, flattened collage. Keep the frame where compression most clearly collapses a long distance into a shallow- looking image.
Exercise 9.7 ⭐⭐ — Open a scene (expansion). Find a foreground object you can get very close to — a flower, a railing, a rock, a bicycle wheel — with space opening behind it. Get closer than feels comfortable, use your widest lens, and let the near object loom huge while the background falls away small. Keep the frame with the strongest sense of being inside the space.
Exercise 9.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — The giant-sun (or giant-moon) shot. Using only distance and a long lens/zoom (or a wide shot cropped hard), make a frame where a distant large thing — the setting sun, a full moon, a far mountain, a big building — looms huge directly behind a small nearer subject (a person, a tree). You will have to stand far back. Document where you stood and explain, in one sentence, why the distant thing looks so large — without using the word "lens" in your explanation.
Part C — Angle and background (Shoot This / Fix the Photo)
Exercise 9.9 ⭐ — Kill the merger. Stage a "merger" on purpose: photograph a friend so a pole, branch, or lamp appears to grow from their head. Then, without moving the subject, make three more frames that each fix it a different way (step left, step right, crouch and aim up). Keep all four. Label which fix gave the cleanest background.
Exercise 9.10 ⭐⭐ — Three backgrounds, one subject. Place a subject in a spot with different things on three sides (a clean wall, a window, clutter). Without moving the subject, photograph it three times so a different background falls behind it each time. Choose the best and write one sentence on why that background serves the subject and the others don't.
Exercise 9.11 ⭐⭐ — Crouch to clean it up. Find a subject standing in front of a genuinely busy background (a crowded street, a parking lot, a cluttered room). Lower the camera and aim up until the busy background is replaced by sky, ceiling, or clean wall. Keep the before (eye level, busy) and the after (low, clean) as a pair.
Exercise 9.12 ⭐⭐⭐ — Fix the photo. A described shot fails: "A portrait of a smiling man in a park at noon. The light is flat and overhead; a trash can sits just behind his shoulder; a bright path leads the eye out of the frame past his ear; he's dead-center and there's clutter on both sides." Write the specific re-shoot using only the tools of this chapter (height, distance, angle, working the scene) plus what you know from Chapters 4–6. Name each change and what it fixes. You may not blame the camera.
Part D — Working the scene (Shoot This)
Exercise 9.13 ⭐⭐ — Ten frames, one subject. Choose one subject in the park-or-trail location and do not leave it until you have ten genuinely different photographs — different heights, distances, angles, and orientations, not ten near-copies. Make the obvious shot first and abandon it. Cull to three and write why each beats the obvious first frame.
Exercise 9.14 ⭐⭐ — Vertical and horizontal. Take five subjects you'd normally shoot horizontally and make each one both horizontal and vertical, moving as needed to make the vertical work. For each, decide which orientation is stronger and why. The goal is to make frame shape a decision instead of a default.
Exercise 9.15 ⭐⭐⭐ — The thirty-minute subject. Pick one subject and work it for a full thirty minutes — circling, changing height, stepping in and back, watching the light and background shift. Make at least 25 frames from genuinely different positions. Cull to your single best. Then identify, honestly, at what minute you would have stopped if you weren't doing this exercise — and whether your keeper came before or after that minute. (It is almost always after.)
Exercise 9.16 ⭐⭐ — Subtract to the bone. Find a cluttered scene with one good subject buried in it. Your only goal: move (step, crouch, rise, close in) until you have subtracted everything inessential and the frame holds only the subject and what it needs. No cropping in editing allowed — do all the subtracting with your feet and your framing in-camera.
Part E — Distortion (Read the Frame / Shoot This)
Exercise 9.17 ⭐ — Spot the foreshortening. Find three photographs (yours or others') that use strong wide-angle distortion or foreshortening — a near-the-lens hand, a low shot up a body, a dramatic close landscape. For each, name what was enlarged by being nearest the lens and what shrank by being farthest, and say whether the distortion helps or hurts.
Exercise 9.18 ⭐⭐ — Use it, then lose it. Photograph the same object (not a face) twice: once close-and-wide so it distorts and looms with exaggerated depth, and once far-and-long so it reads with true, flat proportion. Keep both. Note which you prefer and what each one says — drama versus accuracy.
Exercise 9.19 ⭐⭐ — The flattering portrait distance. Make a portrait the wrong way (close with a wide lens) and the right way (backed up, using a longer focal length / your phone's telephoto or a tight crop from distance). Same person, same light. Compare the nose, ears, and overall proportion. Confirm with your own eyes that distance, not the lens, was the fix.
Exercise 9.20 ⭐⭐⭐ — Straighten the building. Photograph a tall building first the dramatic way (close, low, aiming up, verticals leaning together) and then the corrected way (back up, keep the camera level so the sensor is parallel to the facade, verticals straight). Keep both. Decide which the building "wants" and why — and note that the correction was achieved by position, not editing.
Part F — Point of view as voice (Eye Training / Reflection)
Exercise 9.21 ⭐⭐ — Your point-of-view audit. Open your last forty photographs and treat them as one body of work. Tally: how many from standing eye level? How many low? High? Close or far? Centered or off-balance? Clean backgrounds or busy? Write three sentences describing the point of view your work already has — the patterns you didn't plan.
Exercise 9.22 ⭐⭐ — Break your pattern. From the audit in 9.21, identify your single strongest habit, then spend one shooting session doing the opposite (if you're always eye-level-and-far, shoot only low-and-close). Make ten frames against your grain. Keep the strongest. Note whether the exercise confirmed your voice or expanded it.
Exercise 9.23 ⭐⭐⭐ — A one-stance series. Choose a single deliberate point of view — say, "everything from a child's height" or "always shot from across the street, compressed" — and make a short series of five to seven photographs of different subjects, all from that one stance. The challenge is consistency. A coherent stance across varied subjects is the seed of a personal voice; this is a miniature of the work of Chapter 39.
Exercise 9.24 ⭐⭐ — Eye training: the height game. For one full day, no camera required: every time you're about to look at something interesting, deliberately imagine it from a worm's-eye and a bird's-eye view before you look normally. Add one Light Log entry that also notes the vantage that would best suit the light you saw. You're training the reflex to consider height before the camera is even up.
Part G — Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)
Exercise 9.25 ⭐⭐ — Vantage + light. Return to the kitchen window. Make a portrait or still life where you choose both a deliberate vantage (this chapter) and deliberate directional light (Chapter 5): circle the subject until good window light rakes across it and a clean background falls behind it (§9.3). Keep the frame where light and background coincide.
Exercise 9.26 ⭐⭐ — Vantage + depth of field. Make a frame that uses both an angle that puts a clean background behind the subject (§9.3) and a wide aperture / close focus to blur that background (Chapter 4). Notice that choosing the background and softening it are two different tools; use them together.
Exercise 9.27 ⭐⭐⭐ — Vantage + composition + color. Make one photograph that deliberately stacks three controls from Part II: an unexpected vantage (Ch. 9), a thirds-or-leading-lines arrangement (Ch. 6), and a color relationship (Ch. 7). Write one sentence on how each of the three contributes. This is the kind of layered seeing the whole part is building toward.
Exercise 9.28 ⭐⭐ — Re-photograph an earlier keeper. Take a subject you already photographed for an earlier chapter (your red-door stand-in, your Ch. 6 composition subject) and re-shoot it from a vantage you never tried. Place the new frame beside the old one. Has the meaning changed? This is the red-door lesson — the subject didn't change, you did — made literal in your own Portfolio.
Stretch challenge
Exercise 9.29 ⭐⭐⭐ — One subject, the whole vocabulary. Choose a single subject and make one strong photograph for every tool in this chapter: a worm's-eye, a bird's-eye, an eye-level, a compression (far + long), an expansion (close + wide), an angle that fixes a background, and a frame whose distortion is deliberate. Seven-plus frames, one subject. Lay them out as a contact sheet. You will have proven, in a single subject, that vantage is a vocabulary — and you'll likely find your favorite is one you'd never have shot before reading this chapter.
How to grade yourself
Most of these are shooting tasks with no single right answer, so judge your own work against the chapter's principles, not against a "correct" picture. A frame is succeeding when you can answer yes to these:
- Did the vantage do work? Could this exact photograph have been made from standing eye level a few steps back? If yes, you haven't used the chapter yet — move more.
- Is the background chosen, not accepted? Look past your subject to every edge. Is anything merging, blown out, or competing? If so, which step would have fixed it — and did you take it?
- Did distance set the perspective on purpose? For compression/expansion tasks, can you say where you stood and why, without crediting "the lens"?
- Did you subtract? Is there anything in the frame that isn't earning its place? Could one more step have removed it?
- Can you write the sentence? If you can't say in one clear line why your keeper beats the obvious first frame, keep working — the inability to name it usually means the frame isn't there yet.
Aim, across the chapter, to produce a small contact sheet per subject and one defended keeper per major exercise. That is the habit that matters far more than any single image.
Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Try each with a camera before you read them — in photography, the attempt is the lesson, and in this chapter the attempt is mostly about being willing to move.