Sense of scale

I am currently studying travel photography at MatadorU, an online education community focused on travel journalism, photography and film making, and one of the fundamentals of composition I’ve learnt is called the “sense of scale”.

The sense of scale is a technique of capturing a photograph to show the true size of an object within a picture frame. It adds depth, perspective and makes a picture more intriguing. In my pictures above taken at the Pan Pacific Serviced Suites last weekend, the swimmer in the second picture adds a sense of scale to the image.

In the first image, viewers are not able to fully grasp the size of the Singapore flyer and the skyscrapers. In the second image however, by adding in the swimmer, viewers are able to gauge the height, width, depth and distance of where I’m standing in relation to the backdrop.