As a filmmaker, I learned that you have to think in advance about the size of the shot you are going to do for each moment of the scene, depending on the story you want to tell. Photography is not a stranger to shot sizes of a subject in the picture. Depending on where you decide to crop the image, you can be telling a completely different story.
For this series, I wanted to show a story, developing and giving a new meaning to what was shown in the previous picture, by making the size of the shot wider each time, but still working with the same image.
I am from Argentina, and after studying a little bit about shot sizes both in Spanish and English, I realized there are differences in the ways we name each size. Therefore, I am going to make a list of the sizes I used and their correlation with the ones named in English, with a small reference on what to expect.
The sizes are:
- Big Close Up (BCU): From forehead to chin, showing my face in great proximity.
- Close Up (CU): From forehead until the base neck, where you can see a small bruise that came from a night of passion.
- Medium Close Up (MCU): Until the middle of the chest, where you can see an insignia that may (or may not) redefine the person who gave me the small bruise in my neck.
- Medium Shot (MS): Until the waist (in here a little bit upper) where you can read the inscription in my shirt, which is in spanish and reads "I hate everyone" with a smiley rainbow.
- Cowboy Shot (CS): In English the wider shot after the MS would be the CS until above the knees (originally to see the guns of cowboys), but in Spanish the following shot would be the Medium Long, up until the hips where you can see me holding a glass of water because I am thirsty.
- Medium Long Shot (MLS): After the CS in English comes the MLS up until the knees (or three-quarters of the subject) where the water I am drinking gets reinterpreted. In Spanish, after the Medium Long would come the "American Shot" which covers up until the knee, mostly to show the cowboys on Westerns.
The Focal Length of a lens, represented in mm, in a very simple way to put it, is the angle of view of each lens. The smaller the number, the wider the shot. They go from Wide Angle (with the well known Fish-eye) to Standard (usually around 50mm), to Telephoto (regularly known as Zoom). In this series I used three different Focal Lengths (55mm, 35mm, and 18mm) to portray the same Shot Size of myself (MCU), to show that the wider the lens is, the more distorted the figure gets, particularly in the center of the image (which in this case, happens to be my nose).
