Practice the fundamentals: on scale and Raghu Rai
The fourth issue of the practice the fundamentals series exploring scale inspired by Raghu Rai
The life of a man is of no greater significance to the universe than that of an oyster - David Hume
This week, I’m exploring scale with inspiration from Raghu Rai.
This post is part of the Practice the Fundamentals series. This series started with a simple idea: create an approach to practice photography that improves specific skills. These skills are focused on the artistic side of photography rather than technical and gear issues. If you missed it, this post explains it in more detail and how it’s inspired by musicians.
As usual, this is the recipe:
Define the technique
Find inspiration from someone who does it well (in photography or other visual arts)
Apply it
Define the technique: scale
Scale is the relative size of different elements to each other. In visual arts, it is used to give the viewer a frame of reference to better understand the size of the different subjects. Scale is often used in photography to evoke feelings of grandiosity or vastness, or just to better communicate a sense of size. It’s easier to grasp the size of very large spaces when they are contrasted with familiar subjects in smaller proportion.
Find inspiration: Raghu Rai
Raghu Rai is an internationally acclaimed Indian photographer and photojournalist. He started his career joining a newspaper in New Delhi in 1965 and has since created a tremendous amount of work, including photographing Indira Ghandi, the Dalai Lama, and many timeless images of India.
His documentary style photography often focuses on social and political issues and he uses scale to convey the extent and size of the issues he critiques. Rai uses scale by capturing large crowds in various settings like the photo above of a man reading a newspaper in a crowded and vast train station.
Rai often places individuals in a wider context to show a sense of proportion with their environment. The use of scale in the photo below helps understand the size of the cart by contrasting it to the women pushing it from behind, but also to the women’s comparatively small legs in the front.
In the last two photos, the presence of the individuals close to the trees help us understand the enormity of the trees. In the first photo, the silhouette is tiny and takes up a small proportion of the image compared to the massive roots.
As for the tree in the last photo, it’s massive enough to fit several people chilling on it. I don’t think I would be able to grasp the size of the tree if the photo didn’t include people.
Apply it: how scale works
Scale works by using two visual elements: reference and proportion. The reference point is a visual element that the viewer can easily understand the size of. This is often a person because we all have a sense of the size of humans. It can also be any other object that is relatable to viewers.
Proportion is the size of the reference point compared to the other elements of the photo. The sense of scale comes from seeing the contrast between a relatable reference point and its proportion in the image. The more space there is around the reference point, the more the viewer feels a sense of vastness. If the reference point takes up 30% of the visual space, the surroundings will seem smaller than if the reference point takes up 10% of the visual space.
Cropping a photo can give a good sense of how scale can change the image. In the two images below, the first is cropped to include less space around the reference point. The second one gives a bigger sense of vastness of this Cambodian temple. Indeed, the reference point occupies a smaller proportion of the image.
That’s it for this week. I’m sharing more photos using scale below!
My favourite photographer.