While dining in a local barbeque restaurant, I photographed a poster-like banner hanging just behind me. It modestly proclaims the food that I was enjoying to be “Best in the world.” To emphasize the meaning of this proud boast, I brought my camera down to a low vantage point, and using a wideangle lens turned vertically, I shot upwards to stress the thrusts of the surrounding diagonal wall and metal posts, helping the banner try to live up to its boast. I tilted the camera slightly to energize the diagonal flow of the image, and crowned the scene with a pair of diagonally tilted spotlights to echo the position of the surrounding diagonals. A small pig floats in the background, lending context to the nature of the restaurant itself.

The corridors of power in Georgia’s State Capitol building all lead to the vast rotunda under the capitol’s golden dome. I climbed to an upper level and photographed a press conference in session from virtually straight overhead. The setting composed the image for me – the marble steps leading down to the center of the historic rotunda stop just short of the official who is addressing the press and other dignitaries. The audience, carefully aligned in three neat rows of chairs, listens attentively. My vantage point abstracts the entire conference, avoiding identity and instead stressing conformity. Everyone seems equal here, except for the primacy of the speaker himself. My vantage point also highlights the press release itself – at least 15 copies of it can be seen resting on chairs and in the hands of the participants. The ink-on-paper and verbal communication here might seem incongruous in an age when information is generally transmitted digitally. Yet when viewed in the context of this historic 1889 building, the papers and the speeches seem right at home.

I was standing on the top deck of a cruise ship, moored at the pier prior to our departure. There were other cruise ships at Rio’s port as well, and one of them was in the process of taking on passengers. I shot down on them as they emerged from the shadow cast by the shed of the terminal, capturing their energetic body language as they moved diagonally towards their ship. The shed creates a complementary diagonal thrust. By shooting down on the scene, I am able to shoot unnoticed and draw the diagonals together in my frame. The late afternoon light abstracts both terminal and the passengers, silhouetting everything. I converted the image to black and white to intensify the abstraction.

Early morning finds crews of temple volunteers polishing the ceremonial brass figures that adorn Hanoi's Ambassador Pagoda. I stood on a balcony overhead and shot straight down on a woman who was looking up at her work. The most effective way to photograph any person at work is head on, rather than from the side. Side vantage points are always passive instead of active, and invite confusing mergers in the background. If a person is looking down at their work, the photographer should get down and shoot up, even if it means getting on the floor. And if the person is looking up at their work, it is best to seek a higher vantage point, as I do here, and shoot down on it.

Our van was held up for fifteen delightful minutes by a cattle-drive right up the center of the highway. Most of my shots were made through the open door of our van as these cattle flowed past us, but early on, when we first spotted them coming at us from a distance, I was able to spend a few precious seconds shooting from the middle of the highway. I took the lowest vantage point I could, lowering my camera to almost pavement level and looking down into my flip out viewfinder at the on-coming herd. I placed the double yellow line at the lower right hand corner of my frame, so that it would lead the eye into the heart of the herd. They were coming at me up a long slope, and I shot just as they reached the crest. The yellow line rises and then begins to fall as it vanishes into the herd. Cowboys on horseback drive the cattle from the rear, and traffic backs up behind them. My 420mm telephoto lens collapses the distance between these elements, and makes the distant field seem as if it is an earthen wall at the back of the image. This photograph is essentially a product of my own perspective. It is far more expressive than any of the images I made by shooting down on the cattle from our van as they passed us by, because my ground level perspective vicariously puts the viewer directly into the path of the oncoming herd.

In 1898, the North Head Lighthouse was built just north of Cape Disappointment -- a storm-swept graveyard of sailing ships. It is still in operation. Do shipwrecked ghosts still haunt this lighthouse? If so, could this be one of them? Using the image stabilization feature of my camera, I was able to hand-hold this image at one full second in the dark stairwell of the lighthouse as a fellow photographer, unaware of my presence, came walking up the steps. There is some minor blurring of the stairs and wall, but it supports the central point of the image: movement in time. When my fellow photographer saw me, he stopped in his tracks and looked up, blurring only his face. He graciously apologized for “ruining” my picture. Yet he gave me exactly what I wanted. A phantom. It is the face and the shadow coming out of the body that gives up the ghost here – a function of my high vantage point.