Years ago, I remember the director of photography at National Geographic saying that, "a good photographer has to have the ability to bend over". In other words you can't go around shooting all your photos from a horizontal perspective at eye level.
My cat, shown here, has the same instincts of all cats and likes to spend a lot of time in a location where he can see out while remaining unobtrusive to those around him. To take this photo, I had to lie on the floor and shoot the cat at eye-level (his eye level not mine). The camera used here, a Panasonic GF1, has an electronic viewfinder that will tilt up at an angle of 90 degrees, allowing me to look down and directly through the lens which is on a horizontal plane. The photograph was taken from a distance of about ten inches with a 20 mm lens, and, with the exception of a little bit off the top, is basically un-cropped. I made four exposures and this is the only one that was sharp. The shutter speed was only one tenth of a second, even with the aperture wide open at f /1.7, This is a very dark little place. Fortunately, the cat was distracted by something going on behind me and had his eyes wide open. Cats are not the most cooperative subjects.
The point, once again, is to get where you need to be to make the photo. Eye level is often very boring
And, if I haven't mentioned it before, I should have, be sure that the eyes are sharp whether it's an animal, insect or human being. If you can't get both eyes sharp, try to get the eye nearest the lens in sharp focus. In this case that's kind of a toss up as both eyes are on almost the same plane.
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