Face to Face: Rick Sammon's Complete Guide to Photographing People

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When you include a person in a picture, you add

a sense of scale to the subject or the scene. That’s

true even if the person takes up only a tiny frac-

tion of the image. What’s more, seeing a person in

a scene gives the viewer of the picture the oppor-

tunity to picture him or herself in the scene.

For example, in this image, the lone worker on

the 90-foot-high structure that features a statue of

Chingis Khan, which I photographed in Mongo-

lia, illustrates the enormity of the structure, as do

the tourists in the foreground.

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Do you agree that the picture with the man has

much more impact than the picture without

him?

Including people in architectural and landscape

images also adds a human quality to an image. I

took these pictures in Angkor Wat, Cambodia.

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Here is a photograph that I took in Namibia while

exploring the magnificent sand dunes—the old-

est sand dunes on the planet. I could easily have

waited for the climber to move out of the scene, or

taken him out in Photoshop. However, his pres-

ence in the photograph illustrates the enormity

of the dunes. Quite frankly, I would not have this

picture any other way.

The next time you look at a scene and say to your-

self, “I wish the person would move out of the

scene,” think about how you can use that person

to your photographic advantage.