Ground Level

The camera rests on the floor and the ground becomes a plane running across the bottom of the frame. Feet, wheels, dust and grass arrive at the size of a face.

It is a height nobody stands at, so the shot reads as observed from somewhere strange. That can mean an animal, a fallen person, or simply a camera that has stopped pretending to be a witness.

The lens sits at or near the surface, level or close to it. The near edge of the ground is often out of focus, which is what sells the height more than anything else.

Put something on the ground close to the lens. A shoe, a kerb, a stone, a puddle. Without a foreground object at that height the shot reads as a plain low wide.

A wide lens keeps the ground plane running deep into the frame. A long lens compresses it into a band and loses most of what the angle is for.

Use it for feet approaching, for anything moving across a surface, and for the moment a character ends up on the floor.

Skip it when the scene needs faces. At this height a standing person is legs, and the head is a long way from the lens.

A worm's eye view sits at the same height and looks steeply upward, so the frame fills with what is above. Ground level stays roughly level and fills the frame with the surface instead.

The check is where the lens points. Up at the sky or the ceiling is worm's eye. Along the ground is ground level.

Models lift the camera to knee height, which loses the plane. Say the camera rests on the ground and that the floor fills the lower frame.

The second failure is an empty surface. Name something at the lens, such as feet close to the camera or gravel in the foreground, because that is what proves the height.