Here's the whole idea in one breath: every picture is taken from somewhere, by someone, and that choice has already started telling the viewer how to feel — before they've even worked out what they're looking at. There is no view from nowhere. The moment you pick a spot to stand, you've made an argument.
Start with Something You've Already Done
You've taken a thousand photos without once thinking, "right, where shall I stand?" But you decided anyway — you just did it on instinct. Crouch down to photograph the dog and it looks noble and huge. Hold the phone up high and tilt it down at your little brother, and he comes out tiny and a bit pathetic. Same dog, same brother, same afternoon — but the position you chose changed the whole story. That's not the camera doing it. That's you.
In linear perspective we treated the viewpoint as a piece of structure — the horizon is your eye level, and all the geometry hangs off it. Point of view is the same eye level, but now we ask the subjective question: not "is this built correctly?" but "what is this position making me feel?" They're two halves of the one coin, and this concept is the feeling half.
Position is Point of View
Notice how one little phrase has leaked out of art and into ordinary talk: "what's your point of view on that?" We borrow a word that literally means the spot you're looking from and use it to mean the side you're taking. That's no accident. Artists have always known that where you put the viewer is how you put an idea in their head.
So when you set up any image — a photo, a drawing, a frame of a film — you're quietly answering one question: whose eyes am I lending the viewer, and from where? Close and low makes us feel small and overwhelmed. Far and high makes us feel like a calm, all-seeing observer. Neither is the truth of the tree. Both are choices about the feeling of the tree.
In the toy, the tree never changes — only you move. Drag around it and read how the caption shifts from "towering and watchful" to "small and lonely" to "calm and ordinary". Proof, in your own hands, that the meaning was riding on your position the whole time.