i take a lot of photos from a low angle. and here's a good example showing the difference between an above picture of a lost broken key and a low angle version of the same thing.

to get the low angle picture i set my little compact camera to macro mode and centre point focussing, place it against the ground, and point it in the general direction of thing i'm photoing.

i usually end up taking 4 or 5 shots to get the thing i want to be in focus, with a fair bit of chimping at the time to check.

the worst bit is standing up again as i'm usually wearing my heavy backpack with laptop and various heavy documents.

the crouch is usually worth it though.

so there you go. you probably knew all that already.