I must have heard that saying 10,000 times when I was a kid. It was very popular with my parents. Sadly, I guess I didn't learn a lot about that.
Later in life when I first began teaching Basic Photography I was relentless on my students when it came to composition. "Everyone in the world sees things horizontally at eye level. Get higher or lower...turn your camera vertical...BE CREATIVE!" Sounds simple right? Flash forward 25 years to the present. I was fortunate enough to win a fantastic door prize at the annual RMNP shindig. Denver Digital Imaging is going to print one of my images 24X36 for free and have it mounted on Dura Plaq also for free. I started thinking immediately what image will I choose and where will I put it in the house?
After an evening of looking around the house for an empty space and consulting with my interior decorator (my wife) I decided that the 2 prints hanging in the 32 inch wide cubbyhole over the fireplace have faded so badly after 22 years that they need to be replaced. There's a perfect location for a vertical image. Now the search begins for an image and that's when I came upon a disturbing trend. All of my images that I really LOVE and would like to have printed large are.....eye level horizontal! What the.......
Don't get me wrong, I love all my images and there are plenty of verticals to choose from but under careful scrutiny each of them is flawed somehow. A lot of them were shot with "average" lenses and while they work well as smaller prints they would never hold up to 24X36. I've got a file drawer full of 4X5 transparancies that would be wonderful but I don't currently have megabucks to get them properly scanned. So that takes care of plan A. No vertical image that I LOVE that will hold up to large printing.
So here I am, back to evaluating locations for a nice 24X36 HORIZONTAL print. I found a logical spot and now all that remains is to choose an image. AAarrrrrrrggggghhhhh! Ever wonder what it's like to spend 4 hours going through digital files looking at images? Who's got the migraine meds? But I managed to narrow the choices down to 6. Then to 3. Then to 2. And I finally made my decision, burned the image to cd, and headed for the lab. Care to guess which image I chose from the two above? I'll let you know in a couple weeks when I get the print back.
And by the way, I made a label to stick on the ballhead on my tripod that says, simply....DFV.
DON'T FORGET VERTICAL!
You've got to be kidding me, Bill. My camera will take photos when turned vertically? Why didn't you tell me this a long time ago!
ReplyDeleteSeriously, this is an excellent reminder for all of us. It's easy to get stuck seeing the world through our camera the same way we see it through our eyes: horizontally. Some of my favorite images are vertically composed. Vertical images force the viewer to see the scene in a way they've never seen it before.
Great post!
I think I must have the opposite problem, I only have three photographs in my gallery that were taken horizontally! I really must work to leave the camera horizontal (working on video recently might have changed this - I love the 16:9 format)..
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, if you don't have an L bracket for your camera, get one asap. They make switching a breeze! (also, switch off auto rotate on your lcd preview may be a good idea)
Thanks for the comment Tim. I've been using the RRS L bracket for years. In fact, I'll never have another camera without one. I think I may have exaggerated a teeny bit. I've got lots of verticals and I like them all, just not a lot that I LOVE. Gotta work on that this spring.
ReplyDeleteThe other issue is that I really like panoramic views. A lot of my vertical exposures are shots I can stitch together as a horizontal pan