Exercise 11: Vertical and Horizontal Frames, Part 2

I never expected to spend so much time on this exercise.  It seemed straightforward enough.  Find a place to photograph to which you could return.  Shoot the subject in vertical, examine the photos, then return and shoot in horizontal.   The purpose here was to examine shooting habits, to see whether shooting vertical might be equally as rewarding, and to discover how frame orientation may influence shooting choices.

An initial post on the exercise with a bit of background on the subject matter that can be found here.

A couple of other students seemed to have approached the task in a more efficient manner, shooting vertical and horizontal frames at the same moment, rather than making two trips to the same site.  I might already be on my next exercise if I had done the same.  I can’t say shooting on different days at different hours wasn’t a useful lesson.

Freeman notes that not every subject will fit both approaches and I take this to mean that I wasn’t required to force a subject in order to produce 20 pairs of photos.   For those interested in more photos from this collection, have a look here.

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So, what did I learn?

We do have preference for shooting horizontal, but that’s just the way we’re built.  We see wider than taller. 

Subjects often determine frame orientation.  That seems rather obvious from my collection, which is full of towers and skyscrapers.   Shot horizontal, the buildings would be cut off at the navel.    I like shooting trees and use vertical quite often to capture their height.  To shoot a tree in horizontal means losing something of its stature.   Portraiture is another area where vertical seems more natural and rewarding. 

Sometimes the counter-intuitive orientation can produce unexpected results.  I don’t think I would have thought of shooting my living room in vertical if it hadn’t been for the demands of this exercise.  The requirement helped me think of a way of making it possible and interesting.   I now wish, as I am writing this, that I had done the same for the skyscrapers, created a collage of horizontal shots.   (I see the Burj Khalifa.)

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Revisiting a subject is tricky business.  Even if you find the same exact spot at the same exact time of day, the earth’s inclination has changed and therefore so has the light.  Your mood and thinking has changed.  Maybe something in your life has made you happy or sad.  Maybe you’re just tired from a long week at work.  And so the way you see also changes, which of course affects the kind of photos you take. Revisiting a site to shoot it a second or third time is actually a good exercise for sensitizing oneself to the nuances of impermanence. 

Creating a uniform look to photos of the same subject shot on different days and different hours is no easy task.  This was not one of my goals and I considered it only once I had both my processed vertical and horizontal shots side-by-side.  The first batch, the vertical shots, was darker, the second batch, the horizontal, was lighter.  The difference probably comes down to how I was feeling the day I did the processing, of what looked good to me on that particular day.   Is there a solution?  Is there a way to establish a baseline for processing that creates a consistent look or feel?  I’m guessing there must be and that my learning curve isn’t getting any less steep.

Finally, this exercise seems like a good warm-up for my first assignment, coming up after one more exercise.

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