Exercise 11: Vertical and Horizontal Frames

It's been too long since I last posted any photos.  I've been shooting and images have been accumulating while trying to sort out how to use Lightroom, as well as iPad.  You can read about the latter here.

I returned to the UAE in late August and began a new life in Dubai.  Previously I lived in a rural area about 100km north.  As I'm in new surroundings, one of my photographic projects has been to record images of my surroundings for friends and relatives in far away places.  That fit in nicely with the most recent exercise.

The brief:  Shoot 20 images in vertical.  Does the restriction on vertical framing influence your choice of subject? How do you position subjects within a vertical frame?  Do you find that shooting horizontally is largely a matter of habit?

I have been about the neighborhood at different times of day, from early morning, to midday, to late afternoon.  I have focused largely on my living space and the area nearby.  Rather than post the photos again here, I'll simply link to the blog where I post personal images and let you and the tutor have a look over there.  All images were composed vertically.*  A bit of cropping was necessary on a few as a result of correcting for lens distortion.  Lightroom has been most useful in fixing this problem.

Given that my new neighborhood is full of towers and skyscrapers, including the world's tallest building, vertical framing was actually quite natural and convenient to the subject.  It is perhaps true that shooting horizontally is simply an ingrained preference, but I suppose for good reason.  Human vision is framed horizontally.  We see wider than we do taller.  Personally, I enjoyed this exercise for helping me look differently.  I did not find, as Freeman suggests, that vertically compact subjects ended up being framed near the bottom of the image.  You'll notice that the photos of the homes and the skyscrapers from a distance are mostly centered.  If I had framed near the bottom, I would have ended up with an image 2/3 sky, which might have been acceptable if there had been something other than blue sky, like in either of these images.  As it was, I thought a bit of sand in the foreground might be of more interest.

The brief calls for a follow-up requiring reshooting the same subjects in horizontal.  I think I'd also like to experiment a bit with something in between.  I'll post the results here next week.

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*Postscript:  A few horizontal shots were added 19 Sept.

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