How important are straight horizons and missing ears ?

[eugene_scherba]

sometimes I make my horizons<br />

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[barefoot]

What about people with one leg shorter than the other, eh? Nobody gives a thought about

them do they? Their photos are always going to have wonky horizons. Course they could

always tilt the camera or adjust it in Ps but that might conflict with the photogs natural

vision and that wouldn't necessarily be right, would it?

[beeman458]

"If people comment in missing limbs or non horizontal horizons it is probably because they think the image would be better if the limbs were not cut off or the horizons were horizontal."

 

Because of their bias'

[beeman458]

It's the three bears symdrome; too spicy, not spicy enough, just right:)

 

Just eat! :)

[robert x]

Bloody Hell Thomas, it wasn't spiciness that was at issue with Goldilocks and the three bears' porridge, it was THE TEMPERATURE ! How are we supposed to continue a reasonable debate with such GLARING FACTUAL INNACURACIES ?!?!

 

**sigh**

 

;o]

bawb.x

[beeman458]

Poetic license:)

 

Here in "Kal-e-for-nia", home of the "Gov-a-na-tor," Grizzly bears, Cougars and being right next to "Me-he-co", we worry about how spicy as opposed to hot:)

[terribletomterrific]

Hello John Peri,

 

I don't consider straight or tilted horizons to be technical issues. It's a choice a

photographer makes. It's a matter of style. It's your choice, and it's the viewer's choice to

like it or dislike it. There is nothing particularly right or wrong about these choices. Same

with chopped off limbs or organs, or blown out highlights.

 

If it's under your control, it's your choice.

 

I'm impatient, though, with the amateur who hasn't put in enough time in learning the

craft, (or the sloppy professional, for that matter), who blow out their highlights because

they don't know how not to, or crop in a thoughtless manner, and then want other

photographers to crtique it seriously, with the idea that all of these issues should be

overlooked--because it is "art."

 

Tom<div></div>

[John Peri]

Tom, I think you put it all in nutshell and I truly found your reply very useful. Thank you.

[majumder]

I am, perhaps, too much of an amateur to comment on your comment. I've just posted a picture on PN yesterday of Freddy Murcury's (Queen) statue at Montreux. While taking the picture, I chose to keep the padestal and Freedy straight and upright. The horizon became bent. My objective was a good shot of the statue. The horizon didn't matter. What happens now?

[beeman458]

"What happens now?"

 

Nothing:) Either that or you get a large format view camera so you can straighten up all the lines:)

[jonathancharlesphoto]

Hi John. Coming to this thread rather late I realise Tom Foley

has said most of what I was going to say. But I think your

question opens up a wider issue of: "Why are there rules of

composition at all?" - of which tilted horizons and chopped off

bits are examples of what you should try to avoid. It's that

<u>generally</u> they spoil the enjoyment of the picture for at

least a proportion of viewers <u>and</u> they are easily done if

you are not being careful with your framing. Even quite

experienced photographers can, in the heat of the moment, cut

off the subject's feet and then curse themselves afterwards

when they review the shot (I have on occasion had to transplant

the feet from another shot to the one that I otherwise liked best).

That is quite different from deciding that to get the right

emphasis / scale / intimacy / lack of background / etc. it's better

to get in close and lose the peripheral bits. Likewise with tonal

range - it's easy (especially with on-camera flash) to blow out the

foreground highlights and this is a disaster if it's the subject's

face but if it's just an elbow then it may be sacrificed in favour of a

wider tonality for the important elements; it may also be an

intentional compositional device to avoid unwanted detail or give

dramatic effect.<p>So, as Tom implies, careless breaking of the

rules is irritating (especially as most of the problems at the

taking stage can easily be corrected afterwards) but deliberate

breaking of rules is often necessary to get the effect you want.

<p>There's the second issue of the <u>style</u> of photography

we're talking about. In a formal landscape a tilted horizon would

generally ruin the picture whereas for an action shot taken in a

war zone it would be completely acceptable. Your particular style

depends on catching the moment of "spiritual" contact with your

subject (I'm not sure this is quite the right word but I can't think of

a better one) that creates the feeling of self-appreciation and

thus glamour. At this moment all other aspects of the

composition are of secondary importance and have to be left to

intuition and experience to get approximately right. There may be

times when a bit of adjustment afterwards could improve the

details - and I'm sometimes tempted to point them out! - but

usually they are rather trivial and anyway too much correctness

could actually spoil the spontaneous character of the shot.<p>So

... the bottom line is IMHO: <i>don't worry about it.</i> I suspect

that many of the nit pickers really just want an excuse to spend a

bit longer looking at your pics while they are writing about the

"faults". <p>Best wishes, Jonathan

[John Peri]

Jonathan, thanks for joining. I wonder finally if there are any rules or if they made up by us in the expectancy of critiques.

In between the jokes cracked on this page, I think that quite a lot of wisdom has come through, and I conclude that it's basically up to the photographer and the viewer to appreciate or not. The only premise I remain with is that appreciation is not based on technicalities, so much as on image quality in terms of impact and aesthetics. As both Tom and you rightly say however, one must nevertheless succeed in projecting one's message without irritating too much the spectator, be it either through negligence or ignorance. I've just posted a portrait of a young lady with a flower in her hair that is blown out. Now that is neither ... it's just incompetence!

[beeman458]

John

 

"As both Tom and you rightly say however, one must nevertheless succeed in projecting one's message without irritating too much the spectator, be it either through negligence or ignorance."

 

Just a thought on your above; much of what's created and shown at MoMA's are contrary to your above as the irritation is part and parcel to Photographic Postmodernism. It's not to say your view is wrong, just that much of what's in contemporary art today is intentionally edgy.

[jonathancharlesphoto]

Thomas, that's an interesting angle (sorry, no pun intended!) but I think the "edgy" character

needs to be more solidly disturbing than just irritating sloppiness in presentation otherwise

it's just style-without-substance (which, unfortunately, much of contemporary art is).

[pbajzek]

"Often criticisms on p.net are of the "horizon not straight/ear chopped off" variety when

applied to photos where that is notreally an issue."

 

This is a very astute observation (and a practice of which I admit I have been guilty at

times). I often work with intentional blurring, be it motion blur, shallow DOF, etc., and

while I go out of my way to explain this in my photo descriptions, I always get a slate of

"this photo is blurry!" comments.

 

At first I found this frustrating, but I realized that due to the format of this site, the

majority of viewers/raters/commenters are probably clicking through the "recent photos"

features and not reading the poster's description. Of course this dilutes the educational

value of the process, as often the parties involved are not on the same page in terms of

what sort of feedback is being sought, etc.

 

With this in mind, I find it's usually possible to distinguish useful commentary from

useless. I have taken to ignoring most comments unless I have asked a specific question.

But then I sometimes miss a sincere question or offering...

 

Sorry if this seems a tangent. I agree with the several people who have stressed that

horizons, crops, etc. need only be appropriate to the photo in question, and there are no

absolute rights and wrongs. The "rules" of composition did not start out as rules to be

followed, but rather as analyses of some things that had been successful in the past. I

think it is important to understand these precedents and use them where appropriate, but

photography would be really boring if we all slavishly followed the rules all of the time.

[gregscott]

A silly response:

How come nobody photographs the wavy horizions or multiple horizons and extra ears or eyes or noses that I so frequently see? Maybe I should change medications, or request all of you to take mine.

 

I agree with your gripe, and extend it, conceptually.

I rarely rate a photo with anything below a 4.

That's because without seeing it "in context" in a portfolio, it may be hard to evaluate. Even so, and artist may be persuing a vision that I personally neither appreciate nor enjoy. Sometimes I can see the artistic merit, but sometimes I can't. Even a technically sound photo may get a relatively low rating from me, particularly in nudes, if I can't see an aesthetic reason to click the shutter. But that's an example of a genre that's intensely personal and subjective, and where it's very difficult to evaluate some folk's work meaningfully. I probably rate only 5% of the photos I see, and comment on 0.01%, though I look at thousands. Perhaps, in most cases, Thumper's Law prevails. (Bambi, Walt Disney: If you can't think of something nice to say, don't say anything at all.)

 

Back to the horizontal gripe: Sometimes when framing a shot, even of a waterfall, it's hard to determine when the camera is truly level. Personally, I think that this is overrated. A skewed horizon can be annoying, but if the horizon is not in view, and the trees are all at angles due to perspective, distortion, and the fact that trees lean, who cares? Just frame the photo for composition and "comfortable feel" and shoot the frame. Mountain landscapes are another example. There, you may see a "horizon" but often you see only the closest mountain, where the horizon is anything but level. Again, does it really matter if it's 5 degrees off? I find that sometimes when it IS level, it looks crooked. An presumptious example is the Parthenon. It's got no square angles anywhere. It's designed to LOOK good, not be orthagonal.

[Tony Rowlett]

Mr. Peri, in terms of "rules," I think you could write a book full of them, and photographers everywhere would be wise to read them and even abide by them!