Playing with orientation
by eNoBlog on Jun.08, 2010, under Story-telling, Techniques
Some of you may have noticed something odd about the image we saw in the previous blog entry. The lighting seemed to come to the bottom.
Sometimes called, “horror lighting,” in this case the odd lighting is caused by a trick I played to invigorate the original photograph, which looked more like this:
My thought was that the original’s downward slope was, well, a downer. I was aiming for a dynamic composition with the diagonal arrangement for my subject, but it felt dynamic in a down-hill sense. To correct this, I flipped the image along the horizontal axis to get more of an upward feeling. Unfortunately, I also flipped the location of the sun.
Oops.
After thinking about it a bit, I decided to opt for a vertical composition, achieved through a simple 90 degree rotation to the left (counter-clockwise). Now I get the effect I wanted… without the “horror lighting.”
A little wiser from the experience, here’s how I left a shot of the same bloom, taken a few hours later.
Take away lesson for me: don’t just think about the quality of light, but keep the direction of light also in mind, both during shooting and in post-processing.
