2010-03-28

#714, Lamp

Look at this photo for a bit, and see if you can spot it.

It's only been very slightly cropped, so that's not it.

I really like the colours and textures of this wall, and wanted to have the lamp in the top-left corner for balance and interest. (Everything is relative.) But I also like flat picture space, and that lamp placement would create single-point perspective. More simply: you should be able to see the right side of the lamp since it's on the left side of the frame. Some people see reality, I see a problem to be solved.

I wonder if this photo bugs anyone now that I've pointed out that it defies our actual experience of the world.

2 comments:

Keith Alan K said...

I just assumed you had used a long lens from distance--looks normal enough to me from that mindset until the 'hover' reveals a 35mm lens was used.

Matthew Robertson said...

I had a chance to show this to a few other photographers tonight, and none of them thought it looked odd, either. I find that reassuring.

The 35mm lens is a perspective-control Nikon, which I used on my GH1 for a 70mm equivalent field of view, so there is some compression going on. But to take this photo I eliminated the perspective by standing directly in front of the light, and then shifted the lens up and to the right to get the composition that I liked.

I've used the same trick with my D700 and 85mm PC lens to avoid my own reflection when shooing through glass, but these days I'm reading a book on cinematography that has me thinking more about perspective and the depiction of depth.

Longer articles and other musings on photos and photography can also be found on matthewpiers dot com.

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