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.

I have broken the links to hundreds and hundreds of photos, which will take a long time to repair. The workaround is to replace "photo.matthewpiers" in the link URL with "matthewpiers.smugmug". Awkward, but only temporary.

This is happening because I have revamped matthewpiers dot com. More of what I write and photograph will be going there, so check it out as well.

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