Horizontal vs. Vertical
ecause of camera design, it’s only natural that most of us initially end up shooting all of our subjects inside a horizontal frame. When you consider design, plus the way all cameras are displayed in ads and on store shelves (i.e., horizontally), it’s easy to appreciate why this is. The seduction of “horizontalitis” is so severe that, on average, 90 percent of the amateur photographer’s pictures are horizontal. In one extreme example of “horizontalitis” I once had a student ask me if it was worth the money to buy a camera that shot vertical compositions. Yikes!
As most of you have discovered, your camera—the one that has served you well with so many horizontal compositions—does, in fact, shoot vertical compositions, too; however, I know you’d be the first to admit that most of your compositions are still shot inside the horizontal frame. So, why would you ever want to shoot verticals? To bring a feeling of dignity to a naturally vertical subject (i.e., a single flower on a stem), that’s why! Dignity, strength, and power are the emotions evoked by the vertical line. Since we favor the horizontal, though, photographers manage to squash, squeeze, and push down the obvious vertical subject in order to make it fit inside the horizontal frame. The biggest danger in doing this, of course, is that you have to back away farther from the subject to make it fit inside the squatter picture area. And even though you made it “fit,” you are now left with “clutter openings” on both the right and left sides of the frame. The easiest solution is to turn the camera to its vertical position. Voilà, the clutter is gone!
Early to bed and early to rise makes a young man healthy and wise. Yeah, right. At least, that’s the response from many of my students who, when charged with getting up at the crack of dawn, more often than not vote for more sleep. Well, that’s fine with me, since I can then have all of those wonderful dew-covered spiderwebs that appear in meadows from coast to coast all to myself!
On one such morning, while driving into the morning sunrise, a large field of backlit spiderwebs caught my attention, and not surprisingly, I was the only one around with a camera. It was one of those ideal spiderweb mornings, as the air was dead calm. As anyone who has ever photographed spiderwebs knows, even the slightest breeze can test the patience of Job. And as I’ve also discovered, the farther back I can be when shooting a spiderweb, the better—since even my own breath and body movements can cause a slight “breeze.” Since my magnifications will be quite big and my shutter speeds quite slow, these subtle disturbances in the air will look a hurricane in the viewfinder, and no amount of sharpening in Photoshop can take an image of a blurry spiderweb and make it sharp.
So, having very carefully moved my tripod so that my point of view was as close to parallel to the web as possible, I set my aperture to f/16 and confirmed through depth-of-field preview that there were no distractions of contrast in the background that would call attention away from the web. I adjusted my shutter speed until 1/30 sec. indicated a correct exposure and fired off several horizontal frames. But I wasn’t done yet. I had to make a vertical composition (see here).
Micro-Nikkor 200mm lens, f/16 for 1/30 sec.
Students in my on-location workshops often ask, “What time is the best to shoot a vertical?” My answer is always the same: “Right after the horizontal!” Not all of the time—but most of the time—you can compose each and every subject in either the horizontal or vertical format. It may take some moving around, shifting your point of view, moving closer, backing up, or even changing a lens. But the benefits of shooting your subject in both formats are obvious. The biggest benefit is that you won’t see a loss in image quality when working digitally. Let me explain: When you shoot a vertical subject in a horizontal format and then crop it to a vertical in postprocessing, you end up cropping into the scene to “pull out” your vertical shot. In doing so, you end up throwing away a lot of pixels, and with pixel loss comes a loss in image quality, assuming, of course, this cropped vertical is going to become an 8 × 10–inch or 11 × 14–inch print.
When you make a conscious effort to do your cropping in-camera (more often than not by a combination of moving in closer and left or right, and rotating the camera to the vertical position), you will end up with far more pixels (since you won’t be cropping any out later); this translates into bigger enlargements simply because you’re using the entire area of the frame. Plus, making a sincere commitment to do your “cropping” in-camera will enable you to spend less time on the computer afterward, giving you more time to shoot. Additionally, should the day come when you’re ready to take your work to the marketplace, you’ll be more than ready: Should a client express interest in one of your horizontals and then ask if it is available in the vertical format, you can meet the demand and, thirty days later, deposit that check for your first magazine cover!
CROPPING OUT OF CAMERA
There is perhaps nothing more frustrating than realizing—after the photographic opportunity has long since passed—that you failed to get close enough or that you didn’t see the obvious vertical composition or that you didn’t notice your framing of the subject was, in fact, somewhat crooked. Not a problem, you say, since you’ve discovered that you can crop and correct many of these flaws with the aid of software programs. In Photoshop, you just have to go to the Crop tool, and just like that, you’ve cut out the distracting stuff on the left or created that vertical composition from the weaker horizontal one or, better still, you simply cropped into the image really close to fool everyone into thinking that you really did record a life-size image of that honeybee!
The ease of cropping with software programs is, no doubt, in part behind many photographers’ somewhat lackadaisical attitudes toward achieving effective compositions in camera. These photographers often reason that, what the heck, they’ll just crop it later on the computer. But there’s a downside to all of this postprocessing cropping. Despite how thrilled you might be with the results of your crop on the computer screen, cropping into any image has a price: more noise and a loss of sharpness. And when you crop out more than 10 or perhaps 20 percent, that price becomes even more evident. When you crop into your image, you’re not only throwing away some of the pixels that make up that image but, and even more important, you’re asking the pixels that remain to do the impossible—to stretch out, to expand to make up for the loss of the pixels you just threw away. Let’s assume you want to make an 8 × 12–inch print. If you throw away 20 percent of the original pixels, you are now asking the remaining 80 percent to stretch out, to expand so that you can maintain your 8 × 12–inch image size. When pixels stretch, they do it by offering up a lot of noise and losing some of their snappy color. So, I always suggest trying to get things right in-camera.
Remembering that the best time to shoot a vertical is after a horizontal, I changed my orientation after taking the image here. Going from horizontal to vertical is a snap with the Micro-Nikkor 200mm simply because the lens has a tripod collar, thus allowing me to loosen the collar and simply spin the camera to a vertical position without having to physically move the tripod or reposition the tripod head.
Micro-Nikkor 200mm lens, f/16 for 1/30 sec.