On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 20:37:16 -0500, David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b@xxxxxxxx> wrote/replied to: This one's been bothering me for a few days, and I really wonder about it all... >Jim Davis -- Ginza Umbrellas -- Oh, cool. Fun, fun, fun. Nice of >them to go to all that trouble to build you this shot, eh? :-). Needs >to rotate about 1.7 degrees counterclockwise though. And maybe be >warped for perspective correction? Haven't tried it to actually see. ...so a little bit of thought requred here, to get us away from the nostalgia and list introspective going around... "Needs to be rotated" - why? Is that so you think the bottom edge is a horizon? While I'm not in any illusion that this is an award winner, I personally think having the edges all at completely different angles and the whole shot not looking 'boxed' gives is a bit more life. "Warped for perspective correction" - why? This one I've really got a problem with. I mean, the perspective is what a lens gives you naturally enough. Just as our own eyes do. It's based on angle and position and focal length as to how it ends up looking in a 2D image. So my question is why do some people think so squarely? Surely a horizon should look level, that's something we all agree on. But when shooting from above, is there some 'rule' that says the bottom plane must appears as a horizon, ie. level? For me, doing so would just make it more static and boring. See, if I leveled the bottom, the other three sides would still not square up. Since there hasn't been many other reviews this week, I just wondered what you all thought about this sort of thing. Believe it or not, I actually think hard about any rotating or warping of images and it's effect, and go to the trouble of trying them different ways at times. The end result is 'my art', that which I have chosen to display. It's interesting then for me to hear how someone else thinks my image should look, and that's why I keep contributing to the gallery. And of course it makes me think more about an image, and perhaps learn something such as below: While writing this all up and rethinking my own photo, I wish now that I had more of the wall on the left and bottom. I could then have the brollies occupying more or less a 2/3rds of the frame, which I feel would have helped this image. But, this constraint was more or less due to not having a wider angle lens, and of course wanting to show as many brollies as possible to impress. Maybe this is a 'less is more' type of scene. I also think perhaps an even greater rotation of the frame would have helped. I did manage to include the word 'Ginza' in the shot though :-) I played with the white balance quite a bit. I had diffused sunlight from above, and tungsten store lights at the bottom. One way really dulled the umbrells colours, the other way made the tungsten look horribly yellow. I ended up half way between. BTW, the umbrellas were not paper. If you look closely you can see the fabric tabs that are used to keep them closed. These were real umbrellas used for a rainy season display of course. Oh well, send the thing...
