The Cattery

The Cattery

Going Straight

21 August 2005
Filed under Text

On this subject, two things:

I've lost my horizon mojo. It used to be that I could point a camera and shoot at anything, with any miniscule amount of time to compose the photograph, and the horizon would automatically act as a kind of spirit level. I can't remember a single time in my film-using life that my photos came back from the lab looking crooked. But these days, and I mean specifically in these travelling days when I'm taking an average of a hundred photos a day, I'm seeing many, many skewed horizons. In fact the closer I look, the more I'm becoming convinced that NONE of them are straight. Here's a gallery of crap thumbnails:

A series of crooked horizons

Comparing them, you can see that they're basically all crooked at the same angle. There are two reasons this might be happening: one, that when I used to use film and every photo cost me around 50 cents, I was more scrupulous with my composition. The second possibility is that my D70 is so differently weighted from my F801, which I've been using for ten years, that it's throwing me off. Either way, it's driving me fucking nuts.

In Sri Lanka, there are no parallel lines. I've always taken lots of photos of doors and windows, and my Sri Lanka pics are disconcerting. The top of the door frame is never in line with the top step. The right column never matches the left column. The foot of the bed is parallel with the wall it faces, but the head is at a 30 degree angle to the wall it should be flush with. I haven't yet worked out how to exploit this charming chaos to create good photos. Instead, I'm just getting slightly unbalanced images that probably would look best printed on funny-shaped paper.

Views from the Floor

Tom says:

On the matter of porcupine babies, I believe a baby echidna is called a "puggle".

Helen says:

Rest assured that, as someone who hangs pictures for a living, I also suffer from an inability to identify the horizontal. Using an exacting method of trigonometry, I have worked out that I should just hang pictures so they look straight (to me) and then close my eyes and nudge the right corner up slightly.
You remember back in the eighties when one would blutack posters of Iva Davies and/or Roxette on one's bedroom walls on crazy angles? I advocate this, professionally.

Anna says:

Great new look, and the porcupine/hedgehog babies are the cutest things I've seen today. I want one!

kate says:

gorgeous redesign

I will visit the baby hedgehogs when Anna gets them, they are also very cute (I am impervious to cute and fluffy, but cute and spiky leaves me powerless)

I have no problem hanging pictures straight (whether it's Iva Davies or McCubbin) but I can't get photos flat either. Eventually I decided that it is because my face is crooked and the camera is thrown off by my nose. Or maybe it's the specs.

kate says:

oh, and I just remembered the friend who used to bake cakes that, due to a dodgy oven, were always lopsided.

she decorated them with green icing and had animals walking up the hill...

Naz says:

As someone who has the D70, I know that I've taken my fair share of photographs and have had to tweak them -- I've come to realize that it is the camera, or rather, the lens itself that has a weird bending due to the wide angle of the 18mm. I know, because I did extensive tests, with and whitout tripod, with careful attention to the photo, etc.

And people wonder why I've been considering a return to film...

Tom says:

"Revenge for the '89 Grand Final".

Surely not even the bitterest Cats supporter can wish this on Hawthorn.

But then again, maybe the Hawks will be rejuvenated by the privatisation of the coaching staff, the systematic breaking down of collective player bargaining and a dramatic increase in general fuckwittedness (a polictical phrase developed in Victoria during the mid-90's I believe).

Excuse me while I weep pathetically in a corner.

Speak, friend, and enter


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