In article <pkvd24tknc6f8a86ir2tffd1ejfmet6evs@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Gary Edstrom <GEdstrom@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Why do some people seem to have such a problem composing a picture
> through the viewfinder?
>
> Last year, I finished scanning every one of my father's approximately
> 5,000 transparencies dating back to 1951. During the process, I had a
> chance to really look at each picture in detail, although I had seen
> them all before.
>
> While my father was pretty good at composing pictures, there would be
> times he would hand the camera to someone else so that he could get in
> the picture too. More often than not, the picture would be VERY poorly
> composed. I have one where the camera was tilted at about a 30 degree
> angle, and you only see my dad's head down in the lower-left corner of
> the picture. This was not just a one-shot blunder...all of the pictures
> in the group are similar, although not as bad. The rest were
> recoverable after rotating and cropping the image.
>
> What is so hard about looking through a viewfinder? It seems so trivial
> to me.
>
> Gary
First, why do you assume they were looking through the viewfinder? For
all
you know, the person taking the picture didn't even know what a viewfinder
was and just pointed the camera in the right direction and pushed the
button.
But, to really answer your question, composing a picture in a viewfinder
really is an abstract skill. You look into the window and the stuff
you're
looking at certainly looks straight. To visualize it as the camera sees
it, you need to mentally transpose the scene into another coordinate
system. The camera is tilted to the right, the image will be tilted to
the
left. It's not as obvious as it may seem.
One of the difficult things about teaching a skill to other people is
remembering what it was like when you first tried to learn that skill.
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