for composition specialists...

[sanmich]

I am trying a new way of taking pictures, using a waist level Nikon F.
I just forgot while putting up the gear that the viewing image is inverted 😱
Now, I guess that when working on a tripod, you may have the time to look twice at the scene, make a mental image of it based on both the scene and the inverted viewing image, and take the shot.
I am planning to use the combo very intuitively, on the streets with a hyperfocaled 28mm, and I wandered if what may seem a good shot on the screen will necessarily be a good shot when printed.
In other words: if a composition is working right-left, will it necessarily work left-right?

I am relating this question to a few things:
first, it seems to me that most good pictures I have are oriented left to right.
or is it only a coincidence?
Also, I seem to rememeber that some teachers use the technique of inverting a picture to appreciate its equilibrium. Does this work in a left-right way?

That's it, ladies and gentlemen. Please help an ignorant in artistic theory...🙂

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

When I was in college, working on my BFA in photography, I worked extensively with a Mamiya C330f and an ancient Rolleiflex. I did my graduation thesis project with the C330f. Both TLRs had waist level finders, so they also had the reversed left/right thing. I found that what looked good on the focusing screen usually looked great in the final print. Try working in large format, the whole image is upside down and left/right reversed! Surprisingly, when I worked with 4x5, the upside down image did not make composing hard at all.

 

[delft]

If you like the reversed image better, you can also print reversed.

Dirk

 

[DamenS]

Absolutely - the whole point is to "abstract" the image so that you are merely looking at shapes and visual mass rather than allowing your more analytical and reasoning (less intuitive) mind to kick and (over?) complicate things.

 

[mfogiel]

One way of judging if your composition is good, is to reverse a print face down and upside down and place it on a light box. If you still like the composition, then it is good. As said above, composing on LF groundglass usually helps with the composition, so it is really mainly a question of balancing the shapes and tones. However, there are cases where the orientation can be important, the problem being, that it depends for whom. If I recall correctly, you are from Israel, so for you, as well as for people writing in arabic, the more natural composition will be a reverse of what may be natural in Europe or US. The beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder.

 

[charjohncarter]

You will get used to it.

 

[Juan Valdenebro]

As I studied it, an image should not be equally equilibrated if reversed... It has to do with the way we read... Images (apart from their own internal parts and relations between them) are read from left to right in our western world, and some eastern world public will read images from right to left... I don't feel images are similar if reversed, but really different...

I used to photograph with my Hasselblad from waist level (reversed image) but looking at reality, not at the screen, of course... After years of doing it, I started to use a prism on it, and I prefer it this way... With LF I find things easier because MF's flipped image can go against composition if we look too much at the screen instead of looking at the scene, and it can happen easily as we shoot when intuition says "it works", but if we were looking at the screen, later we see it was working on the screen only... And reversed printing can be done only a few times...

Cheers,

Juan

 

[uhligfd]

When I need to judge my own large prints, I put them all on a large table.

Then I look at them as usual. And when the deciding gets tough, I go to the backside of the table and view the prints upside-down. That normally lets me decide accurately re individual picture quality. Left-right or right left impact or which diagonal or ... such criteria play no role, I think.

 

[sanmich]

Very interesting answers.

Today I asked a friend photographer from France, and he told me what I suspected:
His words were: "generally you enter a picture from the left".
Interestingly, only Juan and Marek seem to feel that way.
I do think it may be a question of writing, although its very difficult to check.
Marek, you are right, I am living in Israel, but I grew up in France (Paris and a small suburb of Monaco named Nice 😉), so my mother tongue is French, and again, I do tend to choose picture that "begin" from the left.

I'll get it a try...

 

[FrankS]

The image on the F's ground glass held at your waist is going to be so small, you will be using it mainly for framing, not so much for analyzing the composition anyway. Don't worry about it.

 

[nikon_sam]

I have had the same thought myself concerning will this shot work as I'm seeing it through a WLF...it is interesting to see the neg then remembering that when I shot it it was reversed...for the most part it works...

Now, another question...do we view the Square the same as we view the Rectangle...?
Does the Square have an unfair advantage in working as a photograph simply because it's square...I usually start in the middle when viewing a square photo vs. left to right with a conventional rectangular photograph...