Left or Right

StephenM said:
Good point; my preference for a camera is one that doesn't get in the way, and in my case I find a simple camera with the minimum of built in features suits me best.

It's a trait in my mental makeup, I suppose. In the computer world, I found assembler straightforward and easy to use, and BASIC incomprehensible and difficult.
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Ahhhhh the lovely Machine code.........happy days
 
droj said:
In my case, the left brain's good for interfacing with the camera (& all its bloody knobs & dials) - choosing an aperture & checking the histogram (if there is one). Then as one homes in, framing & focus are more fluid & in the intuitive realm (right brain).

I've never used a view camera (it would be interesting, but is unlikely to happen in my lifetime), but I've engaged with slrs & tlrs with 'waist' level focussing screens (image reversed but right way up), as well as slrs & dslrs with optical & digital finders, and rangefinder cameras. I've found that the processes of mind & heart whilst framing a shot are very similar in all cases, & can't really think that I have a preference. The process of image making is the same. The aim is to make the machine disappear.
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An idea alluded to earlier, but to add to what was said about composing upside down with a large format camera...

Betty Edwards'. book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain gets you to draw things upside down using the argument that when you draw something,say a chair, you draw as much (more) from memory of "knowing" what a chair looks like (or what you think a chair looks like) as you do from observing what is in front of you.

Drawing something upside down breaks this barrier of drawing what you know, or what you "think" you know, from drawing what you "see",

I often "felt" composing with a view camera was "different" (but not with waist level finder) and after working through Betty Edwards book many years ago I decided it could be because composing upside down was reduced to organising lines, shapes and tones, but viewing the right way up was organising recognisable objects which carried intellectual weightings that didn't necessarily match their graphical design (emotional) weighings. If that makes sense.

Although, I don't use a view camera any more, I occasionally invert pictures at the processing stage to see if the picture still feels right upside down and sometimes tweak the composition, or do some burning and dodging etc with it inverted.
 
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myotis said:
I often "felt" composing with a view camera was "different" (but not with waist level finder) and after working through Betty Edwards book many years ago I decided it could be because composing upside down was reduced to organising lines, shapes and tones, but viewing the right way up was organising recognisable objects which carried intellectual weightings that didn't necessarily match their graphical design (emotional) weighings. If that makes sense.

Although, I don't use a view camera any more, I occasionally invert pictures at the processing stage to see if the picture still feels right upside down and sometimes tweak the composition, or do some burning and dodging etc with it inverted.
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Hmmm. I can see a point in going upside down, but can't see it as in any way necessary. Doing without it seems equally fine to me. I rather feel that it's easier to review an image as a whole entity right way up. But we all have different mental characteristics ...
 
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I was chatting to a painter last year who studied at the Edinburgh College of Art, and the conversation came round to viewing upside down. I was told that one of the lecturers recommended painters to invert their canvases at some point while they were still working on them to review how they appeared.

I personally find it easier to review an image when I've been denied the familiarity that makes it all too easy former to make assumptions. But as I usually say, I'm sloppy and look for any shortcuts I can find.
 
droj said:
Hmmm. I can see a point in going upside down, but can't see it as in any way necessary. Doing without it seems equally fine to me. I rather feel that it's easier to review an image as a whole entity right way up. But we all have different mental characteristics ...
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As you say we are all different, but I follow the psychological reasoning and I found it helped when leaning to draw, as I do with a quick invesion to see if a picture looks as well balanced upside down as it does the right way up.

I've seen other people suggest squinting at, or blurring the image with the same purpose of temporarily divorcing the mind from the subject matter,
 
Just AAMOI and if IIRC...... years ago a device was attached to a volunteer's head so he saw things upside down, well the brain is very clever in that eventually he could see things normally.
 
I remember that program - and it was years ago! The man started out groping around, disorientated; after about 5 days or a week he was confidently riding a bicycle (on the roads, as I recall).

As was pointed out in the program (I think) we do actually see upside down - our eyes contain lenses, after all - and it's the brain that inverts the image. In fact, a view camera screen is the most accurate representation of the outside world we have, since our brains make such a complete job of scrambling it...
 
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