Orientation

I shot this image of a clump of river birch trees at Forest Hills Cemetery the other day. I was looking down into the center where several branches came together. None of them were particularly healthy and some of them are well past their prime.

Because I was looking down into this core, the image had an ambiguous orientation and it showed up in Lightroom, my post-processing software, as a portrait image. Hum, OK, sure, I’ll work with that, I’ll look at it that way. But it was not what I expected to see.

I’m not sure when I stopped taking portrait orientation images (except for portraits of people). I could probably count less than a couple of hundred out of thousands of shots and very few of them are stand-out images. The only reason I can think of for this is force of habit – I don’t shoot portrait because I haven’t shot portrait. Not a great reason…

I like this image and it invites me to rethink how I use my camera to see the world. It’s almost like finding an entirely new and different perspective. This may change how I shoot, and that’s OK - it’s an adventure!