I am not a huge fan of tilted images, and I see it as an unfortunate visual ‘tic’ when I notice entire wedding galleries by other photographers where pretty much all the images are tilted at a very specific angle. That just means that little thought went into composition, and that composition and holding the camera has become a reflex action .. which just happens to include a 30′ tilt to the camera.

I tend to keep horisontal and vertical lines exactly that way … horisontal or vertical. But sometimes a tilted image just has more impact than one that is completely level. And it has been a “feel” thing for me.  I never bothered to analyse why or when these images seemed to work better, since I have an aversion to over-intellectualised analysis of photography … and in this case composition. I feel that composition should be an instinctive reaction to the scene and subject.

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“There are no rules for good photographs,
there are only good photographs.”
- Ansel Adams

Problems with composition …
Most or all beginners tend to ’shoot’ pictures - the camera is aimed at the subject and then the shutter is fired. The result is one of most common errors in photographic composition - the feet of the person being photographed are cut off and lots of empty sky or dead branches or irrelevant whatever in the top half of the picture.

Also, focusing screens of manual focus SLRs have the split-image prism or microprisms in the centre. Most auto-focus cameras also focus on whatever subject is placed in the middle, although the current generation of top-end auto-focus cameras have multi-zone focusing.

Inevitably most camera users photograph their subjects that way - looking at the main subject, dead center of the frame - with disappointing results.

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