A month ago I posted on my tumblr blog that during one of my weekly street shoots I had tasked myself with framing most of my shots vertically (see Tumblr post HERE). My main source of reference and inspiration came from Saul Leiter’s book Early Color (I wrote a review of the book HERE).
The exercise of framing my shots vertically turned out to be an interesting one. I estimate that around 90% of my photographs are framed horizontally. Initially on that day, when I brought the camera up to my eye I found myself automatically framing what I saw through the viewfinder horizontally. I had to constantly remind myself to compose vertically which did not come naturally to me. I was not so concerned with shooting people which really freed me up to concentrate on the exercise.
As a additional nod to Saul Leiter, I also wanted to see things in color so every shot was taken with the intention of it remaining in color instead of being converted to black and white. I played around a lot with light, reflections and color during the shoot and am quite pleased with the results. I am thinking that I should implement for myself a vertical shooting day once in a while to force myself to see things differently.
The following are a selection of photos from the shoot.
