Don’t do this shit. Absolutely nothing about this photograph is clever or artful (well, except for my blurring): any 2-year old with a button-mashing finger and a Fisher-Price camera can take this kind of picture.
I don’t know when this “angle” trend in photography got started, or by whom, but I have noticed a lot of it lately. At the place where I work, I actually hired a “professional” photographer to take the pictures at an event we hosted, thinking he would be able to get better pictures than I’d get simply because he was a professional.
Wrong. He got a few better pictures than I would have simply because he was 6’5” and could stand at the back of the room and photograph someone at the front, effortlessly holding his camera up over the heads of the audience. (He had a telephoto lens.) But other than that, he took way, way too many of these kinds of shots. And I had to pay him for all 57 of them.
This kind of photography is showing up all over the university where I work, in its publications and its many Web sites. I’m told by my tech guru that the theory behind it is that the eye finds anything on a diagonal “more interesting” than anything on a straight line. This may be true, but if so, it should be found in the subject of the photograph itself, not by holding the camera crooked or by taking the photo into Photoshop and rotating it.
I repeat: don’t do that shit. If Ansel Adams or Helmut Newton didn’t do it, you probably shouldn’t, either.
