I’ll be honest, when I agreed to take a photo with a “dutch tilt,” I had no idea what I would be getting into. The effect was surprisingly simple. All you have to do is take a photo at a 45-degree angle, and there you are. I feel like angles in photos are tricky. I’ve always been one for clean and crispy lines, in fear that anything else would be too sloppy. Walking down the hall of my dorm, I realized how uniform and clean the hallways themselves are and decided that would be my subject. Clean subject, clean lines, right?
Wrong.
I crouched to about knee height and captured a few frames using my Canon 60D with a 18-125 mm lens. The hallway was fairly well lit, so I kept my shutter speed at 1/90 of a second and my aperture at f/4.0. However, after taking the frames and rotating them, I realized just how big of an effect the dutch tilt can have on a photo. It was no longer clean and uniform, but transformed into something much more complex and confusing. However, I fell in love and knew this was the shot I was waiting for.
Contact the photographer at Austin.James.Miller@asu.edu. Contact the columnist at courtney.pedroza@asu.edu.
