Laura McCoy’s tour from Budapest to Berlin
Note: Photos from this tour have been edited using only the tools found on an i-phone.
Capturing lines of classic architecture unlike what’s common to a native East Texan became a theme of the photo trip across Europe from Budapest to Berlin. The geometric nature of architecture fits with a photo-cropping style borrowed from Frank Shants.
More than an uncommon angle for the sake of an uncommon angle, Frank Shants’s Whopity-Lop photo cropping flowed into his lens, turning his camera while he composed as needed so that his subject filled the frame, making the most of available space.
Breaking with convention, Whopity-Lops compose the world as best fits and fills the frame.
About Frank, wherever he’s shooting now I hope this finds him. It’s the first he’ll know of my naming an unconventional style for him. He feels to me like family since I inherited this way of thinking from him.
We were both shooting for the old TXU generating company one day when I’d been cast as his assistant, hanging photos along the length of a hallway of offices occupied by a disproportionate number of nuclear Navy vets operating the TXU Comanche Peak nuclear plant at Glen Rose.
Frank brought a tape measure and a line level to hang the show. Everything he does is done with precision. He’s a student of everything. I shot with him twice, which was enough to imprint a good memory, a lesson with an unfettered lens turning as dictated by its subject.
If there’s any way easier than an i-phone cropping tool to enhance a Whoppity Lop, I haven’t found it. One affects the other in the interplay of photos manipulated on either the horizontal or vertical axis. The resulting distortions range from odd to artistic, and often both.
Try it.
,
