Crooked: the use of asymmetry to please the eye, please the heart, and otherwise create interest.

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I like this early photo because nothing is straight except the frame. That is, my camera was straight, but the road really was slightly skewed, the gas station building was old and leaning to one side, the gas pump was rusted and veering to the left. The trees are framed so they look straighter than the buildings, and the mountains look well aligned because of the asymmetry of everything else. The addition of a finger print in the upper left portion of the photo and the refracted rain drops in the middle left quadrant add to the sense of...well, of the newness of the photographer, hahah. Salad days, as they were.

I am a proponent of never, ever putting the horizon in the middle and placing the subject off to the side of the frame. I make no apologies for this. Symmetry is much more boring than most people realize. Its why the Greeks knew about it and quietly sidestepped it in their architecture (get out your level and check out the horizontal lines on their temples: not quite straight! That's because straight to our ocular receptors looks slightly curved, so they slightly curved their temples to make them look straight and pleasing to the eye. Sort of a catch twenty two, really.) John Ford when shooting in the great locales of Monument Valley knew this, and it was the one piece of advice he passed down to a snot nosed fifteen year old Steven Spielberg when he found his way to the grizzled director's office: never stick the horizon in the middle of the screen. Even the ocean isn't quite straight. The Atlantic on the European side is a few feet higher than it is on our side. Why? Mainly because of gravity and the rate at which we hurtle around the sun, but also because symmetry is boring. So let it be lopsided. Let it be loose. Let it be slightly off kilter, because then at least no one can call you boring.