Well, some are at least…
I’m sorting images right now, and a lot of them were shot vertically but not rotated until now, more than a handful of which I was fairly sure were going to be discarded anyway so I didn’t bother – why I decided to save this admittedly minuscule effort is a question for another post. And no, I don’t have my thumbnail/gallery program (XnView Multiplatform) set to read the EXIF orientation automatically because this doesn’t work for HTML and the blog, so I’d end up uploading images that are still sideways – it’s happened before.
What I’ve found, however, is that when the image is sideways, I have difficulty telling whether it’s sharp or not. This makes absolutely no sense, I’m well aware of that, and it’s likely psychological in origin, but it still means I have to orient the image properly to know if I should even be discarding it.
Except, it seems to work mostly with ‘faces.’
This particular aspect tells me it’s probably psychological, because I didn’t have any problems with insects, especially ones that didn’t show their ‘faces’ at all.
I can tell myself that I’m only looking for sharpness and that obviously isn’t changed at all by orientation, but my subconscious mind still whines, I can’t see it clearly this way. It’s not like I’m trying to read, which I can actually do halfway decently sideways though the same inner anxiety is probably still fretting. And since I’m not just looking at sharpness, but composition and contrast and all that, it helps to be upright even though none of those are affected either.
I found out some time back, too, that while I can identify helicopter models quite readily, turn the image upside-down and that almost goes away entirely – admittedly, this was applying to military gunships that have many of the same traits, but oriented properly I could name them in a snap while I was almost completely lost when they were inverted. There’s probably a good evolutionary reason as to why this should be the case, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it would be. I mean, upside-down helicopters have an obvious problem, no argument, but there’s nothing threatening or distinctly ‘wrong’ about a sideways face.
All right, I’ve wasted enough time – back to sorting.