I’m using my field camera this week. It does not have a prism finder, so the image by default is inverted. What is up is down, and what is left is right. And I really like working this way.

By turning images upside down we abstract them. We also force our eye into areas of the picture that we do not normally visit: we all have a tendency to walk around a frame a particular way, so if the image is inverted or rotated we end up visiting parts of an image that we ordinarily wouldn’t.

My field camera has a lot of flexibility in composing and correcting perspectives. But what I like most about it is that it inverts the image on the ground glass. What is up is down, and what is left is right. It helps me abstract.

I wish all modern digital cameras had a feature to allow us to flip the image horizontally and vertically. It would help us spot issues in the compositions at most, and at least it would allow us to learn to see what is really going on in our pictures before we take them.

For example, the moment I rotate the image above, I notice that the foreground is quite dark. I also noice the background mountain in the centre of the frame more than I did when the image was the correct way up. This often allows me to take note of parts of the scene that I wasn’t so consciously aware of. Either just to understand the scene better, or perhaps to allow me to reconsider a composition and make some fine-tuning to remove distractions I had not noticed when rotated the correct way up.

If I were in charge of digital camera design, I would wish for a feature to allow me to flip the image 180º, and also just horizontally, and just vertically.

Our eyes are highly adaptive. Anything we look at, quickly becomes a normalised playing field. It is only by challenging our vision that we notice the things that our vision is innately suppressing. I am therefore often looking for tools that force my eye to look again, and by allowing me to flip the image whilst in the field, I can wake up my vision as it is forced to rebuild its understanding of the scene it is being presented with upside down.

As I say: I am often looking for tools that allow me to look again, and this feature is one I would love to have in a camera.