Tilt Can Be Good

As a sixteen-year-old in the late 1970s, I used to love to play pinball. I still walk past pinball machines, however infrequently, with a sense of lost youth. Hours were spent playing my favourite machine, Joker Poker. It wasn't an altogether unhealthy past-time. I was standing up, thus exercising my legs. My arms would be flapping and twitching, smacking the flipper buttons desperately. My hips would gyrate to the point of levitation. Sometimes I'd get quite worked up, swinging the machine from side to side until the inevitable 'tilt' button lit up and I watched the game go limp. When you gave the pinball machine a Richter worthy shakedown, you paid a price.
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Tilt was bad.

Now, take a look at the image of the sunrise above. It's attractive, but certainly nothing special. We've all seen sunrises like this, many of us have photographed them to great acclaim. Somewhere on earth there's always a sunrise. As I type this there's probably one happening in Ontario, Jamaica and Chile. We're pretty accustomed to sunrises. Some people probably never give them a first thought, let alone a second.

What if we changed our perspective on the sunrise, to something like this....



This image was taken just seconds after the previous one, yet to my eyes, it's entirely more interesting. It's the same scene, just framed to include less sky. Tilt has added dynamic motion to this image...and curiosity. It's no longer just an image of a sunrise; it's a question, or a comment, or a reaction...even if that reaction is 'huh?'.

Tilt is good.

Think about tilt in terms of your life...could things be more dynamic?