Displayed here is an idealized rotation photo showing distortion of the reciprocal lattice. There are two sources of this distortion: (1) during rotation of the crystal, lattice points along the vertical axis cannot intersect the sphere of relection, thus there is a blind “bowtie” shaped region along the vertical direction and (2) diffraction spots nearer the edges of the photo have a greater crystal-to-detector distance than spots in the interior, causing the spots to spread out towards the edges of the photo.