Monday, August 16, 2010

Square is the new circle


Crop is now a more free flowing tool than a format given to all of my pictures. Normally, how we crop is guided by the shape and size of the camera sensor. In this case, however, each group of images that are stitched together are capable of becoming their own entity, guided by subject, not by viewfinder.


There is a long history of the square format, and I personally have little experience with the size and proportions as an image. The square, being even sided, is much more difficult to work with than 3x2, 4x5, or any other rectilinear size.


Especially for landscape, a wider view is much more typical. It is helpful then, when using the square as a window into reality, to have strong verticals or horizontals. The human eye is much more likely to rest happy in the center of the frame, to be satisfied that it has traversed the distance across corners, without really covering the ground. The format is then, a more challenging one, and I intend to learn to use it much more frequently, since I think it lends to a curiosity in the viewer: have we seen any squares lately? Nobody uses this shape in photographs anymore! Our history and frame of reference for such a shape has gone the way of the film camera, lost, except to those of us around to remember, and to revive those old memories.

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