Going Square

As all photographers know, compositional ‘theory’ is one thing we need to be very aware of. However, with so many so-called ‘rules’, one question is what fits best with what scene?

As a photographer who is still learning, I admit to finding composition the most difficult aspect of photography. My eye/brain simply doesn’t yet ‘see’ the final image format: so my approach is to capture the scene with enough ‘space’ so that I can simply experiment with different ‘looks’, which is very easy in LR/PS.

Cropping is my friend at the moment, but this means I ‘waste’ data: which I don’t like doing. I need to get ‘better’ at compositional theory.

As an example, take this recent dual-ISO image, which will look weird as a jpg as it is unprocessed, ie being an interlaced mixture of two images: an ISO 400 and ISO 800 image.

My thinking, when looking at the image in LR, was to eliminate the ‘dead’ foreground, which automatically led me to think square.

As I looked into the square format, I found out that the square format camera was first made by Rollei in 1929. Also, Hasselblad, used the square format in its film cameras from 1948 to 2002. I don’t believe there are any digital cameras that have a square sensor. But, as we know, digital photography makes it easy to crop your images to any aspect ratio you want.

So what does the above dual-ISO RAW look like in a square format: well I will let you decide.