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Square format, and the feelings it create.

Horatio said:
It’s not hip to be square, man.

Well, someone had to say it.
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I see what you did there ..

"I used to shoot rectangle, I used to measure around
But I couldn't bear the snowflakers and had to settle down
Now I'm shooting it real straight, and yes, I crop my frames
You might think I'm crazy, but I don't even care
Because I can tell what's going on

It's hip to be square
It's hip to be square"
 
MattKing said:
At one time National Geographic had their own Kodachrome lab, and it was apparently the highest volume still film only Kodachrome lab in the world.
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I would hope so ! from what a friend who grew up with someone whose dad was some big wig photographer at NG said ... they took 1000s of photos / 1 accepted.. that's a lot of rolls ! personally I think they should have hired "Naruto" to work for them too, probably would have gotten more keepers, and they would have gotten more memes, I mean that dude broke the internet!
 
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vedostuu said:
Nowadays I don't give a crap for it. If I waste paper, it is not a biggie. Printing stage is not the place to save pennies .. And usually the cutout is good material for tests. Usually I don't even cut the rest out.
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I don't bother trimming off the excess either. Mostly my prints are stored in the Ilford boxes that the paper came in, and I use the non-image part of the paper to hold them. It makes my day to open a box of prints and leaf through the memories.


Edit: It just struck me that this looks like a giant Polaroid.
 
Horatio said:
It’s not hip to be square, man.

Well, someone had to say it.
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Yep, and that someone wasn't me... I had been thinking about it since the thread started, lol.
 
Ko.Fe. said:
Square is primitive. Keep it in the middle, with object taking most of the frame and you are golden.
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Square is Magical. Keep it in the middle, with object taking most of the frame and you are golden
 
NB23 said:
Square is Magical. Keep it in the middle, with object taking most of the frame and you are golden
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Square is two-dimensional. Bisect it diagonally and you get two triangles. It's good for origami.
 
warden said:
Are there any formats that yield something other than two triangles when bisected diagonally?
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The elusive circular format, not really in use for over a hundred years, gives you semicircles when you bisect it.

All the true things I say are, by their very nature, not false.
 
Don Heisz said:
Square is two-dimensional. Bisect it diagonally and you get two triangles. It's good for origami.
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But continue bisecting those triangles and it becomes and infinity of triangles. I’m not sure where we are going with this but it’s magical fersure.
 
Don Heisz said:
The elusive circular format, not really in use for over a hundred years, gives you semicircles when you bisect it.

All the true things I say are, by their very nature, not false.
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Fascinating truthiness, oracle of film. The other very truthful part of your comment was that square format is two dimensional. Are there any formats that are three, four, or five dimensional?
 
warden said:
Fascinating truthiness, oracle of film. The other very truthful part of your comment was that square format is two dimensional. Are there any formats that are three, four, or five dimensional?
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828 is lost in the mists of time.....
 
The Greeks, not the geeks, got it right. The Golden Mean is always rectangular. As an art history professor, my late aunt always made a big deal of that. But she was also a famous fresco muralist, and the art experts would get into arguments why her compositions often seemed to have a rotating or circular pattern to them, even though these were nearly always long rectangular works. Her preliminary drawings made it more evident. But she vociferously argued to me that it is because that is how human vision inherently sees things - always by rotating an eye. Nobody quite understood that - but almost nobody realized that she was blind in one eye, and it is how she in fact personally viewed the world ! To the rest of us, the field of vision is not circular, but an oval. But it's easier to make square or rectangular picture frames, so there you go. ... The wisdom of the Greeks, who no doubt would have invented mitre saw machines too if the gods had loaned them some lightning.
 
DREW WILEY said:
The Greeks, not the geeks, got it right. The Golden Mean is always rectangular
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The Greeks acknowledged the might of the circle by incorporating camber into all their supposedly flat horizontal architectural features. A very big circle.

warden said:
Are there any formats that are three, four, or five dimensional?
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Does lenticular count? What about holography? Ah ... how about sculpture? Wait....
 
warden said:
Are there any formats that are three, four, or five dimensional?
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yes there are 3 dimensional with time and sound, and you don't even have to be in an altered state of mind, just one open to the power of suggestion
 
jnantz said:
yes there are 3 dimensional with time and sound, and you don't even have to be in an altered state of mind, just one open to the power of suggestion
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All photos and film have 4-dimensions, existing in a 3-dimensional physical space and in time. I want quantum photography.
 
I thought quantum mechanics was all about never really knowing where anything is, and just statistically predicting it. I'd rather have an image stay put in a rectangular frame on a wall, so I can actually view it.

Otherwise, I can prove Einstein was wrong all along. Gravity is a function of time. Everything gets heavier, slower, and sags more over time. Even the same cameras get heavier. The warp in the time-space trampoline doesn't need any math at all;
and I don't like looking at the weight scale at this point in my life anyway. And every patrol cop around munching donuts is evidence that a hole in something only makes the nearest big object with a corresponding intake hole even bigger over time.
 
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DREW WILEY said:
I thought quantum mechanics was all about never really knowing where anything is, and just statistically predicting it. I'd rather have an image stay put in a rectangular frame on a wall, so I can actually view it.
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Yes, but what I appreciate is that observing something can change its properties. This is what happens when the brain (if present) interprets a photograph.
 
Depends on what I'm observing. If it's TV, I usually just fall asleep. Ain't worth watching. But we all see things differently. People claim cats can't even see TV images, and they're in a rectangular frame at least. But when one of my house cats was young, and a PBS song bird documentary came one, she'd climb all over the TV and check behind, trying to figure out how to get in. She thought the TV screen was a window, and real birds were inside the box itself. About the third time around, she realized it was all fake, and napped through it all. Maybe everything is fake. But who was that great philosopher who concluded, "I stink, therefore I am"?
 

No problem for square, because your are almost guaranteed to trim of some paper if you shoot square.
 
Trim to the composition. Life is not that hard.
 
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