Square format, and the feelings it create.

[radiant]

It’s not hip to be square, man.

Well, someone had to say it.

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"

 

[removed account4]

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.

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!

 

[warden]

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.

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.

 

[Truzi]

It’s not hip to be square, man.

Well, someone had to say it.

Yep, and that someone wasn't me... I had been thinking about it since the thread started, lol.

 

[Pieter12]

The other way around is much harder.

I tend to print everything square, even 35mm. It all goes together that way.

 

[Dusty Negative]

It's neither good nor bad. It's square.

Plato might disagree.

 

[Don_ih]

Plato might disagree.

Plato would not approve of photography (except maybe motion picture photography), so it hardly matters.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Square is primitive. Keep it in the middle, with object taking most of the frame and you are golden.

 

[NB23]

Square is primitive. Keep it in the middle, with object taking most of the frame and you are golden.

Square is Magical. Keep it in the middle, with object taking most of the frame and you are golden

 

[Don_ih]

Square is Magical. Keep it in the middle, with object taking most of the frame and you are golden

Square is two-dimensional. Bisect it diagonally and you get two triangles. It's good for origami.

 

[warden]

Square is two-dimensional. Bisect it diagonally and you get two triangles. It's good for origami.

Are there any formats that yield something other than two triangles when bisected diagonally?

 

[Don_ih]

Are there any formats that yield something other than two triangles when bisected diagonally?

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.

 

[NB23]

Square is two-dimensional. Bisect it diagonally and you get two triangles. It's good for origami.

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.

 

[warden]

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.

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?

 

[MattKing]

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?

828 is lost in the mists of time.....

 

[DREW WILEY]

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.

 

[Don_ih]

The Greeks, not the geeks, got it right. The Golden Mean is always rectangular

The Greeks acknowledged the might of the circle by incorporating camber into all their supposedly flat horizontal architectural features. A very big circle.

Are there any formats that are three, four, or five dimensional?

Does lenticular count? What about holography? Ah ... how about sculpture? Wait....

 

[removed account4]

Are there any formats that are three, four, or five dimensional?

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

 

[Pieter12]

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

All photos and film have 4-dimensions, existing in a 3-dimensional physical space and in time. I want quantum photography.

 

[DREW WILEY]

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.

 

[Pieter12]

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.

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.

 

[DREW WILEY]

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"?

 

[Sirius Glass]

I thought that they, whoever they are, standardized on 8x10 because in the olden days pros shot 8x10 and 4x5, and after pros stopped shooting 8x10 and 4x5, they, whoever they are, didn't change the standard, and so now nothing fits 8x10 without cropping, except maybe 6x7 which I learned today is really 56x67-68. Who knows why they picked 5x7 and 11x14 as standards. Nothing fits them, except 5x7 and 11x14 film I guess.

I found out the standard was screwed up about fifty years ago when I was shooting 35mm, and I had to crop my photos to fit the darkroom multi-easel, pre-cut mats, and pre-made frames, and that seemed really stupid. I was working in student darkrooms and one of the first darkroom accessories I actually bought for myself was an 8x10 "full frame" Speed EZ-EL. I had to cut my own mats. Then for a while I mostly shot slides so I didn't have to crop, except that the projection screens were square and so your slides ended up being letterboxed. When I wanted a print from a slide, I printed them myself full frame on Cibachrome. Now I just print full frame in whatever aspect ratio the film or digital format is and cut my own mats and use those metal frames which you can make any size you want.

Next time I go to the doctor I'll look through a bunch of magazines. I bet I won't find a single ad that is in a 8x10 aspect ratio. I never did any professional advertising photography, but always thought that the advertisers told the photographer what size they wanted, or photographers just left room all the way around the image so the advertisers could crop it any way they wanted. Of course, all that may be my imagination.

No problem for square, because your are almost guaranteed to trim of some paper if you shoot square.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Trim to the composition. Life is not that hard.

 

[Mike Lopez]

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.

Or open your eyes, compose to the format, and you need not waste paper and film.