Unexpected Aspect Ratios to Enhance the Abstract–Part One

Let’s face it, people are typically photographed two ways: Portrait and Landscape. If they are standing or sitting upright, we tend to shoot with the camera in the portrait orientation.  If they are sitting, reclining or laying down, we tend to use the landscape orientation. Unless you are shooting a square aspect medium format form factor, when shooting you seldom consider that ratio between landscape and portrait: the square.

Consider this image of Art Model Brooke Lynne taken at my recent figure workshop. The figure is not standing so the temptation to shoot landscape lured me into a horizontal mindset.  The DSLR form factor forces me to choose one or the other and I picked the easiest grip to hold.  The abstract pose struck by the model suggests a way to go with the crop.

Rather than choose traditional portrait or landscape, why not go square and be a little uncommon? To me the interesting part of the pose is the back. It isn’t something we see featured in photographs very often. My goal was to celebrate the human form but also make us pause for a moment to consider just exactly what we are viewing.  To get from the original capture to the crop above, what is necessary?

Looking at the execution of the crop, there are several key crop concepts that drove this preliminary crop.

1. The shape of the pose is roughly square. A square crop can  emphasize that.
2. The frame is filled and overflowing with the figure isolating the pose and the dynamics of certain portions of the picture.
3. Crop Rotation was used to enhance the angles and provide good shape to the white space resulting in three of the four corners.

This composition might not be your cup of tea and that’s ok.  Keep your eye on Holy Crop! over the coming days as we turn this crop on its head and I show you the crop I absolutely adore…

Rikk Flohr © 2012

Facebook – Added Impact for Landscape and Panoramically Cropped Images

In my last article, I discussed the new “Reposition Image” option for photos displayed on your Facebook Timeline.  Whether you are a fan of Timeline or no, you can take advantage of this new feature: Highlight.

In this standard Timeline view you can see the picture of the singing meadowlark is cropped awkwardly. We could reposition it as I detailed in the previous article to make the images’ subject more powerful within the square aspect-ratio window, or we could invoke the new Highlight feature.  The red arrow in the image above shows the Highlight option.

Clicking the Highlight star does two things. One, it gives you a much wider view of your image, and two, it makes it span both of the columns in your Timeline.  You now have a panoramic window in which to view your image.  The new image is slightly more than a 2:1 aspect ration making it a legitimate Panoramic Crop.  When I measure it out, the window is roughly 840×400 pixels: 2.1:1 – very cinematic.

The Reposition option is still available to you to fine-tune your landscape image up or down to make the window show a more pleasing rendition of your image.  All-in-all, it is a nice solution for displaying your images in a stronger fashion.

Of course, with all things Facebook, it doesn’t work everywhere. If you try to highlight a portrait orientation image, this is the result. Not very good, is it? There is too much white space around the image. A better solution would be to take portrait images and leave them single column but show the full height of the image. They would gain impact and not cause design or page flow to suffer.

With the advent of the Reposition and the Highlight features, Facebook is taking a positive step towards the proper and more aesthetically pleasing display of your photos. They should be lauded for this but encouraged to go the rest of the way.

Take a little time and add Highlighting and Repositioning to your Facebook arsenal.

Next time we will talk about the Missing Aspect Ratio on Facebook.

Rikk Flohr © 2012

Hummingbirds R 4 Squares

Take a look at these six hummingbird photographs. Do you notice anything unique about them?

They are all cropped to the 1:1 or square aspect ratio. For some reason hummingbirds just look good in squares. There are some aesthetic reasons why I crop the hummingbird so frequently to the square aspect ratio and most of them relate to the environment in which I shoot.  This diagram illustrates some of the issues.

1. The feeder I use to attract the hummingbirds near my camera is almost always in frame. When the hummingbird does its dip-retreat-hover act, it rarely gets far enough from the feeder to exclude it from the lens’ field of view.
2. Cropping off the feeder means the hummingbird is invariably staring at the nearest edge of the image. That means empty space behind the bird that looks awkward.  In keeping with the Rule of Space, I want my hummingbird to look into rather than out of my image.
3. I am often rotating my images to improve the “attack posture” of the bird. The square crop allows me to do this with less image loss than a rectangular crop.
4. Hummingbirds just fit the square so nicely. They are essentially hovering little “+” symbols. Sometimes they are a “t” or an “f” but they are always about as wide as they are tall. The combination of their body shape and posture creates a figure that begs for square space.
5. Feeder-attracted hummingbirds often don’t have other compositional elements in the frame.

When other elements are involved like this flower blossom, a rectangular crop works better compositionally. (The bird’s attack posture doesn’t hurt either)

Think about the space your subject occupies and it will lead you towards an aspect ratio. It seems odd but hummingbirds are kind of square from a space perspective.

The 6 Hummingbird photos at the article’s beginning are currently for sale in 8×8 inch signed prints. Go to the Fleeting Glimpse Hummingbird Gallery to purchase your copy today.

Rikk Flohr © 2010