Wider
When you sit back and watch your new HD television, the shape you are looking at has a history. It also has a future, because it is influencing more than you might imagine. And that includes still photography.
Widescreen, the standard in HD television.
The shape of the image frame is usually a given. Standardisation of film gave us a particular range, with shape related very much to size: 35mm for most people, with proportions of 3:2, and generally fatter formats for medium and large format. In fact, the old film-based range of camera formats was more varied than the new digital range. It included 5:4 for large-format (the mainstay of studio shooting), square (the original rollfilm format and maintained by Hasselblad), 7:6 and 4:3 (also rollfilm, the latter from what was known as 645 format), and panoramic formats 2:1 and 17:6, all of this in addition to the 3:2 35mm frame.
Wider camera frames, like this 6x17 cm Linhof, were temporarily lost with the conversion to digital, but are making a return.
Digital cameras offer less …. and more. While the upper end of the market has ported most of the old familiarities from 35mm SLRs to digital SLRs, including the ergonomics and the 3:2 frame proportions, the rest of the market has gone for 4:3, which in its favour is closer to the print shapes that had prevailed during the wet-photography years (that is, 10 x 8), and magazine pages. Rotated for shooting vertically-oriented frames (‘portrait’ as it used to be called, as opposed to ‘landscape’), 4:3 also works more comfortably. 3:2 frames used as ‘portrait’ are for many subjects just a little too elongated for comfort, although, of course, we all get used to handling whatever format we’ve been handed, somehow. What has been lost is flexibility, because sensors are fixed in size. Rolls of film were flexible because the only constraint was their width, and panoramic cameras took advantage of this.
But a new aspect ratio is creeping in, 16:9, otherwise known as widescreen. This longer aspect ratio is not about to take over any time soon, but it draws on the popularity of widescreen in video and cinema. And it presents some interesting possibilities for composition. Beginning with the Panasonic Lumix, and it’s pricier cousin the Leica, a trickle of cameras is emerging with 16:9 ratio.
Widescreen has a history going back to the 1950s, when it was the motion picture industry’s retaliation to the threat of television. People were abandoning the cinema to stay at home and watch the small screen. Worse still, television was showing old movies, which it could perfectly well because its 4:3 aspect ratio was exactly the same as that used for films. This was what became known as Academy Standard, 1.33:1, because it was accepted back in the 1930s by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the people who give out the Oscars, among other things). Wider and wider aspect ratios were Hollywood’s way of attracting audiences back into cinemas, for a bigger experience, and not incidentally making it impossible for television, with its fat screen, to present the same effect.
Widescreen for a while went very wide, reaching 2.59:1 for Cinerama and 2.76:1 for Ben-Hur and a handful of other MGM Canera 85 movies. Now, the two most common aspect ratios are Academy Flat 1.85:1 and Anamorphic Scope 2.35:1. The majority of new television sets are 16:9, which is about 1.78:1, and almost certainly, this particular widescreen format will become more widely used in presenting still photographs. This is partly because of the display opportunities, partly because it is such an attractive aspect ratio in which to compose. Let me explain a little further.
Even though digital printing is so satisfying to do, and so easy, thanks largely to the efforts that Epson in particular have put into the equipment and inks, the sheer volume of digital photographs being produced and people’s enthusiasm for sharing them on-line will keep screens as the most used medium for displaying photographs. And screens of all kinds are hugely influenced by television. The standard for HDTV is 16:9, the format (or aspect ratio as it is also known) that was invented in the 1980s as a compromise, to consolidate the various earlier widescreen formats. Camcorders have naturally followed this, so that steadily, we are all getting used to this image shape as natural. If you want to produce a slideshow, in PowerPoint or any other software, the largest option for the window is 16:9, which is a powerful incentive if you want the highest resolution to project or to put up on a television monitor.
Downtown Beijing - a mall in the Central Business District - shot wide with a stitched sequence.
Some DSLRs with high-resolution sensors and cropping space to spare offer 16:9 as an option that cuts the top and bottom of the frame - a Sony A900 that I have features this. Provided that this crop is clear and obvious in the viewfinder, it removes many of the ‘comprosition’ issues from trying to crop after the event.
But in a significant departure for photography, digital stitching removes all constraints. Sweeping panoramas have proved so popular among all classes of photographers that the post-production software for making them out of an overlapping strip of images is now sophisticated, simple and very effective. Shooting-and-stitching is well-covered elsewhere, so I will not go into the details here. I’ll assume that anyone who is interested knows how to do it. The important point is that it needs almost no special equipment. A special panoramic head that positions the camera’s rear nodal point over the axis is ideal, but not really necessary unless there are parts of the scene close to the camera. Equally, most software can deal with hand-held sequences. And where such long panoramas really come into their own is as prints; they are invariably, after all, large files that will stand up to printing at the kind of size that panoramas demand. And dare I say that this is good argument for a roll-fed printer? Well, it’s an excuse that I made to myself.
Roll-fed printers are an additional incentive to shoot wide.
What is rarely addressed, however, is how to envisage the final result when shooting. Most people shooting a stitched panorama simply start at one end and go, relying on actually finding the composition later, on the computer screen. I imagine we’ve all done this (those of us who have ever shot a digital panorama), but it’s hardly precise. Nevertheless, it’s possible with practice and experience to first study the scene without the camera and work out the limits. A step along the way to this familiarity is a simply cut card frame – or frames if you want a choice of aspect ratios.
For all these interlinked reasons, widescreen is coming to still photography, and so far, we have three ways of shooting it. The first is to use a camera with a widescreen sensor, the second is to shoot cropped (or crop later), and the third is to extend the frame by shooting a stitched sequence. Wide aspect ratios are becoming more popular, and they also offer some interesting possibilities for composition, which is what I want to start looking at over on the Techniques Page…
