Widescreen (part 1)
One of the more obvious uses of a wide frame is the panoramic landscape, where the subject material is horizontal to begin with, and both sky and close foreground are less interesting.
Panoramic photography is almost as old as photography itself, and considerable mechanical ingenuity went into building cameras that would shoot an elongated view. The fact is that panoramas are attractive and well-liked, although as far as I know, no-one has studied why.A good guess would be that the psychology has to do with the pleasure of encompassing things – taking in a full, sweeping view – while the perceptual trigger is that a panorama fits the way we see the world, a horizontal field of view enhanced by scanning from side to side. It’s the way our eyes are arranged, and the way our heads move most easily.
The way we see is shaped horizontally.
The word panorama has extra meanings beyond simply a wide aspect ratio. It is a type of subject and a particular way of looking at the world. Panoramas are views from afar, scanning the horizon, and are understood by most people to be landscapes or cityscapes. All fine and well, but wide aspect ratios have more uses, and there are many more interesting ways of using them in composition, as almost any visit to the cinema confirms. Using them in close-up is just one example. Composing for widescreen in still photography, however, is a very neglected subject, one I’d like to make a stab at correcting here. And now seems to be a good time, as widescreen is subtly encroaching on digital still imagery.
Wide aspect ratios have had their ups and downs in popularity, because they depend first on camera technology, and second on whatever ways of displaying pictures are in vogue. The shape of the image frame is of course a major control. For most photographers it’s an accepted by-product of the camera that they choose – and that choice is often for other reasons, such as price, features, resolution, handleability. But ways of display are arguably even more important. A panoramic print works very well when printed – and printed large. It has a more difficult time on the printed page, because most books and magazines have an aspect ratio slightly taller than wide. For all kinds of reasons, not least shelf width in a bookstore, publishers have been reluctant to produce ‘landscape’ format books. There are other solutions, however. Using two pages as a double-page spread is a common one; a gatefold is rarer, but effective.
Most print media are more upright than horizontal, but this changes when open. A spread promotes the idea of a longer horizontal image.
Now, however, screens are taking over from printed pages (ask any newspaper proprietor), and my argument is that screens are having more and more influence on image display. And screen sizes are becoming standardised. For this we need to look at, and learn from, the film and video industries.
My starting point is the motion picture world, which has been using widescreen for decades. The fact is that for many, if not most directors and cinematographers, wide aspect ratios are just more interesting for composing shots. I talked about this with a friend, the director Ron Fricke (Baraka, 1992). We were looking out over the plain of Pagan, Burma, which is covered in pagodas, during filming of Baraka‘s sequel, and he was framing a long shot with a 600mm lens fitted to the 70mm Panavision camera. The aspect ratio was 2.20:1, and he explained that for the time-lapse landscape shot being prepared, the wide screen was a natural. It gave the perfect sense of an expansive view on a grand scale. And in general, the frame is simply more dynamic than the old Academy Standard, more so also than Academy Flat, and allowed him to pull and hold together two or more elements in a single shot. This latter point not to be lightly dismissed, as we’ll see, because the more elongated the frame, the more it organises, and keeps the eye focused on a horizontal plane.
Following the trend in television towards this widescreen format, some cameras offer 16:9 as an option. For composition, it feels more dynamic and alive than fatter formats, playing as it does to the basic ‘horizontality’ of the way we see. Its limitation is that it does not easily lend itself to being used for a vertical frame, except for occasional extreme situations.
One of a growing number of cameras that offer 16:9 as a framing option.
So, what does it suit, and how are the dynamics different from 3:2 and the even fatter 4:3? The most obvious (and possibly least interesting) situation is when the frame just happens to fit the subject, as in the shot of elephants below. It’s convenient, efficient, and speaks for itself. But at the same time, it doesn’t really engage the imagination.
When the subject fits, simply because of the shape of the main ingredients.
Panoramic landscapes are the classic use of widescreen. These are landscapes in which the view is clear of foreground obstructions – indeed, normally clear of foreground of any kind, and the generally go hand in hand with an overlook. There are many other kinds of landscape setting, but when the foreground is relatively blank, or simply falls away because of the higher viewpoint, that pitches the attention more towards the horizon line. And if the sky is normal rather than exciting and unusual, you have the basic ingredients for a panoramic landscape. Like the example we just saw, they ‘fit’, but in a general sense.
Another use of widescreen is to exploit its inherent sense of horizontal movement. In short, a long frame has stronger vectors, ready to move the eye from one side to the other.
The latent dynamics of a stretched frame draw the eye across, so it starts with more 'structure' than a fatter 3:2 or 4:3 frame.
When a subject also has the potential for horizontal movement, it makes a natural match. In the example below, the graphic lines are mainly horizontal, and there is also a sense of actual movement as the woman walks along.
A walking shot that already contains strong horizontal lines and real horizontal movement, as the diagram below makes clear.
Third in our roster of widescreen uses is the two-shot. This is one of the staples of film-making and television, because of dialogue. Cut-aways from one person to the other are more commonly used, but if both need to be in shot, widescreen gives them space to sit comfortably in the same frame. Obviously, this doesn’t engage still photography to anything like the same extent, but there are still many, many occasions when the core of an image s the relationship between two things or people. Moreover, a still image ‘lasts’ longer for a viewer than a film or video sequence. And, when one of the subjects is closer to the camera, as below, the ‘horizontality’ of the widescreen frame carries a greater sense of depth, as the diagram illustrates. The overall result is that widescreen, much more than conventional frame shapes, tends to make a ‘pair’ out of two subjects.
A two-shot, in which there is also a sense of depth that the wide frame enhances (see the diagram below)
A more static two-shot - an example of how the long frame gives the impression that the two buildings are a 'pair'.
In the second part of this widescreen article, we’ll look at more subtle dynamics, and at how to visualise extended frames – which is what you end up with when shooting a sequence intended for stitching.
