Shooting Square
Old habits die hard.
I started photography with 35mm film. I graduated to better cameras that used 35mm film. I started developing and printing my own prints from 35mm film. As I sought higher and higher quality prints I learned to be extremely economical with film real estate. I was careful to use every bit of the film wisely so I didn’t need to crop and lose any of that precious film area.
I wanted more quality and larger prints. In the days of film that next step was typically medium format film. Before the internet, graduating from 35mm to larger formats what a strange, expensive, and mysterious endeavor. I didn’t want to make mistakes like the mistakes I made buying the wrong 35mm equipment. As painful to my wallet as it was, as long as it took me to save, I decided to go with what all of the other great photographers used. I decided to buy a Hasselblad 500C/M and an 80mm Zeiss f/2.8. That was my one camera and one lens for a long time. Other lenses for that camera had to wait.
Learning to use that camera effectively took a long time. I was enamored and mesmerized that I didn’t have to flip the camera around or even decide between horizontal pictures. I fell in love with square pictures. I printed square pictures. Over time I realized my world did not consist of only square compositions. More importantly, the rest of the world was not enamored with square pictures all the time unless of course you only shot album cover art.
My own personal work and the work I did for other people demanded horizontal and vertical compositions. So I developed an eye for shooting the Hasselblad looking for square and horizontal compositions. I still had no need of flipping the camera around. I thought that was still fantastic. I bought a gridded focus screen which helped to do that more precisely. As an added bonus it was great for making frames that had precise vertical lines and level horizontals. I loved the Hasselblad even more. I can shoot square compositions, horizontal compositions, and vertical compositions on the same camera in the same orientation. I was still making each frame composed specifically for one of those aspect ratios and orientation of the final print.
I still didn’t fully realize the full potential of shooting square. One day out of the blue I finally had the revelation of shooting a square camera. Why not pay attention to all three at the same time for every picture? So that’s what I did, in fact, it was easy with a square camera format. Why didn’t this occur to me immediately? I can make every frame that all three worked and worked equally as well. This was revolutionary for me, every shot that worked (yes you still make bad pictures here and there that don’t work at all) also worked as a square, a 4/3, a 3/4, a 4/5, a 5/4, a 3/2, etc. There was plenty of film real estate to make great-looking prints and double spreads in a book or magazine.
This is when square cameras in general and the Hasselblad 500 cameras truly became my favorite cameras ever. To this day that holds true. If you’ve not tried this or if you have a square camera and don’t compose this way all the time I implore you to start doing it today, for every frame. It may take a while before you get really good at it but it will happen. Sure there will be some pictures that you like better, that are better with one orientation or aspect ratio than another but do your best to make it difficult to decide for the majority of frames you make.
If I am using my Hasselblad 500 cameras this approach is a habit. That habit is just one of the reasons I find joy in shooting 120 film with those cameras. I have another habit that’s not quite so positive. If I pick up any 3/2 (aka full-frame 35mm) camera I immediately revert to using every square millimeter of film to its maximum efficiency. Every frame I shoot is a 3/2 composition with nothing else considered. It’s either a vertical or horizontal long skinny composition.
This is appropriate for 35mm film. It’s not as if you’d choose 35mm film of any kind in the 21st century to make 4/5 or square pictures. Even in the early days of digital, you’d really not use a 3/2 camera and not care about resolution. Of course, if that’s all you had and knew you were shooting 4/3 pictures or square pictures you’d not do that. I still get a nagging feeling when shooting 50 megapixels when I intentionally am shooting for 4/3 or 4/5 or square output by backing up a bit and not caring about all those pixels I am throwing away.
Many photographers have fully embraced this in modern times but old habits die hard when not working on a specific output intention. Here’s a thought, what if one used the square philosophy when shooting 3/2 or even 4/3 cameras. I don’t mean shooting for the square but instead shooting them in one orientation always but making every single composition work as a 3/2 horizontal and vertical, a 4/3 horizontal and vertical, and a square? Would this work?
I’d probably not do this with a 16-megapixel camera just as I’d not do this with 35mm film but it’s certainly a reasonable idea when using 40 or 50-megapixel full-frame cameras. I’d speculate that using 3/2 cameras would be the most difficult to make all those aspect ratios work for every composition made. It would probably be easier with 4/3 cameras. Stay tuned I am going to see if I can do this myself and how it works out.
I am going to see if I can kill that old habit, at least on digital non-square cameras as it was extremely valuable on square film. Why shouldn’t it be the case with today’s high-resolution non-square cameras. I may have to work in reverse than my Hasselblad 500 cameras but we’ll see.