Square Shots-It's hip to be square
Chris Feola
Author, Perfecting Equilibrium: For a brief, shining moment Web1 democratized data. Then Web2 came along and made George Orwell look like an optimist. Now Web3 is Perfecting John Nash’s Information Equilibrium.
Foto.Feola.Friday; plus the PE for March 5-10, 2023
But don't you try to fight it
An idea whose time has come
Don't tell me that I'm crazy
Don't tell me I'm nowhere
Take it from me
It's hip to be square
Foto.Feola.Friday
There’s always been a mystique to square photos. Most film is rectangular: 35mm, 6x7 and so forth. And Film 101 required visualizing shots as horizontals or verticals.
Square negatives and slides tended to be fairly exotic: 6x6cm images from pricy Hasselblads or Rolles, or exotic Pentacons. The vast majority of photographers, including pros, stuck to the more common rectangular format cameras.
Digital cameras have followed this into self-parody, as is obvious to anyone who has seen a vertical iPhone video running on a horizontal screen. But there’s no reason for it beyond familiarity. Fortunately tons of digital cameras let you set the aspect ratio.
I had totally forgotten about this, but someone mentioned it and I checked my Olympus Pen-F. Wade through 10,000 menus, find Aspect Ratio…Voila! 1:1.
Maybe the most fun thing about not being a pro anymore is the Right to be Silly. So instead of always shooting my workhorse camera and lens setups, I go photo walking with my $200 Nokton, lenses that have been stuck in the back of the bag forever, or set the aspect ratio to 1:1.
After all, it’s hip to be square!
领英推荐
Top stories March 5-10, 2023:
From the PE Archives
https://perfectingequilibrium.substack.com/p/cash-rules-everything-around-me
Easter Eggs
My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
March 12th (Substack): New Jobs for a New Age: Job Three-ChatGPT Article Designer. Part III of the PE VLog series New Jobs for a New Age: Creating articles with ChatGPT, and reviewing the results. The transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age is destroying entire fields of work and creating a new generation of Luddites, but it’s also creating new jobs requiring new skills.
March 14th: The return of the NFT; Amazon is launching an NFT market
March 9th (LinkedIn): New Jobs for a New Age: Job Three-ChatGPT Article Designer. Part III of the PE VLog series New Jobs for a New Age: Creating articles with ChatGPT, and reviewing the results. The transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age is destroying entire fields of work and creating a new generation of Luddites, but it’s also creating new jobs requiring new skills.
March 10th: Foto.Feola.Friday; the Perfecting Equilibrium Digest.
Christopher J Feola founded PrivacyChain, which provides Data as a Service to Web3 projects and restores the value of content. If you liked this post from Perfecting Equilibrium, why not share it?