Formats, compositions, and technical stuff

Formats, compositions, and technical stuff

Thanks to Malc for the idea of writing about formats: there’s a bit of standard compositional stuff to say, and there may be one or two bits about cameras, as well… Most of us, most of the time, fit our subjects into the frame that our cameras provide. We tend to accept that it’s the right thing to do – and it’s certainly the convenient way to work.

There have been a few cameras, over the years, that allow different formats: some roll film cameras allow you to insert masking frames to get smaller images, and those with interchangeable backs often offer different formats.

It’s much more unusual for miniature cameras to have variable formats, but the Hasselblad X-Pan (made by Fujifilm) does. As well as offering a panoramic format (20 or 21 frames on a 36-exposure film) it can move both the edges of the frame and the film to give conventional 24x36 images as well as 24x68. The mechanism is clearly rather complex, but they’re lovely bits of kit.

Panoramic images require a bit more from the photographer. A widescreen format looks very bare with only a standard ‘thirds’ composition to occupy it. Good panoramic images need more centres of interest in the frame, and they need to be laid out so that the eye moves naturally from one to the next across the frame, reading a story as it goes. For my money, Colin Prior is the doyen of the format.



Square format cameras are popular in some film formats – as it’s hard to turn a twin lens reflex on its side, a square format and cropping in printing was popular for many years. TLRs are simple and robust, and were the mainstay of professional photography for many years.

Printing the whole of a square negative delivers something rather special in terms of composition. While rectangular formats lean towards being active, dynamic and involving, a square composition is often either boring or stable, or possibly regal and imposing. Good photographers play to this by the way they compose within the frame, and it’s popular for formal portraits and some architectural subjects – but the choice is yours, always.

Whatever the camera’s format, though, it is always possible for you to previsualise an image, and to take it with the specific intention of cropping to achieve what you wanted. In the darkroom, despite standard paper sizes, it’s perfectly possible to use only part of each sheet…



I’ve consciously referred to film and film cameras above, but all of the above maps onto digital working, though the enormous computing power of every camera these days makes it feasible to produce WYSIWYG viewfinders, ready-cropped to any format. Similarly, it allows panoramic modes, where you pan the camera across a scene and the CPU stitches the images into a very long and narrow image.
So a suggestion for today – consider what format will suit the picture you’re going to take best. Experiment with different formats, and see what works for you…