Pixiq

For some reason, I hardly ever see anything written, or opinions passed, about the creative pros and cons of different image formats. And yet the frame dynamics start to work on any potential composition as soon as you raise the camera to your eye. It’s not just that the edges and corners interact with your subject, but that the shape really does have an influence. The more elongated this shape, the stronger its effects on composing, and with more and more DSLRs offering full HD movie capability, it’s beginning to matter.

A few cameras now offer 16:9 as a still shooting option, mainly by some form of cropping. It’s a seamless feature of the Leica D-Lux I use as an always-there snapshot camera, but of course it’s because of the full 16:9 HD option that has become so popular that this stretched format is getting more attention.

But why 16:9 in the first place? Blame it on the movies. Cinema, which continues to influence photography in all kinds of ways, moved in the 1950s to distinctly wider, more expansive aspect ratios, partly as a way of combatting the threat of television, with its still-fat 4:3 format. Of course, in the late 1950s and 1960s they went way wide, up to 1:2.76, almost three times long as tall (that was Ben Hur). 16:9 came along much later, first proposed in 1980 as a compromise aspect ratio that would accommodate all the common movie formats. Now it’s rapidly becoming the worldwide HDTV broadcast standard, and television monitors have followed suit — even, bit by bit, computer screens.

From the moment that the movies broke out of ‘Academy’ standard 4:3, for commercial reasons, directors generally preferred wide, and the reason was that it’s more interesting and dynamic for composition. That sounds like a sweeping statement, but just imagine for a moment what any contemporary movie, from Lord of the Rings to Inception, would look like in fat 4:3. Right, less dynamic. Last year I did in fact spend some time listening to a friend, Ron Fricke, director of Baraka, talking about the pleasures of working within a Panavision frame while he was filming the sequel, Samsara, in Burma. We were looking out over the plain of Pagan, which is covered in pagodas, 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 active 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 organizes, because it keeps the eye focused on a horizontal plane. This is the set-up, but wait till you see the movie, for which Ron shot a long overnight time-lapse, from late afternoon to early morning.

So, it’s more attractive, and while 16:9 isn’t as extreme as Panavision, it goes part of the way. It helps, incidentally, that the width-to-height proportions of 16:9 are not a million miles for the Golden Ratio — 1.77 to 1.618. You could argue that this gives it some aesthetically satisfying edge. But whatever the reason, many people just like the way images fall into place within this widescreen frame.

But what exactly does it do for composition? First, there’s the rather obvious advantage or any subject that’s inherently horizontal, like many landscapes in which things are laid out along the line.

Then, there’s Ron’s point that it organizes. And specifically, it’s great for a two-shot, bouncing the eye left-and-right between two subjects, reinforcing the relationship.

And when there’s a strong single element in shot, this horizontality is even more reason than usual for offsetting the element, to set up a definite relationship with the background. The background, in fact, acquires more of a subject presence. Here’s a simple case. With the angular green patch offset to the right, the eye sees the background of rock as having a ‘center’ to the left, and it becomes an implied subject element. The schematic shows how the balance works, and the importance of framing the left edge to the left edge of the just-noticeable boulder...

There’s more. A wider frame gives a squeezing effect top and bottom. Drawing the viewer’s eye into the centre, with a distinct sense that there is no floor or ceiling to the shot. If you think about it, particularly with many middle-distance shots, the foreground — the bit below, on the ground — is often a distraction, something irrelevant to the subject. A wider frame automatically edits this out.