Landscapes and aspect ratios

click photo to enlarge
After thirty odd years of shooting 35mm film with an aspect ratio of 3:2 I shot with Four Thirds cameras for a few years. These had an aspect ratio of 4:3. To my surprise I found I preferred it to 3:2, particularly for portrait format shots. When you turn a 3:2 camera so that the long side is vertical it seems to me that the aspect ratio doesn't work so well as when it is horizontal (landscape format) - it's simply too tall. There are a few subjects that benefit from a taller shape (and a very few where 16:9 is best) but not too many. I definitely preferred 4:3 in those circumstances. For landscapes, streetscapes and general photography 3:2 was, by and large, fine, but not better than 4:3 and sometimes too long.

Since I've returned to 3:2 with Canon, Nikon and Sony, the three makes I use now, I've generally shot 3:2 and where I've particularly felt it looked wrong (in horizontal or portrait format), I've cropped to 4:3. Today's photograph is a case in point. When I composed the shot I knew I wanted the verticals of the two medieval churches in the shot. However, I also wanted the full width of the street. On a wet day with an overcast sky 3:2 left too much boring grey cloud in the top half of the photograph. Consequently, I shot at 3:2 knowing I would crop to 4:3. Those of you who know the Sony RX100 might wonder why I didn't dive into the menu and set the camera to 4:3. The fact is I find it easier to stick with the same aspect ratio (3:2 is native and the highest resolution) across all the cameras to benefit from a consistent view and maximum pixel dimensions. To do otherwise would be for me, just too confusing, too tedious, and would deny me the best image where 3:2 is the ratio I want.

On the other hand, if Sony had done what Panasonic did with the LX3 (and other LX models), a camera that I owned until it died, and had put the aspect ratios round the lens barrel selected by a click stop switch, then I just might have set 4:3 before shooting.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 20mm (54mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f4.5
Shutter Speed: 1/100
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation:  - EV
Image Stabilisation: On

The general public and photography

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I've never been challenged or queried very much when taking photographs in public places. It has happened, but it has never led to the sort of significant incident that makes headlines. The police, private security guards and others are regularly reported exceeding their authority and interfering with the rights that photographers have to pursue their hobby and profession, and we must all strongly uphold our freedom to photograph in public places in the face of this kind of officiousness. But, what we must not forget is that most people, especially members of the public, are usually very helpful as far as photography goes. For example, people often wait until I've taken my shot before walking in front of me. Others are very generous, telling me about locations where I can get a good photograph. Of course, some people do make a detour to stay out of my shot, not to help me, but because they don't want to be captured on my image, and there's no problem with that. I usually find this happens in smaller places - towns, villages, the countryside - where photography is not an everyday occurrence. In cities and spots frequented by tourists, places where camera-wielding people are common, the locals tend to ignore you much more readily.

The other day I experienced a further example of the goodwill that is often afforded to photographers. I was sizing up a shot down Barn Hill in Stamford, Lincolnshire, when a man stepped out of a building to my left and was about to set off down into the town centre. "Am I going to be in your way?", he said, pausing for a moment. I told him he wouldn't be and he carried on, saying over his shoulder, "I suppose you can always Photoshop me out." I replied, "No, you'll be good foreground interest for me", at which he smiled and strode off, hands behind his back carrying his briefcase.

I've posted two shots of this particular Stamford street before (see here and here), a place with a fine selection of interesting buildings. On our recent visit we managed to dodge the rain and the sun made fleeting appearances. For this photograph, however, it had gone, but the sky had sufficient interest, the light was bright, and I managed to get a shot that I like; one that is all the better for the co-operative figure in the yellow jacket in the foreground.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm
 F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/320 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Barn Hill, Stamford

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Take down the television aerials and burglar alarm boxes, mask the electric door-bells, and you need to do very little else to produce a street where you could film the latest Jane Austen adaptation. Barn Hill in Stamford, Lincolnshire is one of those places that film producers and directors value for the way it has changed so little down the centuries. When I looked at this view my eye saw no building that appeared to be of a later date than the first quarter of the nineteenth century. However, knowing that provincial houses often lagged metropolitan styles by a decade or three, I decided to consult a database of listed buildings to see if my judgement was accurate.

The nearest house on the right with a ground floor and first floor bay is C17 and mid-C18. The house with the green door is similar, though the porch and ground floor bay is thought to be mid-C19 (bah!). The house with the pedimented door and arches over the windows to the left used to be two houses but is now one, and dates from the C17 and late-C18. The next house with the two-storey bow and the open-work Chinoiserie porch is quite a bit earlier than I thought: I'd have said 1810, but apparently it is mid-C18. On the left is a fine, obviously C18 town house, with one of the rainwater heads giving its age away - 1740. The two church spires are, of course medieval. In 1087 Stamford had four churches: by the end of the Middle Ages it had fourteen of which five remain complete, and two in fragments.

I've photographed Barn Hill before. That image was taken from near the building with the Chinoiserie porch. Scouting for film locations is a branch of film production that Google Street View must have made so much easier. With that thought in mind, click here to explore the length of Barn Hill for yourself.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 24mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

The Acme Vehicle Eraser

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If you're a photographer you're always finding stuff getting in your way. If it's not pesky pedestrians sauntering across your scene it's repulsive refuse bins violating your view. Photographing in town or country you frequently find wires, antennae, aerials and poles wending their way through the vista. My particular aversion is vapour trails (contrails to some). Their white scribble, scrawled across the sky scar many of my landscapes and only rarely do I find that they contribute to the composition. Anyway, enough of this alliterative abuse of people and inanimate objects, because there is, apparently, a more convenient answer to the removal of at least one of these intrusions than the painstaking processes currently available: a piece of software promises the painless removal of wires.

The other day I came across an advert for a program called Wire Pilot, a Photoshop plugin that makes the digital removal of telephone and electrical wires - in fact any thin object - an easier task. You might think, given the diatribe above, that I immediately went online and ordered my copy. But no. Wires are relatively easy to remove should you wish to do so. In fact, what I did do was look at the Wire Pilot website to see if they sold a software removal solution for the object that is a bigger pain than pedestrians, bins, wires and vapour trails combined. I mean of course, the car (that's "auto" if you say "contrail"!) and its associated wheeled accomplices, the van, the lorry, etc. Alas, I was disappointed. The "Acme Vehicle Eraser" is yet to be developed. But, when it is, my money will be joyfully despatched with great haste.

I have been known to say that I don't mind vehicles in a shot; that they give an image a sense of the period in which it was taken, and that today's photographic intrusions are tomorrow's historic vehicles over which future viewers will pore with interest. I do believe that. But not all the time! On other occasions, as when I was photographing this view of Barn Hill at Stamford, Lincolnshire, with its houses of every century from the sixteenth to the nineteenth, I want to sweep away the vehicles and reveal the history that they obscure. In the absence of any power to physically do that, the ability to remove them using software would be handy. Now I appreciate that there are certain minor technical difficulties in what I am proposing, but they're surely not insurmountable at the start of the 21st century, a time of Large Hadron Colliders, space missions to distant planets, and mp3 players the size of your fingernail. However, on deeper reflection, perhaps I'm searching for a solution to a problem that will soon disappear anyway. The current economic problems and the dwindling oil supplies may well be the magic wands that make those cars disappear without the need for expensive software!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 18mm (36mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On