Why do all the photo sizes - 4R, 6R and 8R - have different aspect ratios? How are people supposed to frame/crop shots if they don’t know the aspect ratio of the final picture?
Standard photos were:
3-1/2x5, 4x6, 5x7, 8x10, 11x14, 16x20
You can see that these fit: 3-1/2x5, 5x7, and even 11x14 - pretty close to “cut in half”.
Basically, most frames are set for these sizes.
all these sizes are approximately (like 8-1/2 x11) a pleasing ration of height-width for portrait or vice versa for landscape. I’m wondering if the Golden Mean ratio figures into that.
You take a picture, slightly over-scanned, then crop during printing.
Enlargers basically were projectors, projecting the negative onto the paper. So you could selectively crop, you could adjust for out-of-level camera, get creative, etc.
I suspect in the Good Ol Days, your sizes were picked by how big a picture you wanted (and could afford) rather than any outstanding aesthetics.
Huh. I’m a photographer and have no idea what 4R, 6R, and 8R are. Is this a metric convention like A5, A4, A3 paper?
As to the aspect ratios, that’s a good question. Some standard sizes I assume came from the old sheet film sizes like 4x5 or 8x10 (both the same aspect ratio.) 4x6 corresponds to a full frame of 35mm film (Which is 24mm x 36mm). 5x7–no clue where that could have come from, other than 2:3 aspect ratio tends to work well for landscape-oriented photos, but not so much portrait (vertical) oriented photos, where they seem a bit tall. So 4x5 and 5x7 are much better aspect ratios for verticals. But I don’t think they ever made film in 5x7 aspect ratio.
Photo print sizes - Wikipedia I’m not sure - it seems to be saying the US uses the “R” scale, since the rest of the world uses cm?
Yeah, 3:2 being the most common film ratio, you’d think they’d make photo paper all that ratio. Is there any reason to make every size a different ratio?
Two points.
- When we have a larger print,we’d more likely have more of the subject in the photo. So look at common subjects.
a. subjects are very often people.. eg the full body not just the face. So that implies a more stretched ratio. In portrait orientation.
b. switch to group photo’s , its going to be wider but not taller.
c. Switch to rooms, or landscapes.. We’d want more to the left and right, and so put the picture in landscape orientation
The larger the print, the more detail we want, and that detail is to the let and right of the primary subject. Or up and down of it.
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So even if its not any of the three common subjects, its more efficient of paper to show two sides of context, rather than try to show more context on all four sides.
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psychology, if the photo is square, that can look wrong, eg "contrived’., eg it looks like a montage rather than a single photo. Eg if you have 5 things arranged in a X arrangement and take a photo of it, and the result is a square or diamond, it may be evaluated as poor work.. giving a “cluttered” look, or “too full” or something. perhaps due to the lack of context? (eg due to 2 or 1, we expect more context ?, but not too much ?
Are you saying larger photos should have narrower aspect ratios? Fair enough, but that seems to the the opposite of what’s happening.
Yeah that doesn’t sound right. Verticals (especially portraits) tend to work better with more equal aspect ratios, like 4:5 or 5:7. Horizontals tend to work better at narrower ones like 2:3.
I’ve learned to shoot leaving a decent chunk of real estate available on all four sides, then crop during my editing workflow based on my desired aspect ratio.
Of course, if you end up cropping too small an area the quality of your eventual print may be compromised.
mmm
Yeah, I was taught exactly the opposite: frame it as tight as possible in camera. Photographers would often print with the frame markings (the black borders with the film type on it) partly for aesthetic reasons, but also very much to show-off a little bit: “hey, I got this is all in-camera, no crop!”
But it depends what you’re shooting for. If you’re shooting for a newspaper or magazine where you might have overlaid text or something, you might shoot looser than usual.
I tend to err slightly on the side of loose framing when I’m shooting for clients because of all these incompatible aspect ratios, but when I shoot for myself, I always shoot as tight as to require minimal cropping for quality reasons.
Tight cropping in camera is, I suspect, something that comes about for other reasons. It is only recently (in terms of the history of photography) that wide range zoom lenses have been ubiquitous. Before that it was all fixed length lenses, and often times a very limited set of these. The advice I was given - especially for things like press photography - was a wide angle lens and crop in camera as close as you could. This has a very specific result of the composition. The perspective is heavily forced, and the key subject is emphasised against the background, which recedes very quickly, with objects behind the main subject reducing in apparent size. This serves to make for a much more striking composition. A longer lens would force a much greater distance to the subject and result in a much flatter depth to the composition. The counterpoint is that with a really long lens you can manage the depth of field and blur out the background, but the ability to do this is limited - especially if you are photographing say a politician in a gaggle of apparatchiks.
With zoom lenses people tend to lose sight of the perspective effect - cropping in camera versus cropping later with the same focal length lens does not yield the same perspective. But standing the same distance away and playing with the zoom to crop versus cropping afterwards does yield the same perspective.
Just to add to my post above - the obvious and well know exemplar of the question of perspective here is the dolly zoom effect. For instance this video clip.
That’s a very good point about distance-to-subject and the perspective effect it has. It’s an important consideration in photography. Also, distance-to-subject affects your depth of field. The closer you are to your subject, the less depth of field you will have, so if you want a nice blurred background with beautiful bokeh (out-of-focus background), the closer you are to your subject, the more you can throw your background out-of-focus (if that’s your intent. For your standard 85mm head-and-shoulder portrait, it’s usually nice to only have the face, if not just the eyes, in focus and have the background pretty blurry.)
ETA: Funny, I was actually thinking about the “Hitchcock effect” as I call it, but couldn’t remember what it was called.