Aspect Ratio And Composition Tips.

[persephone]

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excerpt

Here’s a primer for beginning photographers on the concepts of aspect ratios and compositional theories.

Aspect ratio is photo’s width/image height, with the long dimension first. There are six common aspect ratios for cameras today (and as many as you like if you use the crop tool, but that’s another subject for another day):

• 1:1 – Square format, traditionally the realm of 6x6cm Hasselblads, and now popularized by various mobile apps.
• 5:4 – Large format and sheet film cameras, mainly 8×10″.
• 4:3 – Broadcast television and video used this aspect ratio, originally in 640×480 pixel resolution; small sensor cameras and compacts (which inherited early video CCD architecture) have been using this aspect ratio ever since. Four Thirds and Micro Four thirds are the larger consumer formats to use it; in medium format there’s also 645 which has the same aspect ratio for both film and digital.
• 3:2 – Double a movie frame; famously invented when Oskar Barnack rotated the film through 90 degrees and doubled the width of the frame to create the 24x36mm ‘full frame’ 35mm camera format. Almost all larger sensored DSLRs use this today.