Instagram hates this aspect ratio!

Lets talk about crop factors and why they are fast becoming a non entity when it comes to photography. I have, since I was a wee laddie, been a huge fan of movies. From Saturday morning westerns and war films in my local cinema (10 pence to enter and popcorn was 20 pence!) to Sunday afternoon classic british black and white comedies and thrillers on the good ole BBC, I have watched probably thousands of movies in my time. One of the things that always attracted me apart from the stories they told and the feeling of escapism they brought me from a terrible childhood, was the aspect ratios that some of these were filmed in. I LOVED the super wide vistas displayed in the classic westerns and the “epics” such as El Cid, Spartacus and The Longest Day. Once upon a time in the West is another superb example of a movie shot in the super wide ratio of 2:35:1. It really allows the viewer to be drawn into the scene and worked perfectly for cinema. However it didnt fare so well on an old fashioned television and when these films were shown on tv they were horribly cropped for the most part and lost so much of the visual scope that made them such a joy to watch in the cinema.

Modern televisions are far more adept with these wide angle formats and with increased screen sizes it is possible to somewhat recreate the look in the home that my eyes remembered from my yoof!

I do love to shoot in super wide angle with my images but you rarely see them on my social media platforms as they just don’t translate well to their formats. Instagram loves a vertical crop and I hate it for that. With IG its all about real estate on the feed and the vertical crop is the most likely to catch the eye of a doom scroller, sat on their toilet at 2am, bleary-eyed and trying hard to get a RSI as they move that thumb in a constant upwards motion! Even your standard 4:3 aspect or slightly wider 16:9 (one of my favourites for woodland) crops suffer with the algorithms. Other platforms are not quite so harsh with ratios, Flikr being one that stands out as doing okay with any ratio, but I think the viewer has mostly been trained to ignore a super wide image which is a shame as I find them very often to be the most impactful of images!

Lonely Joe in Sper wide CINEMASCOPE! (aka 2:35:1)

Another reason this format is not as popular in photography is it requires a fair degree of cropping to achieve. Now with the likes of the 100mp Fujifilm GFX 100s or even the 60mp Sony sensor this isnt too much of an issue as you are still left with a healthy supply of pixels to work with. However with my Nikon Zf and its somewhat “measly” 24mp I end up with about half that with a super wide crop on one of my images. For social media this isnt really too much of an issue but to print it limits my print size a little and you lose the grandeur of the crop somewhat.

Anamorphic lenses are becoming cheaper all the time with companies like Blazar and Sirui producing some incredibly good lenses on a seriously good budget. The beauty of these lenses is they stretch the image out and allow you to keep the MP on your sensor without compromising with crops. They will take some editing to make them look normal but thats a small price to pay in my opinion. I look forward to trying one of these out with my photography and see what I can produce.

Just add popcorn and a cowboy!

So, If like me you love a wide angle image let me know in the comments! I am interested to see how many of you out there feel this is also an issue or whether its just my old brain that finds it a jarring problem!

On to more general things now and been loving my Osmo action 4 and the timelapses its been producing. Very easy to set up and use and produces a really nice timelapse straight out of the camera. I edit it up in the Mimo app, export to my phone and can share within a few minutes of capturing it which is pretty clever too.

The above was shot last week and is in the vertical 16:9 format that IG loves so much lol.

Things have gone a bit quiet for me photographically speaking the last few weeks but this week I start my hunt for fields of poppies. I got lucky with a stunning scene last year and its going to be impossible to top that this year but its still fun to find a field of them and see what I can get out of it.

Thats it for this week, toodles!