The death of portrait

wintoid

wintoid

Back to film
Local time
6:39 PM
Joined
Aug 7, 2005
Messages
1,350
Location
Kent, UK
View My Gallery
I work in IT, and I buy the computers and monitors for my workplace, which are mainly HP. On Friday, I tried to order monitors, and was told that all HP monitors are now widescreen.

If this is an industry-wide trend, it's got to have implications for photography.
 
Buy a second one and make it stand on its lateral side ... 😉

Seriously, I understand the concern, my screen is 16:9 and portraits look bad compared to landscapes.
 
wintoid said:
If this is an industry-wide trend, it's got to have implications for photography.
Click to expand...

I've read that wide format LCDs are cheaper to produce.

Do you used to rotate your monitor to employ it as natural portrait display? First thing comes to mind - wide is good for polyptichs.

That said, if you get a lemon, squeeze it and make lemonade 🙂
 
{beginRANT}
What really annoys me is that most documents are still produced in archaic vertical A4 format - despite most people trying to view them on horizontal screens typically laptops. Corporate Microsoft Word users are the worst culprits.
My solution is to create two column horizontal A4 formated output from pdflatex.

Also does anyone else hate it when photo-books print images across a pair of pages.
If it's a good image I want to see it cleanly on a single page.{endRANT}
 
spysmart said:
Also does anyone else hate it when photo-books print images across a pair of pages.
If it's a good image I want to see it cleanly on a single page.
Click to expand...

Don't complain about the photo-book. Complain about the person who was sitting in front of his photo-book software and decided that it would look better if that picture was printed across two pages.
 
wintoid said:
I work in IT, and I buy the computers and monitors for my workplace, which are mainly HP. On Friday, I tried to order monitors, and was told that all HP monitors are now widescreen.

If this is an industry-wide trend, it's got to have implications for photography.
Click to expand...

When I look at portraits on a wide screen monitor there is just more background to the left and right of the picture. This looks very nice if you use the "on black" functionality for flickr pictures for example.
Using a wide screen display does not mean that a picture is rescaled.
 
I saw a tv programme recently which showed Rankin doing a fashion shoot - he had an portrait monitor. One of the guys in my office had one for the DTP Mac about 15 years ago....They do exist but are rare and lesser spotted...
 
If you're working on a lot of portrait format shots, rotate the display...

391507983_30ec6045ea_o.jpg
 
My new 22" diagonal HP monitor is rotatable. But I never rotate it. TV long ago sounded the death knell for portrait format. I remember reading a poll back in the '80s about the percent of photos taken in portrait orientation, and it was very small. Even back then it was attributed to the influence of the TV screen on our perception of what makes a nice image.

/T
 
Other reasons could be:

1. Most cameras are landscape format by default, you have to rotate the camera to take a portrait.

2. Our natural field of view is landscape format (well, mine is anyway).
 
When I worked at newspapers we all had portrait-oriented monitors for page layout.
I remember reading an article recently about the death of portrait, or verticals, in conjunction with the convergence of stills and video vis. the EOS 5D MK II, RedCam etc. I think it was Dirck Halstead in the Digital Journalist. Anyway, it said when more photographers are streaming video capture and grabbing stills from it there won't be an opportunity to shoot portrait anymore, and the format will fade away and die.
When Olympus first launched the 4/3 system they made a pretty big deal about the aspect ratio being more suitable for portrait than all the other 2/3 cameras...
 
I don't think that the portrait style will die - fashions come and go in photography as in all things, but nothing stops anyone cropping a horizontal frame to create a vertical portrait in post-production. I have done it many times myself (Cos, although I like to do my composition in camera, with two small children its sometimes better to shoot first and compose later!). Nowadays most contemporary digital cameras are of such resolution that the files the produce can withstand cropping in such a way and retain still look acceptable. For those of us that still love to use film cameras, well, we have a choice, personally though, and not to undermine what I have just said, I prefer 6x6 from my blad for portaits 🙂
 
I don't see that the format of a computer screen dictates which format a photographer chooses to shoot in, unless the computer screen is the final intended output for the image, and the image must fill the frame. In this thread is the assumption that computer monitors are what everyone is looking at photographs on, which just isn't the case. Books, galleries, magazines, newspapers etc. all haven't any issues exhibiting portrait-format. How the image is to be finally used is what dictates the format, and even then, cropping is always an option.

Computer screens rarely do an original image justice anyway. I kind of see online images as a cheap way to show people what you have done, but it doesn't show how well you have done it.

And a vertical photograph can indeed be viewed on widescreen monitor, it just doesn't fill the screen from edge to edge, which I don't see as a problem. What's wrong with negative space around the image as in viewing a print on the wall? As long as you are sitting in front of your screen and not more than a couple feet away, an image that is 900 or so pixels by 700 or so pixels is easily viewable. And anyway, monitors have never been portrait format - they've been 4:3 and now they're 16:9.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom