I thought this was probably the best image that I took last Monday at the Gang Rape Protest at Indian High Commission in London, or possibly one of the other two variations on it that are on My London Dairy. But I knew when I took it that is was less likely to be used than some of the other pictures, simply because it it portrait rather than landscape format.
Although portrait images often fit the printed page best, and actually fit better into this blog, the move towards viewing images on screen has meant that landscape format has really become a norm and images in portrait format are less viable. I even get the feeling that many picture editors would prefer landscape format and even if they want to use an image in portrait format would prefer to do their own savage cropping on a landscape original.
It’s all to do with screen formats. Almost all normal screens are landscape format, and the trend over recent years has been away from the normal to the wide-screen – such as the 16:9 format screen I’m writing this post on.
It’s projection of images that shows up portrait format worst, and the use of computer for this. Back in the old days of slide projection, vertical and horizontal formats could usually be projected at the same size – so long as the screen was square. Computer projectors now often use a 16:9 format, allowing a 35mm format landscape image to be be projected to occupy most – around 85% – of the screen, while a portrait image fills just over half of it – around 56%. The longer dimension of the landscape image will be around 1.5 times that of the portrait.
When I got home and uploaded my images to Demotix as usual, I couldn’t use what I thought was my best image as the lead image to the post – because Demotix call for that too be your best landscape image. It fits the web page design better.
More on taking pictures at this event in my next post.
________________________________________________________
My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
To order prints or reproduce images
________________________________________________________