Why is that Dick, like many others, prefers landscape photos to portraits? History, physiology and sheer personal preference all play their part
Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He has an aspect ratio of roughly 4.6:1, when standing and viewed from the front at least. Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk
I don’t know whether it’s just me becoming a grouchy old man, but TV adverts seem to have become more imbecilic over the past year or two. One that particularly saddens me is when that girl sees someone using a Samsung Flip phone and is so overcome with consumer-lust that she runs away to join “the flip side”.
Editor-in-chief Tim recently asked as a “masthead question” whether we editors were tempted by such bendy phones and what would make us buy one, to which I replied: “The Galaxy Z Fold tempts me for use as a camera, and what would make me buy one is a price reduction of exactly one order of magnitude.”
The reason I fancied the Fold (price apart) is simply that it alters the screen’s aspect ratio from portrait to almost square. The shift from desktop PCs to laptops barely affected the aspect ratio via which we absorb our digital content, which remained mildly landscape at around 4:3 (also roughly the shape of cinema and TV screens in olden times). Cinema went widescreen from the 1960s but it took till the early 2000s for laptops and TVs to follow suit with 16:9 or 16:10. Landscape but more so.
That all changed at a stroke when the smartphone took over the world, with its thin upright portrait format around twice as high as wide. (And before you say it, I do know you can turn a phone on its side, but people only do that to watch movies, and the user interface is designed for portrait.) Does this matter? Well, yes, to me it does, but I only barely understand why it is that I prefer landscape. Is the real world portrait or landscape? That depends on where you live. The Highlands of Scotland are awesomely landscape, but where I live in central London is very much portrait; streets lined with buildings that obscure any horizon, some so tall you have to lean back to view them.
The very terms themselves evolved in the era of classic oil painting, when rich folk who could afford it had one done sprawled with dogs and dead pheasants at their rolling country estate, and one upright in a chair in the town house. Portrait puts you at the centre of attention, as millions of selfie-sticks will testify. As a keen photographer I’m sensitive to the effects of field–of-view on composition, of different focal lengths and of film formats (the r
