Vertical Hold

Landscapes are great and all that, but looking through my most recent scans I've become aware that the majority of them were taken with the camera on its side, aka Portrait Mode. Prior to this, if you'd asked me which was more common, portrait or landscape, I'd have probably guessed the latter, so this came as something of a surprise. Perhaps I'm systemically Landscapist!

Of course our own vision is formatted in landscape, the periphery of our ‘stereo’ vision at its widest to the left and right. A handy format from the point of view of keeping an eye out for predators, or spotting tasty land-born prey that we might want to hunt.

So our superior 'landscape' calibrated vision is clearly optimal for spotting things that we might fancy photographing, but once we've focussed in on the 'thing' of interest, perhaps a vertical alignment of eyeballs might be the preferred option.

Sadly evolution hasn't equipped us with a rotating eyeball setup for day to day use, but thankfully most cameras come with this facility built in.

Interestingly, those of us who came to photography in the era of 35mm and modern Compact Cameras may well regard the landscape format as the universal 'standard' for photography, the vertical option being just that, an option. But truly old-fangled formats like Plate Cameras and Medium Format devices (and the more modern oddity of Half Frame 35mm Cameras) more often than not came with Portrait as the standard format, presumably because taking ‘Portraits’ of people would have been their primary commercial use at a time when cameras were very expensive.

So here's the proof, a selection of architectural and other man-made subjects, almost all of which were taken in portrait mode. I've included a landscape just to rest your eyes from the relentless uppy-downyness of it all.

📷 Balda Baldessa 1a

🎞 Kodak Kodacolor 100