Image shapes - Square, Portrait and Landscape
To get the most of any photo shoot, it’s important to talk to your photographer first. We’ll explore some of things it’s worth discussing from time to time.
This time, I want to kick off about orientation, and why that’s so important…
It’s really about understanding what you want to use your images for. For example, if you want a family portrait to sit over your mantle piece you are more probably going to need landscape orientation, rather than portrait.
If you need photographs for your business, you need to be a little more specific - will it be for your website, a brochure, social media etc. If you know the dimensions for website images that’s better still. Whilst I like to give plenty of choice, I always prefer to ensure I’ve delivered enough to suit the client’s needs.
To explain a little more - my digital SLR camera takes a rectangular (landscape) image with a 3:2 ratio.
Modern websites often use square images or letterbox shape for page headers. This translates to a large portion of the image being cropped and not used. I need to take that into account when framing and taking the shots.
I can supply the images in any size and can crop to the perfect shape for you. But the end result is always better we’ve set up correctly before the shoot.
I’ve labelled each of the images in this post with the ratio, to illustrate the importance of a good starting point.