I made this exposure back on the 12th of November at the church in East Washington, NH. The building was locked up tight. Thus I was outside with the camera help above my head and the lens pressed flat against the window pane. I framed the photo using the tilting LCD on the back of the camera. Ain’t modern technology wonderful!?
One might ask how I knew that this scene existed if I had to hold the camera above my head. Well, I initially peeked in the window by standing on tiptoes on a small ledge and steadying myself by holding on to the sill. The scene, lit by the late afternoon window light, was wonderful but I was not going to be able to photograph it while standing on that ledge.
When I got back to my digital darkroom (i.e. the computer) I cropped the frame (as I most often do) to a 4:5 ratio, converted it to black and white and “developed” the image to my liking (in this case with a very slight warm tone). Next, I went to make a print.
One of the features of Lightroom’s print module is that it remembers which print template you had used during your last session. In this case, it just so happened, that the template which popped up containing my 4:5 cropped image was set to make a square print.
I was immediately struck by the square-cropped version, a possibility that I had not considered. The image had much more impact cropped to 1:1 than at the 4:5 ratio I had originally selected. Being stubborn, I printed both versions and have spent some time living with them.
The square crop is, to my mind, definitely stronger. What say you?
Here are two more photos made using my camera obscura on the same afternoon. Since the ground glass of the camera obscura is square, these images are always in the 1:1 ratio. The two photos were made from essentially the same spot, at roughly ninety degrees from each other.
