On Tuesday, I was saying it felt like it should be Friday already. Now that it’s Friday1, I wonder where the week has gone. I was talking to my neighbors about that this evening and we agreed that the inability to keep steady time is probably a symptom of getting older. Every measure of time gets shorter and we look forward to the future less and less.

Anyway, happy Friday! I’ve got some photos for you, and thanks to a really great suggestion from last week, I’m going to include JPG exports of the raw images so you can see where we started from.

Photos

On the face of things, there isn’t much of a common thread between these three photos. They were taken at different times of day, in different locations, and were all edited completely differently. The one thing they all share is that they’re not framed using a common photographic aspect ratio.

The first and last ones are 16:9, which you may recognize as a pretty common aspect ratio generally these days. It’s the aspect ratio that most televisions and computer monitors use. But it’s still not a particularly common aspect ratio in photography, and you’re not likely to find a frame off the shelf that fits a 16:9 photo. The second photo is 2:1, which is even narrower than 16:9! I don’t have an easy example for this one because it’s just not all that commonly used at all.

I don’t typically crop my images in these ratios. I’m fairly certain this is the first time I’ve ever finished an image in a 2:1 format. There’s no reason not to. These photos will likely never be printed out unless I put them on my print site so it really doesn’t matter if it’s inconvenient to find a frame. I don’t plan on putting them on Instagram because it’s a time sinkhole of a social network2. And even if I did, I’d just plop them on a white background that turns them into a 4:3 image the way I’ve been doing for the last couple of years on there.

So why do I let myself be ruled by the tyranny of conventional cropping ratios? Because I usually like how they look! My camera spits out a 3:2 image, which is still a much taller, narrower frame than a 4:3 or a 7:5. I really like my 3:2s most of the time. It makes sense. That’s how I composed in-camera, so unless I made a mental note that I wanted to crop later, I probably liked the way it looked while I was shooting it.

It took me until about four years ago to even think about making cropping a regular part of my workflow. I never really thought about how the framing of an image might help tell the story or just focus the subject better. I had some folks encourage me to start experimenting with different crops in the summer of 2020 and have been making sure I challenge my original framing on photos ever since then.

Part of the reason I struggled so much with this batch of photos, other than the color editing from last week, was that so many of them didn’t look right in the normal crop ratios. When I freed the images from those literal constraints and looked for framing more suitable for them, I was finally able to get them to a place where I was happy with them.

As promised, the raw images:

I loved the contrast between the clouds’ shadows and the broken sunlight in these photos. We were very lucky to get so many clouds while we were there. You run the risk of a bright, blue, boring sky in the desert, and while it seems counterintuitive, there is nothing worse than a sky with no clouds in landscape photography.

Links

Your phone is why you don’t feel sexy by Catherine Shannon

On a lighter note, aren’t we all so sick of looking stuff up? You know what, maybe I go to a restaurant and it’s bad. Maybe I don’t know what’s good on the menu before I get there. Maybe I throw caution to the wind and put something in the dishwasher without googling if it’s dishwasher safe. Maybe I get a flip phone and get comfortable saying, “I don’t know.” While you’re looking down at Google Maps, the love of your life is walking past you on the street. To feel sexy, we need risk and spontaneity. Our phones kill both.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about getting a flip phone in the last few years. I like the idea of just going back to calls and texts. I like the idea just enough to never actually follow through on it.

What really got me in this article was the bit about being tired of looking stuff up. I loathe having to look up a menu before I go somewhere. My husband loves to look up the menu and the reviews and the photos and everything about a place. I don’t know if it’s being sick of looking stuff up or just laziness, but I’m willing to accept a subpar dining experience if it means I don’t have to spend ten minutes talking about whether someone in March of 2022 thought the service was bad.

‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Pulls Audiences Back In by Sonny Bunch, Peter Superman, Alyssa Rosenberg

This one is a podcast! I’ve never shared a podcast before. I’m very uncritical about the media I watch naturally. I’ve watched the Twilight movies upwards of five times. All that to say that I’ve learned a lot from listening to this podcast. I started this episode a couple of days ago while I already had this newsletter planned out and was really stoked to hear this from :

I mean, I would add one more thing, which is that I think it’s actually a good thing for people to kind of be forced to watch things in a range of aspect ratios. I mean, there’s something interesting—kind of funny—about accepting the tyranny of a particular type of ratio as, you know, kind of a determining factor in the way that art is made.

And I think most people don’t think necessarily think about the shape of the image that they’re viewing, but it matters a lot in terms of, sort of, the scope of the image that you’re presenting, or the focus of the image that you’re presenting. And getting people used to the idea that film can come in a lot of different, you know, not a lot, but at least multiple shapes and sizes, I think is a—you know—sort of a useful thing in terms of encouraging people to think about the possibilities of the medium expansively.

Aspect ratios! We have a theme today! This quote came in the context of whether we should watch old television shows in the 4:3 ratio with black bars on the side or whether it should be zoomed in to a 16:9 or a secret third option: give viewers a choice. I prefer 4:3 because that’s how it was originally shot and that’s the version that contains all of the information I’m supposed to have as a viewer. The black bars don’t bother me at all.

Inside the Secret Negotiations to Free Evan Gershkovich by Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, Bojan Pancevski and Arjuna Viswanatha

I am going to be honest: I haven’t finished this one yet. It’s a very long piece and it’s extremely good and I want to make sure I give it the time it deserves, but I also wanted to share this article because everyone should read everything that went into getting these folks out of prison and back home. It’s a gift link, so you should be able to read it even without a WSJ subscription.

There’s a lot to discuss in here. Is it really a good idea to free murderers and arms dealers in exchange for freeing political prisoners? Doesn’t that just incentivize Russia to keep kidnapping innocent people as bargaining chips? Moral hazard isn’t something we can safely ignore in these situations. On the other hand, do we have a duty to our fellow citizens to do everything we can to bring them home when they’ve been illegally detained for no legitimate cause?

Either way, I’m thrilled to see so many people coming home and hope they’re able to settle into some kind of new normal now that they’re back.