One photo, three possibilities . . .

When I was conducting online photo classes, one of the assignments I gave my students was called "squarification."

The objective was to encourage them to look at their images and/or subject matter to see if it could look good not only full-frame, but also as a square. A square image often has a completely different -- and appealing -- effect.

Here's what I mean:

The top photo show you my original composition of colorful graffiti I found on the side of a railroad car.

I liked the bit of red paint up toward the top that leads our eye down into the rest of the picture.

And then I began experimenting with a square format, as you see in the middle picture. Again we've got the red at the top. But we also have blue lines over at the left that lead our eye down to the bottom third of the square photo, where there's a patch of cool-looking rust.

And finally, in the third photo, I return to the top part of the picture and concentrate solely on that red section.

In this version we have the red line beginning upper left, then continuing diagonally down into the middle of the picture, where it makes an abrupt turn to our left before heading south again.

And, as a bonus, we have the blue lines on the left that also encourage our eye to move down to the bottom of the frame.

There you have it. One photo, three different possibilities. Ta da!

All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you for your understanding and kindness.

Squarification . . .

This image (called "Dotted Squares") was created by using some of my hand-painted monoprints and then juicing them up a bit in the computer. I like the warm tones and the repeating square thingies (made by using the rectangular end of a makeup sponge).

I usually also see if the image can be turned into a square. Sometimes a square is better, sometimes it's just different, and sometimes it doesn't work at all.

In this case, I like the square version better, but it doesn't really matter. I'm fond of my whole concept and this gives me two images to upload to Fine Art America, not just one.

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Squarification . . .

As I begin looking through and processing my images from Japan, I'm looking at them wondering how they would look squarified. Why? Because sometimes turning an image into a square changes the entire feel of a scene.

In these first two examples, you see my original photo and then the cropped, square version. In the first, I get a feeling of how immense and dense the foliage is in the Imperial Palace Gardens, making the group of tourists look rather small and insignificant.

By turning the photo into a square, I've now played down the immensity of the gardens and have made the tourists and their umbrellas a more important element in the frame.

#1 = big gardens, little people. #2 = people in a park.

Which one is better? Neither, really. It all depends on the feeling we wish to convey.

In the second pair of photos, you can see my original scene, the way I saw the trees in the park. I focused on the leaves and let everything else fall away softly. Because the tree trunks are so bold, they stand out nicely even though they're out of focus. The overall feeling, though, is trees in a park.

In the second, cropped version, the feeling is different, isn't it? Now it's more about the leaves, with the tree trunks a bit more secondary.

#1 = trees in a park. #2 = colorful leaves on trees in a park. The emphasis decidedly changes.

Am I recommending we all begin squarifying our photos? Of course not. I'm just suggesting we begin looking at our photos in a slightly different manner, noticing how the impact of a photograph, the meaning in a photograph, changes with the format.

So the next time you look at your pictures, just for the heck of it, try cropping them into square versions and see how the emphasis, the entire feeling of a photograph, can change in the blink of an eye.

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Squarification

Sometimes when I create my photomontages, I'll create two different versions, one rectangular and one square. And it's interesting to see the different feel between the two. Sometimes I like one version, sometimes the other, but it's always good for me to create them both, just to have a comparison.

I'll often begin these pieces and then walk away from them for a week, a month, a year, to revisit them later with new eyes. That's what happened here. I knew I had SOMEthing, but wasn't sure what, when a couple of months ago I began working on this. It all came together yesterday.

This photomontage was made from a variety of photographs, including typewriting on onionskin paper, peeling paint, a scratch on the side of a train car, a bit of red paper, part of a wall in Mexico, an adding machine tape, etc. 

This "squarification" concept works well in "normal" photography as well. Let's say you have a landscape and you've composed your photo so that the barn is more toward the left side of the horizontal frame. What if you were to crop away some of the right-hand side? You may find that now your barn looks pretty prominent; all of our attention goes to the barn rather than wandering around a larger frame. Sometimes this is good, sometimes not, but the key thing is to THINK about the possibility of squaring your frame when you're taking the photograph.

Try it. Take the perfect landscape shot. Then think, "what if this were a square format?" Recompose your photo and take it again.

And think about photographs you've already taken. What if, on a cold and rainy day, you were to rummage around in your computer, looking for images that might benefit from being presented in a square format? You might be surprised (pleasantly) at what you find.

©Carol Leigh, who squarifies more often than not . . .

Urban Squarification

Quite often I find that a rectangular image I've created looks good or even better as a square, and it's become my regular practice to examine each image I take to see if "squarifying" it is a viable alternative. Here you can see my original image, which incorporates light and shadow and color on skyscrapers, and how squarifying it creates two different/additional images. You may wish to keep this squarification concept in mind as you peruse your own images ... you may be pleasantly surprised! ©Carol Leigh