Photographic numerology – what is the best ratio aspect for an image

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Figure 1 - Early English Pence of Aethelred the Unready. The reverse bears a cross which made it convenient to divide the coin in halfpence or quarther pence referred to as farthings. Image from Arichis uploaded to the Wikipedia and placed in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Early English Pence of Aethelred the Unready*. The reverse bears a cross which made it convenient to divide the coin in halfpence or quarther pence referred to as farthings. Image from Arichis uploaded to the Wikipedia and placed in the public domain.

The other day I had gone out to take photographs in New York City and I found myself snapping away merrily – ’tis the season for merry!  When I got home, I was curious how many photos I had taken and found that the number was 36.  One roll, I thought to myself.  In the good old days(?) 35 mm roll film used to come in 24 exposure and 36 exposure rolls.  This is like a base twelve system of some sort and smacks of either a Babylonian (twelve sixty minute hours to the half day (sunrise to sunset) or old English (12 inches to the foot, 36 inches to the yard, twelve pence to the shilling, and twenty shillings or 240 pence to the pound) conspiracy.  By the way at 36 mm x 26mm, 35 mm film wasn’t even 35 mm, which is another mystery.

Hmm, it’s all very strange and, of course, the reason that film is the way it is results from some historical vagaries.  But it is not the only numerological oddity in photography.  Why is the favorite aspect ratio today 6 x 4? 6/4 = 1.67.  What about full frame 35 mm that’s 36/26 =  1.38.  Think about the common paper sizes from when 35 mm film ruled. 8 x 10 gives us 1.25 as does 16 x 20.  11 x 14 gives us 1.27.  All of these are very similar and almost compatible with 35 mm film, just a wee bit of cropping. But 5 x 7 gives us 1.4.

There is however, something really interesting about all of this.  I try to standardize my aspect ration and only rarely go to a random freehand aspect ratio.  But I typically find that 8 x 10 doesn’t feel quite right, nor does 5 x 7.  What’s magical about 6 x 4?

The answer is, perhaps obvious.  1.67 is very close to the golden proportion or 1.6180339887.   We have discussed this before.  This proportion, as sides of a rectangle, was discovered by the ancient Greeks to be the most aesthetically pleasing.  It often occurs in nature and the Greeks and later artists used and use it widely, for instance in defining the proportions of the Parthenon.   It is also manifest in the approximation referred to as the Golden Rule of Thirds, which we have also discussed.  All of this, is food for thought on a rather cold day.  If it gets colder, I might just look into the details of the roll film sizes.

*Æthelred the Unready was king of England (978–1013 and 1014–1016).  Unready” is a mistranslation of Old English unræd (meaning bad-counsel)—a twist on his name “Æthelred”, meaning noble-counsel. A better translation would be ill-advised.

Nemo on Wheaties

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Figure 1 - Domique Martinez's Nemo on Wheaties, Tampa, FL, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Domique Martinez’s Nemo on Wheaties, Tampa, FL, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

I wanted to share one more photograph from my recent trip to Tampa, Florida. This (see Figure 1) is a photograph of Dominique Martinez’s marvelous sculpture “Nemo on Wheaties.”  Nemo in this case is an angler fish – in fact a rather scary looking angler fish.  He captures the sunlight in many ways, but most particularly in his shiney convex eyes that invariably place a diminutive photographer in the picture.

What is probably most appealing to me about Nemo on Wheaties is that he reminds me of a book that I used to read to my son when he was small entitled Big Al.  Big Al was the ugliest fish in the sea, and as a result none of the other fish wanted to associate with him.  But in the end Big Al saved the day by rescuing all the other fish from become dinner. I loved Big Al.

Love at the barricades

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I was really struck and haunted this week by a moving image by Viktor Drachev from AFP/Getty Images showing a young couple in front of the barricades in Kiev, Ukraine.  The image evokes the story of Eponine and Marius in Victor Hugo Les Miserables, or more specifically the musical by that name.  I really think that the image speaks for itself on so many levels.  It could just as easily be from the 1848 Paris Insurrection as  today’s Ukrainian Protests.  And for that it is a highly successful photograph.

A hotel mirror

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Figure 1 - Dusk in my hotel mirror, Tampa Bay, FL. (c) DE Wolf 2013

Figure 1 – Dusk in my hotel mirror, Tampa Bay, FL. (c) DE Wolf 2013

At dusk today I was working on my laptop in my hotel bedroom.  The lights were turned off since I had been enjoying the pastels of the waning day. When I looked up the last light was shining in the huge silver framed mirror above the desk.  It acted as a perfect frame of the sheer curtains and the sky outside the window.

It seemed the perfect opportunity for a photograph; so I grabbed my camera and was dismayed to see just how low the light was.  I set the camera for ISO 6400 and aperture priority.  Even so  the exposure with my EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM was 1/13th of a second at f/5.0 working at 44 mm.  I had heard that you can do this handheld with an IS lens, but I had never tried it before.  So it represented a real test of the IS system.  The result, which I deem a success,  is shown in Figure 1.

In my mind it was a black and white from the start.  You can see the graininess from the ISO 6400.  But for an old Tri X Pan guy like me this is actually pleasing. I gave it a slight cold tone to the mid range and warm yellow to the highlights.  It is rare that I cold tone, but in this case I like the results.

Tampa Bay winter sunrise

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Figure 1 - Tampa Bay Sunrise. December 14, 2013,. (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Tampa Bay Sunrise. December 14, 2013,. (c) DE Wolf 2013.

As a New Englander I always find it strange to travel to some warm place in winter.  Provided that you stay in the Northern hemisphere there seems to be something peculiar going on.  It’s a lot warmer, but just as dark.  The sun still hangs relatively low in the sky and there is still a foreboding sense of winter.

This week I found myself… Wait that’s a silly way to put it, I got on an airplane and arrived in Tampa.  While my wife dealt with the first big snow of winter 2013/14, I was in sunshine.  This btw did not make me popular with my wife.  Also the city of Tampa found it necessary to spray some kind of artificial snow all over the place.  Whatever it was didn’t fool me and burned my eyes.

Still these are the shortest days of the year – even in Florida.  I offer up Figure 1 we shows the winter sun trying to rise over Tampa Bay shrouded in clouds.  This was a tough picture to work up and, I think, not totally successful.  Still Ibelieve that it conveys the feeling of the morning.  The sun cracks both the horizon and the clouds.  Look closely an you will see a blow-up Santa leaning over the balcony on the building in the foreground.

Adding dramatic effect to landscapes with fog

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Figure 1 - The Grand Canyon filled with fog on November 29, 2013 by Erin Whitaker via the US NPS and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – The Grand Canyon filled with fog on November 29, 2013 by Erin Whitaker via the US NPS and in the public domain.

A lot of times a mundane or hackneyed landscape can be turned into a dramatic one with the addition of a little fog.  This week in pictures brought two absolutely stunning  examples.  The first comes from the London Metropolitan police via Reuters and shows the skyscrapers of London’s Canary Wharf district dramatically climbing above a fog enshrounded city on December 11, 2013. The second is taken on November 29, 2013 by Erin Whitaker via the United States National Park Service and shows the rare event due to a thermal inversion of a fog filled Grand Canyon.  It is shown here as Figure 1.

Two everyday guys and a gorgeous blonde

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A couple of months ago I posted about the world’s first Pope Selfie.  I thought at the time that it was important to not only link to the AP photo of the pope taking the selfie, but also to be sure to include the selfie itself.  Hmm, does this raise a grammatical question?  Is it selfie itself or selffie yourself? Well I guess that it doesn’t really matter.

Now we have the gone viral image of Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt taking a selfie of herself with British Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama at Mandela’s memorial service on Tuesday.  Before getting further into it let me point out the obvious – two dudes hanging out with and perhaps fawning over a beautiful woman. Nothing new there.

What strikes me about both the Pope’s selfie and Prime Minister Thorning-Schmidt’s selfie is that what we usually see is not the selfie itself but someone else’s photograph of the selfie being taken.  The act of taking the image becomes more important than the image.  It is as if the whole emphasis had morphed away from the selfie to the act of selfiing(?).  This is a curious phenomenon.  We all have seen pictures of photographers taking pictures.  I’ve even done some myself and, I think, that they can be significant in telling the story of photography, as part of the history of photography.  But this, I believe, is something more.  I suspect that at some level what is going on is that we have celebrities that we admire or worse worship, and catching them in the act of taking a selfie is the same as saying that they are just like us – which, of course, they are.  And better still, they are just as narcissistic as we are, which in turn makes it all right to be self possessed.

Anyway I remain a fan of the self portrait.  Although, I think that Chuck Close takes it all a little far.  The selfie remains something fun.  There is a certain spontaneity about it and, yes, a lack of self-consciousness.  This is part of the allure of the cell phone explosion.  The more prolific these devices become the less and less we are bothered or taken aback by people snapping pictures.  And that means that what we call “modern times” will be quite candidly captured for posterity.

Forget beauty – tell me about price?

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Figure 1 - 1880 ferrotytpe by an unknown artist, portrait of Billy the Kid. From the wikimedia commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – 1880 ferrotytpe by an unknown artist, portrait Wof Billy the Kid. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

The was a recent posting on the Worldwide Eye Facebook Photography Users Group concerning the world’s most valuable photographs.  Here value is judged by the price collectors are willing and have paid for them.  The important caveat here is that the art and collectables market can be very fickle.

Still this sent me searching. and I was curious to discover that there are several not completely self consistent such lists. Start with Gizmodo, which is basically the list that I saw.  You might expect to see the likes of pioneers such as Julia Margaret Cameron but her photos fetch number in the mere hundreds of thousands of dollars.  I’m not rushing out to buy one tomorrow.  What about my all time favorite “Moonrise Hernandez, NM” by Ansel Adams.  That can go as high as $600,000 depending, and here’s the key point, upon when it was done.  But these are all lacking from the top ten list anyway.

What Gizmodo gives us as “the most expensive” (which, of course could change tomorrow) Andreas Gurstein’s 1999 image “Rhein II.”  Hmm and very interesting.  A list on Wikipedia is similar, but as mentioned not exactly the same.  Also it takes you beyond the top ten. Here you’ll find “Moonrise…” down at number 19.  What gets really fascinating is number ten a ferrotype from 1880 of “Billy the Kid” by an unknown artist (see Figure 1) which sold for $2.7 M. Going through the list is kind of interesting.  Are we Philistines for looking?  In the end there are many beautiful favorites.  So I’ll just end with Edward Steichen’s 1904 image “Moonlight The Pond” – so very soothing and beautiful.

Fantastic tunnel

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I was struck today by a great image by Phillipe Merle of the AFP showing a newly opened pedestrian’bicycle/bus tunnel in the city of Lyon, France.  It was unveiled on the eve of the city’s festival of lights. It is certainly going to be the envy of bicyclists everywhere.  There’s no rain, snow, or dodging cars and trucks.  So perfect, and I think as a photograph as well.  The projections(?) pf the city on the walled tunnel create a real fantasy land and the pastels are just gorgeous.  The perspective is also wonderful and are the concentric circles of light that seem to flash and move away from you. These create a marvelous sense of magic and movement.  I also find the geometric balance to be quite interesting. There are two sets of triangle forming lines above the tunnel that are just askew of one another. One flows into infinmity the other out of it.  This makes the balance of thirds seem to resonate back and forth.  Again creating motion.