14-7-7

Walker Pickering has a blog that I've followed for a while. He also has a Tumblr account, and his own photography site.  I think he's immensely talented. The images are rife with underlying narratives, emotion, intriguing juxtapositions of the normal and the absurd. There's an architectural element to them where he distorts natural perspectives and presumed horizon lines by tilting images so that vanishing points are upset. The buildings often look normal and unnatural simultaneously, it's more noticeable when you scroll through one of his sites and the buildings, for just a second, seem to fall over, or get wider, or something.

The other thing he does is shoot in square format. I don't know if he's using a camera that automatically crops to that shape or if he's just cropping to it. His images don't follow the hard, fast rule of being square but better than half of them are. I guess it's hip, or has been made so by Instagram and others. I looked for a digital camera of note that shoots natively in the square, I couldn't find one that was "good" unless you wanted to spend $17500 on a digital back that fits on your Hasselblad camera, Hasselblad camera not included. It's still not square but it's closer to it.

I've recently acquired a Rolleiflex film camera that shoots 6X6 negatives. It's square, and I like using it if only because it makes you look at things differently again, since anyone who shoots a lot of photographs already looks at things differently. My Fuji X100s has a square format option, but I feel like I'm wasting pixels, and I could always crop to square but as someone who composes in camera and rarely ever crops an image (I don't think I've cropped an image on this site since before January 1, 2013, and very rarely if ever before that) until today.

When I took this picture there was a bunch of stuff in the top right that I didn't want and if I panned down I didn't have the figures in the field where I wanted them. So I shot the left side of the frame the way I wanted it and cropped it to square.

Is square the new black? Is it cheating? Have I offended the 36X24mm gods? I don't know. I'm going to shoot a week of 120 Rolleiflex film for this site soon. It will be a good test. And then I'll irrationally long for Nikon to make a 6X6 sensor camera for under $2000 with a Rolleiflex equivalent 80mm fixed prime lens.

Anyway, there it is, a cropped photo and a non landscape format photo, both in the same day. Huh.