Aspect ratios... Photographers would take that quite serious during the film era, it was considered
carefully before shooting. Now, with high resolution sensors giving us more than enough for cropping,
camera brands, as well as photographers themselves, seem to kind of ignore the aspect ratio of their
cameras. But I bet each of you at least once had been thinking "damn, I have to crop every shot
I've taken today..." And I've been there too. Actually, I'm experiencing that sh** from the very start right
until now. While some may argue that in digital photography aspect ratio doesn't matter that much,
others like me find it frustrating sometimes. Most of the popular cameras have a 3:2 ratio, but
if you look through your final edits you'll find out that most of them are more square than that
weirdly long rectangular RAW files... So why in the world we have that stupid inconvenient
aspect ratio in our cameras? We'll dig into that today!
Sup brothers and sisters, it's Aperture Value with a new History behind... episode
and in this one we'll look into the history of photographic aspect ratios, in particular
the 3:2 ratio that is the most common, but also the most insufficient and inconvenient.
No one would think of implementing something like that since the beginning of photography
until one German dude was hired by Ernst Leitz. Oskar Barnack was an engineer working for Leitz
at the beginning of 20th century. Devoted to improving the cinema cameras, he was dealing with
35mm film a lot since it was the main format for movie cameras at the time. Contrary to
relatively small cinema format, photography was mainly revolving around 8x10 film, which is
just huge if you haven't seen one. And being an enthusiast photographer himself, these huge camera
systems for landscapes were not an option for Mr. Barnack since he had asthma and, as you know, it's
kind of hard to hike in the mountains with a big ass 8x10 behind your back when you cannot breathe sh**.
So he decided to use the parts from a cinema rig to make his own little pocketable camera.
Now the point was to use an existing 35mm film and the rollers that would fit the film
perforation. The genius was in turning the strip 90 degrees and moved from vertical to horizontal
advancing. So before, the cinema camera would have the vertical strip of film inside that would
capture the lens projection. By the way 35mm refers to the overall width of
the strip, the actual area of projection is 18x24mm which is, you guessed it, has 4:3
aspect ratio, a common ratio for silent film era. Later, more aspect ratios were introduced
over time for various reasons, for example more narrow frames allowed to have more place to record
an audio track or to save space to get more frames out of the same length of film. On the opposite,
more square ratios were needed for anamorphic lenses to allow de-squeezing of the image.
In other words, you can get lost in cinema aspect ratios and I'm not gonna play Alice here, if you
want to explore it more deeply you can jump into the rabbit hole on your own. What matters to us
is that now Oskar had a horizontal film strip in his little camera and using the
cinema rig rollers gave precision, but to have a horizontal frame you have to advance them twice,
therefore instead of 18x24 now we have 24x36 millimeter frame. That is why probably the
early Leica M3 models were double stroke since one stroke gave you the vertical cine frame
and the second one would achieve 24x36. And now with this frame, that many photographers now call
full frame, we have an aspect ratio of 3:2 which, let's be honest, stinks. It is too wide
for horizontal shots and definitely too tall for vertical shots, and something tells me that Barnack
was well aware of this problem since the very first shot he made with his
new little camera called Ur-Leica already seemed to benefit a bit from a more square crop, I mean
look at that negative space, come on!.. But at the time his goal was not to achieve perfect ratio,
he just wanted a small and capable camera for himself and I definitely respect him for that;
just imagine that you want something so bad that you have to invent it yourself!
He didn't mind cropping and instead of trying to fix aspect ratio, he started to deal with the lens
problem which, as you can understand, none existed for the new system. And I don't blame him for
letting that 3:2 happen, given the circumstances: it was just easier to use existing cinema film
advances instead of inventing new ones. And don't you dare think that Barnack was the only one
coming up with a compact 35mm photo camera; around that time there were tons of others who tried to
do the same and actually there were quite a few of them that offered more adequate aspect ratios like
24x24, 32x24 and 30x40. But unfortunately, all of them remained just prototypes because of the
same reasons: the custom film advance systems made from scratch were too bulky and such big cameras
could not compete with those who had already refined cinema advances inside of them. The price
for it was the odd 3:2 ratio, but given the success and popularity of Leica cameras (and epic failure
of others who didn't follow Leica's recipe), closer to the beginning of World War II everyone kind of
settled with 24x36mm negatives. Fast forward to 40s and 50s, after the war and fall
of Germany many companies truly understood the need for small high quality compact cameras and
the potential market. And since nobody would care about the defeated post-war country
or its company, many of them would freely use Leica's engineering decisions and lens mount.
F***ing russians even went as far as copying completely everything, down to the smallest screws and then
slapping their communist brand on it, something like GSHSDR-32B. Nikon, however, was still trying to
push the proper 24x32 aspect ratio with their Nikon I rangefinder and it made sense: anyway you
would most likely crop your standard 24x36 frame, so with Nikon I you could get better composing and
get 40 instead of 36 exposures out of a standard roll. Unfortunately, the General Head Quarters a.k.a.
American folks in charge of the occupied postwar Japan, banned export of them to the US. The official
reason was that the automatic color slide cutting machines used in the US were set up to fit Leica's
24x36 format unlike Japanese machines that were using 24x32. But in reality, Kodak as a strong
monopolist of photographic film and formats at the time simply made sure that Nikon I never
makes it to the American market. And so Nikon first tried to solve the problem by increasing the frame
size from 24x32 to 24x34 without compromising the camera body structure too much. Later, they
would just give up and introduce a now legendary full-frame 24x36 Nikon S2. After that, basically,
there were no attempts to correct that stupid-ass 3:2 ratio... At the same time, true photographic film
and cameras for shooting it kept their much better aspect ratios with sizes like 6x4.5,
6x6, 6x7 and 8x10, most of them revolve around 4:3 ratio. With the emergence of a digital era, APS-C
and then full-frame sensors were developed with classic film 3:2 ratio in mind and yes, you heard
it right: first came APS-C sensor, so who's daddy now huh?.. About same time Mamiya introduced first digital
medium format camera and guess what, they also went with the original medium format film's 4:3 ratio.
All the medium format cameras today have a very nice and flexible 4:3 aspect ratio sensor. Another
bright spot in this aspect ratio mass is a Micro Four Thirds system. Developed together
by Olympus and Panasonic, it is the first camera imaging system developed from scratch.
Unlike others, it was intended to be digital and no surprise with freedom of choice they chose the
4:3 design for their sensors. Besides just the right size of the frame for better composition
and common print sizes, there's also a very important engineering aspect that applies to
medium format as well: more square sensor allows for much smaller and better performing lenses.
The image circle is used much more efficiently than the one of full-frame or APS-C. So here we
are now, what started as a heritage and a nod to a film photography era becomes a burden that
companies seem to just blindly keep on carrying... Although we have systems with 4:3 aspect ratios,
still the dominant APS-C and full-frame cameras are executing the same silly 3:2 format that
sometimes just pisses me off in post. We are paying for over-engineered lenses to produce an
image circle that we as photographers use only partially, but the price of the R&D and the useless
extra weight of glass is purely on us. While medium format does not offer currently what I want
and Micro Four Thirds being more and more video centric, not to say that it's kind of dying off
these days, as a photographer I have to go with 3:2 images. There are workarounds: I could
stretch the image, fill in the space with Photoshop or simply crop, but I cannot stop thinking how nice
it would be like to get the same sensor area but with different aspect ratio. Besides convenience,
we would probably get much better and smaller lenses for the APS-C and full frame systems... but
all that is never gonna happen and all we can do is just follow the stream. I know, I know, some may
argue that 3:2 is perfectly fine and there is no need to crop: just compose with what you have, but...
isn't that restraining? I honestly can't remember the last time I didn't have to crop the picture.
The world is not meant to be captured in that stupidly long rectangular box. Well, I hope this
episode got you educated a little bit, personally I was curious about it and the research was quite
fun, if you feel the same way hit the like button! These History behind... series are most interesting to
do, but if you ask me, they don't get the deserved views for some reason, so head over to the playlist
and check out more episodes like this, that will get you busy until our next time. See ya!