The reading will be more comfortable and quicker. It will make the shot easier and your viewer will appreciate it. If for some reason you are setting up a picture to take text then consider the portrait view. It may be better to use landscape with text if you want to include other things in the image. This can reduce the impact of the rest of the picture. Reducing the impact of text in an image is often a good idea as the eye is drawn to it. The importance of reading the text is minimised. The impact may be more in the other elements of the scene. For example, the name of a café may not be as significant as the run down and decaying feel of the old building and its name sign. Where the impact of text is stronger than its meaning then you can span the image for effect. Using landscape format may be a good idea if the meaning of the text is unimportant. If you must use that page orientation with text find ways to keep the text from going across the page. Landscape view will hinder reading if the text spans the page. It is easy to forget that very wide pages make reading difficult. If you are taking a picture with words in it think about your page orientation. Page orientation is a composition and presentation decision. How a picture will be used is a reason to frame a picture that way. Taking the picture with that page orientation better suites the situation than cropping afterwards. A long thin alcove in a wall suits a long thin picture format. Often a picture purchase is made to fit in a place which needs that format. It might also be about the way the picture is to be used. The need for upright formats is not just about what is in the picture. Page orientation is also about presentation You will need to shoot a number of different shots to get the feel for it. An upright page orientation helps the picture sides to hold in the viewer’s eye to the portrait subject.Įxercise: Try a traditional portrait format and see if you think the portrait orientation is more effective. The taller, thinner format helps the person pictured to engage with the viewer. In portraits there is often no movement or implied movement.

The landscape view provides space to move into. We would normally give a wide orientation to something that is moving. The portrait format is ready made for capturing the upright nature of the natural portrait.

It is important to make page orientation comfortable for the eye. Portraiture can easily be done in landscape format but has an odd feel. Consider every one as carefully, or more carefully, than your normal landscape shots. You just have to practice the framing.Įxercise: Go out for a day. The same framing opportunities arise in portrait as do in landscape. Page orientation drives the framing decision. If you take the shot in portrait from the start it lets you get close to the shot and fill the frame. This is wasting a compositional opportunity and image space. Despite how natural it is, many people take the picture in landscape, then crop the shot afterwards. If your subject is long and upright then it is pretty natural to take it in an upright framing. So here are a few ideas to keep you thinking… Subject orientation So what makes you turn your camera sideways and change the page orientation to take a portrait shot? There could be a number of good reasons. It is a natural position since the shutter release is in a naturally comfortable position.

It is probably true to say that the starter SLR- photog generally uses landscape orientation. When taking a picture the photographer needs to consider orientation as part of the composition decision. Normally the aspect ratio is considered only for landscape view – a ratio is not given for portrait view. The current norm is for SLR video formats to be the same 4:3 of the still images. Wider screens on televisions in recent years has introduced a new format of 16:9 although this is not seen as a common format for still photographs. This means four units along the long axis. In most SLR formats the aspect ratio is 4 to 3 (or 4:3 as it is written). In most cases we also consider the aspect ratio. The use of the term ‘page orientation’ refers to either horizontal (landscape) or upright (portrait). The picture above is in the portrait view – the longest side is upright. Landscape orientation is where a page or picture has the longest side on the horizontal. but there are other reasons to pick a particular format There are a many reasons to choose portrait view Sometimes page orientation is dictated by subject.

Portrait vs landscape