For personal viewing, does it make sense to capture in portrait aspect any more?

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skyglider
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For personal viewing, does it make sense to capture in portrait aspect any more?
3 months ago

In the days of film, viewing of the captured images were via prints or slides. Prints were the dominant viewing media and they can be viewed in landscape or portrait mode by simply rotating the print.

Then in the early days of digital, the mega pixels were limited so it made sense to rotate the camera 90 degrees and capture in portrait mode for optimum resolution.

Now when almost all cameras are 12 mega pixels or greater, does it make sense to rotate the camera 90 degrees and shoot in portrait mode anymore? (commercial reasons excluded)

Although I've been shooting in portrait mode now and then up to now, it occurred to me that maybe I should try to shoot in landscape mode as long as I can step back far enough to get the vertical height required in a landscape frame. Reasons being:

  1. Current computer screens and HDTV set screens are in the 16:9 and 16:10 aspect now. It's a lot less pleasing to view images in portrait aspect on those wide screens.
  2. If portrait aspect is desired for prints, there's more than enough pixels for cropping the portrait aspect out of a landscape capture and still retain optimum resolution for the prints.

I think I'll only capture images in landscape mode from now on if possible, and crop any portrait aspects for prints in post processing. This will allow the most pleasing viewing on computer and HDTV screens.

Curious to hear what you take on this is,
Sky

Edited 3 months ago by skyglider
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