FZ30 Which aspect ratio?

I am going to Kenya soon on a holiday and intend taking many hundreds of photos. I hope I get at least one National Geographic moment!

I have always set my camera on 4:3 ratio and not thought much about it, until recently when I twigged that all my photos from the memory card, developed at the camera shop, have been getting cropped top and bottom. Very frustrating. Resizing them 6"x4" on my computer gives them a stretched look.

Does 3:2 have any problems, eg with the flash (internal and external), or with wide angle or telephoto conversion lenses?
Is it a good choice for developing photos straight from the memory card?

I love PP and I do intend doing a lot of PP after my holiday with my favourite shots, and my enlargements but not with all my pictures. It would take forever.
Thanks Jane

janep said:

I am going to Kenya soon on a holiday and intend taking many
hundreds of photos. I hope I get at least one National Geographic
moment!
I have always set my camera on 4:3 ratio and not thought much about
it, until recently when I twigged that all my photos from the
memory card, developed at the camera shop, have been getting
cropped top and bottom. Very frustrating. Resizing them 6"x4" on
my computer gives them a stretched look.

Click to expand...

Naturally! ;-)

janep said:

Does 3:2 have any problems, eg with the flash (internal and
external), or with wide angle or telephoto conversion lenses?
Is it a good choice for developing photos straight from the memory
card?

Click to expand...

Your flash coverage will be as good/bad as it was with 4:3 ratio. (This is also true of any add-on lens adapters) You'll simply be cropping off the upper and lower bands of the old 4:3 "crop" to deliver the 3:2 crop from the camera.

janep said:

I love PP and I do intend doing a lot of PP after my holiday with
my favourite shots, and my enlargements but not with all my
pictures. It would take forever.
Thanks Jane

Click to expand...

As long as you're playing around with different ratios, you might try the 16:9 ratio, which is used by the LX series, but is also a fun framing aspect ratio, sort of like a panorama, but not quite. It'll teach you some things about composition. Yes, you'd have to print such things specially, but hey, it's still fun to try.

--
Just cruisin' ...



EffZeeOneVeeTwo, EffZeeThirty, Tizzy (who captured the Eagle)

I always use a 3:2 ratio so that a full-sized photo fits nicely without cropping whenever I want to actually print something on a photo printer (I have two dye-sub photo printers, one that prints 6"x4" and one that prints A4 size). There's no problem with conversion lenses because the ratio only relates to how the image is recorded on the sensor and not the lens. I think 3:2 is also much closer to 35mm film size while 4:3 is more like a traditional, non-widescreen,TV size. If you're never printing anything and only posting on the Internet, for example, then 4:3 will give you a little more resolution.

Jack

If possible, I would shoot in 4:3 all the time and crop later. It's easy to set a certain aspect ratio in Photoshop's crop tool; I assume that other programs will allow that.

With 4:3, you areu using all of the CCD. Why take a chance? Maybe tape some guidemarks on your LCD to help in composing, but take all the CCD wants to give you. I recently shot some 16:9s, and wished that I had just settled for post-cropping.
If you shoot RAW, the image will be 4:3 no matter what you set the camera at.
Dan Daniel

Thanks for your replies. You have given me much to think about.

For printing direct from my memory card I think 3:2 ratio sounds a very good idea.

For PP I think I can stick to 4:3. I tried the crop tool on Photoshop. Fantastic, thanks for the tip. I have saved a preset 6"x4" at 300dpi, which will make it much quicker in the future for editing. The other thing I need to do is not to frame my photo compositions so tightly in the viewfinder ( I don't use the LCD screen). I need to leave a space top and bottom in my pictures for future cropping.
Thanks again for the advice.
Jane