1. Today feels like Monday. We must do something about a major, single-day holiday at mid-week.

2. Just me, or does anyone else ever have a terrible time deciding whether a photo looks better in the original aspect ratio or with a square crop? (Esp. trying to figure out in Sunlit?)

@smokey monday Monday MONDAY!

The most Mondayest of Thursdays.

@smokey Hi Smokey, I find that square can look good, as long as you keep all the aspects of the photo that you feel it needs. Sometimes I’ve found that the when cropping a shot freeform, it naturally becomes a square and I just go with it. Other times, I’m cropping to a square form for the challenge I’m entering, and I feel that part of the overall effect is lost; but the square crop is a stipulation of the challenge, so I just have to go with it.

@JezB Hi Jez, thanks for your wisdom! I kind of feel like the “rise” of the square crop is in part because it gives us “snappers” (as opposed to photographers who compose the shot, etc.) a chance to make a decent-looking photo from something that has something “wrong” on one edge or the other 😂 (Also because it allows room for app UI below the photo on a portrait phone display 😂) Like when I’m chasing butterflies—I don’t always have the chance to compose a shot well before it flies off, so a square crop can eliminate a stray tomato cage or whatever.

On the other hand, like you, I’ve definitely felt square has made something worse; for instance, the cowbird convention is very cramped in the square crop and much better in the original landscape. And in the set I’m fretting over, there’s a shot with a butterfly, wings extended, that I think people will think looks lovely in the square crop, but which I know looks better in the original landscape, where the wings “extend” into that horizontal dimension…

My current dilemma is that I have a set of photos, some landscape, some portrait, where one can’t be square cropped, one might benefit from a square crop, a few could go either way, and one or two are OK but, to me, worse photos when cropped square. Maybe the simpler solution is for me to figure out the “align-and-resize” CSS/JavaScript in modern WordPress themes and backport it to my old one 😂

@bix I can see the benefit of that! (Part of my problem with this particular set is that I have things in multiple orientations, which always look strange together to me.)

@smokey 1. yesterday we had the same discussion: wednesday as a day off… every week… would be cool :-)

1. like to do photographs but I dont like the square

@derandre Ha, that sure would be cool!

I definitely didn’t like square when it first (re)appeared this century, although as I mentioned in my reply to Jez above, I’ve come around to it some as it often lets me salvage something from “composed”-on-the-fly shots.

(You have to have each Markdown list item start a line, apparently!)