Camera Store - The Hell of Retail

What’s “aspect ratio”?

Speaking of aspect ratio…

In a time of widescreen DVDs, sixteen-inch PowerBooks, and wide Plasma TVs, I would think that the simple concept (or even the term) of “aspect ratio” should not be alien to most people.

However, the fact that people often ask for prints (or other picture-making services) in an aspect ratio different from that of the original image, and then are surprised at the results, shows that very little thinking indeed goes on about the proportions of your rectangular photograph.

The most typical symptom of this lack of thinking happens when people get prints in the most common sizes, 4x6 and 5x7. Divide those lengths and you see that they are 1.5 and 1.4 times as long as they are wide, respectively. Most film pictures, and all digital pictures, are a little wider than that, proportionately (about 1.33). That means some of the area near the longer edges has to be cut off for the image to fit in the print. Either that, or the image must be “squashed” to fit the proportions (which often makes people look unnaturally fat or skinny, depending on the orientation), or the image must be printed with some empty space to either size. The default, though, is to crop the image, which allows you to get the subject to be as big and detailed as possible. It does mean some stuff gets left out.

Customers are always mad that we cropped out the wrong thing, despite our best efforts at guessing what’s most important in a picture. Worse yet, customers often complain about cropping as if they were unaware that cropping any differently from the way we did it would cause someone’s face to be half-cut-out. Sometimes they appear to miss the impossibility of having both THIS object AND that object in the image while still having the image fit the narrow aspect ratio.

The most extreme examples are customers who bring in old photographs which are square (about 3x3 in.), and ask to get 4x6s out of them. I scan the photographs and show them that you have to cut this or that out for the image to fit in the 4x6. “Oh, REALLY? Why?!” What do you MEAN, “why”? Well, because your picture is a friggin’ SQUARE, and you want some of it in a RECTANGLE, so you gotta cut SOMETHING out!

Once, a customer had a picture of herself by a sign, with another person on the other side of the sign. She wanted to crop the image so that it was her and the sign, with the other person cropped out, but in such a way you could still read all the sign. The sign was kinda diagonal in the picture, and as you slowly cropped more and more of it, you stopped being able to see the whole sign long before the other person was gone. It took a while for the customer to see that SOME of the other person – at least the arm – had to be in the picture if she wanted to be able to read the whole sign.

One way to bypass the whole “what do I crop out” dilemma is to print the whole image so that it fits in the print, plus some empty space which then gets cut out. In other words, instead of making the longer dimension of the image match the longer dimension of the print (with the shorter dimension thus being too big, necessitating cropping), we make the small dimension of the image match the small dimension of the print. (This is equivalent to, instead of cropping the image of a narrow/rectangular movie image so that it fits your TV screen – the “Full Screen” format – you can instead show the whole rectangle so you see the whole image, but then the image is smaller and you get a black band on top and on the bottom of the TV screen – the “WideScreen” format). Since this means the print becomes smaller than standard, it will not fit on albums and frames, and its subjects will be smaller than they need to be, so almost no one ever chooses that.





Occasionally, professional photographers want an 8x10 or 8x12 print, and then complain that something was cropped out. I again explain to them that the image they supplied was a different aspect ratio than the print they wanted, so something had to go. They then ask me what the hell I’m talking about, and then ask if it’s possible for me to not crop anything, which means they weren’t paying attention to what I was saying. I then tell them that they have to either ask us to print the whole image in the print, which will make the print smaller (equivalent to watching a widescreen movie on a TV), or to distort the image so that it fits the aspect ratio (equivalent to stretching the widescreen movie so that it fits the TV screen except then everyone looks really skinny). They then ask me why that is. Grrr.

Is it so hard to understand that it is NOT possible for a 4x6 image (which is 1.5 times as long as it is wide) to fit in an 8x10 frame (which is 1.25 times as long as it is wide) without some cropping, stretching, or adding empty space?

What’s worse, my regional manager then made fun of me at a meeting once for talking to customers in terms of aspect ratio, as if I were teaching them how to analytically solve coupled second-order differential equations or something. Dude, in, like, SEVENTH grade, when you learn the quadratic formula, one of the neatest things you could do with it is to find the Golden Ratio, the aspect ratio of a rectangle that, when a square is cut out of it, it leaves behind a rectangle of the same aspect ratio. This has all kinds of applications, like in ancient Greek architecture and stuff, and shows you that you can actually find out something relatively fundamental about geometry from complicated (for a 7th grader) algebra. Which is very cool. (Solving this problem is a fun way to pass the time if, say, you’re gonna be stuck in a line or airport terminal or in a car or plane for a while and happen to have a pen and a scrap of paper with you). Anyone who is not familiar with the concept of aspect ration had a bad 7th-grade math teacher. Or just does not try hard enough to make use of their widescreen TVs.

(Widescreen TVs, by the way, have the option of making images adjust in any of these ways that we do with pictures: stretching (everyone looks really fat because the image is wider), cropping (you only see the middle of the image – not a problem when you watch a widescreen movie, which is the point of having a TV like that), or showing the whole TV image in the middle of the screen with a black rectangle on either side. Just like is shown in the image above, but on a TV instead of onto a print).

And, as I said in the previous post, the reason that I like 8x6s so much is that you get the whole digital image in a big but cheap print and you don’t have to worry about any of this stuff. Digital pictures are always one and a third times as long as they are wide, which is more “square-like” than the traditional 1.4 or 1.5 for film.

That 1.33 aspect ratio actually comes from the size of the standard TV, because TVs have always been one and a third times as wide as they are tall (until widescreen ones started coming out a few years ago), so computer monitors (with rare exceptions) are also always one and a third times as wide as they are tall. Since there are many standard pixel sizes in this format (“VGA” is 640x480 pixels, which is what a TV is, and “SVGA” or “Super VGA” is 800x600, which is what most computers were until recently), early digital cameras claimed “VGA” or “SVGA” resolution so people knew that this could fill their computer monitor and be the right size – or just because people were familiar with those image sizes. When cameras started being able to capture images with one or more megapixels, they stuck with the old VGA and SVGA aspect ratio of one and a third (which after all IS still the one used on computer monitors – mine’s 1400 by 1050 pixels, most range from 1024x768 to 2000x1500). The exceptions are digital SLRs (which want to behave as much like film SLRs as possible, so the images they generate have an aspect ratio of about 1.5), and some consumer digicams that have a “4x6 mode” where a black bar is shown at the top and bottom of the display (like a widescreen movie) to show you what you will see when you get that picture developed as a 4x6 (the camera also does not record the pixels outside that area, so what you see IS what you get).

Of course, knowing the average digicam user, I can see them going “This mode does not let me get as much into the picture – Who’d ever use THAT?”, and then getting the picture printed as a 4x6 and asking “Why were the top and bottom cropped out?”. Grrr…

posted by Remus