Monthly Archives: November 2009

More on aspect ratios

Paintings

A fascinating subject.

Some three years ago I wrote a brief piece on Aspect Ratios after acquiring my Panasonic LX-1 which came with a widescreen 16:9 picture option.

While 30 years with film Leicas has me pretty much convinced that 3:2 is the best for me (and that’s what I use most often on both the LX-1 and the G1; the 5D is, of course, 3:2, take it or leave it) a recent email from a reader got me thinking about the subject again.

Peter writes:

A subject that has annoyed me forever is the disconnect between common print and frame sizes and the aspect ratio of the most broadly used cameras.

The most common size for enlargements and frames is still 8×10. What percentage of photographers do you think are still using 4×5? How obscure is 11×14?

The move from 5×3.5 to 4×6 took hold just as digital was coming in at 4×3. And why 4×3? Because cathode ray tubes for TV were that size and could be used for early computers. As a fan of 16:9, I pretty much have to crop anything that needs to be printed.

Peter, by the way, typically views his digital pictures on a large screen LCD TV which, of course, is 16:9, consonant with the widescreen format used by most moviemakers today.

Rather than dwell on photographs, I thought it might be fun to pull twelve favorite paintings from memory and take a look at their aspect ratios, so here they are, in no particular order. These have been in my mind’s eye for, what, 45 years (I am 58)? With the sole exceptions of the Raphael and Uccello, both of which are carefully posed, all the others share an almost photographic snapshot vision, never more so than in the two Degas examples. No surprise, really, as that’s the way I tend to see things. To keep matters simple, I show the aspect ratios in the order longest side: shortest side, regardless whether the format is portrait or landscape:

Botticelli – Portrait of a Young Man – 4:3

Degas – L’Absinthe – 4:3

Caravaggio – The Conversion of St. Paul – 4:3

Degas – Place de la Concorde – 3:2

Seurat – La Grande Jatte – 3:2

Manet – A Bar at the Folies-Bergere – 4:3

Ingres – Bather – 3:2

Monet – La Grenouillere – 4:3

Titian – Noli Me Tangere – 5:4

Uccello – The Battle of San Romano – 16:9

Raphael – The School of Athens – 3:2

Seurat – Baignade – Asnieres – 3:2

I learned some interesting things from this little exercise. 4:3 and 3:2 dominate in my choices. Had you asked me what ratio Noli Me Tangere or La Grenouillere or The Bather or Baignade were, for example, I would have sworn up and down that they are 16:9 or even longer! Turns out nothing could be further from the truth. And, indeed, when you look at vast canvases like Uccello’s Battle of San Romano (Louvre, National Gallery, Uffizi) their unusually broad aspect ratio for the times – 16:9 and the only ‘widescreen’ painting here – is an awful lot to take in.

So maybe 16:9 is really largely a modern development, one of the movie age, because classical art uses it rarely. I realize that a dozen selections hardly constitute ‘Classical Art’ but I doubt you will find too many widescreen paintings ….

Thanks for those thoughts, Peter.

And as I’m dying to answer the question “Which of the above would you like on your wall at home?” let me say there’s no contest. By a huge margin it’s that magnificent Botticelli work at the beginning of this piece, prosaic as its 4:3 format may be. It’s in London’s National Gallery and once you enter the large gallery in which this very small painting is exhibited you will understand why.

Working with two displays

Displays

Some thought required.

As I am new to the world of working with two displays, having used but one at a time for the past thirty years, I thought it might be helpful to share some thoughts on how things stand now that I use two Dell 2209WA displays with my MacPro.

Here are some useful metrics regarding the area of various displays in square inches of usable screen:

iMac 24″: 239 sq. in.
Dell 2209WA: 219 sq. in, or 438 sq. in. for two
Apple 30″ Cinema Display: 394 sq. in.

So using two 2209WA 22″ diagonal Dell displays, I have 83% more display area than in the 24″ iMac I used earlier and 11% more than the user of one 30″ Apple Cinema Display.

However you look at it, that’s a lot of surface area and while the first reaction is Wow!, in use there are some issues which need addressing.

First, given the 16:10 near-widescreen format of the Dells it makes sense to locate the Dock at the left rather than below the screen. Unless you are watching movies, most 3:2 ratio photographs use less than the full width of the screen so placing the Dock on the left makes sense, and that’s the first problem. If you frequently place files temporarily on your Desktop, as I do, then it’s a long drag-and-drop from the file’s location on the right of the right hand display to the trash can at the lower left of the left hand display. So I’m getting used to right-clicking the file and clicking on Move to Trash instead. If several files are to be trashed, I simply highlight them by dragging a clicked mouse over them and then right click and Move to Trash in one click.

Often, when working on the right display, I need to access an application. Once again, it’s a long way to the Dock on the left display as the following picture indicates (Yes, that’s the HAL 9000 on the Desktop(s) and yes, I am a huge Stanley Kubrick fan!):

Two display desktops side by side.

So rather than move the mouse pointer all the way to the left display to click on the desired application, I use HimmelBar which resides in the menu bar. I place the Menu Bar on the right display as that works well with this approach (System Preferences->Displays->Arrangement):

HimmelBar in use

HimmelBar has been around for ages and is a free download. In its current version (I’m using 3.0 (64) ) it allows the user to edit the drop down lists of Applications and Utilities, so as to avoid a core dump. I simply choose those I use often (much the same ones as in the Dock) and try to limit the list to no more than the height of the screen to avoid having to scroll. If you create an Applications folder in your user home folder (normally the Applications folder resides in the home folder of the hard drive you boot from) then you can have a further selection of personal applications to choose from. However, I avoid this approach as I simply like to have all my applications in one place for ease of maintenance and update.

While HimmelBar always resides in the MenuBar, there’s an alternative approach using a product named Xmenu which will pop up at your mouse pointer’s location when a Cmnd-key combination is struck (you can choose the second key, the first has to be Command). I find I am more comfortable with HimmelBar but others may prefer Xmenu.

So between the Dock and HimmelBar, the Application menu is never far away.

How about the physical arrangement of the displays? Here’s how mine looks:

Elevation view.

Plan view.

As you can see, the monitors are abutted along the vertical axis and sloped slightly inward to present a perpendicular view with a small turn of the head. My eyes are approximately 30″ away from the center point and level with the top of the display(s).

That leaves the issue of what to display on which screen. For work (my job is data intensive) I keep detailed lists on the left screen and items clicked in these for extensive reading on the right. That allows me to quickly scan news story headlines in a feed reader (I use the excellent NetNewsWire) and then read a clicked story of interest on the right screen.

For Lightroom I find I am most comfortable with the detailed LR screen on the right – the one with all the processing controls – with the full sized, uncluttered loupe view on the left.

Is this better than simply using a giant 30″ diagonal screen? I don’t know. I do know that when using the 24″ iMac I rarely broke disparate application displays into adjacent windows as the single 24″ screen was never large enough, whereas with two displays I find I’m getting used to the idea of using one as an index and the other for detail.

Based on my short period of use, is the second monitor a necessity? Far from it. More of a luxury. Maybe it will grow on me, but as of now I’m rather lukewarm on the concept.

Paris Metro

Photographs

Les couleurs de France

Some like the BART, filthy and noisy. Others swear by the Underground, or at it when it is on strike. The perverse adulate the BMT and its cousins in New York, though not on steamy summer days when the air conditioning is out and you can’t see for the graffiti.

But any true underground train aficionado will tell you there is only one worth eulogizing and it is the Metro in Paris. Once you have seen the Louvre station you will understand.

Keeping it clean – the Paris Metro. M3. 35mm Summaron, Kodachrome 64.