In the golden age of photojournalism and street photography, 35mm photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson insisted on printing the full negative, including the black film rebate. It wasn’t a decorative flourish, it was a statement of integrity. Hands off, it declared. What you see is exactly what I saw. The visible frame edges became proof of fidelity to the moment, a quiet resistance to manipulation after the fact.1
This contrasts with other traditions, like large-format or studio photography, where the negative was always seen as raw material, meant to be cropped, refined, and shaped in the darkroom. The negative was a sketch; the final print was the true composition. Today, in the era of digital capture and infinite recomposition, the boundary between these philosophies has blurred. Yet the discipline of composing decisively, in camera, in the moment, may be more valuable than ever. It’s not just a constraint, but a form of presence.
Frame Dynamics
The shape of the frame isn’t neutral; it controls and restricts vision, imposes order, and shapes the meaning of the photograph. Depending on the subject and the photographer’s approach, the edges of the frame can exert a strong or subtle influence on the image. Some compositions press against the frame, allowing it to contain or echo the subject’s lines. Others float more freely, like in casual snapshots, where the frame recedes and the subject feels unbounded. The power of the frame lies in how much the photographer allows it to speak.
In wide-angle photography, especially, dynamic movement often emerges from the interplay between diagonals and the rectangular frame. These diagonals may carry their own movement and direction, but it’s the fixed geometry of the frame that gives them tension and significance. The edges become a kind of resistance, a boundary that shapes energy, forces lines to converge, clash, or escape.
Frame Shape
The shape of the viewfinder influences how we make photographs, even if today we can crop our images endlessly. Before digital cameras, the standard aspect ratio was 3:2, inherited from 35mm film. But this proportion wasn’t chosen for aesthetic reasons, it was a historical accident. There’s nothing inherently more balanced or expressive about 3:2. In fact, many of the ways we encounter images in daily life, paintings, screens, books, and photographic paper, suggest a preference for more compact, less elongated formats.
The 3:2 Frame
In terms of composition, the 3:2 frame tends to impose more on the image. It has a kind of built-in momentum, encouraging horizontality and often pushing the eye toward the edges. By contrast, the 4:3 frame, now common in digital sensors, is more neutral. It doesn’t privilege a direction as strongly. Its geometry feels quieter, more self-contained. There’s often more breathing room around the subject and less pressure to stretch or compress visual elements just to satisfy the frame.
Part of the reason 3:2 existed was practical: early 35mm film was small, and the elongated shape allowed more surface area for enlargement. But today, freed from the technical limits of film, we can ask more openly: what kind of space do we want our images to live in? And how does the shape of that space guide our way of seeing?
It’s important to recognize the natural balance of a photograph. Sometimes a horizontal (landscape) orientation suits the subject best, offering space for the eye to move across the frame. Other times, switching to a vertical (portrait) orientation brings a stronger compositional focus. The choice isn’t merely about subject shape, it’s about movement, weight, and rhythm.
Orientation
Even when photographing vertical subjects within a horizontal frame, interesting dynamics can emerge. A standing figure or tall building placed off-center can create tension and flow, encouraging the eye to move laterally across the image. Rather than resisting the frame, the subject can activate it, playing against its geometry to create a more engaging composition.
We tend to favor horizontal photographs, perhaps because they mirror the way we see. The human field of vision is naturally wider than it is tall. But long before the rise of screens and social media, vertical images held their own. Magazines have long preferred vertical photos for their covers and spreads, often to echo the upright format of the page. And now, with smartphones and platforms like Instagram, vertical framing is more important than ever.
There’s also something quietly psychological at play in vertical compositions. When the subject isn’t grounded, what we might call “non-allocated”, most people instinctively place it below the center. The eye resists scanning upward. The lower edge of the frame becomes a visual base, a kind of ground plane. Gravity, real or implied, pulls the subject downward. This creates a curious tension in vertical frames: while they rise upward, our instincts draw us back toward the base. The composition becomes a negotiation between ascent and stability.
Square
Most subjects are longer in one direction than the other, so it’s natural to align the frame to their dominant axis. That’s why the square frame can feel so restrictive, it resists that logic. Few cameras use it, and for good reason: the square is one of the hardest formats to work with. It has no directional bias. Its perfect 1:1 proportion is stable, static, and unnervingly neutral.
This symmetry imposes a kind of formal rigidity. Composing within a square often feels like negotiating with a frame that won’t budge. Symmetry becomes tempting, sometimes even necessary. It’s not uncommon for photographers working regularly with square-format cameras to imagine a horizontal or vertical bias anyway, treating the square as a container to be escaped. Many compose loosely in the viewfinder, leaving extra space at the sides or top and bottom, with the intention of cropping later. The square, in that sense, is rarely left untouched. It’s less a final form than a starting point, an abstract grid from which the image must be coaxed.
Footnotes
-
Freeman, M., 2017. The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos. Kindle ed. London: Ilex Press. ↩