Squares Monthly Special photo by Fritsch

© Hochzeitsturm, Darmstadt 2010 by Fritsch

Just to encourage you to do the monthly special and then share it, I wanted to show you what Fritsch of Hobokollektiv did. I did an interview with Fritsch in 2009, showcasing some of his great work.

I'm working on revamping the organization of my site (perhaps during the holidays?), but until then, if you post a "squares" monthly special on your own blog of photo sharing website and then paste the link into a comment of any post during the month (or email it to me), I'll add it to the link of the monthly special post so other readers can see it.

Square composition: album cover inspiration

Album covers can be a great source of inspiration for composing square photos. I have used them before to show how strong diagonal lines create powerful images. Here, I want to do a quick and basic look at a few ways to slice a square:

1. the pyramid

This goes back to the strong diagonal lines method. Think of creating a pyramid or triangle with the square and you've got an eye-catching shape.

2. The diagonal slice

This is basically a variation on the triangle (note the triangle made by her arms). The difference between the pyramid and the diagonal slice (I'm totally making up these terms, btw) is that the former occupies the center and the latter cuts the square into two triangles with one diagonal line. In the Belle & Sebastian cover, you can imagine a line extending from the upper right corner (her head) down through her arm toward the lower left corner. The other "triangle" provides space for text, but the photo would be equally well balanced without it.

3. Dead center

A strong composition for a portrait is to place the subject dead center in the square. The eyeline is typically in the top third of the square. In the above image, the nose is pretty much dead center.

4. The horizontal split

Hiroshi Sugimoto's beautiful seascape was used for a U2 album cover. You may be used to seeing photos that give the sky either 1/3 or 2/3 of the visual space, but in a square format, a 50-50 division creates a yin/yang sense of balance.

5. The vertical split

Same as above, but sliced vertically. Here, the boy is the line dividing the two halves.

6. Four quarters

You may be noticing by now that square composition like symmetry. In the Weezer cover, you get four even slices of the square topped off with a third of white space.

Same 4 quarters structure in the famous Beatles album cover, but in this case, the people occupy the lower half of the image.

Pay attention to square composition, divide it into shapes in your mind, and you will develop an eye for visually appealing crops.

Displaying photos: The square photo grid

Serendipitously, just after posting my monthly special on squares, I found out that one of the members of a movie group I attend has a display of square-framed photos in his home. I asked if he wouldn't mind sharing them on my blog and he graciously accepted. I have done posts in the past about gallery displays, but this is my first post about photos in another person's home. Of the two, I much prefer the context of real life. In fact, I may just have to make this a regular feature.

I'll let Scott tell you about the photos:

These are all photos I originally took with my Olympus OM-2, mostly on Kodachrome, and then digitized and converted to monochrome for the wall installation. Each has significant family value, either because they are shot in places where ancestors originated or lived, or because they are places Judy and I have been to together. I wavered back and forth about whether to crop the photos themselves square or not, and decided in the end to keep them all landscape (because most are landscapes, or because I'd need to eliminate key family history elements in the cropping). I did not restrict myself to set ratios, as you will notice, in order to add a bit of randomness to what was a fairly ordered arrangement.

Here is a brief background of each photo, numbering 1-9, left-to-right and top-to-bottom:

1. Sandbar at low tide off the western shore of the Isle of Man. My Manx ancestors' graves are in a cemetery immediately to the left of the photo, on top of a steep, sandy cliff that erodes away in the winter storms each year, contributing more and more ancestral bits to the sandbar...

2. Veteran's club, Castronovo, Sicily. My wife's maternal family immigrated from this village in the 1920s and settled in New Jersey. The old men in the village gather at these clubs during the day to play cards, talk and drink.

3. Sunset over the Cousenon River near Mont St. Michel. Judy and I camped along this river on our first trip to France. This is where it has been made into a straight canal, in man's never-ending fight to control nature ("le couesnon en sa folie mit le Mont en Normandie").

4. Fence bordering St. John's Church, central Cardiff, Wales. Just to the right and inside the fence lies the tombstone of my 4th-Great Grandmother, Ann John, who is buried with her son. Her husband and other children joined the LDS church and emigrated to Utah in the 1850s.

5. Puri for sale on the train platform in Agra, India. Judy and I spent a day exploring the town of the Taj Mahal, and while we were waiting for the return train to New Delhi this man pushed his cart with steaming hot bread up and down in the afternoon light.

6. Almond orchards in bloom, Kashmir, India. Judy and I saw this scene from a taxi early one afternoon while we were on a carpet-buying excursion. The workers are taking a break after gathering up branches pruned that day.

7. Italian fishermen setting off for the evening in their boat along the coast of the Adriatic, near Ancona. We camped there one night, on our way north to Venice after visiting distant relatives of Judy's father's family in Foggia, Puglia.

8. Deer Creek Reservoir, looking west, during a lull in a thunderstorm. I was driving back from Park City one evening and caught this very interesting study in gray.

9. Minamijima Island, Ogasawara (Bonin) archipelago, Japan. This limestone island 500+ miles south of Tokyo has a natural arch through which the ocean flows. We took a study abroad group there, and Judy is wading in the shallow, warm water.

Thanks, Scott for sharing your inspiring use of photography in the home!

November Monthly Special: Squares

"Mailboxes" Paris, 2010

This month's theme is in part inspired by my desire to revisit my very first monthly special: "the grid." I am fascinated by grids and how they influence everything from notebook paper to architecture. A grid creates order out of chaos, as in the above photo of mailboxes outside an apartment building in Paris. The tension between order and disorder immediately caught my eye. I have tried to figure out why this image pleases me so much (I realize it may not be the case for most people) and I think it may have something to do with my paradoxical love of chaos (artistic abandon, anarchy, call it what you will...) and my drive to organize it. In fact, you may recall a quote from a past post about how unlike the painter, who starts with a blank canvas and chooses what to add, the photographer starts with the chaos of the world and chooses how to frame it. Maybe that's why I'm a photographer and not a painter—that, and the fact that I can't draw to save my life.

Rather than repeat the "grid" theme, I want to focus on the square—how we compose within it and with it. This will include square composition, a graffiti-inspired tutorial, and even cards and home décor. Hopefully, I'll get back to more frequent posting this month. I encourage you to try a squares-inspired photo or photo project. If you post one on your blog or on any kind of photo site, post the URL in a comment (or email it to me) in any post during the month and I'll add the link to this post.

For now, start looking for squares around your house, your city, in the magazines you read and the products you buy. This might be an activity you haven't done since preschool, but I think revisiting it will bring artistic inspiration.

readers with posts for this month:

Fritsch