ASPECT RATIO AND FOCAL LENGTH

Discover how the size of your camera’s sensor and the lens you attach to it can play a big role in the composition of your images

It’d be easy to think that when you take a picture you’re completely in control of how the landscape will look in the frame, but in many ways you’re locked into the predetermined aspect ratio. For a printed image your aspect ratio would be the proportion of the width compared to the length, so an image 30cm wide by 20cm tall would have an aspect ratio of 3:2 – or 2:3, if it was in portrait orientation.

An aspect ratio of 3:2 is pretty standard in digital photography, though it’s actually determined by the design and size of the electronic sensor inside your camera body. Some camera manufacturers, such as Olympus and Panasonic, implement vastly different aspect ratios, as their native images come out at 4:3, so your composition would need a completely different approach compared to using the standard 3:2 ratio.

Although you’re tied into the natural framing that your sensor outputs, you can crop in to your preferred aspect ratio in Photoshop, and many cameras also let you crop to change the aspect ratio in-camera, but at the expense of losing pixels and resolution. There isn’t a ‘correct’ aspect ratio to go with, as it’s completely down to personal preference, but it’s worth being aware of this before splashing out on a new camera.

Another part of photography that you may not think would have too much bearing on your compositions is your choice of lens and the focal length you choose to shoot at. To keep things simple we’ll be looking at the focal lengths of a full-frame camera here, though if you’re using a cropped sensor like an APS-C you can find out the film equivalent focal length by multiplying them by the crop factor, such as 1.5x on Nikon or Sony’s APS bodies, 1.6x on Canon, or 2x on Micro Four Thirds.

When you zoom in more on a scene the perspective changes as the elements in your scene become more compressed, which can have a huge impact on how you compose your shot. Many photographers actually prefer to shoot landscapes with a long telephoto lens for this reason.