These days, square pictures are all the rage on Instagram, and Facebook, but they certainly did not start there. There have been a variety of square format cameras from Polaroids to Mamiyas, going back many decades. I even had a small, square format camera in the early to mid 1970’s, with which I took pictures of pigeons in Washington DC. I think I even had it when I joined the military in 1981. I don’t remember what it was. It was a Kodak, I think, and my mother owned it when she was young. It took 110 film cartridges, and had no internal meter. I have no concept of how I got actual pictures out of it as a 13-year old, but I still have sone of them. They’re packed in a box somewhere in the nether regions of time and space, or under a pile of boxes in a closet. I don’t remember which. If this post doesn’t have one, it means I haven’t found them.

As far as I am concerned, the chief among square format cameras was the Hasselblad. With its funny name, and steep price tag, the Hasselblad was the Rolls Royce of cameras. I say “was” because I am writing only about film cameras. Hasselblad makes digital cameras these days, but it is not the company it was in its heyday. The modern, digital Hasselblad are also decidedly not square format, either, and they aren’t made in Sweden anymore.

I have owned a Hasselblad 500CM since 1997. The camera I own was built in 1975. That makes it 45 years old at the time of this writing. It still works perfectly. I have had it in for repairs a few times, but they have never been major. When it is not suffering from having an owner who forgets to focus, or has the tripod off-kilter, or who meters improperly, it produces some fine pictures.

But getting used to the square format took some getting used to. I use the whole image, edge to edge, of the pictures I take. I crop only occasionally, but I know that I will lose resolution when I do. The reason for square format is for cropping, though. A photographer can take portrait, or landscape pictures without having to turn the camera on its side, and use use the part of the image corresponding to the desired image. I use the whole 6x6cm image. I like the fact that Ansel Adams did too.

Not that I am comparing myself to Ansel Adams, but I just like being in good company.

Composing for square format requires different rules than do the classic letterbox formats. Square is decidedly non-dynamic, so leading lines take on more importance.

I’m going to let you in on a secret. I am untrained in composition. I took an art appreciation course in college, but I have no formal education in either composition or photography. What I know, I picked up by taking pictures, and looking at pictures. Along the way, I learned about dynamic lines, and the golden mean. The result of this is that I took scads of bad pictures before I understood how to do it right. I still take bad pictures. I don’t display them. This is why if you look at my Flicker page, you will see that I don’t post every day, and I don’t post multiple images at a time. I’m picky about what the world gets to see. I may take a hundred images on an outing, but I may display only one or two, and sometimes none.  

Using film cameras has one chief drawback that digital cameras do not: the inability to adjust film speed. I had a choice in the above picture to stop motion for the girls, or to get the foreground in focus. My film speed as 100 ASA, and not 64-128000 ISO. I could have put on a longer lens, and moved backwards to get the same composition with all of it in focus, but I knew that the light on the girls was fleeting. I had seconds to get the picture. Compositionally, though, it’s pleasing.

If you have read some of my earlier posts, you saw me refer to “slow zen” now and again. This is the idea that my pictures have a sense of calm to them. Slow is the process of composing until everything looks right, and zen is the calm. The Hasselblad was what really began this for me. The square format lends itself to this concept very well, mostly due to the less dynamic nature of the format itself. There is a modern method in digital photography called focus stacking. This is where the photographer takes a series of pictures from very close-up to infinity, and focuses on a different part of the scene for each, then stacks them in Photoshop to create a picture in sharp focus throughout. I’m still not certain that I even want to make those kind of pictures, but it does create very dramatic images, which a square format camera without some kind of tilt/shift mechanism can’t do. My large format cameras can do that in a single frame, but not the ‘blad. The constraints inherent to the camera create the need to become more creative to achieve a desired result. Sometimes, it is successful.

Square format presents challenges for any photographer, but practice and determination can pay off.

Thanks for looking!

–Gary L. Quay