My Google Pixel Smartphone can put me into a group photograph I took from behind the camera. Using Add Me, it combines separate shots so that everyone appears together, including the person who was holding the phone. Considerable intelligence has gone into making this possible. Rather less appears to have gone into letting me take an ordinary photograph in 3:2. The phone can rearrange who was there, but I cannot select the rectangle I want to photograph them in.
Every year, the smartphone industry stages another celebration of its own photographic genius. More megapixels, larger sensors, better lenses, cleverer processing. Exposures are stacked, shadows recovered, noise suppressed and faces subjected to increasingly elaborate computational attention. Then comes the software cabaret: remove this person, add that one, move the subject, apply a look. Apple, Samsung and Google compete to persuade us that the next great moment in photography will arrive in a phone box. Judging by the presentations, the remaining obstacles are mostly reality itself.
Meanwhile, I would quite like to choose a classic aspect ratio.
In the standard camera app on my Pixel, the choice is between the full 4:3 image and a 16:9 crop. These are also the two options listed in Google’s own camera documentation. There is no 3:2 setting. Open the resulting photograph in the editor, however, and I can crop it to precisely that format. So the software knows what 3:2 is. It simply insists that I ask for it after taking the picture, every single time.
This is hardly an eccentric request. The 3:2 rectangle is the format of traditional 35mm photography, carried forward into almost every full-frame and APS-C digital camera. It is also the shape of the familiar 10 × 15 cm print. An industry so keen to borrow the language of professional photography might reasonably be expected to accommodate one of its most established formats. Apparently, a century of photographic practice carries less weight than whatever needed demonstrating at the latest product launch.
I prefer 3:2 because, for the photographs I take, it looks better. Horizontally, it gives a landscape space without stretching it into a strip. Vertically, it gives a portrait proportions I find more elegant than the squat 4:3 frame. Other photographers can prefer other shapes; that is precisely why cameras should offer a choice. I am not asking Google to settle an aesthetic argument. I am asking it to stop settling mine for me through an incomplete settings menu.
And no, 16:9 does not solve this. Those are the proportions I associate with television. For most of my still photographs, they feel too wide in landscape orientation and too narrow in portrait orientation. A panorama is another deliberate compositional choice, sometimes much wider still. Offering me widescreen when I ask for 3:2 is rather like answering a question you found more convenient than the one I actually asked.
The inevitable response is that I can crop afterwards. What a spectacularly stupid answer to a request for a default setting. Every single photograph has to be opened, cropped to 3:2, adjusted and saved. The same preference, expressed through the same manual operation, over and over again. I would happily trade a few of the magic tricks for one setting that saves me doing the same bloody thing three hundred times after a holiday. The phone gets artificial intelligence; I get repetitive clerical work.
Worse, this treats framing as something that happens after photography. When I compose a picture, I work with the boundaries I can see. They determine where I place a face, how much foreground I include, how a line enters the scene and what stays outside it. With a different frame, I may move, change my angle or arrange the picture differently. Having to imagine the eventual crop inside the wrong viewfinder frame is an unnecessary handicap. Trimming the result later cannot give me back the moment when I could have composed it properly.
This is where the tech idiots deserve the name. The people who can enthusiastically explain a dozen ways for software to reconstruct a photograph, yet dismiss choosing its proportions as something the user can sort out afterwards, have missed a fairly elementary point about photography. The frame is part of the decision. Treating it as an administrative detail is an extraordinary blind spot in a product sold on its camera.
The review culture does remarkably little to discourage this thinking. Too many camera comparisons become forensic examinations of deeply uninteresting photographs: brickwork, foliage and shadow noise inspected at magnifications nobody would use to enjoy the picture. One phone retrieves more texture from a wall; another produces a more exciting sky. Eventually, a winner is declared, as though photographic excellence were waiting somewhere in the mortar.
Those tests have their place. But if you scrutinise pixels while overlooking basic compositional controls, you have tested image processing and announced a winner in photography. A technically immaculate photograph can still be an aesthetically lifeless bore. The nerds are so busy inspecting the contents of the rectangle that they have forgotten to ask whether we can choose the rectangle. Apparently, making the photographer crop an entire holiday manually is less troubling than a slightly softer tree.
The fix is almost embarrassingly modest. Keep the 4:3 sensor. Add 3:2 to the shooting options, show the correct frame in the viewfinder and remember the selection. The existing 16:9 option already demonstrates that a crop is acceptable; 3:2 would discard less of the sensor image. If retaining the full capture is important, preserve it behind a reversible crop. No new lens is required, and nobody needs to invent another form of intelligence.
Before the next keynote congratulates everyone on reinventing photography, perhaps someone could hand the phone to a photographer and listen to the answer. I do not need another demonstration of how cleverly the software can change my picture. I need the camera to respect how I want to take it. You have taught the phone to add the photographer to the photograph. Now stop designing it as though the photographer were the idiot.
Just my five cents.
//Alex
alexreusch 