Portrait vs landscape: vertical for portraits and horizontal for landscapes?
The reason the vertical orientation, or portrait orientation, is the one favored for portraits is because it easily allows you to focus your subject in the center of the image. This ultimately leaves little room for the surrounding setting and makes it easier to focus attention on the main subject.
It is a fairly logical intuition to orient your frame in this direction when you want to shoot a portrait, since we naturally reduce our visual field when we focus on someone or on a single subject.
Conversely, the horizontal orientation, or landscape orientation, will allow for more space across and include more elements. It is therefore particularly suitable for capturing the grandiose aspect of what we see more broadly with our eyes, as is the case with landscapes.
Portrait and Landscape: vary your orientations
The orientation of your camera is directly related to the composition of your image. It is therefore important to determine the visual message you want to convey when deciding how to frame and orient your image, even if it means getting rid of the default orientation, whether it’s landscape or portrait.
While you need only move away from your subject to include a background when in portrait orientation, choosing the landscape orientation can sometimes be a better choice, especially in the following cases:
- To include an external element
- To contextualize
- To focus on the upper body only
- To highlight your subject with a specific background
- To position your subject on one of lines from the rule of thirds
- To follow the subject’s gaze
- To make the image more dynamic
- To show movement
Use of the landscape orientation can also be justified for several of the above reasons at the same time, as in the following examples:
The portrait orientation, meanwhile, allows for greater vertical details. It’s very interesting to use in architectural photography in order to accentuate the dizzying sensation that one can have in front of huge buildings.
Mastering landscape photography
Likewise, the portrait orientation can be particularly interesting in landscape photography. It allows you to capture imposing elements and make them the main element. This orientation is often used in landscapes to highlight an element (a mountain, a tree that stands out, etc.), lending a very specific visual and dynamic power to the image.
Portrait orientation also accentuates the feeling of closeness, even if the photographed element is actually sometimes very far away. Thanks to this orientation, which tightens the frame, you can also take the opportunity to overlay the fields, with one element of the landscape very close to your lens and another element in the background (see the first example image).
In conclusion
To find the right orientation for your scene between landscape vs portrait, we recommend that you simply practice doing both each time to get started. Each orientation will involve reviewing your framing and composition and ignoring the most frequently used orientations.
Alternating between landscape and portrait is therefore an excellent exercise to help you better convey the desired message and perceive the strength of images according to their orientation, since each scene, each person’s gaze and each person’s sensibilities are different.
By Céline Nébor
