Everything Horizontal is Now Vertical.
→ October 11, 2024 | Reading time: 2 minutes
The L-grip that came with my camera has a 1/4"-20 tripod-thread on the side, for convenient vertical videography. A large percentage of the stuff (images and videos) the media team at River creates, are 1080×1920 versions of whatever they would have made otherwise. Looks like the world has moved on from appreciating landscapes to indulging portraits on screens full time.
I also realise—with not a small amount of concern—that it is only a matter of access (neither choice, nor philosophical or otherwise stance) before the floodgates of narcissism-slash-comparison bursts in to drown out our lives. (We recently got a KL11-phone to look at messages sent via WhatsApp groups. The phone has KL11’s Instagram account signed in.)
The lack of room for peripheral vision feels worse than blinding.
PS: I was reading NickAsbury’s latest ThoughtsOnWriting column discussing billboards (public advertisement). We make a lot of billboards (sometimes lovingly called ‘hoardings’ in emails that forget to turn on the doublespeak) to sell the Indie to unsuspecting victims of traffic and shopping. The ones that S and H work on are beautiful, well-made, fun even. The ones that I used to make were pages from books disguised in cloth-flex. I am used to pointing out how in most cities, the bill-board-ed folks are the only people smiling at you. The point is that we contribute to the clutter and the incessant nudging and the noise that one cannot turn off. Wondering what my penance could be.