What is your favourite aspect ratio?

[ROL]

1.67 by your reckoning (3:5, mine), depending almost entirely on the image. My thoughts...

[jnanian]

1.571428571429

[tkamiya]

I let the image tell me but usually settle on either 4:5 or 2:3.

[BradS]

I have an ongoing, highly volatile love affair with the square.

I'm generally too lazy (or unconcerned) to crop so, neg format == print format which is either 1.0, 1.25 or 1.4. When I'm feeling ambitious, I'll go for a 1.571428571429 but, I avoid 1.61803398875 like the plague (it's cliche!).

[lxdude]

3.1415926535

Which kind?

[SMBooth]

This begs the question, should you shoot and crop to fixed ratios or crop to what you feel is best and bugger the ratio.

[Steve Smith]

1, unless I'm feeling really adventurous, in which case it's 1 with a 90 degree twist. Leo

That's just crazy. Have you tried a 180 degree twist? I did with my Rolleicord a few weeks ago to get a shot over a tall fence.


Steve.

[panchro-press]

6X9 and 5X7...you do the math.
Dave

[benjiboy]

I crop according to the individual image, I prefer 6X6 because it's easy to crop either to portrait or landscape format.

[Bruce Watson]

For a while I was a fan of capturing my composition regardless of aspect ratio. I found in printing that my prints tended to fall into a few different aspect ratios within small. So I measured them to find out what they were (and had to do some research to interpret the results).

Turns out that I "see" in just a few aspect ratios. One is 4:3, which fits fairly nicely on my 5x4 film. Then there's the golden ratio ((1 + sqrt(5))/2, or 1:1.618, which works out to about 5x3. And there's a panoramic ratio I see in sometimes, about 1:sqrt(5), or about 1:2.24, or about 5x2.25

Having found this out, and also facing the problems of printing and framing if each print is a custom size, I've started to limit my prints to one of these three aspect ratios. And it's working out just fine, and simplifying my printing/framing too.

I have no idea why it works out like this for me. The human mind is a mysterious place.