Sometimes I am asked why some images are proofed with a lot of extra space around the shot. The simple answer is aspect ratio! Now, I am not going to pretend to be an awesome explainer of things, but in short, all of the most popular print sizes (4×6″, 5×7″, 8×10″, etc) have a different aspect ratio. If you go back to your days in geometry (pretty sure it was geometry and not trig or calculus) we all learned about ratios. 2:3, 4:5, they are all different sizes.
I’m more of a visual person myself, so I put together an example to show you. The green box is the ratio that most DSLRs shoot at, a 2:3 ratio, which would be print sizes 4×6″, 8×12″, 16×24″, etc.
The red box is a 5:7 ratio, which is pretty much only a 5×7″ print.
The blue box is a 4:5 ratio, which is an 8×10″, 16×20″, etc., crop.
Below is a PNG that other photographers can save and use to help explain this to their clients, or that you can use to see how your own images will crop based on the size you want!
