Back in 2007, when I got my first phone (Motorola L6i), I was a firm believer in one thing: photos should be taken in landscape mode. I just couldn’t stand photos taken in portrait orientation. How could anyone appreciate the beautiful sunset or a mountain range in a vertical or square photo? It always had to be a nice wide landscape shot.
What about videos? Don’t even get me started. Taking videos in portrait mode felt like a sin to me. I would take pictures and videos on my phone, transfer them to my PC, and bask in their full horizontal glory on a bigger screen.
Of course, this was all in the pre-social media, pre-Instagram era when phones generally had squarish screens (and keypads) unlike the tall, vertical ones we have nowadays.
But why portrait?
Fast forward to 2024, and something strange happened. Over the years, the way I consume (see) photos has changed. No more “transfer to laptop and organize neatly into folders” sessions. Instead, thanks to the magical powers of cloud storage and much larger phone screens, I now view pretty much everything directly on my phone. And guess what? My phone is almost always in portrait mode.
This led to a small crisis in my daily usage. Every time I took a landscape photo, I had to go through the ordeal of turning my phone sideways, disabling the orientation lock, and then fidgeting with the auto-rotate feature to get the photo to show correctly.
So, little by little, over the year I gave in. Now, I click almost every photo in portrait orientation. Of course, when I am trying to capture a wide nature scenery or take a group picture, I wish I could take it in landscape orientation but honestly, I have now adapted to the simplicity of just holding my phone upright and clicking away. Besides, it feels more natural now.
Camera click buttons again?
Here’s the funny part: The latest iPhone 16 has this fancy new side camera click button, which encourages people to take pictures in landscape mode. I feel nostalgia when I think about the old Nokia N-series phones which had these camera click buttons as a standard feature. I guess now I have lived long enough to see tech trends come full circle, just like low waist jeans. Fashionable once, cringe later, and then cool again.
For now though, I have fully transitioned to portrait photos. Let’s see how long it lasts before another tech cycle (VR?) turns my views sideways!