Old Vic

One of the first, perhaps the first, books of photographs I ever bought was New York Vertical by Horst Hamann. It's a great book full of New York icons in a format (1:3 aspect ratio) that really suits the skyscrapers and urban canyons of New York. And I've been kind of obsessed by panoramics ever since. Not those elongated, stitched together frames but real photographic panoramas that use film aspect ratios and optics.

Hamann's Linhof Technorama uses 120 film and gets 4 frames on a roll. Only about £10k new. Bargain. It's about as wide as you can get without rotating optics and a curved film plane.

Anyway, I was toying with the idea of combining the aspect ratio with the vertical orientation and a zoom lens rather than a wide angle. The vertical panorama format works quite well. Even at the extremes of 1:3 but computer screens just don't display them very well. Horizontal still wins and I think I prefer the 16:9 cinematic ratio. But I do like the way the long lens compresses the perspective and makes everything look like it's all sitting on top of each other. Plenty to see if you go large. If only the camera and the monopod weren't so bloody heavy.