My camera has this great setting that allows me to take square cropped pictures. To my knowledge, Canons nor Nikons have this ability, only my little Panasonic (GH2). It’s awesome! I find it so much easier to compose in-camera as opposed to making cropping decisions later on.

I got an instagram account a while back, and became attracted to the idea of a square composition. I’ve always been into iconic imagery, especially with photos, and the square format seems to lend itself well to these really precise compositions.

The minimalism adds an intensity, an immediacy to the pictures that rectangular photographs lack. Rectangles are more generous, they give you time to take the image in and offer a little more context. That’s one thing that makes wide-screen great for film– it shows you a whole gamut of imagery so you get to soak in the landscape of a scene; it really envelopes you. And typically I have been attracted to those dramatic long pictures because of that function + the association with visual storytelling. But the square format is curt and still effective. Squares may tell shorter stories, but they speak louder.