PHALON’S FILE: Ignoring Our Wide, Wide World

July 17, 2023

Look at how much you’re missing on the left and right when you don’t hold your phone camera
horizontally. Lots of horizon, to start with. Photo by Joe Phalon, 7/2023.

We live in a horizontal world, and yes, the Earth is flat. At least as far as we can see.

We look for wide-screen movie theaters, the better to lose ourselves in the great expanse of the Great Plains of John Ford or the dystopian future of Mad Max.

When flying, given the choice, most of us opt for a wide-body plane.

Our televisions now stretch from the front door to the bathroom.

So why, why, why do people insist on shooting photographs and videos vertically when using their smart phone cameras? I can understand that in the heat of a moment, such as a natural disaster or a newsworthy event, proper composition is the last thing on one’s mind, but why do so many people hold the phone vertically when recording little Harold stretching a double to a triple?

Did we really need to see more grass and sky than ball game? I think Grandma and Grandpa would prefer to see the ball arriving from the corner of the shot as Harold beats the throw. When it’s played back on your wide-screen TV, there’s lots of dead space on the right and left.

Perhaps social media led us here. TikTok is vertical by default.

Our eyes are side-by-side. The windshields of our cars reflect this and are twice as wide as they are tall. Most athletic superlatives are measured horizontally, with few exceptions such as the pole vault.

Even a home is ultimately measured by the terrestrial distance it covered.

Crosswords puzzles are usually solved with the horizontal words first. In fact, many players pride themselves with completing all the horizontal clues before having to resort to those back-alley vertical clues.

So, what happened? The iPhone.

Until the iPhone came along, conventional cameras invariably were oriented in the horizontal or “landscape” perspective. We would turn the camera sideways on rare occasions for the vertical “portrait” orientation for pictures of little Harold standing proudly for his first day of school. Or perhaps years later, his first mug shot.

Modern humans began appearing about 200,000 years ago. And in all but the last 150 years or so—with the invention of balloons and the airplane—we’ve been totally earthbound resulting in our horizontal view of the world.

Now humans have gone vertically, so far vertically we can say that we traveled a quarter-million miles to the Moon. But even on the Moon, the astronauts held the camera horizontally.

It’s time we turn our camera phones sideways, people, unless we want future generations to think the world was sandwiched between the sky above and the parking lot below.

Joe Phalon, Contributing Writer

Contributing Writer

Joe brings decades of journalism experience to the Ridge View Echo, covering everything from local school boards to the U.S. Supreme Court. A former National Law Journal editor and Columbia Law School press officer, he now enjoys telling community stories in Blairstown, where he lives with his wife, Rose, and their two dachshunds.