Medium Format is about the Square

I made a remark about "seeing in medium-format" recently. I took it to mean that, of course, I needed a medium-format camera to get the shots I was really seeing. (Because the cure for photography problems is mo' gear, of course.) Since medium-format cameras are more expensive than a fully-kitted out Macbook Pro, I wondered about second-hand ones. Those were mostly film, or as expensive as settling for a 512GB SSD card instead of the full 1TB. Plus there's the whole thing where medium-format cameras can be used as dumb-bells if you can't get to the gym, and need a trolley to carry them around.

OK. Slight exaggeration.

For some reason I looked at the entry in Wikipedia on medium-format cameras. it told me that most of them were 6cm x 6cm, and some later ones were 6cm x 4.5 cm. Wait, what? Square? Like Instagram?

I hauled out my Panasonic DMZ-40TY-H4562 or whatever silly name it has, and clicked through the menus. Aspect Ratio: 3:2 (35mm), 4:3 (HDTV), 16:9 (widescreen), 1:1 (square). Whoa. The sun was out. I nipped into the park and took some photographs.

So here's a piece of fence in 16:9

and again in 4:3

and again in 3:2 

and this is what it should look like.....

Doesn't that feel more solid? The wider formats just go on about how much fence there is, but somehow, to my eyes, the square format gives a better sense of how the fence relates to the ground and open sky as well. There's no open sky in the 16:9.

The next one is just plain perfect. Ordinary, but perfect.

If that had been a 35mm shot I would have made a 'meh' and moved on. But that bank of gorse is so much more impressive when you can't see lots of open ground to the right. Here's a 16:9

and here's what it should look like

The photograph is about the water and the stream. We only need to see one post-war semi to understand that this is in a suburb somewhere. The top picture gives us too much detail we don't need.

Medium-format, yes. But it was about the Square, not the film or sensor size.