Day 101: Widescreen Tree Background

2026-05-18

Hello!

The article I published yesterday, where I aggregated a bunch of internet links to celebrate Day 100? Yeah, I'm not doing that ever again. Way too much effort. I much prefer the shorter stream of thoughts that I can just get through in a moment's time.

Although, In a Moment's Time is a great song.

... See what I mean about a stream of thoughts? I literally have no idea what I'm going to type next, and you get to see how my brain connects different ideas together (relatively unfiltered!).

Anyway, this photo is cropped with a specific aspect ratio. After reading this article on some support for weird ("cinematic"?) crops, I wanted to give it a shot. To be fair to Alex Armitage, he's good at what he does and the landscape Xpan crops frame the subject nicely. The Xpan crop is apparently 65x24, about 2.7 times as long as it is tall. It's traditionally used to show you what's on the horizon. Nothing distracting in the foreground, nothing monotonous in the sky and clouds. Eye-level, and nothing else.

It would be great for landscape photos and putting emphasis on a single subject, but I'm not sure it's meant to be used like this, for such a regular tree close to the camera. No faraway views to admire, just this tree and its curtain of leaves.

No nuance. Which is actually something I'm struggling with, when I write.

Describing feelings and emotion is really difficult! This awful and simultaneously amazing sensation of being human is super hard to describe. I do not know the nuanced words for love or sadness; I have to look up the definition of "platonic" and "ennui" from time to time.

I've heard that if you want to be a better filmmaker, watch lots of movies. If you want to be a better storyteller, read lots of books. I haven't quite done that, but as you can tell from yesterday's article, I read a lot of internet articles and blogs. I've become a regular reader of The Atlantic and The New Yorker (an "erudite" young man, as my jazz band teacher put it).

At The New Yorker, I read Nicholas Dawidoff's account of his late mother Heidi, who struggled through an apocalyptic World War II separated from her parents. If only all obituaries were like this.

Cheers,
David