Landscape film/photography is dying on social media..

I do the photography and end of the year slide show for my kid's mountain bike team. For a roughly 200 athlete team, I take between 2,000-4,000 images per race (they start at 8 AM and end at roughly 2:30-3:00 pm.) I'm particularly sensitive to this subject right now as I've been editing video in my free time for about 3-4 weeks now.

I upload all them to a team drive and every race I ask families to upload theirs as well. 80+% of the uploaded ones are vertical orientation (and HEIC ). Having to do a regular 16:9 video to play back at the banquet, basically they're worthless to me. It is a complete nightmare for post-processing workflow. I can use them but they are at least 4x the amount of work to get them in. Even my wife shot over 1/2 the first race this way after listening to me gripe about it for multiple years now.

I've preached this to them and this forum before, but Landscape is inherently superior for this.

Why? I can think of a few reasons right off the top of my head. .

This is the biggest one IMHO. Cropping a vertical shot to fit a 16:9 slideshow means throwing away up to 70% of the image resolution. This is the one I run into a lot. I get a great photo, that totally loses it's impact when it goes from 9:16 to 16:9.

Also, Vertical photos remove the context of the shot and that's super important for the story I'm trying to tell. The photo needs the lateral context, the trail, the berm, the dust, the rider they chasing/leading, and the direction of travel. Portrait mode eliminates all of that. In this same vein, panning with a fast rider moving left-to-right or vice versa is difficult enough with a landscape view. But that being said, it's significantly easier keeping them in view when compared to a vertical view. People will send me shot's where only 1/2 the rider is in the frame. They think that's a good shot? Finally, is the layout of our eyes are horizontal. We natively perceive speed, motion, and depth on a wide field of view, not a vertical snapshot.

Instead of a seamless batch-import, I’m stuck endlessly manually keyframing, reframing, and converting a butt ton of vertical HEIC files just so families can see their kids on the big screen. (Truth is I use 95% of my own shots and most of those just don't get used.

But hey, at least they (thought) the photos looked great on their phones.

Ok rant off.

quote:

---

Lonnie Utah

---

Man, are you a damned hero! I would be too annoyed to finish the project.

I truly can't take portrait mode for anything but a select few types of shots.

My biggest pet peeve in life continues to be:

You are somewhere public. You either ask (or they ask you) someone to take a photo of your group.

Their FIRST actions without fail, are: take steps back and flip to portrait mode!

You end up with a picture that is 40% floor/ground in front of the group, 20% left/right room on either side and people too far away to see faces.

quote:

---

Well, it was worth it hearing the 'Ohoos!!!" and "Ahaas!!!" last night when we played it for the kids/parents.

And the team gave me the "golden pedal" award for all of my work, so that's something...

---

Would be funny if you made a similar presentation composed ONLY of the most marginal portrait images/videos and which really highlighted the deficiencies of such. Might they learn from that?

quote:

---

For a roughly 200 athlete team,

---

Damn. My team hovers around 40-50 athletes between middle school and high school and I find organizing that many athletes for practice a challenge at times. I couldn't imagine the logistics of a 200 rider team. That's about 1/4th the size of the entire Alabama league in 30+ teams.