Once the wedding is over and you start settling in to married life, one of the best parts of being newlyweds is displaying all your pretty wedding pictures around the house! It’s a fun (and maybe daunting) task to go through your photos and decide which ones you want to have printed and hung for guests to see. So you’re going through and spending a lot of time figuring out which pictures will go where and what sizes you need, making sure everything will be just right… But it can be easy to overlook a simple yet verrry important factor when choosing your prints: Are you taking into consideration photo ratios and how the pictures will be cropped at different sizes?
Allow me to explain. Most cameras these days are formatted to take photos at a 2:3 ratio, or the standard 4×6 print. But as you change the size of the print, the ratio can change too. (For instance, the standard 8×10 and 16×20 sizes are a ratio of 4:5, not 2:3.) In other words, the photo will most likely need to be cropped. It might seem like an easy decision to blow up that beautiful close up of you and your groom to hang on the wall, but what if printing a 16×20 cuts off half of his forehead? Might take away from the photo a little bit! For those of you who are visual learners like me, here are two examples using the most common print sizes.
Wider photos work great as long as you are ok losing some of the overall scenery in the photo (i.e. the pretty branches of a big tree). This shows how you might crop a photo if the subjects fall on the rule of thirds, more towards one side instead of the center:
Closer up photos can work too as long as your faces don’t take up the majority of the photo and nothing important is cut out. This also shows what a crop might look like if the subjects of the photo are centered:
(I didn’t show an 11×14 crop because they are almost identical to the 8×10/16×20, only ever so slightly less cropped.)
So it’s definitely important to think about how much your photo will be cropped before determining the best size for it to be printed! If you are totally set on blowing up a photo but you really don’t want it to be cropped, 8×12 or 16×24 would be the sizes needed to keep it at a 2:3 ratio, but it can be difficult to find frames that size. Although often you can buy a bigger frame and have a custom mat made to fit the size of the photo you want. Just a few things to keep in mind :)
Hope this helps some of you as you choose photos to display in your home! Happy Wednesday :)
