Look down next time you're in the park. Tell me what you find.

The towers are the part everyone frames. They're also the youngest thing in the shot.

That isn't a criticism. It's just a strange thing to stand on.

I spent three weeks in New York shooting brand films.

By the end I kept setting up low, because I keep finding that the ground holds the older story.

Central Park's outcrops still carry those grooves.

They run in two directions. The ice came through more than once.

Then a glacier covered the whole island, roughly 30,000 years back.

When the ice moved it dragged stone across the surface and cut grooves into the rock.

That rock was mud on a seafloor about 450 million years ago.

Heat and pressure turned it into schist. Manhattan's towers are anchored in it.

Composition is the thing. The ratio just decides how honest you have to be about it.

What's the last frame that stopped your scroll? Tell me its ratio without looking it up.

The ratio debate gets tiring.

Filmmakers default to 16:9 or 2.39:1. Creators default to 9:16, and more of the feed goes vertical every month.

3:2 sits in neither camp. That's why I chose it.

Worth knowing. The Matrix was shot on Super 35, so the negative is nearly square.

Every scope frame of that film is a crop somebody chose.

Then I watched The Matrix on a plane, in a frame far boxier than the scope version I grew up with.

I spent the flight watching the edges instead of the plot.

I noticed it by the second shoot. The constraint taught me more than my last three combined.

If the frame can't hold the story, no camera move is going to save it.

On the glass: the Catta Ace is on loan from DZOFilm. It goes back in November. No money moved either direction.

Three rules.

Locked off shots, no camera movement.
Composition over coverage.
18-35mm DZOFilm Catta Ace as primary, Helios 44-2 for close-ups.

The first one started as an accident. My travel tripod was too flimsy to trust.