"Lace Curtain Window" by Eric Rennie

The image above appears in a juried competition called "Be Square" at the Southeast Center for Photography in Greenvile, SC from December 4 to Deceber 28, 2015.  The juror is Christophe Dillinger, a photographer and editor of Square magazine, a web publication dedicated to the square format.  The photo was taken on my birthday several years ago in a hotel room in Annapolis, MD.

Square formats are relatively rare unless cropped that way -- not the least because most cameras use rectangular formats.  Images on my Canon 5D are shot with a 3:2 ratio, whether vertical or horizontal.  Since I was taught to visually compose images using all four corners of the viewfinder, the resulting photo tends to come out as a rectangle, even if I end up doing some cropping here or there.  Occasionally, however, a squared-off composition may present itself once I have had a chance to see the unedited image on a computer screen, as happened with the photograph above.  If the composition works well as a square, I will go for it, because there is something very satisfying about the shape.