6x6: Give your subjects some room
The rectangular format of most cameras encourages photographers to crop rather tightly around a subject's face or torso. The 6x6 cm square format encourages you to give subjects a little bit of space.
 | George on the carpeted floor of an office building. Hand-held, Tri-X film. It seemed like a good idea to crop out some of the carpet with Adobe Photoshop. After all, this is supposed to be a photo of the dog, not of commercial carpet. As the cropping tool was being adjusted, an an art director from Hearst Magazines walked by. He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook until I became convinced that it was the space in front of the dog that made the photo work. |
 | Roommates. Sadly marred by a technical flaw: the reflector edge in the lower left corner of the frame. |
 | Reading. From Cape Cod. This was taken with the 80mm lens, a normal focal length for 6x6. If you're not trying to fill the frame with the subject's face, you don't need a telephoto lens to avoid an unflattering perspective. In medium format, this can result in big savings. A telephoto lens for a Hasselblad or Rollei 6000 is about $4000! |
 | Generation Gap. If you're still using film... Most people probably look better in black and white. If you want the sharpest results, you'll get them with Agfapan 25, Kodak TMAX-100, and Kodak BW400CN. Kodak's ancient TRI-X emulsion has enough grain that it may flatter certain subjects. You will probably find that TRI-X in the 35mm format yields grain that is simply too obtrusive. TRI-X works very well in 120 or 4x5 size, however. If you're doing color, you'll want subtle tones, low color saturation, and low-ish contrast. Good places to start in the color negative world are the Kodak Portra films, Fujicolor Pro 160S, and Fujicolor Pro 400H. For color slides, try Fuji Astia or Kodak E100. |
Information from: http://photo.net/learn/portraits/?p=4
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