It’s funny. These days, most people associate an image that’s cropped as a square as something that’s being done as a compromise for the benefit of social media – particularly Instagram. For the longest time, a square was the best format to use on Instagram because it’s all it would display, and it still is the most common crop today. On other social media, square became popular because it has the same dimensions whether the viewer holds their phone vertically or horizontally.

But square images have been around since long before Instagram or social media. In fact, they were around long before the Internet existed at all. And it has a very different psychological effect on the viewer than a vertical or horizontal orientation image. In this video, Mark Denney walks us through the square crop, how and why to use it and how you might want to use it to get better compositions.

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