AMEN!
The worst are all of the portrait videos out there - come on folks, wake up.
And it’s permeating elsewhere too. One of the accessory makers we work with has said they are selling more adapters/stands to hold displays vertically than ever.
Sorry, we’re too old and fossilized in our ways to appreciate TicTok. :vb-lol:
Seriously though, whatever’s fun for them is okay IMO. I’m not harmed thereby. They’re not on my lawn. :vb-agree:
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Oi! Don’t you lot go lambasting me about smartphone photos and then do the same yourselves with vertical video!
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Tools vs aesthetics. Apples and oranges.
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As Ted said Apples and Oranges - smartphone photos are an annoyance; vertical video is an abomination!
I can’t decide if your spelling of TikTok is excellent comedy or just an accidental confirmation of your point. Or both. 
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My bet is on BOTH! For me, it would be TikTack(y)…
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I am a millennial and I still don’t get the point of TicTacPaddyWhack. This is the only Tic Tac that ever will matter to me:
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Is that the variation that’s used today? It’s a nonsense children’s counting song so don’t stress it. But your post came just as I began a hike and made me have that silly song in my head the entire three miles.
Lyrics from my youth, or similar (from wikipedia):
This old man, he played one,
He played knick-knack on my thumb;
With a knick-knack paddywhack,
Give a dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
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I couldn’t agree less on vertical or portrait orientation photography and I have seen vertical video done well - nearly always the human form done by commercial photographers / videographers for commercial websites. If you were lucky enough to use one of the older Hasselblads, you were limited to square as that was the only mode you had.
Landscape orientation is a European convention which was first challenged successfully when Japanese woodblock prints and komiku started appearing wrapped around Eastern made ceramics and all sorts of artists collected them - from van Gogh to Degas. The Japonisme wave made a huge impact on framing and storytelling in lens and traditional composition and it was one of my starting points/lesson for any image-maker who wanted to get better at composition.
I will agree though that some people do forget they can orient their cameras in different ways and that goes for both landscape and portrait - it depends on the artistic intention if there is one.
Ansell Adams / Henri Cartier Bresson etc etc - I challenge anyone to find bad portrait orientation photos by them.
You’re missing my point. Of course, you can make truly great landscape photos that are vertical. I have a ton of them of the slot canyons in Utah and Arizona for instance. The point was that smartphones have made vertical the default, for the worse overall.
Conversely, the reciprocal issue existed with cameras where the default was horizontal. And a great many people/portrait photos were taken with all of this extra space on each side which IMHO lessens the impact of the photo.
So of course, great art is often about “breaking the rules or conventions” and skilled photographers do just that.
My point was that conventions often have good reason they exist, and knowing when to break them is a skill that needs to learned IMHO.
And just to touch on the overwhelming plurality of vertical videos, I’d argue the vast majority were shot that way because the photographer just didn’t stop to consider thinking differently. And to that point, many of these same vertical videos have wide swings of position (to the point of motion sickness) in attempts to capture things occurring what is out of the vertical “frame”.
TLDR The smartphones vertical orientation has made vertical the default especially with inexperienced photographers ,and thus ties back to my earlier point that using film and thus having to literally pay for every shot was/is a positive experience on the path to being a better photographer.
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When I think of phone vertical videos, my mind flashes to YouTube accident scene captures done that way, which are incredibly difficult to watch as the phone gets swung all over the place.
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One more off topic point since we in standard TPCR fashion have gotten far, far away from the original thread topic.
Some of the very best mentoring I got on photography came from an unexpected source, which was during my days with Radius. I was assigned the task of assisting a product photographer shooting photos of our new products for various brochures and print advertisements.
And the thing that immediately struck me was the amount of time he spent, setting up and looking at the products, long before he took a single frame. I even asked why he just didn’t shoot more shots and then pick the best ones to submit to us.
He told me that he always remembered the mentoring he got from who was at the time, a fairly famous portrait photographer… that photographer had an axiom which was what he termed the tyranny of three and five feet…
What he meant by that was that the overwhelming number of photos are taken at the photographers eye level which with 95% of adults corresponds to between five and six feet in height.
The three feet comes from the fact that the vast majority of humans won’t get closer than three feet to another person because of the sense of “personal space” and that often that same 'barrier" extends even to inanimate objects that aren’t “yours” personally.
And thus explaining why he had me get ladders or watched him crawl under a glass table to look at what he was photographing.
So TLDR great photos just don’t happen but are made with effort, thought and skill, and IMHO smartphones have only accelerated the rise of lazy photography.
So end of soliloquy and getting back on topic. The former photo dealer I mention earlier has said that Nikon is getting major pushback from their “pros” and will further clarify what this " exit " actually means to their customer base.
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This should be a life lesson - not just in artistic pursuits, but professions as well. Knowing when, and how, to “break the boilerplate” in a contract document, or be contrarian in a stock purchase, are all skills learned from training and experience, and not to be taken lightly. I do it in my legal practice, but stick to the conventions in my photographic endeavors.
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Your clarification is welcome, although it is a contrast to your previous statements. However, it’s good to see you acknowledge that turning your image making device into a different orientation is something that all image makers should explore.
I’m not going to be contrarian about whether it’s good to take one photo / make one image after half an hour of deliberation or take plenty of snaps and then choose from a contact sheet - however most of European Arts education has always been about experimenting, trying different versions of an image or design and taking variations of lighting / composition etc.
The term “Bracketing” is now consigned to a automatic in-camera technique for capturing HDR but its principle lies in the roots of European arts education. From design sheets to illustration mock-ups - artists, photographers and designers are encouraged to explore - when you have built up the “muscle-memory” of what makes a good image, then you can take the short cut.
Mind you, I do admire people who can always see what is perfect or great composition, without having to spend the man-hours developing the skills.
Thanks for starting with with condescension …
So new board, slightly new name, but same arrogance…
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Hey, wasn’t me that rubbished my saying on the previous board that photographers wanted SD cards back on MacBooks was it? Or that the previous MacBooks were a pile of doodoo…
Or was it?
Anyhow, I avoid you when I can except when you choose to respond to me. There’s a hint for the future eh?
So on a lighter note, speaking of portrait vs. landscape, I am a big fan of tennis (well, watching it, I can’t hit a tennis ball to save my life), and the rise of tiktok has led to an unfortunate trend: tennis highlights cropped to portrait mode. Aaaaahhhh. Kids are the worst. 
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