When buying a camera, the most important consideration for me is what aspect ratios it comes with. I avoid 3:2 because I think it is more akin to a panoramic format. Once I had been working with 6:7 and 4:5 for a few years, I could not go back to the 35mm format. It is simply too wide, and too short.

Below I show the differences between the popular aspect ratios from most narrow (6:7 is almost a square) to widest (3:2 - 35mm standard format).

Green: 6:7
Blue: 4:5
Red: 4:3
Yellow: 3:2

Venturing out in the field with the aspect ratio set for your given pictures will enable you to realise tighter compositions. I have found that the idea of cropping later to be too loose for beginners at least. For myself, I have found that once I began to work with 4:5, after many years of working with 3:2, my compositions ‘clicked’ more, and things just seem to fall into a more natural order when composing. I have great trust in working with constants, be it fixed focal length lenses, or fixed aspect ratios. They offer a degree of discipline to my process and make me work harder at fine tuning my compositions.

This is why I am re-writing my aspect ratios book. I think aspect ratios are too important, yet oddly, seem to be overlooked, or rarely considered when one buys a camera.