One of the craziest things about the invention of the ur-leica is the start of the 3:2 format. Before most cameras followed the 4:3 format as did movie film. Ev

One of the craziest things about the invention of the ur-leica is the start of the 3:2 format. Before most cameras followed the 4:3 format as did movie film. Even most paintings before that followed a format somewhat similar to 4:3. It was considered natural as it seems to roughly follow the natural field of human high accuracy vision. Barnack however did not have much of a choice. His camera was brand new and was a side project so he could not have a film manufacturer make film just for his camera. So he decided to use movie film but to run it from side to side (as not to obstruct the view of the photographer. In order to avoid film wastage he decided to combine to movie frames to for one camera frame (ie to have round numbers and avoid random length off cuts). That worked but changed the aspect ratio. The film camera was 4:3, he moved the 4 from the horizontal to vertical and doubled the 3 by combining two frames to get 6:4, or 3:2. And thus the 3:2 format was born purely out of practical necessity and without any artistic reason. And somehow this wide and short format lives on until now with many photographers swearing it is the best aspect ratio, even though I do not think there is any reason to believe so and nobody seemed to believe so before Barnack had this purely technical problem.