Mom accidentally shot in panoramic mode
This describes one of those typical film photography moments when you set your camera to panoramic mode accidentally and don’t know until the photos come back from the printer. Good for period piece writing.
Gesundheit! APS-C takes its name from the failed late-nineties film format called Advanced Photo System, which offered photographers three frame sizes in one: “High Definition,” a 16:9 ratio; “Panoramic,” a roughly 3:1 ratio; and “Classic,” the standard 3:2 ratio. This system was fantastic, because it allowed your mom to accidentally shoot an entire role of film in Panoramic mode and not realize it until the 4×11″ prints came back from the lab with everyone’s heads cut off and seven inches of negative space surrounding them. Anyway, the C in APS-C is for “Classic”, and digital APS-C cameras offer roughly the same frame size as APS film shot in this mode. Until last year, Canon also made digital SLRs with APS-H sensors, presumably named after the larger “High Definition” APS frame size option, although Canon stuck to the standard 3:2 ratio. (That “High Definition” has nothing to do with what high definition means today.) Nobody has yet made an APS-P sensor, which is a good thing. What you do with this knowledge is up to you.