Well, thank you all for your thoughtful responses. Those are good examples, Pieter. And I do like your boat picture, Russ, even though it is rather different from your usual style and subject
Composing for the square is quite difficult, but you do get used to it after a while. The biggest snag with square negatives is that they are so wasteful of printing paper (you can’t buy square paper, obviously, and now with inkjet printing here in Europe you can only get ‘A’ sizes, which are more or less 3:2, not even 10x8). Having said that, a great deal of the time with film I actually framed up
intending to crop to a rectangle, which has the advantage that you don’t have to turn a WLF camera on its side for portrait format. I had my viewfinder marked up for both landscape and portrait shots, and usually printed those to something like a 5x4 proportion, which is a bit squarer than 4:3 or 3:2.
The other pretty neat thing you can do with the square is to use it to get some shift for architectural work. With my 50mm lens, I would frame the subject up in the very top part of the frame, ignoring the foreground completely. This means that you can avoid tilting the camera upwards so much, and reduces converging verticals. These shots were printed to 3:2 landscape format with the bottom of the negative cropped right out.
So in many ways the good old 6x6 negative is (or was) a versatile beast, because even with a big (intentional) crop you still had a decent size film area and plenty of IQ. Still, back in the day, there were also quite a few anti-cropping fanatics and followers of HCB, who insisted on printing their 6x6 negatives to include the rebate and prove that they
had not cropped. Especially the Hasselblad snobs, of course, because the rebate then included the two little notches which told the world that this photo had been shot on (what was then) the most expensive MF camera you could buy.
Here’s another one which I think is definitely a “square shot”. A most unusual slate double headstone at Withiel.
John